$650,000 to Make Ethereum Faster

Nimbus has received a $650,000 grant to continue its work on the next major update to the protocol on Ethereum 2.0.

The Ethereum Foundation has provided an additional $650,000 for Nimbus, a project that builds the infrastructure for Ethereum 2.0. The investment is important for the next step in the development of Ethereum. The purpose of Nimbus is to enable smartphones and embedded devices to operate smart contract-capable nodes.

Nimbus first time received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation in March 2018 as part of the funding program for scalable research and development at Ethereum. With the latest grant, the Foundation’s total commitment to Nimbus amounted to $1.65 million.

The team plans to use the new resources to bring more engineers on board, research distributed storage solutions, prepare to implement ETH2.0 Layer 2, and solve technical challenges.

Ethereum urgently needs a scaling solution

The Ethereum Foundation is looking for ways to scale the Ethereum network as it is almost bursting. Network utilization has skyrocketed in recent months and peaked at 90%. If it reaches 100%, the network will become significantly slower and more expensive to use, making it more difficult for companies to build on.

Part of the Nimbus project is figuring out how to make Ethereum scalable so more companies can use it simultaneously and run more performance-hungry applications. The Ethereum blockchain is currently too resource-intensive to run on a smartphone. Nimbus is supposed to change that and is therefore written in Nim, an easy-to-use programming language that was developed for use on cell phones — especially on older, less powerful ones.

Author: Marko Vidrih

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