We're here with our last hurrah before we head into 2021 - read on for the latest news on a few grantees!

Gitcoin for CLR matching

Gitcoin's CLR grants were one of the first real-world uses of quadratic funding, with the number of unique contributors to a grant carrying greater weight than the dollar total in determining the match amount.

CLR grants have come a very long way since the first round in early 2018! With 16 organizations and almost as many individuals pledging matching funds as of Round 8, it has grown into a truly community-driven support system for the ecosystem's many open source contributors. The platform itself has matured as well, with recent UI improvements including:

• A "shopping cart" enabling users to donate to multiple grants at once and share their cart with friends
• Integration of zksync for scaling, allowing multiple donations to be rolled into one transaction
• Collections so users can keep track of their favorites, or browse other people's top picks

EIP 1559 R&D

EIP 1559, which proposes changes to Ethereum's fee market, has been a focus of community-wide discussion and development since 2019. A recent multi-recipient grant went to support ongoing community-driven research and development: Consensys received funding to help coordinate research and development efforts, while funds sent to the 1559 multisig are administered by signers from several organizations to support community efforts including client implementation, infrastructure, bug bounties and outreach.

There had been plenty of work done on EIP 1559 prior to this grant, and that progress hasn't slowed! A small sample of recent updates:

• Toolbox for interacting with the EIP 1559 testnet, courtesy of the Besu team
• In-depth economic analysis of EIP 1559's strengths and weaknesses by Tim Roughgarden
• PR opened by the Vulcanize team for their 1559 implementation
• Community outreach report by the Ethereum Cat Herders

Track progress on EIP 1559 R&D via Tim Beiko's regular updates, implementers' call notes, or keep an eye on the mainnet readiness checklist.

A few more quick mentions

• BLS Hubble Frontend: Working frontend for a burner wallet supporting account management and message signing using a BLS signature scheme
• Blind Find: modified SMP implementation for more efficient encryption in zkSNARK; designed zkSNARK circuits and functions to create and verify proofs. Follow progress on Github!
• Web3 Labs for Web3j: Solidity dependency management, Web3J Beacon Node API Client, and more news in the recent community update.

• Nethermind for eth1 client: Beam Wallet in beta, released a recipe for Terraform deployment of client and monitoring stack, introduced plugins.

And of course we can't leave without acknowledging the massive achievement of all the client teams and other builders who contributed to the December 1 launch of the eth2 beacon chain!

Until next year :wave: