May 2018 EF Grant Cohort Announced

adminJanuary 21, 2024

Thank you to everyone who applied and we are excited to announce our latest Ethereum Foundation grants! We provided a total of $2.84 million to 22 beneficiaries.

Apply for the next round here! 🦄

background

The Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the Ethereum Foundation’s goal is to provide developers with the best R&D, developer experience, and education. Despite the initial promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go, and we are here to work with the community to make concrete progress.

These grants will support the entire ecosystem and fuel the team working hard on research and development to help further develop Ethereum. It’s scalable, useful, and secure.. These projects don’t have ICOs or token sales; they simply focus on building useful products and experiences.

scalability This may take the form of implementing sharding, plasma, or state channels with an existing team or on your own. It could also be in the form of optimizing geth/parity or building a replacement client. Usefulness To improve developer experience (e.g. static analyzers, linters, development frameworks, mobile SDKs) or user experience. security This can range from auditing existing contracts, providing tools to prevent error-prone programming patterns, to contributing to alternative security-focused second-tier languages. We also product design A community that helps solve product and UX design issues, including areas such as key management, Ethereum payment UX, and onboarding flows.

Finally, we would like to recall how the Ethereum project began. open source developer Contribute to the project in your spare time. In that spirit, we have launched a “hackship” grant for community members who propose impactful Ethereum side projects.

What we provide to our beneficiaries

non-dilutive funds
technical advice
Connect with more users
A platform to share your work

We hope to give the Ethereum team more runway, advice, and resources so they can focus solely on building useful products and experiences.

Additionally, many of these grants can be followed up with additional funding and/or collaboration once milestones are achieved. We believe this will provide a tight feedback loop on the impact on the ecosystem.

Beneficiary List: May 2018

Scalability:

in Peru – $250,000. National Channel R&D.

PISA (standard Patrick McCorry etc.) – $250,000. National Channel R&D.

Sprite implementation (by sick) – $200,000. Payment channel implementation.

General calculations for plasma (by Parsec Lab) – $50,000. Plasma implementation.

plasma (by Kyokan) – $50,000. Plasma implementation.

Plasma (by fourth week) – $32,000. Plasma implementation.

Usefulness:

DevEx Grants*:

Wallet Connect (by Balance.io) – $150,000. Interoperability of web dapps and mobile wallets.

iOS Development Kit (Author: Aki) – $50,000. iOS + Ethereum Starter Project (MVVM support).

EtherKit(by Vault.io) – $50,000. iOS development framework (Swift).

VIP node – $35,000. Light client incentives.

BrowseEth – $25,000. Typescript library for browsers.

#buidl grant**:

ENS Foundation – 1 million dollars. Until now, the Ethereum Foundation has supported ENS through hiring developers internally, but ENS has now matured to become its own independent organization. We are excited to continue working with this great project/team in the future.

pop wallet – $100,000. An open source browser wallet.

Trust Wallet – $30,000. Open source mobile wallet.

security:

zeppelin – $430,000. Solidity Compiler Audit (co-sponsored with Augur)

Sediyu – $50,000. Smart contract formal verification research and development.

SecureEith – $30,000. Smart contract development standards.

Gitcoin – $25,000. Bug bounty platform.

Hackturnship:

Flint programming language – $10,000. A smart contract language focused on safety.

Richard Rittauer – $10,000. Developer onboarding documentation.

Chris Spanos – $10,000. Developer onboarding documentation.

Chinese Academy of Sciences (Lee Soon et al.) – $5,000. Sharding research and development.

* DevEx Grant – Improves the developer experience (“useful” for developers).

** #buidl Grant – Builds for end users (“useful” to them).

Wishlist for future grants

We hope to see more support in future grant rounds in the following areas:

scalability
1. Implement more payment and/or status channels 💚💙
2. More plasma implementations 💚💙
3. More sharding implementations 💚
4. Improved efficiency of existing clients such as Geth & Parity 💚💙
5. “Lightning Network” for Ethereum without tokens 💙
6. Tokenless Casper Staking Pool Contract 🔥
7. WebAssembly R&D 🔥
Usefulness
1. Improved private key management and Ethereum transactions 💚💙
2. Alternative Wallet/Client Design 💙
3. Wallet-to-wallet standard and portability 💙🔥
4. Tools to improve your developer experience 💚💙
5. Improved documentation and developer/user training videos 💚💙
6. Tokenless end-user products 🔥
7. Viper Development 🔥
8. High-level language with a focus on security 🔥
security
1. Security Audit for Solidity and Vyper 💙
2. Smart Contract Audit 💚
3. Especially thanks to ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multi-signature wallets, vaults 🔥
4. Tools to prevent vulnerable code 💚💙
Hackturnship
1. 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 from this pool of side projects. If you’re wondering where to start, take a look at the list above.)