Hello again! We’re back to share the grants that went out over the second quarter of 2020 – but first, some ESP updates from the last few months:
We’re writing about grants today, but grants are not the only kind of support ESP can offer! We recently published a blog post featuring some amazing teams that you won’t find on the list below, since they received support other than the traditional grants highlighted here.
Meanwhile, the community has put on some awesome virtual events that really are the next best thing to the in-person gatherings that we’ve all been missing – and in some ways, even better. Through some of these events the ESP team has had the opportunity to connect with hackers and attendees all over the world; check out recordings of our presentations at ETHGlobal’s HackMoney and HackFS, Gitcoin’s Protect Privacy, and ETHPlanet’s EDCON.
Last but not least, we added a “pinboard” to our Wishlist page, where you can find some specific challenges posed by the eth2 team. If you want to make a unique contribution to eth2, this is a great place to start!
And now, without further ado, here’s our list of grant recipients in Q2:
| Category | Recipient | Description | More Info |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community and Education | Akomba Education Initiative | On-chain certification framework, and development of modular learning resources and accredited courses using this framework. | akomba.com/ |
| Community and Education | Couger | Educational initiative creating working groups and corporate meetups/workshops to discuss and develop open standards and proofs of concept. | |
| Community and Education | FOSS Responders | Event organized by Open Software Foundation to help connect open source projects and teams affected by COVID-19 with funding opportunities in various open source ecosystems. | fossresponders.com |
| Cryptography and ZKP | STARK-related explorations | Research and development on Distaff, a zero-knowledge virtual machine written in Rust which automatically generates a STARK-based proofs of execution, including progress toward Turing-completeness. | github.com/GuildOfWeavers/distaff |
| Cryptography and ZKP | zk-SUMMER | Program for students to learn about and build on Ethereum, with zero knowledge proofs as a key focus area. | |
| Cryptography and ZKP | Hubble | Optimistic rollup hub which enables creation of optimistic rollup chains within the same interface, removing the need to ever “exit” the ecosystem by allowing users to move between chains instantly and at negligible cost once they have entered the rollup space. The goal of Hubble is to allow the creation of any rollup chain simply by writing a solidity function. | thehubbleproject.github.io/docs/ |
| Cryptography and ZKP | Peek-A-Book | Private order matching system that allows users to advertise trading orders without leaking the amount or price. | |
| Cryptography and ZKP | UniRep | Private and nonrepudiable reputation system which uses zero knowledge proofs and Ethereum contracts. | |
| Cryptography and ZKP | zkzkrollup | Improving Fawkes-Crypto to support a PLONK-based recursive solution for cheaper Layer 1 verification. | github.com/zeropoolnetwork/fawkes-crypto |
| Cryptography and ZKP | Analysis of Arithmetization-Oriented Ciphers | Research to optimize the advanced cryptographic protocols that make use of symmetric ciphers. | |
| Cryptography and ZKP | MACI User Interface | Web-based user interface for Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure. | |
| Developer Experience | Meson: A Mixnet To Rule Them All | Research into network level privacy based on Katzenpost, including decentralising the public key infrastructure, incentives, and dynamic tuning of mixnet parameters. | github.com/hashcloak/Meson |
| Developer Experience | SWARM | Research and development on Swarm, a decentralized storage solution. | ethswarm.org |
| Developer Experience | ChainSafe | Grant to ChainSafe for maintenance and improvements on the Web3JS library. | github.com/ethereum/web3.js/, chainsafe.io/ |
| Ethereum 1.0 | OpenEthereum | Maintenance on the OpenEthereum client and repository. | |
| Ethereum 1.0/Ethereum 2.0 | DataHop | Large-scale simulation of the proposed DiscV5 service discovery protocol for eth2 in order to evaluate and improve performance and provide Sybil resistance. | datahop.network |
| Ethereum 2.0 | RSA MPC review | Audit of the RSA MPC (multi-party computation) paper and code by the KZen team. | eprint.iacr.org/2020/374.pdf, github.com/ligeroinc/LigeroRSA, Diogenes Octopus Playing Red Team for Eth2 |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Schlesi | An initiative to create a number of multi-client eth2 testnets in preparation for mainnet. This work led to the current Medalla testnet, composed of 20k+ validators and 600+ nodes with the majority run by the community | github.com/goerli/medalla |
| Ethereum 2.0 | BSC Eth2 Network Evaluation | Collaboration between a professor and master’s student to evaluate libp2p gossipsub simulations using the Barcelona Super Computer (BSC), investigate ways of hardening gossip networks against attacks, and develop a monitoring tool. | bsc.es |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Beacon Fuzz | Continued maintenance and infrastructure upgrades by Sigma Prime on Beacon Fuzz, a differential fuzzer for finding crash-causing and consensus bugs in eth2 clients. | github.com/sigp/beacon-fuzz |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Lighthouse | Continued development of Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse staking client, written in Rust, for the Ethereum 2.0 network. | github.com/sigp/lighthouse |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Prysm Client | Continued development of Prysmatic Labs’s Prysm staking client for the Ethereum 2.0 network written in Go. | github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm |
| Third Party Funding | UNICEF Cryptofund | Cryptocurrency-denominated investment fund targeting startups that use blockchain technology for social impact. | unicef.org/innovation/blockchain |
| Third Party Funding | CLR.FUND | Open quadratic funding protocol using Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI). | clr.fund |
| Layer 2 | Perun | Go-based implementation of state channels hub and node client. | perun.network |
| Layer 2 | Fuel Labs | Research and development of optimistic rollup for building scalable, permissionless, trust-minimized rollup. | fuel.sh/ |
| Layer 2 | Unified State Channels | Continued work on getting State Channels production-ready, including launch of Web3Torrent, a demo app which uses state channels to enable micropayments for torrented data. | statechannels.org/ |
| User Experience | Gas Station Network | Productionizing GSN2, testnet dapp integrations, and educational materials. | opengsn.org/ |
Total Q2 allocations: $3,884,000
This list represents non-recurring funding from across the EF, including grants via our public inquiry process, delegated domain allocations and third-party funding (types B, C and D as defined in the EF Spring Update). As always, it’s a privilege to work with these amazing projects and so many more.
Keep up with future ESP news by following us on Twitter @ef_esp or signing up for our newsletter. And as always, we’d love to chat about how we might be able to support you in your own work – just get in touch at esp.ethereum.foundation/en/project!
