It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

Where applicable, the grant recipient is listed first, followed by the project for which the grant was awarded.

Fuel Labs for Optimistic Rollup R&D, SparsENS

Fuel Labs is best known for their work on a UTXO-based design for scalable, trust-minimized optimistic rollups. This multitasking team is also developing SparsENS, a stateless ENS subdomain registrar aiming to reduce transaction costs for registering ENS subdomains. Fuel Labs’ grant went toward both these efforts, and in recent months they have hit some major milestones:

Keep an eye out for a SparsENS testnet around the end of the year, and watch the Fuel roadmap for new features and future version releases!

Nomic Labs for Buidler Hardhat

Hardhat, formerly known as Buidler, is a flexible and extensible development environment. The recent Hardhat release represented both a major evolution of the protocol, and a new chapter for a project that has matured from a side project into an indispensable tool for Ethereum developers. The release brought a long list of improvements and new features, including:

• Mainnet forking to simulate mainnet state in a local development environment
• Tenderly integration for advanced debugging and monitoring directly in the Hardhat workflow
• Revamped compilation pipeline for improved compilation speed and the ability to configure arbitrarily complex compilation setups
• Improved support for ethers.js and Typescript
• And many more! You can find the full list here.

The Hardhat release included breaking changes, so be sure to upgrade if you’re working with an older version of Buidler!

Hubble Optimistic Rollup Hub

Hubble enables deployment of programmable optimistic rollup chains within a single hub, allowing users to move between chains within the rollup space instantly and cheaply. The initial Hubble grant was recently completed, with final milestones including:

• Transfer-only testnet launch with batched deposits, single withdraws, CLI and REST APIs, on-chain verification and fraud proofs
• Testnet upgrades including transaction and deposit fees, BLS signatures, and variable length balance and PDA trees
• Documentation for the Hubble libraries, APIs and commands

Hubble will continue to develop as time goes on – in fact, a second grant has recently been awarded for development of a front end interface allowing users to interact with Hubble’s BLS signature scheme. Hubble is not owned by any one person or project, but you can follow its progress on the very lively Hubble Project Github repo!

We promised ourselves we’d keep this post light, but we can’t resist adding just a few more:

The list never stops growing, so we’ll be back next month with another round!

We’re here with our last hurrah before we head into 2021 – read on for the latest news on a few grantees!

Gitcoin for CLR matching

Gitcoin’s CLR grants were one of the first real-world uses of quadratic funding, with the number of unique contributors to a grant carrying greater weight than the dollar total in determining the match amount.

CLR grants have come a very long way since the first round in early 2018! With 16 organizations and almost as many individuals pledging matching funds as of Round 8, it has grown into a truly community-driven support system for the ecosystem’s many open source contributors. The platform itself has matured as well, with recent UI improvements including:

• A “shopping cart” enabling users to donate to multiple grants at once and share their cart with friends
• Integration of zksync for scaling, allowing multiple donations to be rolled into one transaction
• Collections so users can keep track of their favorites, or browse other people’s top picks

EIP 1559 R&D

EIP 1559, which proposes changes to Ethereum’s fee market, has been a focus of community-wide discussion and development since 2019. A recent multi-recipient grant went to support ongoing community-driven research and development: Consensys received funding to help coordinate research and development efforts, while funds sent to the 1559 multisig are administered by signers from several organizations to support community efforts including client implementation, infrastructure, bug bounties and outreach.

There had been plenty of work done on EIP 1559 prior to this grant, and that progress hasn’t slowed! A small sample of recent updates:

Track progress on EIP 1559 R&D via Tim Beiko’s regular updates, implementers’ call notes, or keep an eye on the mainnet readiness checklist.

A few more quick mentions

And of course we can’t leave without acknowledging the massive achievement of all the client teams and other builders who contributed to the December 1 launch of the eth2 beacon chain!

Until next year :wave:

Our intrepid grantees have been keeping busy as always – read on for some recent accomplishments

ENS

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) runs on the Ethereum blockchain, but it’s not just for ETH addresses! ENS maps human-readable domain names to locations all across the distributed web, including ethereum and other blockchain addresses, Tor .onion addresses, decentralized websites and data hashes stored on IPFS, and more. ENS continues to expand its reach, with recent integrations including:

That’s far from everything – read the ENS 2020 Retrospective for a recap of a pretty packed year, follow ENS on Twitter @ensdomains and check out the 2021 roadmap to see what’s next.

Textile and 3box for IPLD Object signing and encryption

IPLD is a data structuring framework used in IPFS. Textile and 3Box received a combined grant, joint funded with Protocol Labs, to create a signing and encryption standard to enable greater composability and interoperability between web3 applications while keeping user data sovereign. All work funded by this grant has now been completed, including:

Ethereum developers can already integrate JOSE standards such as JWE and JWS into their IPLD-based dApps, and there’s more to come! This work is part of a longer term effort to increase data interoperability across IPFS/IPLD-based apps and tools.
For more, you can follow principal investigators carsonfarmer and oed, who continue to engage with the community around this project; follow Textile on Twitter @textileio, blog.textile.io or Slack; and 3box on Twitter @3boxdb, medium.com/3box or Discord!

bitfly for beaconcha.in eth2 block explorer

As the launch of the beacon chain approached, the bitfly team wanted to make sure there was an open source eth2 block explorer from day 1. beaconcha.in has become that and much more, with a treasure trove of resources for Ethereum stakers and enthusiasts including:

• Growing eth2 knowledge base
• Wide variety of trackers and visualizations including charts with data on liveness, participation, total stake and more
• Mobile app for monitoring eth2 validators

Keep up with bitfly on Twitter @etherchain_org or Reddit u/etherchain.

But wait, there’s more!

• Unirep private and non-repudiable reputation system: completed smart contracts, CLI and zk circuits
• MPC Phase 2 UI: completed design and specification; developed components including server, CLI and browser client

More to come next month!

We’re excited to announce the grantees selected for the recent staking community grants round.

This grants round invited proposals that make the Ethereum staking experience easier, safer, and more secure. We were thrilled to see all of the great work proposed by these teams, and we’re looking forward to continuing to find new ways to support the ecosystem. In the meantime, if you’re working on something in this space and could use support, consider submitting a project inquiry with the Ecosystem Support Program.

More than $1M has been allocated across 25 grants in 4 different categories:

A few months into Ethereum’s proof-of-stake journey, it bodes well for the health of our ecosystem to see so many deserving teams across such a wide distribution of categories.

The biggest category this round was community / education. Easing the path to staking is crucial for the health of the staking ecosystem long term. Staking communities and educational content are helpful pieces of this puzzle, and we’re looking forward to more development here, especially outside the English speaking world.

Just as community and education are vital to getting stakers across the starting line, robust open source tools are key in ensuring that stakers can run their nodes safely and securely. This round, the tools we saw were primarily security and orchestration oriented, and we look forward to continued innovation here moving forward.

Data analysis / visualization

As more ETH is staked with the beacon chain, it is increasingly important to have insight into the function and health of the network. Last year’s Medalla Data Challenge was ample evidence of the interests and capability of the Ethereum ecosystem to gather and analyze network data. The projects in this category further these goals on mainnet.

Research

Finally, there were a few research projects included in this round. There are many open research questions related to staking and the future of the network; we actively invite more research efforts in this area.

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We’re excited to follow these teams in 2021 and beyond, and to see the wider impact that they have on the budding Ethereum staking ecosystem.

The breadth and quality of this round of grants is an incredible signal for the burgeoning staking community and for the Ethereum ecosystem at large. Here’s to the start of a great year!

This month, we’ve got the latest on from two groups doing great work to grow the Ethereum ecosystem!

Couger for education and community building in Japan

Specializing in AI, Couger might seem like an unlikely champion of Ethereum education! However, Couger has not only explored the intersection of Ethereum and AI and piloted a zero knowledge voting protocol – they’ve also become avid educators and collaborators in their native Japan. Couger received a sponsorship in 2020 for their ETHTerakoya meetups as well as a series of workshops and working groups. Couger was recently awarded a second grant to continue and expand upon their previous work, including:

• ID x Voting x Blockchain” working group bringing together corporate, technical and legal professionals to work on open standards and proofs of concept: meeting notes in Japanese and English
• Public workshop presenting findings of the IDxVoting working group meetings: notes in Japanese and English and full video of the presentation (split into part 1 and part 2)
• Working group on eth2 convened in November 2020: notes in Japanese and English
• Planned commmunity building initiatives targeting students, enterprise and general public awareness

Watch ethereum-terakoya.org for upcoming events and meeting notes. We’re looking forward to seeing these initiatives develop, and continuing to expand our support for Japan’s growing Ethereum ecosystem!

MetaCartel for post-hackathon support

The MetaCartel DAO is a community of builders working to accelerate the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly at the application layer. In 2020 MetaCartel put special focus on helping hackathon participants to continue developing software and dapps after the hackathon is over. ESP grant funds were awarded in the form of a contribution to the MetaCartel DAO to be allocated toward post-hackathon support, particularly for projects emerging from the ETHOnline virtual hackathon.

In addition to providing mentorship as teams refine their products and build sustainable business models, MetaCartel DAO gave small grants to ETHOnline projects including:

• Llama, a crypto community treasury hub
• Mindful, a platform automating portfolio rebalancing and dollar cost averaging
• Overlay, a derivatives protocol using on-chain oracles to enable trading on data streams

Keep track of MetaCartel’s many initiatives, not to mention their notorious memes, on Twitter @Meta_Cartel or via their Substack newsletter.

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

Baseline

The Baseline project is defining a protocol that allows businesses to synchronize their systems of record and reduce costly errors in B2B transactions. It uses the Ethereum Mainnet as a common frame of reference, while keeping confidential business logic and data private using zero-knowledge proofs. The project is housed under the Ethereum OASIS. First launched in March 2020 by a group of 15 teams, Baseline is now overseen by representatives from over 30 companies and organizations. Currently in v0.1.0, released in August 2020, Baseline already offers many tools for enterprise users including:

The funding awarded to Baseline was allocated for the recently announced Baseline Protocol Grants program, administered by Baseline’s governing bodies via Open Collective to support continued research, development and adoption.

Follow Baseline’s progress on Twitter @baselineproto, contribute on Github or join the conversation on Discord, Slack and Telegram.

Aztec for PLONK

The Aztec team are blazing trails in the zero knowledge realm as the creators of PLONK, an efficient and universal SNARK construction, and its successors TurboPlonk and UltraPlonk. Aztec received a grant in August 2020 toward their work on PLONK and the Rust-based Noir language for programmable privacy inside a PLONK rollup. Aztec has reached some major milestones recently with PLONK and Noir as key elements, including:

There’s plenty more in the Aztec pipeline – follow their progress on Twitter @aztecnetwork, Github AztecProtocol, or join the Discord.

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

Devfolio for Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0

Devfolio’s Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0 had two tracks, each targeting different groups for a rigorous 8 weeks of training and mentorship with the goal of onboarding talented developers into the Ethereum ecosystem.
Track 1 brought 20 talented Web2 developers with little or no experience with blockchain to:

• Learn building blocks for Ethereum development such as Solidity, Remix and Hardhat
• Explore a variety of use cases, from defi to DAOs, NFTs and decentralized storage
• Work on an Ethereum-based project of their choice

Track 2 targeted intermediate Web3 developers to focus more intensively on developing a project over the full 8 weeks. Projects ranged from novel L2 implentations to secure privacy infrastructure, with mentorship from industry veterans.

The EtherPunk online hackathon, which took place during the first half of the fellowship program, was a timely opportunity for fellows to submit their projects to the hackathon and connect with prominent developers for presentations and feedback sessions.

The fellows accomplished a lot both during and after the program – developers who started the program with little to no knowledge of Ethereum have already gone on to win thousands of dollars in hackathon prizes and land internships at leading companies in the ecosystem. You can see the fellows’ final project submissions here.

Keep up with ETHIndia on Twitter @ethindiaco, and watch the Devfolio blog for news about future events!

Web3 Labs for Web3j

Web3j is a JVM and Android integration library for Ethereum, created with the goal of making it easy for Java developers to work with Ethereum. Java is one of the most common languages used in enterprise settings, and JVM (Java Virtual Machine) is one of the most-used development platforms. Web3j, first released by Web3 Labs founder Conor Svensson in 2016 with the goal of supporting JVM developers, has been developed and maintained by Web3 Labs since 2017. Web3 Labs received a grant toward their continued work on Web3j, with recent work including:

• Updating the Web3j documentation
• Updating the Maven plugin
• Development on Solidity library dependency management
• Addition of smart contract migration support

The Web3 Labs team will continue to be the stewards of Web3j, with planned work including improvements to developer experience, eth2 client open API implementation, and making enhancements requested in a recent user survey as well as ongoing maintenance.

Follow Web3 Labs on Twitter @web3labs or contribute to Web3J on Github.

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.

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

GSN

GSN (Gas Station Network) provides a decentralized infrastructure for dapp builders to decrease friction in their UX by abstracting away transaction costs. A network of relayers make “collect calls” to paymaster contracts which can implement any logic for gas payment conditions. A dapp developer could choose to cover the cost of gas themselves, allow users to pay gas with a credit card or a token other than ETH, or enable ETH-less withdrawals from stealth addresses. GSN v1 has been live since 2019, but the recent v2 release added a host of new features and improvements including:

• New modular composable architecture giving developers more choice in which parts of the system they need to understand or trust for their specific use case
• More decentralized and censorship-resistant security model
• Wallet UX improvements to make transaction signing more transparent and secure
• Customizable gas griefing mitigations

Follow GSN on Twitter @opengsn to keep up with future progress, or learn more and contribute on Github.

Quadratic Dollar Homepage

The Quadratic Dollar Homepage is inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold display space by the pixel. Rather than simply selling space, the Quadratic Dollar Homepage (QDH) lets users determine the relative scale of images on the page using two experimental blockchain voting mechanisms:

• Quadratic voting allows voters to indicate not only their preferences between a set of options, but the strength of those preferences. On QDH, holders of MOON, BRICK or POAP tokens can cast as many votes as they have tokens, distributed between the images on the page in whatever way they choose.
• Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure (MACI) discourages bribery by making it impossible to verify how a user has voted. QDH accomplishes this by giving the user an “I’m being bribed” option when signing the vote transaction. This causes the transaction to be sent with an incorrect nonce, invalidating the vote. The user can then change their signing key to submit a second, valid vote.

Grantee Raman Shalupau has recently completed his funded work on the QDH user interface, MACI smart contracts and documentation. For a more in-depth look at how QDH works, this demo a provides a video walk-through of both the web interface and the back end components. You can find Raman Shalupau on Twitter @ksaitor, or contribute to Quadratic Dollar Homepage on Github.

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.

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

InterRep

For a user switching to a new social media platform, one of the biggest points of friction is rebuilding their reputation. InterRep aims to reduce this friction by allowing a user to link a social media account with an Ethereum address, which can be used to confirm their identity on a new platform.

Grantees Jay Graber and Raphael Roullet implemented the UI and smart contracts for an InterRep MVP (you’ll need to connect with MetaMask on Ropsten in order to interact with the UI). The initial version, launched to Ropsten on June 30, allows a Twitter account to be verified via an API and privately linked to an Ethereum address. An NFT “badge” is minted to the linked address which acts as an attestation of ownership of the associated reputation. See the launch post for more details on how InterRep works, use cases and future plans.

Statebox, Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges for Compositional Game Engine

Game theory, which studies strategic interactions between rational actors, is at the heart of mechanism design for decentralized systems. However, the “games” involved in real-world interactions such as validating a blockchain or voting in a DAO are extremely complicated and difficult to reason about.

Enter Compositional Game Theory, which treats large, complex games as composites of smaller, simpler games. The equilibrium (i.e. an outcome in which any given player has no incentive to change their strategy as long as all other players’ strategies remain the same) of a complex game can be defined on the basis of its simpler components.

Although these concepts are highly relevant to Ethereum, the underlying theory is extremely complex. Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges aim to make the theory more accessible by creating a software engine for both modeling and analyzing strategic interactions via modular programming. The recent release post shares more details on the system, which uses a small domain-specific language along with Haskell for defining functions, and an illustration of the process using an auction format as an example.

This introduction is only the beginning – the project is in early stages and will continue to evolve and add new functionality. Follow @Statebox for updates, and head to the project’s Github to keep up with progress or contribute.

Blogs blogs blogs!

The Ethereum Foundation privacy and scaling team has launched a blog where they’ll be sharing what they discover and develop, often working closely with grantees, along with guest posts from grantees themselves.

The inaugural guest post, An Introduction to Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup, came from Kyle Charbonnet, who received a grant to assess the security properties of Optimism’s optimistic rollup implementation. This was not an audit, but an opportunity to learn more deeply about a construction that is anticipated to be heavily used and emulated. The results of the assessment will be published soon; meanwhile Kyle’s post provides an overview of the protocol to put it all into context!

A few other recent posts from grantees:

• Scotty Poi, SSZ Visualizer Online: an introduction to the new visualization playground at ssz.dev.
• Blagoj, Rollup Diff Compression: tl;dr on research into reducing the L1 data footprint of a rollup for the specific use case of airdrops.
• Dark Forest, v0.6 Round 2 Wrapup: results, resources, emergent strategic and economic models, special contributions and more from the most recent round.
• Geoff Lamperd, Trusted Setup UI Update: improvements to the UI for a general trusted setup infrastructure.

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.

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

Imapp for EVM Gas Cost Estimator

Gas costs in Ethereum are a constant topic of debate and improvement. The average user only sees what they pay to send a transaction – whether the gas limit is very high, very low or just volatile. But where do those suggested gas limits come from?

No two smart contracts are alike; each contains a different set of instructions, or OPCODEs, to be executed in the EVM. Gas is used to compensate miners or validators for the computational cost of executing these OPCODEs, i.e. the work that their machine has to perform. Computation costs are highly variable, even between different validators executing the same smart contract. The OPCODE instructions, program context, and the node’s hardware and software configuration all factor into the actual cost.

The imapp team set their sights on more accurately estimating real-life computation costs, providing important data that will inform discussions among core devs about adjusting the OPCODE prices. Accounting for all of these factors to improve the accuracy of gas cost estimates means being able to do more within the gas limit, as well as:

• Ensuring that developers who want to optimize for gas costs are also optimizing for real computational costs imposed on nodes
• Keeping the network diverse by ensuring miners and validators are sufficiently incentivized to keep the network secure even if they are running on consumer (rather than highly optimized) hardware
• Preventing DoS attacks or other code that exploits mismatches between estimated and actual cost
• Mitigating factors that could lead to a more unpredictable fee market for users, such as miners preferring certain contracts over others for inclusion in a block

Imapp first received a grant in late 2020 for Stage I of the project, which consisted of preliminary experiments, research and analysis and was completed earlier this year. A second grant was awarded to fund Stage II, building on the work from Stage I. The approach in Stage II is structured into three primary domains:

• Program generation: generation of EVM bytecode programs from which measurements will be gathered
• Instrumentation and measurement: running the generated programs in a controlled environment and measuring the time to compute each instruction
• Analysis: statistical analysis and validation of measurement data

The Gas Cost Estimator Stage I Report contains a thorough breakdown of the project background, findings from Stage I, and plans for Stage II. You can follow progress on Github, or keep up with the imapp team on Twitter.

Rock Logic for Stereum

As Ethereum transitions to Proof of Stake, the security of the network depends on a large and decentralized validator set. Eth2 client teams have focused on lowering barriers to entry like hardware limitations or technical expertise, while numerous community efforts are underway to make staking as accessible as possible to anyone who holds the requisite 32 ETH. One of these efforts is Stereum, which aims to reduce technical friction for solo stakers by streamlining the process of setting up a validator node.

The idea behind Stereum was first realized as prysm-docker-compose. Using Stereum’s docker images (software packages that combine code and configurations for easy setup) solo stakers could install and configure the Prysm eth2 client, server environment and monitoring services in one go. The team received funding in late 2020, and a second grant in 2021, to extend that functionality to more clients and create additional tools and resources for stakers.

The Stereum team posts regular updates to their website and Twitter. You can also follow along and get involved on Github, or contribute to their Gitcoin grant!

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.