The Ethereum Foundation aims to stimulate and support base layer exploration. Ethereum platform brings decentralised protocols and tools to the whole world which empower innovators to create next-generation decentralised applications (dApps), and build a globally available, more free and trustworthy internet. They have recently declared the finalists of wave 3 Grants program.
The foundation’s grant initiative began in 2018 with a blog post to motivate scalability research for first and second-layer solutions. Since then, they’ve devoted over eleven million dollars to 52 projects and committed to enhancing the Ethereum ecosystem. Grants have backed multiple state channel implementations, plasma, improved developer frameworks, diverse client research, security audits and much more.
Since the time, Ethereum’s grants program started, the foundation has been requested to show higher transparency and to offer an insight into their processes. They have now provided a funding snapshot and an update to the grants process. The program’s purpose is to award seven million dollars to scalability projects. Security projects have been granted around two million dollars, #buidl projects (the projects that enhance customer experience) around $1.6 million, and DevEx projects (that improve developers’ experience) have received $744K.
The EF Grants process is continually evolving and has received an update. With this round, they’ve further advanced the internal processes to ensure timely fund distribution. They focus to award funds on a consistent basis to offer immediate funding to the teams and projects leading to decentralisation and transparency. The grant process takes into consideration the project roadmap, technical knowledge, and commitment to the ecosystem. They aim to support projects that build the critical infrastructure of the younger community. The wave three applicant pool provided many innovative ideas and strong teams.
The EF team has announced the finalists of the Wave 3 program. The finalists of scalability projects are StarkWare received four million dollars, Force move game framework $300K and Harmony has been granted around $90K.
The Security projects finalists are Kestrel Institute, ICE centre at ETH Zurich and Pyramid each with about $400K, $185K and $30K. The Finalists under Usability Developer Experience (DevEx) grant are Yakindu IDE that received about $95K, Solidity Resolver Engine was granted $50K, and Etheratom was funded around $45K. Building end user finalists are Dappnode, Uniswap, Nethermind and thaEth with rewards of $250K, $100K, $50K and $20K respectively. Under the category of education, the Cryptoeconomic.study received about $35K building textbook and coursework. For hackternships, Pseudo-randomly selected committees and Etherlinker each received $10K.
Scalability was always the focus of EF grant program. With the Wave 3, the Foundation expanded into community and education efforts to bring in new talent into the ecosystem.
