Happy July! Read on for the list of projects funded in Q1 of this year.
But first: office hours are in session! Signups are open now through this Sunday (July 4) for teams or individuals to request a one-on-one call with the ESP team during the week of July 5-9. These calls are a simplified way for teams or individuals to access certain types of support such as high-level feedback, resource recommendations or guidance on applying for grants. More info and guidelines here.
Q1 Funded Projects
On to the real stars of the show - the outstanding teams and individuals who received funding in Q1!
| Category | Project | Grantee | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | China ecosystem development | ETHPlanet | Support for ETHPlanet's ecosystem building initiatives in China, including working with students and universities, events, community organization, and educational resources. |
| Community & education | DE-FERENCE | Decipher | Research and discussion-focused blockchain conference run by Decipher, a blockchain society at Seoul National University. |
| Community & education | Devspace Virtual Hackathon | Computer Society of India | Student-run hackathon organized by the Computer Society of India, targeting developers, researchers and students. |
| 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 | Informational websites | Deployment of a series of easily digestible, informational and educational websites about the Ethereum ecosystem | |
| Community & education | Russian-speaking ecosystem development | Sponsorship of a series of Russian-language virtual Ethereum meetups | |
| Community & education | Web3 Teacher Training Program | Blockchain Acceleration Foundation | Development of a curriculum and course to train university students and professors to become educators in Ethereum development, aiming to provide them with a foundation to lead educational initiatives at their respective universities. |
| Consensus Layer | Beacon Chain Network Topological Analysis | Shreyas Samaga | Applying topological data analysis techniques to aspects of the beacon chain network including visualization of validator behavior, insights into the structure and health of the p2p network, and inspection of key consensus metrics. |
| Consensus Layer | Beacon Chain Ransom Attack | DeMontfort University | Proof of concept of a ransomware attack on Ethereum validators, illustrating the need for more secure infrastructure for large providers. |
| Consensus Layer | ChainGuardian | NodeFactory | Application and graphical interface for managing multiple validators and beacon nodes with statistics and monitoring. |
| Consensus Layer | Lodestar | ChainSafe | Continued development the Lodestar JS beacon chain client, with goals including light client R&D, improved tooling and documentation, and preparation for the Altair hardfork. |
| Consensus Layer | Prysm | Prysmatic Labs | Continued development of the Prysm client, focusing on beacon chain production support and refinement, as well as R&D on Altair, the Merge, and Sharding. |
| Consensus Layer | Shard Data Proof of Custody MPC | Platon | Continued research and development on multi-party computation for setting up ethereum validators and decentralized staking pools. |
| Consensus Layer | ssz.dev | Website resources documenting and demonstrating the SSZ serialization standard, including a visualization playground and React-based SSZ implementation. | |
| Consensus Layer | tPlonk | Christian Rechberger | Research and development on tPlonk, a SNARK-friendly lookup based hash function. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Dark Forest Infrastructure and Tooling | Blaine Bublitz and Jacob Rosenthal | Continued work on zero knowledge tooling, infrastructure and community developer support in connection with Dark Forest. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | BLS Global Wallet | James Zaki | L2 wallet contract replacing ECDSA signatures with compressed BLS signatures in optimistic rollups. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | C.R.E.A.M. | Couger | Development of a protocol for secure, anonymous, and verifiable voting technology, as well as additional zero knowledge R&D and enterprise adoption efforts. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | CLR.fund UI | Spencer Graham | Enhancements to the CLR.fnd user interface, aiming to create an application that can be deployed by anyone to run their own CLR funding round. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Dark Forest | Continued work on Dark Forest, a decentralized and persistent RTS (real-time strategy) game, demonstrating use of zk-snarks to construct “incomplete information” environments where users can keep a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. Dark Forest was created to demonstrate the capability of this framework to create complex environmental and strategic dynamics in decentralized gaming. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Forum Moderation with Prediction Markets | Smart contracts and automoderator bots for using prediction markets to mitigate spam in online forums. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | MicroMix v2 | Aitivity | Extensions to MicroMix, an ETH and ERC-20 mixer built on Semaphore, including the ability to deploy a new contract for any denomination, a mixer registry to avoid splitting liquidity, enablig layer 2 deployment, and a fully open-source and non-minified user interface. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | MPC Phase 2 | Geoff Lamperd | Productionizing a suite of components for browser-based trusted setup ceremonies. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Optimism Security Assessment | Kyle Charbonnet | Security assessment of the Optimism codebase, resulting in a report detailling Optimism's design and code structure and pointing out security vulnerabilites. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Reputation Proving Service: Design and Specification | Jay Graber | Design and specification for a reputation proving service that exports cryptographic proofs of user attributes from existing sites where users have accrued reputation such as Github or Twitter, which can be verified by sites or decentralized applications. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Reputation Proving Service: Development | Raphael Roullet | Development of a reputation proving service that exports cryptographic proofs of user attributes from existing sites (such as Github or Twitter) to be verified by sites or decentralized applications. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Rollup Block Explorer Site Design | Rachel Akerley | UX strategy and UI design for a rollup block explorer dashboard, including research-informed information architecture and visual identity. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Rollup Diff Compression | Blagoj Dimovsk | Research paper and proof of concept for efficiently storing data on the blockchain while using rollups for the airdrop use case. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Unirep Social | Design a smart contract requiring users on a Unirep-based private and decentralized social media platform to risk reputation in order to post, with any post resulting in a reduction or addition of their total reputation score. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | zk Data Marketplace | Jacksoom Liu | Design for a trustless data market using a smart contract to allow encrypted data to be published for sale, while buyers can confirm authenticity using a segment of exposed data and a ZKP issued by the seller. |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Zkopru Stress Testing | Stress testing, monitoring tools, CI setup and cluster testing scripts for Zkopru, a layer-2 scaling solution for private transactions using zk-SNARK and optimistic rollup. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | ETH Winter Education Resources | Nick Ulven | Conversion of resources from the ETH Winter program, including Intro to Eth documents, mentor reading lists and quests, into a publicly consumable format. |
| Developer experience & tooling | GASOL: Gas Analysis and Optimization Toolkit | Universidad Complutense Madrid | Development of a super-optimizer for Ethereum smart contracts that optimizes block-by-block by searching for instruction sequences that are semantically equivalent to the original sequence in the block but consume less gas, aiming to reduce overall transaction costs and increase transaction capacity. |
| Developer experience & tooling | Software Engine for Game Theoretical Modeling | University of St. Gallen and Statebox | Software engine for game theoretic modelling of compositional games, e.g. auction mechanisms or governance structures, using Compositional Game Theory. |
| Developer experience & tooling | web3swift | Universal library providing web3 functionalities in the Swift language, to enable building of full-featured native dApps in the Mac/iOS ecosystem. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Zkopru Ceremony Site Design | Rachel Akerley | User-friendly website design for the zkopru rollup trusted setup ceremony. |
| Execution Layer | EIP 1559 R&D | Besu | Coordination of efforts to prepare EIP 1559 for adoption by core devs and clients. |
| Execution Layer | Besu | Maintenance and development on the Besu eth1 client. | |
| Execution Layer | Nethermind | Maintenance and development on the Nethermind eth1 client. | |
| Execution Layer | Nimbus | Maintenance and development on the Nimbus eth1 client. | |
| Execution Layer | OpenEthereum | Maintenance and development on the Erigon (fka TurboGeth) eth1 client. | |
| Execution Layer | Erigon | Maintenance and development on OpenEthereum, a takeover of the Parity client. | |
| Indirect funding | Baseline Protocol | Funding for Baseline Grants supporting research, development and adoption of the Baseline protocol, which allows businesses to synchronize their systems of record and reduce costly errors in B2B transactions. | |
| Indirect Funding | CLR Matching | Gitcoin | Matching funds to rounds 9 and 10 of Gitcoin's CLR grants, funding public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem. |
| Indirect funding | CLR.FND | Development of a production-ready version of clr.fund, a decentralized quadratic funding protocol using BrightID and MACI to to enable permissionless, pseudonymous, and minimally-trustful protocol-level funding for Ethereum. | |
| Layer 2 | StablePay Layer 2 SDK | SDK for accepting payments and optionally converting them to stablecoins via multiple L2s with one API. | |
| Verifiable Delay Functions | Biprimality research paper review | Benjamin Wesolowski | Deep review of a research paper titled "Big primes make me high: New results on biprimality testing" by Dmitry Khovratovich and Mary Maller, to validate a breakthrough result in biprimality testing which could facilitate large scale RSA MPCs. |
Total awarded in Q1: $5,341,000
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.