Ethereum Foundation Update: $2 Million of Grants Disbursed for ETH 2.0

The Ethereum Foundation has updated its community via a blog post on the projects and developers who have been giving a grant for their work on ETH 2.0 and ETH 1.x, August 26, 2019. ETH 2.0 is scheduled for early January 2020, but some people have their doubts whether this is achievable in just four months. The largest grant of $725,000 was given to Prysmatic Labs.

Projects Funded

The grant to Prysmatic Labs has been given for the development of a sharding enabled full node client, meaning it could phase out Geth and Parity as the main node operators.

Harmony, which recently had an initial exchange offering (IEO) on Binance, was given $189,000 to help develop the Beacon chain for ETH 2.0. The Beacon chain will act as the nervous system of the network, connecting the Proof of Work layer (PoW) to the Proof of Stake (PoS) layer and directing the flow information between the two.

Sigma Prime and Status have been given a combined $485,000 and $500,000 respectively to build their own client implementations. This confirms the fact that the Foundation is trying to spread out the use of clients, rather than limiting it to a one or two as seen in Bitcoin.

Whiteblock and Chainsafe have also been given grants to work on development and testing for ETH 2.0. Chainsafe is working on a JavaScript based light client while Whiteblock will test the network and evaluate interoperability. Additionally, Whiteblock will be analyzing the slightly controversial libp2p implementation.

ETH 2.0 as a Gamechanger

The only thing that has held Ethereum back on paper is their inability to process transactions like EOS and TRON. While EOS has largely overstated their throughput, they still have throughput much greater than that of Ethereum.

Scaling for Ethereum on-chain is an essential function, unlike in Bitcoin where the network is purposefully congested on the main layer and scaling is being targeted on the second layer.

Transactions still process incredibly fast on Ethereum thanks to low block propagation time and immaturity of the network. If DeFi goes mainstream on the current Ethereum network, it would cause carnage beyond that of Crypto Kitties.

ETH 2.0 has the potential to revolutionize mainstream finance and introduce the concept of programmable money. The missing piece from the puzzle is being fixed, allowing the network to scale to meet a user influx.