It's always fun to hear about new grants as they're awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we'll check in on projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!
Where applicable, the grant recipient is listed first, followed by the project for which the grant was awarded.
Fuel Labs for Optimistic Rollup R&D, SparsENS
Fuel Labs is best known for their work on a UTXO-based design for scalable, trust-minimized optimistic rollups. This multitasking team is also developing SparsENS, a stateless ENS subdomain registrar aiming to reduce transaction costs for registering ENS subdomains. Fuel Labs' grant went toward both these efforts, and in recent months they have hit some major milestones:
- Launched and completed two audits of the Fuel 1.0 Optimistic Rollup testnet
- Announced Fuel 1.5, a new design which uses BLS aggregate signatures to increase throughput and lower transaction costs
- Launched a Pokemon-inspired game running on Fuel
- Submitted a proposal to the Reddit scaling bake-off
- Designed and developed the smart contracts for SparsENS
Keep an eye out for a SparsENS testnet around the end of the year, and watch the Fuel roadmap for new features and future version releases!
Nomic Labs for Buidler Hardhat
Hardhat, formerly known as Buidler, is a flexible and extensible development environment. The recent Hardhat release represented both a major evolution of the protocol, and a new chapter for a project that has matured from a side project into an indispensable tool for Ethereum developers. The release brought a long list of improvements and new features, including:
- Mainnet forking to simulate mainnet state in a local development environment
- Tenderly integration for advanced debugging and monitoring directly in the Hardhat workflow
- Revamped compilation pipeline for improved compilation speed and the ability to configure arbitrarily complex compilation setups
- Improved support for ethers.js and Typescript
- And many more! You can find the full list here.
The Hardhat release included breaking changes, so be sure to upgrade if you're working with an older version of Buidler!
Hubble enables deployment of programmable optimistic rollup chains within a single hub, allowing users to move between chains within the rollup space instantly and cheaply. The initial Hubble grant was recently completed, with final milestones including:
- Transfer-only testnet launch with batched deposits, single withdraws, CLI and REST APIs, on-chain verification and fraud proofs
- Testnet upgrades including transaction and deposit fees, BLS signatures, and variable length balance and PDA trees
- Documentation for the Hubble libraries, APIs and commands
Hubble will continue to develop as time goes on - in fact, a second grant has recently been awarded for development of a front end interface allowing users to interact with Hubble's BLS signature scheme. Hubble is not owned by any one person or project, but you can follow its progress on the very lively Hubble Project Github repo!
We promised ourselves we'd keep this post light, but we can't resist adding just a few more:
- CLR.FUND: Completed Round 0, the first decentralized quadratic funding round using real funds; launched Round 1 integrating BrightID for sybil resistance.
- Generalized State Channels: First mainnet implementation by The Graph using the Nitro protocol and State Channels server wallet implementation
- Gnosis for OpenEthereum: Launched bug bounty program; released v3.1.0.
- DataHop for DiscoveryV5: Developed a simulation environment for prototyping and evaluation of variants of the DiscV5 protocol, implemented the proposed service discovery mechanism.
- Akomba for Skilltree: Deployed certificate issuance infrastructure, opened up requests for access to the first version of the app and initial proposals for courses to be built on Skilltree.
The list never stops growing, so we'll be back next month with another round!