Ecosystem Support Program, from the Ethereum Foundation, just released their Allocation update for Q4.
On March 22, 2021, Ethereum Foundation Ecosystem Support Program listed the Q4 list of funded projects, from various categories, such as Community & Education, Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs, Developer experience & tooling, Ethereum 2.0, just to name a few, valued at US$4,091,000.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!The Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring many community grants from open-source projects that benefit Ethereum. These grants are given through invited interested parties to get in touch through their inquiry form.
Below you can check the Q4 grants Awarded from EF Ecosystem Support Program:
| Category | Grant | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Community & education | ETHTerakoya | An educational initiative by Couger organizing public meetings, workshops, and working groups producing prototypes and standards. |
| Community & education | EthereumCN | Chinese language resources and community building, including eth2 resources and a program for university students. |
| Community & education | Truffle | Sponsorship of the TruffleCon 2020 virtual developer conference. |
| Community & education | Creacion de Contratos Inteligentes con Ethereum | Scholarship for 11 independent developers to attend the National University of Bogota smart contract development course “Creacion de Contratos Inteligentes con Ethereum.” |
| Community & education | Descubriendo Blockchain | Spanish-language Ethereum education course with each lecture given by a different speaker, primarily featuring experts from LATAM communities. |
| Community & education | India Ecosystem Development Events | Organization of virtual developer events targeting students from top engineering colleges in India. |
| Community & education | Devfolio Fellowship | 8-week mentorship and education program with separate tracks for seasoned Ethereum developers, and web developers with no experience in Ethereum. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | 4byte.directory | Support for students from the ETH Summer program to continue work on 4byte.directory, a tool for mapping the 4-byte function selectors used by the EVM back to a list of known canonical function signatures. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Scaffold.eth Projects | Support for students from the ETH Summer program to continue various projects on scaffold.eth. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Blaine Bublitz, Ivan Chub, Jacob Rosenthal for Dark Forest and ZK Tooling | Improvements to zero knowledge tooling and infrastructure based on learnings from continued development of Dark Forest. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Kautuk Kundan for BLS Hubble Frontend | Creation of a frontend allowing users to create accounts and interact with Hubble and other applications which use BLS signatures. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Geoff Lamperd for MPC Phase 2 UI | Website and other components for browser-based trusted setup ceremonies, including server application, browser-based client and Firebase backend for core fuctions. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Riya Singh for Anonymous Login with Semaphore | A proof of concept using Semaphore for anonymous login, allowing a user to prove they belong to the list of KYC’ed users without revealing their validated properties (eg. phone number) or notifying the KYC provider of the login purpose. |
| Cryptography & zero-knowledge proofs | Cory Dickson for MACI 1.0 | Continued development of the Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure MVP toward the specified v1.0 implementation. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Igor Gulamov for Hubble Audit | Security audit of Hubble, an optimistic rollup hub allowing creation of multiple chains with the same interface for increased interoperability between ORU chains. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Chance Hudson for Zkopru Infrastructure | Improvements to Zero-Knowledge Optimistic Rollup tooling and developer ecosystem, including a testnet to analyze zkopru’s performance under realistic conditions, with multiple coordinators competing for batch creation via burn auction mechanism developed by Iden3 for the Hermez network. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Umbra | Protocol for Bitcoin-style “stealth addresses” on Ethereum, allowing a payer to send to a public identifier (e.g. an ENS name or public Ethereum address) while creating a fresh address, controlled by the recipient, each time funds are sent. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Obsidian on Ethereum | Research and proof of concept by a group of students and professors from the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science to demonstrate that key features of the Obsidian smart contract language can translate successfully to Ethereum. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Yul-Isabelle | Writing of Yul’s formal semantics in the Isabelle theorem prover, with the goal of verifying compiler transformations. |
| Developer experience & tooling | ETH Learning | Continuation of ETH Summer, a program for students to learn about and build on Ethereum. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Chainsafe | Audit of GSN v2 contracts. |
| Ethereum 1.x | Nethermind | Continued support to Nethermind for work on eth1 and .NET client hardening. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Nimbus | Continuation funding to Status for development of the Nimbus eth2 client. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | ConsenSys Automated Verification Team | Continued work on formal modeling and verification of components of the eth2 specs. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | ethereum2-docker-compose | Work by Rock Logic to extend the ethereum2-docker-compose staking node toolbox, including support for the Teku and Lighthouse clients as well as additional features, articles, and documentation. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Lighthouse | Continued development of Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse staking client, written in Rust, for the Ethereum 2.0 network. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Staking Community Grants | Special grants round focused on tools for improving the staking and validator experience. |
| Ethereum 2.0 | Medalla Data Challenge | Hackathon-style competition for blog posts focused on data tools, visualizations, analyses or other ways of making data from the Medalla testnet. |
| User experience | ENS on L2 with general approach | Standard for securely retrieving verified information from off chain, including subdomain records from ENS domains stored on L2 but generalized for use with any data outside the Ethereum mainnet. |
| User experience | Etherisc | Support for the integration assessment phase of a pilot project led by Etherisc and Acre Africa to provide blockchain-based agricultural microinsurance for smallholder farmers in Kenya. |
Total awarded in Q4: $4,091,000
Some of the previously granted projects are:
Uniswap – Grant Received: $50,000 + 120 ETH for security audit in 2018:
Automated market maker designed around ease of use, gas efficiency, and decentralization.
Turbo-Geth – Grant Received: $20,000 in 2019:
Optimized go-ethereum client.
Ethereum on ARM – Grant Received: $20,000 in 2019:
Custom Linux images to automatically turn resource-constrained devices into full Ethereum nodes.
About Ecosystem Support
The Ecosystem Support Program exists to make a wide variety of resources more accessible to projects across the Ethereum ecosystem by deploying resources where they will have the biggest impact, with a particular focus on universal tools, infrastructure, research, and public goods.
ESP is an outcome of the expansion of the original Ethereum Foundation Grants Program, which focused mainly on funding.
