Ethereum Foundation Completes Fourth Leg of its Grants Program
Living up to its new year’s resolution to support promising projects that were developed on their blockchain technology, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it has completed grants of its fourth leg of its Grants programme Wave IV, by providing nearly $3 million to over 20 projects.

Scalability and Usability
While the foundation has selected its grantees from five different categories namely scalability, security, usability (DevEx), (#BUIDL), hackternships and client diversity, the maximum number of grantees belong to scalability and usability (DevEx), whereby six and seven projects were awarded grants respectively.

As made public Ethereum foundations official blog post, the top six prominent projects that received the most significant grants were:

Status which is an ETH 2.0 client in Nim which secured $500,000.
Prysmatic Labs which is an ETH 2.0 Prysm client which secured $500,000.
Non-Custodial Payment Channel Hub – which provides payment upon delivery for the open source SDK release built by Spankchain, Kyokan, and Connext at Devcon 4, received $420,000.
Prototypal​, the Front-end state channel research, and development project received $375,000.
Finality Labs​​, which is involved in the development of Forward-Time Locked Contracts (FTLC) and Kyokan, that develops production-ready Mainnet Plasma Cash & Debit plugins both receiving $250,000.
Other exciting projects that received grants spread across various categories include Atomic Cross-Chain Transactions ($65,000) and EthSnarks ($40,000) in the scalability category. Flintstones also earned a hefty $120,000 in the security class.

Projects classed in the Usability group included TrueBlocks ($120,000), Gitcoin​​ ($100,000), VulcanizeDB ​​($75,000), Buidler ​​($50,000), Ethdoc​​ ($25,000), Ethers.js ($25,000), and Kauri​​ ($25,000).

While Magic Money Tree ($50,000) and Sigma Prime ($150,000) were categorized in #BUIDL and Client Diversity respectively.

Elizabeth Binks​​, who chose to work on Ring signature implementation with nine or more keys, and Lindsey Gray​​, whose area of interest was Development of C++ BLS-381 implementation, received $100,000 as part of the Hackternships programme of the Wave-IV grants program.

The post also invites other projects to apply for their next grants program and provides a wishlist with the broad topics being scalability, privacy, usability, security, education, and hackternships. The wishlist includes some exciting subtopics such as a tokenless Lightning Network for Ethereum, WebAssembly R&D, plasma implementations, vyper development, and security audits, smart contract audits, and alternative wallets.

Ethereum’s Way of Engaging With the Community
The grants program was started by the Ethereum Foundation so that it could help promising projects meet their goals and help Ethereum become a stronger force in the crypto ecosystem. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated in his first post when the foundation kickstarted the grants program, that these grants were by no means a source of profit.

This vision of the grants program was not just meant to infuse capital but was to provide an opportunity for the community to come together and participate in Ethereum 2.0 development. By way of these programs, the Ethereum Foundation assured community members to keep on helping and encouraging community-led innovation. To quote a snippet from the announcement, the foundation thanked the participants, stating:

“Thank you to all the fantastic community members that have applied with creative ideas on how to bolster our ecosystem. We would not exist without the time and energy that you put into Ethereum. While the program continues to grow, we will increasingly continue to involve more community members in the decision-making process.”

The Wave grants program seems to be an excellent way of engaging the community and working together towards a common goal. Such projects do not just involve the community but also encourage them to come up with innovation which could foster the growth of the community as a whole.



Should other blockchain foundations undertake a similar approach for the benefit of the crypto space? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.