Vitalik Buterin’s Inaugural Ethereum Foundation Grant Awards

The results of the first wave of grants by Ethereum Foundation have been released and lucky individuals and tech companies have been awarded grants ranging from $10,000 to $1.5 million. This is in line with Ethereum’s mission to support useful smart contracts and dapps on the Ethereum blockchain with a goal to empower developers with the education, development experience, and cutting edge research and development data to innovate.

The grants provided by the foundation are designed to encourage individual and team developers to work harder and produce useful products that run on the blockchain ecosystem. It is a signal to the community that Ethereum ecosystem is not complete – it is missing the most essential components to run and developers are essential to it.

Ethereum Foundation Grant Purpose Expansion

The grant was announced strictly as a scalability-focused program but the company behind the ecosystem decided to broaden the project support to include usefulness and security of the ecosystem and dapps. The areas on which the grant focused on are:

Scalability:

Scalability refers to the science of implementing state channels, plasma, or sharding on an existing project – on your own or with an existing team. Scalability can also refer to the process of optimizing parity or nurturing alternate clients.

Usefulness:

Usefulness of an application or a system refers to how much benefits it has to offer the user and the amount of experience the developer gets in implementing it. The benefits of a dapp or system can be measured by linters, development frameworks used, available documentations, static analyzers, and solidity development among others.

Security:

Security in this context can refer to anything from auditing existing contracts to implementing development tools that prevent error-prone patterns in the code. It can also refer to contributing better alternative layers of languages that boost the security of the applications running on the platform.

What The Top Awardees Get

All the projects that won the grant do not sell tokens and do not plan for an ICO; they simply focus on developing application products that are useful to the blockchain ecosystem and gain experience in working with the platform.

Among the top awardees of the Ethereum Foundation first grant are L4 Research which got $1.5M State channels research scalability grant, Runtime Verification which got $500,000 for a Casper contract formal verification security grant, and ETHGlobal which got $200,000 DevEx Grant for its Ethereum developer conferences.

The grant includes non-dilutive funding, technical advice, connection to more users, and a platform to share work.