Our intrepid grantees have been keeping busy as always - read on for some recent accomplishments 🏆

ENS

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) runs on the Ethereum blockchain, but it's not just for ETH addresses! ENS maps human-readable domain names to locations all across the distributed web, including ethereum and other blockchain addresses, Tor .onion addresses, decentralized websites and data hashes stored on IPFS, and more. ENS continues to expand its reach, with recent integrations including:

• Partnership with CloudFlare to improve ETH.LINK service
• Expansion of the multi-coin standard, now allowing ENS records to store addresses and receive assets from 109 different blockchains
• Testnet deployment of smart contracts to integrate the DNS namespace, allowing registration of an ENS record for any ICANN domain (eg .com)

That's far from everything - read the ENS 2020 Retrospective for a recap of a pretty packed year, follow ENS on Twitter @ensdomains and check out the 2021 roadmap to see what's next.

Textile and 3box for IPLD Object signing and encryption

IPLD is a data structuring framework used in IPFS. Textile and 3Box received a combined grant, joint funded with Protocol Labs, to create a signing and encryption standard to enable greater composability and interoperability between web3 applications while keeping user data sovereign. All work funded by this grant has now been completed, including:

• Formalized specs defining IPLD structures for JOSE standards
• Reference Go implementation, with considerations for interoperability with the...
• Javascript/Typescript implementation!

Ethereum developers can already integrate JOSE standards such as JWE and JWS into their IPLD-based dApps, and there's more to come! This work is part of a longer term effort to increase data interoperability across IPFS/IPLD-based apps and tools. For more, you can follow principal investigators carsonfarmer and oed, who continue to engage with the community around this project; follow Textile on Twitter @textileio, blog.textile.io or Slack; and 3box on Twitter @3boxdb, medium.com/3box or Discord!

bitfly for beaconcha.in eth2 block explorer

As the launch of the beacon chain approached, the bitfly team wanted to make sure there was an open source eth2 block explorer from day 1. beaconcha.in has become that and much more, with a treasure trove of resources for Ethereum stakers and enthusiasts including:

• Growing eth2 knowledge base
• Wide variety of trackers and visualizations including charts with data on liveness, participation, total stake and more
• Mobile app for monitoring eth2 validators

Keep up with bitfly on Twitter @etherchain_org or Reddit u/etherchain.

But wait, there's more!

• Unirep private and non-repudiable reputation system: completed smart contracts, CLI and zk circuits
• MPC Phase 2 UI: completed design and specification; developed components including server, CLI and browser client

More to come next month!