Ethereum Foundation Grants Update - Wave III

Ethereum Foundation Grants Update - Wave III: A New Wave of Innovation and Collaboration

The Ethereum Foundation Grants Program has been a driving force behind the development of the Ethereum ecosystem, providing critical funding and support to projects that aim to advance the platform's scalability, security, and usability. Since its inception, the program has committed over $11 million to 52 projects, with a focus on scalability, security, and usability. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Wave III grantees, the selection process, and the future of the program.

A Look into the Selection Process

The Ethereum Foundation Grants Program has received feedback requesting greater transparency into its processes and a deeper look into the various types of projects considered. In response, the program has refined its internal processes to ensure timely fund disbursement and has expanded its focus to include education and community efforts.

Funding Snapshot

The EF Grant Program has provided more than $11 million in support to 52 projects since early 2018 (Waves I, II, and III). The funding allocation remains true to the program's original purpose, with nearly 7 million dollars awarded to scalability projects. Security has been granted almost 7 million dollars, while #buidl projects (projects that improve user experience) received 1.6 million dollars, and DevEx projects (projects that improve developer experience) received 1.6 million dollars.

Wave III Grantees

The applicant pool for Wave III offered a record number of strong teams and innovative ideas. The grantees for Wave III are:

• Scalability
  • StarkWare -- $4 million with 6,000 ETH Performance-based Bounties. Development of standards report and production-quality software for optimized STARK-friendly hash functions and tooling
  • Force Move Game Framework -- $300,000. Force move games state channel framework
  • Harmony -- $90,000. Minimal sharding and random beacon chain
• Security
  • Kestrel Institute -- $400,000. Formal verification of cryptographic primitives
  • ICE Center at ETH Zurich -- $185,000. ICE Center research and tooling development
  • Pyramid -- $30,000. Smart contract language
• Usability
  • Developer experience (DevEx grant)
    • Yakindu IDE -- $95,000. Eclipse-based IDE
    • Solidity Resolver Engine -- $50,000. Universal API tool
    • Etheratom -- $45,000. Atomized solidity IDE
  • Building for the end user (#buidl grant)
    • DappNode -- $250,000. Mass full node adoption
    • Uniswap -- $100,000. DEX framework
    • Nethermind -- $50,000. .NET client implementation
    • thaEth -- $20,000. Gnosis Safe UI Design
• Education
  • Cryptoeconomics.study -- $35,000. Building a textbook and coursework
• Hackternships
  • Pseudo-randomly selected committees -- $10,000. Sharding R&D
  • Etherlinker -- $10,000. Unreal Engine 4 API for Ethereum

Wishlist for the Next Grant Round

The Ethereum Foundation Grants Program is now accepting applications for Wave 4. The wishlist for the next grant round includes:

• Scalability
  • More payment and/or state channel implementations
  • More plasma implementations
  • More shasper implementations
  • Improving efficiency of existing clients such as geth & parity
  • A tokenless "Lightning Network" for Ethereum
  • WebAssembly R&D
• Privacy
  • STARKS R&D
  • BLS12-381 implementations in new languages
  • libp2p Python implementation
• Usability
  • Improve private key management and transacting in Ethereum
  • Alternative wallet / client designs
  • Standards and portability between wallets
  • Tooling that improves developer experience
  • Improved documentation & developer/user education videos
  • Tokenless end user products
  • Vyper development
  • More security focused high-level languages
  • Non-transferable ID tokens
• Security
  • Security audits for Vyper
  • Smart contract audits
  • Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults
  • Tooling that prevents vulnerable code
  • IDE with a visual debugger
• Hackternships
  • You already have a job (or school)? No problem! Suggest a problem you want to solve and we're happy to fund a 10-week $10,000 externship for your spare-time working on Ethereum.

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Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2018/08/17/ethereum-foundation-grants-update-wave-3