It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they are awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll look at some projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent recipient milestones and achievements!
InterRep
For a user moving to a new social media platform, one of the biggest sticking points is rebuilding their reputation. InterRep aims to reduce this friction by allowing a user to link a social media account to an Ethereum address, which can be used to confirm their identity on a new platform.
Beneficiaries Jay Graber And Raphaël Roullet implemented the user interface and smart contracts for one InterRep MVP (you will need to log in with MetaMask on Ropsten in order to interact with the user interface). The initial version, launched on Ropsten on June 30, allows you to verify a Twitter account via an API and privately link it to an Ethereum address. An NFT “badge” is minted on the linked address which serves as proof of ownership of the associated reputation. See the launch message for more details on how InterRep works, use cases and future plans.
Status Box, Philip Zahn And Jules Haies for the compositional game engine
Game theorywhich studies strategic interactions between rational actors, is at the heart of the design of mechanisms for decentralized systems. However, the “games” involved in real-world interactions, such as validating a blockchain or voting in a DAO, are extremely complicated and difficult to reason about.
Enter Compositional game theorywhich treats large, complex games as composites of smaller, simpler games. The equilibrium (i.e., an outcome in which a given player has no incentive to change strategies as long as all other players’ strategies remain the same) of a complex game can be defined on the based on its simplest components.
Although these concepts are very relevant to Ethereum, the theory behind them is extremely complex. Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges aim to make the theory more accessible by creating a software engine to both model and analyze strategic interactions via modular programming. The recent exit station shares more details about the system, which uses a small domain-specific language with Haskell to define functions, and an illustration of the process using an auction format as an example.
This introduction is just the beginning: the project is in its early stages and will continue to evolve and add new features. Follow @Statebox for updates, and visit the project website GitHub to track progress or contribute.
Blogs blogs blogs!
The Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy and Scaling team has launched a blog where they will share what they discover and develop, often working closely with grantees, as well as guest posts from grantees themselves -themselves.
The inaugural guest post, An Introduction to Optimism’s Optimistic Rollupcame from Kyle Charbonnetwho received a grant to evaluate the security properties of Optimism optimistic implementation of accumulation. This was not an audit, but an opportunity to learn about a construct that should be widely used and imitated. The results of the evaluation will be published soon; Meanwhile, Kyle’s post provides an overview of the protocol to put everything in context!
Some other recent messages from beneficiaries:
- Scotty Poi, Online SSZ Viewer: an introduction to the new visualization playground at ssz.dev.
- Blagoj, Cumulative Differential Compression:tl;dr on research into reducing the L1 data footprint of a rollup for the specific use case of airdrops.
- Dark forest, v0.6 Round 2 Recap: results, resources, emerging strategic and economic models, special contributions and much more from the most recent cycle.
- Geoff Lamperd, Secure Setup UI Update: UI improvements for reliable general configuration infrastructure.
Are you working on anything that you think could improve Ethereum? Visit our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.
