Announcing Beneficiaries of the Ethereum Foundation Grants

Ethereum Foundation Grants: Empowering Developers to Build a Scalable, Useful, and Secure Ecosystem

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the inaugural wave of grants, marking a significant step towards empowering developers to build a scalable, useful, and secure ecosystem. This comprehensive grant program aims to support researchers, developers, and designers working on the Ethereum blockchain, with a focus on scalability, usefulness, and security.

The Goal of the Ethereum Foundation Grants

The Ethereum Foundation's primary objective is to empower developers with best-in-class R&D, developer experience, and education. By providing non-dilutive funding, technical advisory, connection to more users, and a platform to share their work, the foundation aims to give Ethereum teams more runway, advice, and resources to focus on building useful products and experiences.

The Grant Program's Focus Areas

The grant program has a broad focus, encompassing scalability, usefulness, and security. Scalability can be achieved through implementing sharding, plasma, or state channels with existing teams or on one's own. Usefulness is for improving the developer experience, such as static analyzers, linters, dev frameworks, mobile SDKs, documentation, Solidity/Vyper development, or experimenting with new dapps that provide utility to the end user. Security can range from auditing existing contracts to providing tools that prevent error-prone programming patterns to contributing to alternative second-layer languages that focus on security.

The Inaugural Grant Winners

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the inaugural grant winners, which include:

L4 Research – Scalability Grant – $1.5M. State channels research.
Runtime Verification – Security Grant – $500K. Casper contract formal verification.
ETHGlobal – DevEx Grant* – $200K. World-class developer conferences for Ethereum
Prysmatic Labs – Scalability Grant – $100K. Sharding implementation.
DDA – #buidl Grant** – $100K. Tokenless decentralized derivatives network + state channels R&D
Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Scalability Grant – $50K. Sharding 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. Solidity static analyzer.
Alex Komarov – Design Grant – $10K. Key management UX study
(Anonymous) – Hackternship – $10K. Deterministic WebAssembly.
Ankit Raj – Hackternship – $10K. Technical writing for Geth and Solidity.

What the Grant Winners Receive

The grant winners receive non-dilutive funding, technical advisory, connection to more users, and a platform to share their work. Many of these grants may be followed up with additional funding and/or collaboration when milestones are achieved, providing tight feedback loops for impact to the ecosystem.

Wishlist for Future Grants

In future rounds of grants, the Ethereum Foundation would like to see more applications in the following areas:

Scalability: Alternate sharding implementations, Alternate plasma implementations, Improving efficiency of existing clients such as geth & parity.
Usefulness: UX design studies to improve private key management and transacting in Ethereum, Alternative wallet / client designs, Tooling that improves developer experience, Improved documentation & developer/user education videos.
Security: Security audits for Solidity and Vyper, Smart contract audits, Tooling that prevents vulnerable code.

"Hackternships"

The Ethereum Foundation is also looking to fund and hire from the pool of side projects, providing a 10-week $10K externship for community members to work on Ethereum. Successful projects will be featured at a developer conference.

Next Steps

This is an ongoing grant program, and the Ethereum Foundation invites the rest of the community to approach them with their ideas. Ethereum is built by the community for the community, and the foundation is here to support developers in building a scalable, useful, and secure ecosystem.

Conclusion

The Ethereum Foundation grants mark a significant step towards empowering developers to build a scalable, useful, and secure ecosystem. By providing non-dilutive funding, technical advisory, connection to more users, and a platform to share their work, the foundation aims to give Ethereum teams more runway, advice, and resources to focus on building useful products and experiences. As the grant program continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see the impact of these grants on the Ethereum ecosystem and the innovative projects that emerge from this support.

Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2018/03/07/announcing-beneficiaries-ethereum-foundation-grants