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As we embark on a brand new decade(!), the Ecosystem Assist Program crew wished to talk to a number of the current progress, transition and studying across the program, and share particulars of our 2019 monetary allocations.
What’s ESP?
The Ecosystem Assist Program (ESP) is the arm of the Ethereum Basis targeted on offering help to groups all through the Ethereum ecosystem. This contains monetary and non-financial help. ESP is an growth of the Grants program, which beforehand targeted totally on financial help.
Enhancing Our Processes
The 2019 Ethereum Foundation Spring Update first previewed a few of our plans for evolving from Grants to ESP. Since that transition, we’ve continued to award simple grants, and helped make connections to different potential sources of funding the place an EF grant was not a match. We’ve got additionally facilitated recommendation from trade consultants, neighborhood publicity, entry to cloud companies and different infrastructure, and extra.
During the last 9 months we’ve included suggestions to refine our utility course of and made a variety of adjustments, together with:
- A standardized course of for reviewing ESP purposes
- An expanded group of area consultants obtainable to assist with peer assessment of purposes, or to advise candidates on their tasks
- Elevated give attention to offering candidates with 1:1 suggestions
- Labored extra carefully with accepted tasks to create clearer targets, roadmaps, and mutual expectations
Increasing Communications
With these stronger processes in place, we’re making an effort to extend visibility and to draw extra high-quality purposes. To that finish, we’re making some adjustments to how we talk, from bettering present channels to including some shiny new pages to the ESP website.
Some adjustments are modest, however we hope that they’ll be useful in each holding the neighborhood knowledgeable and higher making ready potential candidates. On the entrance web page now you can observe the newest information about ESP and see which occasions we’ll be collaborating in, whether or not just about or in individual following the present and ongoing well being disaster.
We’ve added to our FAQ, improved our inquiry kinds, and most significantly debuted some new web page banners that we predict actually tie the room collectively 😎. Maintain a watch out for much more additions within the coming months, and common updates to present content material!
We’ve additionally added a Wishlist to convey consideration to particular areas like safety, Eth2, and privateness, the place we’d wish to see extra purposes. This record is not a declaration of what is vital to the ecosystem, or perhaps a assertion of ESP’s priorities. Nonetheless, we hope the record serves as inspiration for anybody seeking to become involved! As all the time, we need to strike a steadiness between demonstrating the vary of efforts that ESP helps whereas additionally embracing potential contributors working outdoors of the particular areas we have outlined.
On the reporting entrance, we can be publishing common weblog posts to announce new grant recipients, however a grant is barely the start. Shifting ahead, we’ll even be highlighting what supported groups go on to perform. On the brand new Featured Projects web page, we’ll highlight tasks which are months or years into the work that was enabled by these grants. We’ll additionally use our weblog and develop our use of social media to have fun grant recipients as they obtain milestones and make progress towards their targets.
Monetary Assist in 2019
Whereas we labored to enhance the Ecosystem Assist Program all through 2019, we continued to help tasks throughout the ecosystem. Awarding grants is just one manner that we offer that help. There are lots of superb groups that aren’t EF grant recipients, both as a result of they’re already funded or as a result of their explicit focus is simply not the precise match for EF funding. Nonetheless, we work to help these important contributors in no matter manner we will (for instance, as a bridge to new alternatives or as an amplifier of community results for his or her tasks).
That stated, monetary help continues to be a serious a part of how we help the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Over 70 tasks obtained monetary help in 2019. What’s listed beneath particulars newly distributed grants to groups in 2019. It doesn’t embrace recurring help, tranches for newly achieved milestones from prior recipients, or funding for different EF groups. For extra particulars on the entire Basis’s work, we’ll share a 2020 Spring Replace within the coming days.
We’re together with names and summaries for every funded venture beneath. You will discover a searchable spreadsheet together with hyperlinks to study extra about particular person tasks right here.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 growth is in full swing, with many groups working collectively to make Ethereum extra scalable, resilient, safe, and naturally introduce Proof of Stake! We’ve helped to fund a various bunch of two.0 shoppers, in addition to efforts towards interoperability, bettering reliability and creating developer tooling. Along with the grants listed beneath, Ethereum 2.0 work has been supported via recurring funding and different channels.
Eth2 Purchasers: $1,695,000
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Concord Consumer | Assist for the Concord crew to develop a beacon chain shopper in Java. | https://github.com/harmony-dev/beacon-chain-java |
| Lighthouse | Assist for Sigma Prime’s continued growth of the Lighthouse staking shopper, written in Rust, for the Ethereum 2.0 community. | https://lighthouse.sigmaprime.io/ |
| Nimbus | Assist for Standing’s continued growth of the Nimbus shopper for Ethereum 2.0, designed to carry out properly on embedded techniques and private cell units, together with older smartphones with resource-restricted {hardware}. | https://nimbus.team/ |
| Prysm Consumer | Assist for Prysmatic Labs’s continued growth of the Prysm staking shopper for the Ethereum 2.0 community written in Go. | https://prylabs.net/ |
Eth2 Tooling & Different: $1,459,000
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorial analysis on CBC Casper | Analysis by Ryuya Nakamura of College of Tokyo and Dominik Harz of Imperial School London to ascertain the theoretical basis of CBC Casper together with the evaluation of safety, efficiency, and incentives. | https://ethresear.ch/u/nrryuya/activity/topics https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/415.pdf https://github.com/LayerXcom/cbc-casper-proof |
| Beacon Fuzz | Differential fuzzer for Section 0 of Eth2. | https://github.com/sigp/beacon-fuzz/ |
| Cryptonext | Survey and report on attainable approaches to aggregatable post-quantum signatures in Eth2. | https://cryptonext-security.com/ |
| Dmitry Khovratovich | Cryptoanalysis of the Lengendre PRF and Proof of Custody building. | https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/862.pdf |
| Herumi | Convey the Herumi BLS library according to the IEFT spec. | https://github.com/herumi/mcl |
| Lodestar | Work by Chainsafe on Eth2 light-client R&D inside their Lodestar javascript shopper; in addition to persevering with to offer help to the Eth2 JS/web-browser ecosystem by growing libraries, tooling, and academic sources. | http://github.com/ChainSafe/Lodestar |
| Nimbus | Grant to Standing, co-funded with Protocol Labs, to construct nim-libp2p, a networking stack in Nim. | https://github.com/status-im/nim-libp2p |
| Runtime Verification | Formal verification of the Eth2 Deposit Contract; constructing the Section 0 Beacon Chain spec in Okay Framework for the needs of formal verification; and formally verifying Accountable Security and Believable Liveness towards the Okay Beacon Chain. | |
| VDF analysis—hybrid prover | Analysis on the soundness and efficiency of a hybrid Wesolowski-Pietrzak VDF prover. | |
| VDF: Quantity Concept Assertion | Show a quantity theoretic assertion which suggests an data theoretic decrease sure for modular squaring. | |
| Whiteblock | Ethereum 2.0 community testing and testnet/interoperability help: evaluation of the libp2p gossipsub implementation, working with implementors to assist refine the networking stack and specification, and advancing interoperability efforts. | https://whiteblock.io/ |
Eth 1.x: $487,000
Important work continues on bettering Ethereum because it exists in the present day, with upgrades being labored on by 1.x contributors to assist enhance Ethereum within the rapid time period. Targeted upon areas embrace Stateless Ethereum, bettering developer expertise, rising node shopper range, guaranteeing that operating a full node stays sustainable, and making ready a path to the two.0 rollout. As with Eth2, these are simply the allocations that took the type of grants. We’ll share extra about different supported efforts – together with Geth, extra 1.x and Stateless analysis, and extra in later organizational updates.
Layer 2: $1,211,000
Layer 2 options allow all kinds of purposes which may in any other case be too costly, sluggish, difficult, or simply not attainable to implement straight on the Ethereum base layer. 2019 was an thrilling yr throughout which groups and people throughout the neighborhood got here collectively to make enormous strides towards making Ethereum extra helpful and scalable. This work is essential within the close to time period, however simply as worthwhile for the longer term. Eth 2.0 will nonetheless profit from the improved privateness, scalability, and suppleness supplied by Layer 2.
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Connext | Aligning Connext fee hubs with generalized State Channel unification venture. | https://github.com/ConnextProject/indra, https://connext.network |
| Cryptoeconomics Labs | Plasma Chamber, an OVM-inspired, basic objective layer 2 utility framework | https://www.cryptoeconomicslab.com/ |
| LeapDAO | Plasma Leap: a Extra Viable Plasma design which permits execution of good contract performance on plasma utilizing EVM enforcer, a computation verification engine that enables for enforcement of off-chain execution. | https://leapdao.org/ |
| Matter Labs | Productionizing Plasma Ignis, a SNARK-driven zk-rollup implementation. | https://matter-labs.io/ |
| PISA Analysis | Basic accountable watchtower system for state channels and decentralized finance protocols, which permits events to rent an accountable service to observe the off-chain protocols and on-chain contracts on their behalf. | https://www.pisa.watch/ |
| Plasma Group | Analysis into generalized plasma, Optimistic Rollup, and OVM (Optimistic Digital Machine). | https://plasma.group/ |
| Twitch Performs Pokemon on Plasma | Check suite for educational establishments and researchers to check financial and coordination theories of decentralized governance fashions. | flexdapps.com |
| Unified State Channels | A joint grant to Prototypal, Magmo and L4 analysis aimed on the unification of State Channels efforts. Along with merging efforts already in progress, contributors labored collectively to rewrite, optimize and do formal modeling of the underlying protocol; design a demo app; and design a resilient shopper that gives fund restoration ensures to customers. | statechannels.org |
Cryptography and Zero Data Proofs: $426,000
There’s extra work than ever going into analysis and growth on cryptography and 0 data proofs. These efforts strengthen the elemental constructing blocks of the protocol, opening up new potentialities for scaling, privateness, and safety. 2019 was all about sensible steps ahead, with instruments being constructed that make developments extra accessible to builders with out requiring a complicated understanding cryptography.
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| AirAssembly | Language for encoding Algebraic Intermediate Illustration (AIR), making STARK programming extra accessible by enabling succinct proofs of computational integrity in zk-STARKS. | https://ethresear.ch/t/airassembly-a-low-level-language-for-zk-starks/6419/4 |
| Aztec | Cryptographic building which permits nested composition of a batch of Aztec vary proofs inside a zk-SNARK circuit, to allow future growth of privateness preserving rollups. | https://www.aztecprotocol.com/ |
| Circom | A sturdy and scalable language for advanced arithmetic circuit design. | https://github.com/iden3/circom |
| FPGA Snark Prover | Enhancing effectivity of zk-SNARK proof creation by offloading operations to an FPGA (subject programmable information array). | |
| Kestrel Institute | ACL2 Ethereum shopper and AXE equivalence checker to formally confirm cryptographic primitives (together with MiMC, PiMC, Edison hash, BLAKE2) relevant to numerous makes use of of zk-SNARKS. | https://www.kestrel.edu/home/projects/fv-of-r1cs/index.html |
| Legendre PRF Bounty | The Legendre PRF (pseudo-random operate) is required to allow secret-shared validators utilizing multi-party computations. These bounties encourage extra analysis on key restoration assaults, to extend confidence in utilizing this cryptographic primitive. | https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/862.pdf, https://legendreprf.org/bounties |
| MACI | Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure: a collusion resistance scheme that drastically will increase the chance concerned in shopping for or promoting votes. | https://github.com/barryWhiteHat/maci |
| Platon | Validation and implementation of the “Proof of Custody” scheme, which permits secret shared validators through multi-party computation, enabling trustless staking swimming pools in addition to redundancy to lower the chance of getting slashed as a consequence of compromised {hardware} or software program. | https://github.com/PlatONnetwork/proof_of_custody |
| Statebox | Analysis into utilizing class principle to show diagrams, securely and compositionally, into zk-SNARK circuits. | www.statebox.org |
Developer Expertise: $1,322,000
Ethereum opened up a complete new design house for purposes. As builders have explored this house, inevitably they’ve found new ache factors and required new instruments. We’re making important investments in enhancing developer expertise on Ethereum, from bettering the vary of programming languages, software program libraries, dev tooling, node infrastructure, decentralized storage, messaging, and extra. These developments allow builders to do extra, extra simply, to allow them to give attention to their merchandise moderately than on constructing their very own customized tooling. In the end we would like it to be straightforward – and enjoyable – to construct on Ethereum.
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Buidler | Extending capabilities for Buidler, a process runner for Ethereum good contract builders. | https://buidler.dev/ |
| DeepSEA | Analysis at Yale and Columbia on DeepSEA, a language producing coq proofs to compile formally verified code to the EVM guaranteeing no bugs are launched. | https://certik.org/deepsea_blockchain.html |
| Ethereum on ARM | Customized Linux photographs to routinely flip useful resource constrained units into full Ethereum nodes. | https://github.com/diglos/pi-gen (for ARM32 repository, Raspberry Pi 4 picture), https://github.com/diglos/userpatches (for ARM64 repository, NanoPC-T4 and RockPro64 picture) |
| Moon | EVM and WASM runtimes for formality language in addition to associated libraries, documentation and tutorials. | https://github.com/moonad/, https://sunshinecybernetics.com/, https://github.com/moonad/Formality/blob/master/DOCUMENTATION.md |
| NomicLabs | Developer expertise analysis, prioritization, and roadmapping. | https://nomiclabs.io/ |
| Play | Decentralized database for verified Solidity code. | https://playproject.io/play-ed/ |
| py-libp2p | Capstone venture by 4 College of Pennsylvania seniors to develop a python implementation of libp2p, utilized by IPFS and Eth2, and accompanying easy-to-use toolsets | https://github.com/libp2p/py-libp2p |
| Shadowlands | Framework for constructing terminal-based Ethereum apps with a textual content UI, as a substitute for apps with web-based UI. | https://github.com/kayagoban/shadowlands |
| Solhint | Continued growth and added plugins for Solhint, a device for linting solidity code to establish dangerous coding practices. | github: https://github.com/protofire/solhint/, Firm profile: https://protofire.io |
| Solidity Protection | Enhancements to the solidity-coverage device, which gives a manner for Solidity builders to measure the accuracy of their javascript take a look at suites, obtain protection reporting and extra. | https://github.com/sc-forks/solidity-coverage |
| SOLL | Second State’s LLVM based mostly compiler, a yul different to assist transition Solidity to eWASM. | https://github.com/second-state/SOLL, https://www.secondstate.io/ |
| Swarm | Analysis and growth on Swarm, a decentralized storage answer. | https://swarm.ethereum.org/ |
| Tenderly | Enhancements to Buidler’s console.log performance. | https://tenderly.dev/ |
| Web3J | Growth and upkeep of the Web3j library with a view to present an improved expertise for Java, Android and Kotlin builders. | https://blog.web3labs.com/web3j-ethereum-foundation-grant-update, https://www.web3labs.com/web3j, https://github.com/web3j/web3j |
Consumer Expertise: $213,000
We’re all the time looking out for common instruments and upgrades that scale back friction for the tip person with out compromising decentralization or any of the opposite issues that make Ethereum particular. Addressing widespread ache factors like fuel prices, identification administration, deal with readability, and interoperability makes it simpler for dapp builders in all places to onboard customers.
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Eauth | Oauth2 suitable authentication service framework based mostly on Ethereum. | https://github.com/pelith/node-eauth-server |
| ENS Basis | Continuation funding for Ethereum Identify Service, decentralized Web naming infrastructure on Ethereum. | https://ens.domains/ |
| Ethereum Pockets SDK | Abstraction layer which permits dapp builders to simply combine with a number of wallets. | https://dappsdk.io/ |
| Everest | Id and credential system which permits identification claims resembling KYC standing to be securely revealed, shared, and verified on Ethereum Mainnet. | https://everest.org |
| Gasoline Station Community | Meta transactions normal and decentralized community of relay nodes to deal with fuel charges on behalf of customers. | https://gasstation.network/ |
| POAP | Subsidization of Proof of Attendance Protocol fuel prices at Devcon. | http://www.poap.xyz |
Group and Training: $422,000
Merely put, Ethereum wouldn’t exist with out its neighborhood and the folks that work to develop and enrich our ecosystem. These groups convey individuals collectively each in individual and on-line, improve the variety of our international neighborhood, and assist to construct a common data base by making instructional supplies free and obtainable to all.
Oblique Funding $484,000
A brand new form of ecosystem wants new methods of occupied with funding! The Ethereum ecosystem depends on open supply builders and unbiased thinkers to thrive. To this finish, we glance to help novel methods of funding proficient contributors outdoors the normal constructions of corporations and organizations; grants and VCs; contracts and salaries. This class is all about entrusting sources to the neighborhood.
| Grant | Description | Extra Information |
|---|---|---|
| Gitcoin | Funding for operations, bounties and CLR matching. | https://gitcoin.co/ |
| MolochDAO | Funding for the launch of MolochDAO in an effort to diversify growth funding. | https://molochdao.com/ |
| UNICEF | ETH and BTC donations to UNICEF’s Crypto-denomintated Fund to help blockchain improvements within the growing world and encourage using cryptocurrencies (with out changing them into fiat). | https://www.unicef.org/ |
We’re happy with all the things our 2019 cohort completed, and we’re forging forward in 2020 with renewed vitality and objective. As all the time, massive due to the neighborhood to your ardour and help, and we stay up for holding you updated with the newest from the ESP crew! 🦄
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