It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll review a couple of projects that are underway, or already on the finish line. Read on for some recent recipient milestones and accomplishments!
interrep
For a user switching to a new social media platform, one of the biggest sticking points is rebuilding your reputation. InterRep aims to reduce this friction by allowing a user to link a social media account to an Ethereum address, which can be used to confirm her identity on a new platform.
beneficiaries jay graber Y Rafael Roulette implemented the user interface and smart contracts for InterRep Most Valuable Player (You will need to connect to MetaMask in Ropsten to interact with the UI.) The initial version, released to Ropsten on June 30, allows you to verify a Twitter account via an API and privately link it to an Ethereum address. An NFT “badge” is minted on the linked address that acts as attestation of ownership of the associated reputation. Watch the launching post for more details on how InterRep works, use cases, and future plans.
status box, Philip Zahn Y jules hedges for compositional game engine
game theory, which studies the strategic interactions between rational actors, is at the heart of the design of mechanisms for decentralized systems. However, the “games” involved in real world interactions, such as validating a blockchain or voting on a DAO, are extremely complicated and difficult to reason about.
Get into compositional game theory, which treats large, complex games as being made up of smaller, simpler games. The equilibrium (ie, an outcome in which a given player has no incentive to change his strategy as long as the strategies of the other players remain the same) of a complex game can be defined on the basis of its simpler components.
Although these concepts are highly relevant to Ethereum, the underlying theory is extremely complex. Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges aim to make theory more accessible by creating a software engine to model and analyze strategic interactions through modular programming. the recent post post shares more details about the system, which uses a small domain-specific language in conjunction with Haskell to define functions, and an illustration of the process using an example auction format.
This introduction is just the beginning: the project is in the early stages and will continue to evolve and add new features. Follow @Statebox for updates and head over to the project page. Github to keep up with progress or contribute.
Blog, blog, blog!
The Ethereum Foundation’s privacy and scaling team has launched a blog where they will share what they discover and develop, often working closely with grantees, along with guest posts from grantees themselves.
The inaugural guest post, An Introduction to Optimism’s Optimistic SummaryHe came from Kyle Charbonnettwhich received a grant to evaluate the safety properties of Optimism Implementation of optimistic accumulation. This was not an audit, but an opportunity to learn more deeply about a build that is anticipated to be widely used and emulated. The results of the evaluation will be published shortly; in the meantime, Kyle’s post provides an overview of the protocol to put it all in context.
Some other recent posts from grantees:
- scott later, Online SSZ Visualizer: an introduction to the new display field in ssz.dev.
- Blessed, Cumulative Difference Compression:tl;dr on research to reduce the L1 data footprint of an abstract for the specific use case of airdrops.
- Dark forest, v0.6 Round 2 Summary: results, resources, emerging strategic and economic models, special contributions and more from the most recent round.
- Geoff Lamperd, Trusted Settings UI Update– UI improvements for a trusted general configuration infrastructure.
Are you working on something that you think could change Ethereum for the better? go to our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we finance.
