The Ethereum Foundation is always looking to make a positive impact. They are actively looking into supporting applications, smart contracts, and other innovative projects. Earlier this week, the Ethereum Foundation announced their first grants to help bolster this ecosystem.

The Ethereum Foundation Grants

With a grant issued by the foundation, developers can keep working on their projects. There is a lot of research and development that goes into every single project. Empowering these innovative developers in any way possible is what the Ethereum Foundation aims to achieve first and foremost. Collaboration is critical in the way of blockchain technology and any feature derived from it.

For the community, these grants also play a big role. The “decisions” made by the Ethereum Foundation highlight projects worth keeping an eye on. No ecosystem is complete without looking at the technological implications from all different sides.Several key aspects of the Ethereum network need more support. With these grants, it becomes a bit easier to address those areas and support the people who attempt to improve the network as a result.

Especially in terms of scalability, usability, and security, there is still room for improvements. The Ethereum Foundation will continue to issue grants to solidify all of these different aspects moving forward. It is important to note support projects have no ICOs, token sales, or anything along those lines. These are all projects designed to make Ethereum better and stronger.

The “Lucky Winners” of the First Grants

Quite a few projects successfully received a grant. We see multiple projects focus on hackternship, which tackle Geth, Solidity, and Deterministic WebAssembly. Scalability is also a major area of work right now. L4 Research, Prysmatic Labs, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Turbo Geth, and Plasma Taiwan Dev all received grants of various sizes. These projects focus on sharding, state channels, Plasma, and so forth. All of these improvements will be quite positive for Ethereum once they go live on the network.

It is evident there are still a lot of improvements to come to Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation helps all winners with technical advisory, a platform to share their work, and the non-dilutive funding. With L4 Research pocketing $1.5m, it seems state channels research is of the most interest as of right now. The Casper contract formal verification by Runtime Verification also netted a $500,000 grant. Casper is Ethereum proof-of-stake implementation, which should come to market relatively soon.