Where did the Ethereum Foundation spend its money last year?

Editor’s note: This article is from the Ethereum Foundation blog, translated by Qin Xiaofeng of Odaily Planet Daily. Please be sure to indicate the source when reprinting.

Recently, the Ethereum Foundation released a report announcing the latest progress of the Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) and the use of financial funds in 2019.

In 2019, the Ethereum Foundation allocated a total of $7.809 million in new funds to various teams. According to the 2019 Spring Report (click to read), the Foundation will invest $30 million in key projects in the entire Ethereum ecosystem, and this budget will not be affected regardless of whether the ETH price rises or falls; in addition, $19 million of the budget is planned to support the development of ETH 2.0, $8 million to support the development of "ETH 1.0", and $3 million to attract and motivate development talents.

1. Recent Developments in ESP

The Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) is a branch of the Ethereum Foundation dedicated to providing support to teams across the Ethereum ecosystem, including both financial (funding) and non-financial support. ESP is also an extension of the Grants program, which primarily focuses on financial support.

The Ethereum Foundation first proposed the plan and some of its vision in its Spring Report of 2019. Since then, the Foundation has continued to provide direct funding support, while helping ESP connect with other potential sources of funding, and also facilitates industry expert advice, community exposure, access to cloud services and other infrastructure.

Over the past nine months, the Foundation has collected feedback from all parties and improved the application process. The changes are as follows:

• Standardize the process for ESP review applications;

• An expanded pool of experts in the field available to assist in peer reviewing applications or to advise applicants on their projects;

• Pay more attention to providing 1V1 feedback to applicants;

• Work more closely with accepted projects to establish clearer goals, roadmaps, and shared expectations.

The Foundation is also working to raise the profile of ESP and attract more high-quality applications. To this end, the Foundation has also made some changes in its communication methods, from improving existing channels to adding some new pages to the ESP website.

(ESP official website)

Some of the changes are subtle, but the foundation hopes they will inform the community and better help potential applicants. For now, you can follow the latest news on the ESP website homepage and learn about the activities ESP will participate in during the epidemic.

The site has added FAQs, improved the survey format, and most importantly, a new "Featured Projects" display, which regularly rotates some of the projects supported by ESP and their related information.

In addition, a "wish list" has been added to the website to attract people's attention to specific areas, such as security, ETH2.0, and privacy. Please note that this list is not a high priority in ESP, and ESP's focus is not limited to these areas, but hopes to see more applications in them. I hope this list will inspire those who want to participate.

Going forward, ESP will publish regular blog posts announcing new grant recipients. But this is just the beginning, and in the future ESP will also highlight the work that the supported teams are accomplishing. You can keep an eye out for more additions in the coming months, as well as regular updates to existing content.

2. Financial usage in 2019

While we worked hard throughout 2019 to improve the Ecosystem Support Program, we also continue to support projects across the Ethereum ecosystem, and funding is just one way we do that. There are many great teams that are not Ethereum grantees, either because they have already received funding or because their research is not a good fit for our grants. However, we still do what we can to support these important contributors (e.g., helping their projects expand their impact).

Of course, financial support remains a major part of our support for the entire Ethereum ecosystem. In 2019, more than 70 projects received financial support from the Ethereum Foundation.

Listed below are new grants to teams in 2019, excluding regular funding, previously awarded grants, and funding to other Ethereum Foundation teams.

We have also made a table for each funded project name and abstract (click to read). The details of this funding are as follows:

ETH2.0

The development of ETH2.0 is in full swing. Through the efforts of many teams, Ethereum has become more scalable and secure, and Proof of Stake (POS) has also been introduced. The Ethereum Foundation has also funded many Ethereum client teams, who have been working hard to achieve interoperability, improve reliability, and create developer tools.

Eth2 clients: $1,695,000

Eth2 tools and other: $1,459,000

In addition to the funding listed above, work on ETH2.0 is also supported by regular funding and other channels.

ETH1.X: $487,000

To this day, the most important work is still to continue to improve Ethereum. Some ETH1.x are still working tirelessly on upgrades to help Ethereum continue to improve in the short term. Key areas of focus include stateless Ethereum, improving developer experience, increasing node client diversity, ensuring the sustainability of running full nodes, and paving the way for the launch of ETH2.0. Here are some ETH1.x funding support projects:

We will share more information about other supporting work in the future, including Geth, other ETH1.x, and stateless research.

Layer 2: $1,211,000

Layer 2 solutions enable a wide variety of applications that may be too expensive, too slow, too complex, or impossible to implement directly on the Ethereum base layer. In 2019, teams and individuals across the community came together to make Ethereum more useful and scalable. This work is not only critical in the short term, but also extremely valuable in the long term. Eth 2.0 will also benefit from the greater privacy, scalability, and flexibility provided by Layer 2.

Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs: $426,000

Last year, there was more research and development work in cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs than ever before. These efforts strengthened the protocol’s infrastructure and opened up new possibilities for scaling, privacy, and security. The goal for 2019 is to take a tangible step forward by building tools that make it easier for developers to make progress without having to understand cryptography more deeply.

Developer Experience: $1,322,000

Ethereum has opened up a whole new design space for applications. As developers explore this space, they inevitably discover new pain points and require new tools. We have made significant investments in enhancing the developer experience on Ethereum, including improvements to programming languages, software libraries, development tools, node infrastructure, distributed storage, messaging, and more.

These improvements enable developers to get more done more easily, so they can focus on their products instead of building their own custom tools. Ultimately, we want them to make developing on top of Ethereum easy and fun.

User Experience: $303,000

We are always looking for common tools or upgrades to reduce friction costs for end users without compromising decentralization or some of the special products on Ethereum. We need to solve some common pain points such as gas costs, identity management, address readability and interoperability, so that DApp developers can more easily serve users anywhere.

Community and Education: $422,000

In short, Ethereum exists only because of its community and the people who work to grow and enrich the ecosystem. These teams bring people together, both in person and online, increase the diversity of our global community, and help build a general knowledge base by making educational materials freely available to everyone.

Indirect funding: $484,000

A new ecosystem requires new ways of funding. The Ethereum ecosystem relies on open source developers and independent thinkers to thrive. To this end, we want to provide funding for talented contributors outside of the traditional structures of companies and organizations, including: donations, venture capital, contracts, salaries. This category is all about entrusting resources to the community, as shown below:

We’re proud of all that we accomplished in 2019, and we’re excited to continue building on our success in 2020. As always, we’re grateful for the community’s enthusiasm and support.

For more details on all of the Foundation’s work, we’ll be sharing a Spring 2020 report in the coming days, so stay tuned.