Greetings from the Ethereum Foundation Grants Team!
As we move full steam ahead towards Devcon 4, we’re back to announce wave 4 of the grant program! Thank you to all of the fantastic community members who have applied with creative ideas on how to strengthen our ecosystem. We wouldn’t exist without the time and energy you put into Ethereum. As the program continues to grow, we will continue to involve more and more members of the community in the decision-making process. The Today Grants Program has been greatly improved since the beginning of this year, thanks to all the helpful feedback from the community, allowing us to provide better public tools and infrastructure.
If you haven’t heard of us before, our latest announcement delved into the program’s history, funding overview, and processes. find that post hereand you can see guidelines and more here.
Without any more preambles…
🎉 We are proud to announce our Wave 4 recipients! 🎉
scalability
- Non-Custodial Payment Channel Center: $420K. Payment upon delivery of the open source SDK version created by chain whipping, kyokanY Connect at Devcon 4
- prototype –$375K. Research and development of front-end state channels.
- purpose laboratories— $250K. Development of Forward-Time Locked Contracts (FTLC).
- kyokan –$125K. Development of production-ready Mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugins.
- Atomic cross-chain transactions –$65K. Research led by Maurice Herlihy of Brown University.
- ethsnarks –$40K. Development of a cross-compatibility SDK to make zkSNARKS viable on Ethereum.
Security
- flintstone –$120K. Further development of the Flint Language, including a security-focused IDE by Susan Eisenbach of Imperial College London.
Usability (DevEx)
- TrueBlocks –$120K. Open source block explorer.
- gitcoin –$100K. Funding rewards on Gitcoin.
- VulcanizeDB –$75K. “Community” block explorer.
- builder –$50K. Development 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 continue the development and maintenance of Ethers.js.
- kauri –$25K. Funding for documentation rewards in Kauri.
(#BUILD)
- Magic Money Tree (Dark Crystal) –$50K. Tool to securely store and retrieve keys and secrets through a multisig design from the Secure Scuttlebutt team.
internships
Diversity of clients
Do you want to #BUILD with us? Check out the developer wish list below and follow the links for more information. If you can imagine a project related to the listed topics, please submit a request and talk to us.
Wish list!
scalability
- More payment and/or state channel implementations 💚💙💜
- More plasma implementations 💚💙
- Improve the efficiency of existing customers, such as geth & parity 💚💙
- A tokenless”lightning network” for Ethereum 💙
- website assembly R&D 🔥
- Python libp2p implementation 🔥
- Plasma Cash implementations for fungible tokens using found defragmentation techniques here Y here 🔥
- Casper academic analysis 🔥
Privacy
usability
- Improve private key management and transactions on Ethereum 💚💙💛
- Alternative portfolio/client designs 💙💜
- standards and portability between portfolios 💙
- stamping that improves the developer experience 💚💙💜💛
- Improved documentation and educational videos for developers/users 💚💙💜💛
- End user products without token 💜
- viper development 💜
- More focused on security high level languages 💜
- Non-transferable identification tokens 🔥
- Establishing a cross-client and specification test suite for the JSON-RPC API 🔥
- Analysis and analysis of real world Ethereum transactions (application usage, gas/opcode usage, lost avenues for optimization, etc.) 🔥
- Tools that verify the source of contracts on the client side, make use of the metadata hash, and display NatSpec feedback to the user for use in wallets 🔥
Security
- Security audits for snake 💙💜
- Smart contract audits 💚💜
- In particular, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults 💜
- Tools that prevent vulnerable code 💚💙💜
- IDE with a visual debugger 🔥
- privacy solutions 🔥
- More in-depth network monitoring tools 🔥
Education
- Community groups and conferences for underrepresented and underserved communities 🔥
- Translation of research, documentation and specifications into other languages 🔥
internships
Already 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 featured at a developer conference. We’re also looking to hire and fund from this group of side projects. If you’re looking for where to start, check out the list above.)
💚 — Wave I / 💙 — Wave II / 💜 — Wave III / 💛– Wave IV / 🔥 — New to wish list
For more inspiration…
