A decentralized system for peer-to-peer content suggestion utilizing a “Two Of Two Scorched Earth” reward/punishment scheme proposed by Vitalik Buterin to incentivize quality content sharing. The goal of the project is to deliver a proof-of-concept implementation on mainnet to demonstrate the usefulness of this scheme for a variety of applications.
Developer Experience
EthWorks
Maintenance and improvements on Waffle, a library for writing and testing smart contracts. Grant objectives include ENS integration, expanded documentation and addition of dynamic mocking.
The Arbitrary Message Bridge can not only transfer tokens between any two EVM-based chains, but can relay any data or call contracts – for example, calling a method on the Ethereum mainnet from POA network or a Quorum Chain. The grant to POA Network will be used toward expanding AMB’s capabilities, creating demos and preparing for 2.0 support.
The Tasit SDK is a JavaScript framework for building native Ethereum mobile dapps using React Native, with a focus on user experience and easy onboarding.
Implementing a fast binary field FFT which is necessary in order to estimate the difficulty of computing data availability roots; with additional exploration into whether it’s better to use 16 vs 64 bit fields in the light of special CPU support for the latter.
Ethereum 2.0
Lighthouse
Continued funding for Sigma Prime in developing the Lighthouse staking client, written in Rust, for the Ethereum 2.0 network. Lighthouse v0.11.1 testnets are up and running, with user-facing testnets coming soon.
Continued funding for Chainsafe’s work on Eth2 light-client R&D within their Lodestar javascript client, as well as further development of libraries, tooling, and educational resources supporting the Eth2 JS/web-browser ecosystem. Results from an audit of a number of Lodestar’s key components were recently published.
Continued funding to Status for development of the Nimbus client for Ethereum 2.0. Nimbus is designed to perform well on embedded systems and personal mobile devices, including older smartphones with resource-restricted hardware. Nimbus is nearing a v0.11.1 testnet release.
Research led by renowned complexity theorist Ryan Williams into the sequentiality assumption of RSA-based VDFs, i.e. seeking a better understanding the “delay” part of VDFs (verifiable delay functions), which are the basis for unbiasable randomness in Eth2. The work funded by this grant is specifically aimed at proving information-theoretic lower bounds for modular exponentiations.
Indirect Funding
Gitcoin bounties
Funds for community-administered bounties contributing to Ethereum ecosystem development.
Cryptoeconomics Labs is working toward a production-ready implementation of Plasma Chamber based on OVM. Expected grant outcomes include testnet deployment of the OVM contract, a Plasma wallet, and a developer portal with tooling and documentation.
Continued development of Ethereum Name Service, including full DNS namespace integration, using ENS and IPFS to store and serve DNS names; multi-coin support; improvements to the ENS website and Manager; advocacy and outreach.
