Ethereum Foundation Grant Program: Wave III Insights

We have been diligently working to familiarize ourselves with numerous incredible individuals and initiatives, and are exceedingly thrilled to share the names of the honorees of Wave III of the Ethereum Foundation Grants Program!

We commenced 2018 with a blog entry aiming to stimulate scalability research for first and second-tier solutions. Since that time, we have allocated over $11M to 52 initiatives focused on enhancing the Ethereum ecosystem. Grants have financed numerous plasma and state channel executions, varied client research, improved developer infrastructures, security assessments, and much more (you can find all of them in our earlier posts: Wave I & Wave II)!

An Insight into the Selection Procedure

As the Grants Program has progressed, we have received input asking for increased clarity in our operations and a more in-depth examination of the different categories of projects evaluated. Here’s a funding overview and update on the grant process:

Funding Overview

The EF Grant Program has disbursed over $11M in support of 52 initiatives since early 2018 (Waves I, II, and III).

Our funding distribution remains faithful to the program’s foundational aim, granting nearly $7M to scalability projects. After this, security has been granted almost$2M, #buidl projects (initiatives enhancing user experience) have received $1.6M, and DevEx projects (projects that improve developer experience) received$744K. Although funding distribution is primarily concentrated on scalability, the quantity of funded projects is more evenly allocated amongst various categories.

Grants Process Update

The EF Grants program is continually progressing. In this cycle, we have enhanced our internal procedures to guarantee prompt fund allocation. We recognize the rapid pace of this space and value the necessity of swift availability of funds to the forefront. Ultimately, our intention is to distribute grants on an ongoing basis to offer more immediate assistance to the projects and teams steering efforts toward decentralization and transparency.

Ideal candidates should possess robust technical expertise, a well-defined project roadmap, and demonstrate a dedication to promoting collaboration within the ecosystem. For more details regarding applicant requirements and process flow, please refer to our Applicant Expectations and FAQs.

Wave III

With each iteration, the grants program advances. Our objective is to effectively facilitate progress for projects developing the essential framework of our emerging community. Numerous tracks need to be established before Ethereum “achieves success,” and it has been remarkable to observe all the initiatives striving to create these tracks.

The applicant pool for Wave III showcased an unprecedented number of exceptional teams and creative concepts. It is both intriguing and humbling to witness the variety of projects globally that share a commitment to advancing Ethereum. These are individuals dedicating their leisure time to reading ethresear.ch, innovating new libraries and wallet designs, and participating in communities discussing the latest in DApp usability and security…and we cherish them for it.

Without further ado…

We are thrilled to reveal our Wave III Finalists!

Scalability

• StarkWare — $4M with 6K ETH Performance-centric Bounties. Development of standards report and production-ready software for enhanced STARK-compatible hash functions and tooling
• Force Move Game Framework — $300K. Framework for force move games state channels
• Harmony — $90K. Basic sharding and random beacon chain

Security

Usability

Developer experience (DevEx grant)

Creating for the end user (#buidl grant)

• DappNode — $250K. Broad full node adoption
• Uniswap — $100k. DEX framework
• Nethermind — $50K. .NET client implementation
• thaEth — $20K. Gnosis Safe UI Design

Education

Hackternhips

Scalability will persist as a priority for EF grants; however, we also seek to support other vital initiatives. This encompasses enhanced UX, novel clients, high-level programming languages, improved developer tools, and projects aimed at increasing the security of Ethereum applications. With Wave III, we expanded into educational and community initiatives to assist in attracting new talent to the ecosystem.

Wantto #BUIDL alongside us? Check out the development wishlist below and follow the links to discover more. If you can envision a project related to the topics mentioned, submit a proposal and get in touch with us!

Wishlist for the upcoming grant cycle

Scalability

1. Additional payment and/or state channel implementations
2. More plasma implementations
3. More shasper implementations
4. Enhancing efficiency of current clients such as geth & parity
5. A tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum
6. WebAssembly R&D

Privacy

1. STARKS R&D
2. BLS12-381 implementations in new languages
3. libp2p Python implementation

Usability

1. Enhance private key management and transactions in Ethereum
2. Alternative wallet / client designs
3. Standards and portability between wallets
4. Tools that enhance developer experience
5. Improved documentation & educational videos for developers/users
6. Tokenless end user applications
7. Vyper development
8. Additional security-focused high-level languages
9. Non-transferable ID tokens

Security

1. Security assessments for Vyper
2. Smart contract evaluations
3. Specifically, evaluations for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults
4. Tools that avert vulnerable code
5. IDE with a visual debugger
6. Privacy Solutions

Hackternships

Are you already employed (or in school)? No issue! Propose a challenge you’d like to tackle, and we are delighted to fund a 10-week $10K externship for your available time working on Ethereum. (Successful initiatives will be showcased at a developer conference. We are also seeking to recruit and fund from this collection of side projects. If you’re unsure where to initiate, refer to the list above.)

—  Wave I / — Wave II / — Wave III / — New to wishlist