Announcement of Ethereum Foundation Grant Recipients

We are excited to share the results of the first wave of grants from the Ethereum Foundation.

As a reminder, the Ethereum project seeks to support useful dapps and smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, and the goal of the Ethereum Foundation is to empower developers with best-in-class R&D, development expertise, and education. Despite the initial promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go and are here to work with the community to drive concrete progress.

These grants will galvanize teams working hard in research and development to support the entire ecosystem. Additionally, we hope that these grants signal to the community what we believe to be the missing pieces in the ecosystem that need further support. Put another way, the Foundation is here to serve the teams and individuals working to prevent a tragedy of the commons.

This year, we will double down on working with the community to make Ethereum scalable, useful, and secure. As such, although this grant program was announced two months ago as a program strictly focused on scalabilitywe decided to extend support to projects that are doing a great job in scalability, utility and security. These projects have no ICOs, no token sales, and are simply focused on creating useful products and experiences.

scalability it can be in the form of implementation of sharding, plasma or state channels with existing equipment or on your own. It can also be in the form of geth/parity optimization or creating alternative clients. Utility it is to improve the developer experience (eg static analyzers, linters, development frameworks, mobile SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Vyper development) or experiment with new dapps that provide utility to the end user. Security It can range from auditing existing contracts to providing tools that avoid error-prone programming patterns to contributing to alternative second-layer languages ​​that focus on security.

We are also starting to interact with the design community to help solve UX and product design issues. For example, key management, Ethereum UX payments, and onboarding flows are areas that need major improvement for mainstream adoption. We would like to fund more design studios, hire and connect talented designers with exciting teams in the space.

Lastly, we would like to recall how the Ethereum project started: passionate open source developers contributing to the project in his spare time. In that spirit, we’ve started a “hackternship” grant for community members who propose an impactful Ethereum side project.

List of winners

Here are the winners of the Ethereum Foundation’s inaugural grants:

Research L4 – Scalability Grant – $1.5M. Investigation of state channels.

Runtime verification – Security Subsidy – $500K. Formal verification of Casper’s contract.

ETHGlobal – DevEx Scholarship* – $200K. World-class developer conferences for Ethereum

prismatic laboratories – Scalability Grant – $100K. Fragmentation implementation.

DDA – #build** Scholarship – $100K. Tokenless decentralized derivatives network + state R&D channels

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Scalability Grant – $50K. Fragmentation simulation.

Plasma Taiwan Dev – Scalability Grant – $25K. Plasma implementation.

ethers.js – DevEx Grant – $25K. Web3.js alternative.

Turbo Geth – Scalability Grant – $25K. Geth optimization.

solium – DevEx Grant – $10K. Static solidity analyzer.

alex komarov – Design Scholarship – $10K. Key Management UX Studio

(Anonymous) – Hackternship – $10K. Deterministic WebAssembly.

ankit raj – Hackternship – $10K. Technical writing for Geth and Solidity.

* DevEx Grant: improves the developer experience (“useful” for developers).

** #buildl Grant: End-user builds (“useful” to users).

What we provide to teams that win a grant

1. Non-dilutive financing
2. Technical advice
3. Connection to more users
4. Platform to share your work

We hope to provide Ethereum teams with more hints, tips, and resources to focus on simply building useful products and experiences.

Additionally, many of these grants can continue with additional funding and/or collaboration when milestones are reached. We believe this will provide feedback loops tuned for ecosystem impact.

Wish List for Future Grants

In future rounds of grants, we would like to see more applications in these areas:

1. scalability
   
   1. Alternative fragmentation implementations
   2. Alternative Plasma Implementations
   3. Improve the efficiency of existing clients such as geth and parity
   4. A Tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum

2. Utility
   
   1. UX design studies to improve private key and transaction management on Ethereum
   2. Alternative wallet/client designs
   3. Tools that enhance the developer experience
   4. Improved documentation and educational videos for developers/users

3. Security
   
   1. Security audits for Solidity and Vyper
   2. Smart contract audits
   3. Tools that prevent vulnerable code

4. Hackternships
   
   1. Do you have a job (or school)? No problem! Suggest a problem you want solved and we’ll be happy to fund a 10-week external internship worth $10,000 for your spare time working on Ethereum. Successful projects will be presented at a developer conference. We are also looking to hire and finance from this group of side projects.

Next steps

This is an ongoing grant program, and we’d like to invite the rest of the community to approach us with their ideas (app link).

Ethereum is built by the community for the community and we are here to support it. Thanks for building!

Better,
Ethereum Foundation Team
3.7.18