We are delighted to announce the selected recipients for the recent milestone of the community grant cycle.
This grant round solicited proposals that make the Ethereum staking experience easier, safer, and more secure. We’ve been thrilled to see all the great work these teams have come up with and look forward to continuing to find new ways to support the ecosystem. In the meantime, if you’re working on something in this space and might need help, consider submitting a project request to the Ecosystem Support Program.
More than $1 million was allocated to 25 grants across 4 different categories:
| category | amount (USD) |
|---|---|
| community/education | 391,800.00 |
| new tools | 200,000.00 |
| data analysis/visualization | 180,000.00 |
| research | 268,655.00 |
A few months into Ethereum’s proof-of-stake journey, it bodes well for the health of our ecosystem to see so many deserving teams across such a wide spread of categories.
The largest category of this round was community/education. Easing the path to staking is crucial to the health of the staking ecosystem in the long term. Staking communities and educational content are useful pieces of this puzzle, and we look forward to more development here, especially outside of the English-speaking world.
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| cadCAD Edu | cadCAD masterclass: economics of the ETH2 validator | A cadCAD Edu online course built around the economics of the eth2 validator. The team will also produce open source cadCAD validation models for the community to conduct their own analyses. |
| Carlos Mesa | How to bet? Spanish video guides | Video staking guides and content for the Spanish-speaking community |
| Ching-Yi Lin, Pi-Tan Hu | Eth2xK8s: Staking Ethereum with Kubernetes | Getting started guide for running multi-validator setups with Kubernetes, including all necessary configuration files. |
| Cashew coin | End-to-end eth2 validator guide | Detailed step-by-step staking guides, plus other guides on grafana dashboards, Docker eth2 installations, and securing commit keys with ledger |
| Empire Ventures | eth2.academy | An interactive educational resource that bridges the information gap between the many moving parts of the eth2 ecosystem: from highly technical research work to customer-user interactions and everything in between. |
| butta, lamboshi, superphiz, unvetica, worth it | EthStaker | Supporting the EthStaker community to continue building an online venue and set of resources for amateur bettors to get started. |
| Jeffrey Milewski | Fundamentals of the Eth2 economy | An online course and website focused on the economics of participation as a validator and the institutional economics of the eth2 protocol. |
| Ross Moody | My Journey to Ethereum Staking | An article/guide that traces the experience of learning to bet from a very beginner level. |
| Rudy Lu | WeETH Stake | Support for eth2 staking and validation ecosystem in China |
| Scott Piriou | Staking Guide for Beginners in French | A series of eth2 staking articles for the French-speaking community. |
| Ether | The Ether Wiki | A wiki focused on eth2 with the aim of educating and helping potential validators integrate |
| Techtec | PoL | Eth2 educational content, including staking guides, in Japanese |
Just as community and education are essential to getting actors over the starting line, robust open source tools are essential to ensuring actors can manage their nodes securely. This cycle, the tools we saw were primarily focused on security and orchestration, and we look forward to continued innovation here in the future.
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Goebel | valid8r | A command line tool to “validate” the local configuration of a validator. Check common system and application default settings for the performance and security of a staking configuration. |
| Daniel Streit | Mnemonic division | A web tool and open source code that uses threshold cryptography to create “K of N” mnemonics. This will make it easier to store validator mnemonics securely. |
| Isaac Agudo | Signatory HSM BLS | A standard for an HSM BLS signer based on blst, including open source code and documentation. This work will help stakeholders manage their keys more securely. |
| Jakub Tomanik | MacSteak | A macOS app to streamline the staking experience for traders of all skill levels by wrapping a platform to run Ethereum software on Apple hardware. |
| Mara Schmiedt, Alon Muroch, Collin Myers | Eth2 Secret Shared Validators | Audited implementation of a shared secret validator configuration, an essential element to improve validator resilience and diversification on the eth2 network. |
Data analysis/visualization
As more and more ETH is staked on the beacon chain, it is increasingly important to have insight into the functioning and health of the network. Last year Medalla Data Challenge was sufficient proof of the interest and capacity of the Ethereum ecosystem to collect and analyze network data. Projects in this category pursue these goals on the mainnet.
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Bitfly | beaconcha.in | Further development of the FOSS beaconcha.in block explorer, including an open source mobile client and support for the merge and share testnet. |
| Jim McDonald | chain | Integrating eth1 deposit tracking into chaind, a tool for collecting and indexing data from running staking nodes. |
| Omni Analytics Group | Tracking Ethereum 2.0 Validator Health Level | A continuation of the work initially submitted to the Medalla data challenge: a formal methodology for analyzing validators based on performance and an accompanying web dashboard. |
| pintail | Explore validator rewards and penalties | A series of blog posts explaining validator rewards/penalties using mainnet data. |
Research
Finally, some research projects were included in this cycle. There are many open research questions related to staking and the future of the network; we actively invite more research efforts in this area.
| Beneficiary(ies) | Project | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Barcelona Supercomputing Center | Eth2 Network Explorer | Rumor Eth2 network crawler expansions focused on improving p2p gossip data collection. |
| Barcelona Supercomputing Center | Monitoring Eth2 client resources | Monitoring of R&D resources for each of the 4 main network clients. |
| Diego Losada, Fernando Collado | Ethereum on ARM | R&D to provide users with an easy way to run a full Eth2 node on ARM devices (such as Raspberry Pi 4) |
We are excited to follow these teams in 2021 and beyond, and see the broader impact they are having on the burgeoning Ethereum staking ecosystem.
The scale and quality of this round of grants is an incredible signal to the growing staking community and the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole. This is the start of a great year! 🚀
