Ethereum Foundation Grant Program Wave 5

The Ethereum Foundation Grants Program is an ongoing, ever-improving experiment in how EF can best invest the resources of the Ethereum community to have the most long-term impact on the Ethereum ecosystem. When the grant program launched in early 2018, a key focus was supporting scalability efforts. This focus later expanded to include security, usability, privacy, and education.

In 2019, we will return to our core focus to support important Eth2.0 and Layer 2 scaling efforts. However, we are open to all grant proposals that: Urgent, Important and Unique Improvements This further develops the Ethereum vision.

With these priorities in mind, we are pleased to announce our first recipients for 2019.

problem – Produces ‘Plasma Ignis’ code, a SNARK-based “rollup” capable of supporting up to 500 transactions per second.

LeapDAO – A more practical Plasma design with smart contracts such as the ‘Plasma Leap’ feature.

py-libp2p – A Python implementation of libp2p that will be used in Eth2.0 research as well as many other projects by UPenn seniors completing their capstone project (Zixuan Zhang, Robert Zajac, Alexander Haynes, and Aspyn Palatnick).

Ethereum on ARM – Support decentralization of Ethereum by providing Ethereum client images for resource-constrained devices, including initial investigation into the use of ARM nodes for Eth2.0 staking.

Görli Testnet – A cross-client testnet led by Chainsafe and widely supported by the Ethereum community. It was launched at GörliCon in late January.

Shadowlands – A Python-based TextUI rapid prototyping platform for Eth apps that breaks the paradigm that everything has to be a web app.

deep sea – Research at Yale and Columbia on DeepSEA, an officially validated language that compiles to EVM.

Finally, although we aim to increase transparency of our grant program in general, we have decided not to include grant amounts or wish lists. We made this decision because we do not want applicants to be biased by their previous wishlists and compensation amounts. Instead, we pursue innovative ideas and detailed budgets.