Hello from the Ethereum Foundation Grants Team!
As we progress full throttle toward Devcon 4, we are excited to announce Wave 4 of the Grants Program! A heartfelt thank you to all the amazing community members who have submitted their inventive proposals to enhance our ecosystem. We owe our existence to the dedication and effort you invest in Ethereum. As the program continues to evolve, we will increasingly engage more community participants in the decision-making process. The Grants Program today is significantly advanced from earlier this year, largely due to the valuable feedback received from the community, enabling us to offer improved public tools and infrastructure.
If this is your first time hearing from us, our last announcement offered a detailed overview of the program’s history, funding summary, and procedures. You can find that post here, and see guidelines and more information here.
Without further delay…
We are delighted to declare our Wave 4 Grantees!
Scalability
- Non-Custodial Payment Channel Hub — $420K. Payment upon delivery for the open-source SDK launched by Spankchain, Kyokan, and Connext at Devcon 4
- Prototypal — $375K. Front-end state channel research and development.
- Finality Labs – $250K. Advancing Forward-Time Locked Contracts (FTLC).
- Kyokan – $125K. Development of ready-to-use mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugins.
- Atomic Cross-Chain Transactions — $65K. Research spearheaded by Maurice Herlihy of Brown University.
- EthSnarks – $40K. Creation of a cross-compatible SDK for zkSNARKS to function on Ethereum.
Security
- Flintstones — $120K. Further advancement of the Flint Language including a security-centric IDE by Susan Eisenbach of Imperial College London.
Usability (DevEx)
- TrueBlocks – $120K. Open-source block explorer.
- Gitcoin — $100K. Funding bounties on Gitcoin.
- VulcanizeDB – $75K. “Community sourced” block explorer.
- Buidler – $50K. Creation of a modular alternative to Truffle based on Ethers.js.
- Ethdoc — $25K. Open-source tool for the organization and interaction of smart contract codebases.
- Ethers.js — $25K. Support for ricmoo to persist in the development and maintenance of Ethers.js.
- Kauri — $25K. Funding documentation bounties on Kauri.
(#BUIDL)
- Magic Money Tree (Dark Crystal) — $50K. Tool for securely storing and retrieving keys and secrets via a multisig design by the Secure Scuttlebutt Team.
Hackternships
Client Diversity
Do you wish to #BUIDL with us? Check out the dev wishlist below and follow the links for more details. If you envision a project that aligns with the topics listed, please submit an application and connect with us!
Wishlist!
Scalability
- Additional payment and/or state channel implementations
- More plasma initiatives
- Enhancing performance of existing clients like geth & parity
- A tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum
- WebAssembly R&D
- libp2p Python implementation
- Plasma Cash implementations for fungible tokens utilizing defragmentationtechniques discovered here and here
- Scholarly assessment of Casper
Privacy
Usability
- Enhance management of private keys and transactions in Ethereum
- Alternative wallet / client designs
- Standards and portability across wallets
- Tools that enhance developer experience
- Refined documentation & educational videos for developers/users
- Tokenless consumer products
- Vyper development
- Increased focus on security in high-level programming languages
- Non-transferable ID tokens
- Creation of a specification and cross-client test suite for the JSON-RPC API
- Evaluation of and analytics for real-world Ethereum transactions (application usage, gas / opcode usage, overlooked optimization opportunities, etc)
- Tools that source-verify contracts on the client side, utilize the metadata hash, and display NatSpec comments to users for wallet applications
Security
- Security evaluations for Vyper
- Smart contract evaluations
- Specifically, evaluations for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults
- Tools that avert vulnerable code
- IDE featuring a visual debugger
- Privacy Solutions
- More comprehensive network monitoring tools
Education
- Community groups and conferences for marginalized and underserved communities
- Translation of research, documentation, and specifications into various languages
Hackternships
Already employed (or studying)? No issue! Propose a challenge you wish to address and we will gladly sponsor a 10-week $10K externship for your extra time working on Ethereum. (Successful initiatives will be showcased at a developer conference. We are also seeking to employ and finance from this group of side projects. If you’re searching for a starting point, refer to the list above.)
— Wave I / — Wave II / — Wave III / – Wave IV / — New to wishlist
For further inspiration…
