This one's a double header! Below you'll find the lists of grantees from both Q3 and Q4 of 2021.
A note on categories: where we once listed Ethereum 1.0/1.x or Ethereum 2.0, you'll now see "Execution Layer" and "Consensus Layer" respectively. This is part of a broader effort to shift terminology to be more clear, accurate, and inclusive. Check out this recent post for more on the reasoning for the shift.
And now, to the grantees...
Q3
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | DAO Drops | dOrg | Research into approaches to third party allocation via programmatically defined DAOs (based on on-chain traction) which could leverage the domain knowledge of individuals and communities in the Ethereum ecosystem to serve as resource allocators. |
| Community & education | ETHAtlanta 2021 | ETHAtlanta | Enterprise-focused community event in Atlanta, Georgia, US. |
| Community & education | ETHTurin Meetup 2021/2022 | ETHTurin | Monthly meetup in Torino, Italy, with a project-focused agenda. |
| Community & education | LisCon 2021 | Community-focused conference in Lisbon, Portugal. | |
| Community & education | Road to Devcon: Remix Learneth | Dacade | Incentives for developers learning to write smart contracts through the Remix Learneth program, deployed in Spanish on the Dacade peer to peer learning platform as part of the Road to Devcon initiative. |
| Community & education | Road to Devcon Meetup and Event Grants | Round of small grants to virtual and in-person meetups around the world. | |
| Consensus layer | Beacon Chain Network Stress Testing | CryptoManufaktur | Beacon chain network stress and scenario tests on cloud instances distributed across the globe; initial tests will be performed against small 32-node networks to assess viability, refine test tooling, and formulate a methodology for subsequent, larger tests. |
| Consensus layer | Validator Load Testing | Ethereum on Arm | Mainnet load testing on restricted capacity ARM devices, and publication of metrics and reports regarding load capabilities of Ethereum validators on many different client and hardware choices. |
| Consensus layer | Wagyu Suite | Development and continued support of Wagyu, a multi-client, desktop UI automating the setup and management of staking infrastructure. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Advancing Tree-Based Vector Commitments | Exploration into approaches to tree-based vector commitments, including RSA groups, multilinear and lattice-based constructions, to address challenges such as aggregatability and post-quantum security. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Foundations of hash-based SNARKs book | Alessandro Chiesa and Eylon Yogev | Book covering the information-theoretic foundations of hash-based SNARKs, with a focus on mathematical correctness, comprehensiveness and clarity of results. |
| Developer experience & tooling | dethcrypto | deth | Ongoing development and maintenance of TypeChain and other Ethereum developer tools. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Web3JS Maintenance and Ecosystem Development | Chainsafe | Maintenance and extension of the web3.js Ethereum JavaScript API and development of a website to serve as a hub for web3.js documentation, educational content, and community. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Kind-Lang Ethers Module Implementation | Victor Maia with Rigille Menezes and Tiago Campos | Formally verifying key Ethers.js modules in Kind-Lang, and support for Kind-Lang community development. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Improving JS Ethereum Cryptography | Paul Miller | Security & auditability improvements to the widely used js-ethereum-cryptography library. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Zero MEV | P Mcgoohan | Collection, publishing, and categorization of MEV-rich data in order to bring further visibility to MEV and promote understanding of the problem. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Web3 Bounty Tooling | Tarun Sachdeva | Open-source toolkit for facilitating contributions and bounties across the Ethereum ecosystem. |
| Execution layer | Mempool Research & Data Support - EIP 1559 | Blocknative | Provision of historical mempool data for backtesting and simulations of how EIP-1559 would have behaved under past scenarios. |
| Execution layer | OpenEthereum Execution Client | OpenEthereum | Maintenance of the OpenEthereum client as needed until the merge, and contribution to development of the Erigon execution client. |
| Execution layer | Besu Execution Client | Hyperledger Besu | Continued maintenance and development of the Besu execution client. |
| Execution layer | Node Crawler UI | Mohamed Mansour | APIs and front end interface for the open-source Ethereum node crawler available as part of go-ethereum. |
| General Research | Protocol Research | Daniel Perez | Sponsorship of PhD research at Imperial College London, including L1 actual transaction throughput and DeFi contract vulnerabilities. |
Total awarded in Q3: $2,992,000
Q4
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | Web3 Lagos | Conference in Lagos, Nigeria covering a variety of topics including making the switch from Web2 to Web3. | |
| Community & education | Blockchain Fellowship | ESatya | Three month online course aiming to familiarize Nepalese developers with the key elements of blockchain technology through instruction and project-based learning. |
| Community & education | Ethereum Eje Cafetero Meetups | Ethereum Eje Cafetero | Community talks and meetups in Colombia's Coffee Region. |
| Community & education | ETH CUBA | Kickstarting community growth in Cuba. | |
| Community & education | Ethereum Medellín | Platohedro | Community development in Medellín, Colombia. |
| Community & education | Ethereum Tegucigalpa | Support for Ethereum community development in Honduras including meetups, developer events and Spanish-language Ethereum content. | |
| Community & education | 0xPARC | Organization supporting applied cryptography research and development. | |
| Community & education | ETHGlobal | Virtual and in-person hackathons focused on building the Ethereum developer community through learning opportunities and hands-on support for hackers. | |
| Community & education | Electronic Frontier Foundation | Nonprofit dedicated to promoting digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. | |
| Community & education | Fight For The Future | Grassroots activism group that fights for a future where technology is a force for liberation and not oppression. | |
| Community & education | Coin Center | Nonprofit promoting sensible regulatory approaches to cryptocurrency technology through research, advocacy and educating policymakers. | |
| Consensus Layer | Lighthouse grant through April 2022 | Sigma Prime | Continued development of the Lighthouse consensus client. |
| Consensus Layer | Lodestar, light clients and JS tooling | Chainsafe | Continued development of the Lodestar JS consensus client, with goals including light client R&D, improved tooling and documentation, and Merge readiness. |
| Consensus Layer | Prysm client | Prysmatic Labs | Continued development of the Prysm consensus client. |
| Consensus Layer | Stereum Q4 2021 | Rock Logic | Continued development of the Stereum "one click installer" 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 | EthStaker | Continued support for ETHStaker, a community group promoting and supporting Ethereum staking through education, advocacy, technical support, tooling, etc; and funding of a mainnet ETHStaker validator to be used for demonstrations, client metrics, and more. | |
| Consensus Layer | Investigation of Delay for Applied Boolean Functions | Moscow State University, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics | Investigation of circuit latency bounds, a crucial security consideration for Verifiable Delay Functions. |
| Consensus Layer | DiscV5 Research | DataHop | Research and optimization of the DiscV5 service discovery mechanism; current goal is the publication of a report including performance evaluation of the proposed mechanism and an evaluation of its resistance against attacks. |
| Consensus Layer | SSZ SimpleSerialize | Continued development of ssz.dev, a website documenting and demonstrating the SSZ serialization standard, including a visualization playground and React-based SSZ implementation. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Identity, Reputation and ZKP research | Justin Martin | Development of proofs of cryptographically-verifiable truth claims, such as ownership of web2 identities or government issued credentials. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Prediction markets for content curation | Janmajaya Mall | Content sharing platform demonstrating the use of a prediction market mechanism for collaborative curation. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | zkEVM Research and Development | Ying Tong Lai, Electric Coin Company | Contributions to research and development on the zkEVM project, which aims to build both a zk rollup that directly supports smart contracts, and a proof of validity for the EVM that could verify Ethereum's entire history in one proof. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Maci: Coordinator Service | Chao Ma | API to manage MACI proof generation using messages signed with the coordinator's private key, a more straightforward and scalable interface allowing users to construct correct proofs by running commands in the cli. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Obsidian On Ethereum | Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science | Continuation of research and proof-of-concept development 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 | Formal Verification of Contracts Library | OpenZeppelin | Formal verification by Certora of OpenZeppelin's library of template contracts for commonly-used components and standards. |
| Developer experience & tooling | ZK Rollup and L2 Developer Tools | Ryodan | Work on Layer 2 and zk rollups including a zk rollup design that eliminates transaction history data for contract execution and zkCloud, a service which aims to help developers use zero-knowledge proofs to write smart contracts and programs more easily. |
| Execution Layer | Low-level optimization of a bigint library for IPA base field calculations | Dag Arne Osvik | Optimized field-operation library in Go, intended to replace Go's bigint library in Verkle tree implementation for improved performance following the switch from KZG to IPA commitment scheme. |
| Layer 2 | L2BEAT | Maintenance and expansion of L2BEAT, a website offering statistics, analysis and risk factors for comparison between Layer 2 scaling solutions. | |
| Other | Startrail | Infrastructure for recording the distribution and appraisal of physical artworks. | |
| User experience | w3a.io | a42 Inc. | Ethereum-based authentication and authorization of usage rights to physical devices. |
Total awarded in Q4: $10,837,000
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.