Ethereum Foundation Grants Update – Wave IV

Greetings from the Ethereum Foundation Grants Team!

With Devcon 4 in full swing, we’re back to announce Wave 4 of our grant program! Thank you to all our fantastic community members who submitted creative ideas on how to strengthen our ecosystem. Without the time and energy you invest in Ethereum, we wouldn’t exist. As the program continues to grow, we will continue to involve more community members in the decision-making process. Today’s grants program has improved significantly compared to earlier this year thanks to helpful feedback from the community, allowing us to provide better public tools and infrastructure.

If you haven’t heard of us before, we went in depth about the program’s history, funding summary, and process in our last presentation. Find that post hereYou can check guidelines, etc. here.

Without further ado…

🎉 We are proud to announce our Wave 4 winners! 🎉

scalability

• Non-custodial payment channel hub​—$420K. Pay when shipped for open source SDK releases built by spank chain, Kyokanand connection At Devcon 4
• prototype​​ — $375,000. Front-end status channel research and development.
• final lab​​ ​​– $250,000. Development of forward lock-in contracts (FTLC).
• Kyokan​​​ ​​– $125,000. Development of a production-ready mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugin.
• Atomic Cross Chain Transactions — $65,000. The study was led by Maurice Herlihy of Brown University.
• EthSnarks​​ ​​– $40,000. Developed a cross-compatible SDK for zkSNARKS that can run on Ethereum.

security

• flintstone — $120,000. Further developments in the Flint Language, including a security-focused IDE developed by Susan Eisenbach at Imperial College London.

Usability (DevEx)

• TrueBlocks ​​– $120,000. Open source block explorer.
• Gitcoin​​ — $100,000. Funding Bounties for Gitcoin.
• VulcanizeDB ​​– $75,000. “Community Source” block explorer.
• biller ​​– $50,000. Developing a modular alternative to Truffle based on Ethers.js.
• Edik​​ — $25,000. An open source tool for configuring and interacting with smart contract codebases.
• Ethers.js​​ — $25,000. We support ricmoo for the ongoing development and maintenance of Ethers.js.
• kauri — $25,000. Support document bounty for Kauri.

(#build)

• Magic Money Tree (Dark Crystal) — 50,000 dollars. A tool to securely store and recover keys and secrets with the Secure Scuttlebutt Team’s multi-signature design.

Hackturnship

client diversity

Want to #BUIDL with us? Check out the developer wishlist below and follow the links for more information. If you can imagine a project related to any of the topics listed, submit an application and talk to us!

Wishlist!

scalability

1. Additional payment and/or status channel Implementation 💚💙💜
2. more plasma Implementation 💚💙
3. Improved efficiency for existing customers, etc. Guess & equal 💚💙
4. Tokenless”lightning network“For Ethereum 💙
5. WebAssembly Research and Development 🔥
6. libp2p Python implementation 🔥
7. Discovered Plasma Cache implementation for fungible tokens utilizing defragmentation technology here and here 🔥
8. Casper’s Academic Analysis 🔥

seclusion

1. starks Research and Development 🔥
2. BLS12-381 Implemented in a new language 🔥

Usefulness

1. Improved private key management and Ethereum transactions 💚💙💛
2. Alternative Wallet/Client Design 💙💜
3. standard and portability Between wallets💙
4. tooling Improves your developer experience 💚💙💜💛
5. Improved documentation and developer/user training videos 💚💙💜💛
6. Tokenless end-user products 💜
7. viper development 💜
8. More focus on security high level Language 💜
9. Non-transferable ID token 🔥
10. Setting up a specification and cross-client test suite for the JSON-RPC API 🔥
11. Analysis and analysis of real Ethereum transactions (application usage, gas/opcode usage, missing methods for optimization, etc.) 🔥
12. Tools to source-check client-side contracts, leverage metadata hashes, and display NatSpec annotations to users for use in their wallets 🔥

security

1. Security audit for: viper 💙💜
2. Smart Contract Audit 💚💜
3. Especially thanks to ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets and vaults 💜
4. Tools to prevent vulnerable code 💚💙💜
5. IDE with visual debugger 🔥
6. Privacy protection solution 🔥
7. More in-depth network monitoring tools 🔥

education

1. Community groups and conferences for underrepresented and underserved communities 🔥
2. Translate studies, documents and specifications into other languages ​​🔥

Hackturnship

Do you already have a job (or school)? are you okay! Suggest a problem you’d like to solve, and we’ll cover a $10,000 external internship for 10 weeks to work on Ethereum in your spare time. 💚💙💜💛 (Successful projects will be featured at developer conferences. We are also looking to hire and fund this pool of side projects. If you’re looking for where to start, see the list above.)

💚 — Wave I / 💙 — Wave II / 💜 — Wave III / 💛– Wave IV / 🔥 — Added to wishlist

For more inspiration…

Stay informed with research here and here.