It's that time again - our Q2 grantee lineup is coming right up.
But before we get to that: ESP is hiring a Team Lead! We're looking for someone organized, innovative, and passionate about Ethereum. If you think you might be the right person to lead a small but hardworking grants team, see the job posting and apply here.
And now, to the grantees:
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | Ethereum Cat Herders | Community group supporting Ethereum core developers with project management, communication and coordination. | |
| Community & education | EthCC | Ethereum France | Developer and community conference held in Paris, France. |
| Community & education | Ethereum HN | Grassroots Ethereum community group organizing meetups, workshops and developer events in Honduras. | |
| Community & education | Ether University Content and Educational Resources | Nathan Leung | Community-building and educational resources for undergraduate students participating in the ETH Summer learning program. |
| Community & education | ETHUni: ETH Spring Community Development | Scott Moses Sunarto | Community building and support for the ETH Spring undergraduate learning program, plus formatting and migration of content to the ETH Spring website for public consumption. |
| Community & education | ETHUni: ETH Summer | Therese Cresalia and Scott Moses Sunarto | Management of ETH Summer, a virtual program to introduce undergraduate computer science and mathematics students to Ethereum. |
| Community & education | Smart Contract Auditing Bootcamp | Secureum | Structured program to train aspiring auditors on smart contract security and auditing. |
| Community & education | Ethereum Public Goods Funding Mapping | Sumedha Deshmukh | Research project to map out the public good funding landscape within the Ethereum ecosystem. |
| Community & education | Cryptofund 2021 | UNICEF | Cryptocurrency-denominated investment fund targeting startups that use blockchain technology for social impact. |
| Consensus layer | Eth2 Crawler | ChainSafe | DiscV5 crawler, API and front end to capture and interact with information about beacon chain nodes. |
| Consensus layer | Fast Hash-to-Curve Research | Dimitri Koshelev | Research and write-up about faster hash-to-G2 hash functions for BLS12-381 for potential performance optimizations in SNARKs, L2 dapps and more. |
| Consensus layer | Stereum | Rock Logic | Docker images for solo stakers to install a beacon chain client and dependencies in a single setup, with support for all production clients on testnet and mainnet. |
| Consensus layer | Beacon Fuzz | Sigma Prime | Continued maintenance and development of Beacon Fuzz, a beacon chain testing framework, including performance optimizations, integration of new clients and targets, and testing new Altair functions for bugs or vulnerabilities. |
| Consensus layer | Lighthouse | Sigma Prime | Continued development of the Lighthouse beacon chain client. |
| Consensus layer | Beacon Chain Liveness Improvements | Stanford University's Tse Lab | Research into solutions for potential liveness attacks on Ethereum's beacon chain consensus algorithm. |
| Consensus layer | Ethereum Staking Committee Japan | Effort to expand staking in Japan through awareness, education, and support for the engineering community, as well as fostering the Japanese staking environment from technical, regulatory, and business perspectives. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ZK Games | Justin Glibert | State of the art research on using zkSNARKs in blockchain game mechanics to build decentralized real-time strategy games. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Verkle Trie Optimizations | Dag Arne Osvik | Implementation of the verkle trie data structure for Stateless Ethereum. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | MPC Phase 2 UI Enhancements | Geoff Lamperd | Improvements to the Phase 2 MPC trusted setup UI for a faster and more streamlined process, based on learnings from the zkopru MPC. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ZK Developer Tooling | Jacob Rosenthal and Blaine Bublitz | Development of tools to improve the applied ZK developer experience, including contributions to Dark Forest, circom, and Hardhat . |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ETHUni: Private Data Marketplace POC | Nick Ulven | Development of a proof of concept on-chain marketplace for secret or permissioned data using zkSNARKs. |
| Developer experience & tooling | clr.fund UI | clr.fund | Improvements to the user experience for the clr.fund decentralized quadratic funding protocol, including improvements to the clr.fund deployer, subgraph, documentation archives, new MACI circuits that allow scaling to millions of users, and conducting a trusted setup ceremony. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Vyper/Fe Formally Verified Compiler | formalize.eth | Formally verified transformation of the Fe smart contract language to Yul as well as development of features needed to support a complete ERC20 implementation. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Viblex | Heiko Burkhardt | Graphical representation of smart contract architectures, enabling users to analyze and interact with the contracts on both mainnet and testnets, including local testnets. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Gas Cost Estimator Stage II | Imapp | Systematic approach to estimating gas costs of EVM OPCODEs accounting for differences in hardware, software and programming environments, in order to inform discussions on adjusting OPCODE prices. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Formal Verification of Yul Compiler Transformations | Kestrel Institute | Formalization of the semantics of the Yul language, as well as application and extension of existing formal verification and equivalence checking tools to prove the correctness of Yul compiler optimizations |
| Developer experience & tooling | Decentralized Community Management Research | Other Internet | Research study and paper on decentralized community management, analyzing organizational composition, communications, and conflict resolution and proposing community management best practices. |
| Developer experience & tooling | GCatch++ | Penn State University | Extension of GCatch, a system for detecting concurrency bugs in Go programs, to apply detection of channel-related non-blocking bugs to Ethereum clients. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Transaction Classification Schema | Rotki | Open source library and set of schemas to decode ethereum transactions and classify the associated actions (e.g. classifying a transaction as a CLR donation, a token exchange, or adding liquidity to an AMM). |
| Developer experience & tooling | Decentralized Identity Tooling | Symfoni | Open source toolkit for decentralized identity and verified credentials on Ethereum, including wallet, data container and SDK. |
| Execution layer | Nethermind Execution Client | Nethermind | Continued maintenance and development of the Nethermind execution client. |
| Execution layer | Layer 1 R&D | Quilt | Support for ongoing research and development into Layer 1 protocol features and security. |
| Execution layer | Nimbus Execution Client | Status | Continued maintenance and development of the Nimbus execution client. |
| Execution layer | Fluffy Portal Client | Status | Development of the Fluffy light client, designed for the Portal Network, which aims to enable resource-restricted devices to contribute to the Ethereum network by accessing the necessary APIs to perform standard wallet operations without needing to sync the full state. |
| Execution layer | Erigon | Torquem | Continued maintenance and development of the Torquem (fka TurboGeth) execution client. |
| Layer 2 | Arbitrum Review | Kev Zettler | Review of the Arbitrum system and codebase, reporting any vulnerabilities to the Arbitrum team, similar to the previously supported review of Optimism. |
| Layer 2 | L2Beat | Website displaying usage statistics and risk factors for comparison between Layer 2 scaling solutions. | |
| User experience | BrightID | Advancement of BrightID's social identity network infrastructure, including strengthening node security and anti-sybil protections, building a web client, and enabling blind signatures. | |
| User experience | ZK Games Design Support | Moe Janneh | Design support and artwork for teams working on experimental ZK games and applications. |
Total Awarded in Q2: $7,794,000
Are you working on something you think could change Ethereum for the better? Head to our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.