The foundation prioritized scalability in its most recent round of grants.
This past Friday, August 17, the Ethereum Foundation revealed[1] the recipients of its third wave of grants. Although funded projects range in topic from security to education, most of the program's grants have been allocated for scalability improvements. Since the first wave[2] was announced in early 2018, nearly $7 million has gone to scalability endeavors, equal to 61.3 percent of the Ethereum Foundation's funding pool.
StarkWare Industries received the largest grant by far – $4 million with 6,000 Ether to fund performance-based bounties. The company will use these funds to develop "production-quality software for optimized STARK-friendly hash functions and tooling." StarkWare informally announced[3] it had received the grant last month via Twitter[4].
STARK technology, which refers to zk-STARKs[5], could theoretically scale Ethereum in a transparent way. A zk-STARK is a succinct, zero-knowledge proof to verify transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. This verification method contrasts the zk-SNARK, another privacy-based mathematical process popularized by Zcash[6] that relies upon a third party to operate. STARK technology would apparently circumvent this "trusted setup" model of zk-SNARKs.
Two other scalability projects were awarded smaller grants. Research team Magmo[7] won $300,000 to develop its force-move games framework, which is "a small state channel[8] framework capable of running 3rd-party 'applications' that conform to a simple state-machine interface[9]." The team behind Ethereum Harmony[10] (based on EthereumJ implementation) received $90,000 to further build the beacon chain[11] and pursue minimal sharding[12].
The foundation noted that though scalability remains the focus of its grant program, it also looks to fund projects in other
