Announcing the May 2018 cohort of EF grants

Thank you all for applying, and we are delighted to announce the latest subsidies from the Ethereum Foundation! We financed 22 beneficiaries for a total of $ 2.84 million.

Apply here for the next round! 🦄

Background

The Ethereum project aims to support useful DAPPs and intelligent contracts on Ethereum blockchain, and the objective of the Ethereum Foundation is to allow developers of the class R&D, the experience of developers and education. Despite the early promise of the ecosystem, we still have a long way to go and we are here to work with the community to generate concrete progress.

These subsidies will feed the teams working hard in research and development to support the entire ecosystem and help make Ethereum more scalable, useful and secure. These projects do not have ICOs, no token sales and simply focus on creating useful products and experiences.

Scalability Maybe in the form of the implementation of rupture, plasma or state channels with existing teams or yourself. It can also be in the form of optimization of Geth / Parity or to build alternative customers. Conviviality is to improve the experience of the developer (for example, static analyzers, liners, development frameworks, mobile SDKs) or user experience. Security Can range from the audit of existing contracts to the supply of tools which prevent programming models subject to errors to the contribution to alternative second layer languages ​​which focus on safety. We are also starting to engage with the Product / Design Community to help solve products of product design and UX, including areas such as key management, Ethereum UX payments and integration flows.

Finally, we would like to remember how the Ethereum project started: passionate open source developers contributing to the project on their free time. In this spirit, we have started a “hackterns” subsidy for the members of the community who offer a project by hard -hitting etherum.

What we provide for beneficiaries

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

We hope to provide Ethereum teams with more tracks, advice and resources to simply focus on the creation of useful products and experiences.

In addition, many of these subsidies can be followed with additional funding and / or collaboration when milers are reached. We believe that this will provide close feedback loops for the impact on the ecosystem.

List of beneficiaries: May 2018

Evolution:

Penis – $ 250,000. Canal state R&D.

Pisa (by Patrick MCCORRY et al.) – $ 250K. Canal state R&D.

Sprites implementation (by Enharged) – $ 200,000. Implementation of payment channels.

General calculation on plasma (by Parsec laboratories) – $ 50,000. Implementation of plasma.

Plasma (by Kyokan) – $ 50,000. Implementation of plasma.

Plasma (by Fourth state) – $ 32K. Implementation of plasma.

Usability:

Devex subsidies *:

Walletconnect (by Assessment) – $ 150,000. Interoperability for web dapps and mobile wallets.

IOS development kit (by Ackee) – $ 50,000. IOS + Ethereum start -up project (MVVM support).

Etherkit (by vault.io) – $ 50,000. IOS development framework (SWIFT).

vipnode – $ 35,000. Slight customer incentive.

Go through – $ 25,000. Dactylographed library for browsers.

#Buidl Subsidies **:

ENS Foundation – $ 1 M. To date, the Ethereum Foundation has supported ENS via internal job developers, but now is mature enough to become its own independent organization. We are delighted to continue working with this major project / team in the future.

Pop wallet – $ 100,000. Open Source browser portfolio.

Trusted wallet – $ 30,000. Open source mobile portfolio.

Security:

Zeppelin – $ 430,000. Audit of the solidity compiler (coparraine with Augur)

Cedille – $ 50,000. Intelligent contract formal verification R&D.

Secure – $ 30,000. Standards for developing smart contracts.

Gitcoin – $ 25,000. Bug bonus platform.

Hacktern:

Flint programming language – $ 10,000. Intelligent security language focused on security.

Richard Littauer – $ 10,000. Integrated developer documentation.

Chris Spannos – $ 10,000. Integrated developer documentation.

Chinese Academy of Sciences (Yi Sun et al.) – $ 5,000. Fragile R&D.

* Devex Grant – improves the experience of developers (“useful” for developers).

** #Buidl Grant – Builds for User (“useful” for users).

List of wishes for future subsidies

In future grant cycles, we would like to see more applications in these areas:

1. Scalability
   
   1. More implementations of payment and / or state of the channels 💚💙
   2. More plasma implementations 💚💙
   3. More rupture implementations 💚
   4. Improved the efficiency of existing customers such as Geth & Parity 💚💙
   5. A “lightning network” without token for Ethereum 💙
   6. Casper implementation pool contracts without tokens 🔥
   7. Weba researches R&D 🔥

2. Conviviality
   
   1. Improve the management of private keys and the transaction in Ethereum 💚💙
   2. Alternative portfolio / customer conceptions 💙
   3. Standards and portability between portfolios 💙🔥
   4. Tools that improve the developer’s experience 💚💙
   5. Improvement of documentation and developer / user education videos 💚💙
   6. Final user products without tokens 🔥
   7. Vyper Development 🔥
   8. More high -level languages ​​focused on security 🔥

3. Security
   
   1. Safety audits for Solidity and Vyper 💙
   2. Smart contract audits 💚
   3. More specifically, the audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig portfolios, vaults 🔥
   4. Tools that prevent vulnerable code 💚💙

4. Hacktern
   
   1. Do you already have a job (or a school)? No problem! Suggest a problem you want to solve and we are happy to finance an $ 10,000 externat of $ 10,000 for your spare time working on Ethereum. 💚💙 (Successful projects will be presented during a developer conference. We are also trying to hire and finance from this basin of parallel projects. If you are looking for where to start, look at the list above.)

💚 – Funded in March 2018 Cohort
💙 – Funded in the May 2018 cohort
🔥– New to the list of wishes

Following steps

This is a program of subsidies in progress, and we would like to invite the rest of the community to approach with your ideas (application link).

Ethereum is built by the community of the community, and we are here to support you. Thank you for the construction!

Best,
Ethereum Foundation team
5.2.18

(Mainly paraphrasé of first message))