The Ethereum Foundation continues to fund research and development for the advancement of the distributed application platform. Today’s grants provide insight into what critical infrastructure the foundation is focusing on.
The Ethereum Foundation announced its latest wave of grants today[1], which will fund 22 ecosystem projects with $2.84 million. The grants will be used to help fuel teams working to grow the Ethereum ecosystem, and are especially meant to further scalability[2], usefulness, and security.
Today's six scalability winners received a total of $832,000, compared to $1.7 million for the inaugural scalability grant winners on March 7[3]. These numbers could suggest that scalability projects don't require as much funding as in previous grant periods because, as recently teased by Vitalik Buterin, some scalability measures[4] might be closer to being solved.
The foundation also awarded four security grants worth a total of $535,000; five developer experience grants (meant to improve "useful" tools for developers) worth $310,000; and four "hackternships" worth $35,000.
The biggest jump in funding was for #buidl grants (those for end users); the foundation's single $100,000 grant in March was dwarfed today by three awards worth roughly $1.13 million. Most notable is the $1 million for the Ethereum Name Service[5], which the Foundation reports is now "mature enough to become its own independent organization."
The Foundation's wish list for future rounds of grant funding features seven focus areas, including tokenless Casper staking pool contracts; Vyper development; and specific auditing for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, and vaults.
Created in April 2015, the Ethereum Foundation's ÐΞVgrants[6] program has three goals, namely, to give developers the chance to finish projects that will contribute to the ecosystem, "to extend the codebase," and to increase "outreach
