The Ethereum Foundation on Monday, Jan. 7, announced that it was giving a major grant worth $5 million to ethereum development group, Parity Technologies.
The statement read:
“The Ethereum Foundation is thrilled to announce a scalability, usability and security grant of five million dollars (USD) to Parity Technologies.”
In a blog post, the Ethereum team explained that the foundation offered the grant to recognize the efforts of Parity technology towards ethereum development to encourage specific areas of its work including ethereum scalability solutions like Plasma and eWasm.
Parity technology is better known for developing and maintaining an ethereum client software which along with Go-ethereum (Geth) are the most used clients. “Parity Technologies has been an invaluable member of the Ethereum ecosystem for their leadership in core development efforts, their Parity Ethereum client and more,” the ethereum team wrote about Parity.
Details of the Grant
During the last annual conference for developers (DevCon4) held in Prague, representatives from Parity showcased some of their plans for the ethereum network, particularly regarding Serenity—a future ethereum upgrade that will solve all scalability problems.
The statement continued:
“We [Ethereum Foundation] couldn’t think of a more applicable fit for a grant given Parity’s constant push to raise the technical bar and their pinpointed focus on next generation advancements like proof-of-stake, sharding and WebAssembly.
Nothing that:
“[The] grant will fund Parity’s work on Casper, sharding, light clients, developer tools, QA, audits and infrastructure improvements.”
Also it stated that the grant will be delivered according to three milestones viz: The completion of eWasm compatibility work; Shipping a light wallet for mainnet; and the successful completion of Phase 0 and Phase 1 of sharding. The ethereum team did not specify how much will be paid after each milestone.
Purpose of Developer Grants and Accelerator Programs
Developer grants like this are not uncommon in the blockchain and cryptocurrency circles; they are used to encourage developers to bring innovative solutions on a blockchain network. The so called ‘ethereum killers’ often provide grants and accelerator programs to attract developers to their relatively new platforms. As Smartereum reported, the Tron Foundation which is responsible for the development of the TRON blockchain announced the launch of a $1 million worth accelerator for DApps and products on the Tron blockchain to empower developers and foster innovation within the blockchain industry.
Moving Towards Ethereum 2.0
For its part, the Ethereum Foundation and ethereum core developers are working towards future milestones on ethereum development roadmap. Barring any problems, the next planned upgrade of the ethereum network Constantinople will go live next week. The hardfork is expected to prepare the network for the transition from a Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS).
As Smartereum reported, ethereum developers had several meetings and reached key decisions concerning Ethereum 1x and Ethereum 2.0 which will solve scalability and other problems faced on the ethereum network. The team is also considering the replacement of the ethereum virtual machine with eWASM as well as a possible blockchain storage rent to dissuade low priority applications from clogging the network.
Solomon Sunny is the market reporter for Smartereum, one of the global leaders in Ethereum, blockchain and currency news. He produces technical price updates on digital currencies and writes recent developments about blockchain.
