The Ethereum Foundation has unveiled a Foundation led and Co-funded grant aimed at financing the development of Serenity, Ethereum 2.0.
According to the blog post, the Ethereum Foundation has in previous times granted substantial awards to leading client development teams that are currently tasked with delivering long-standing multi-clients testnets as the launch of Phase 0 approaches.
Receiving the grants are Harmony that got an award of $189,000 for the development of the Beacon Chain. Next is Prysmatic that is development a full featured sharding client for Ethereum 2.0 that can process transactions faster than ever before. Prysmatic was awarded a grant of $725,000 for the development of the Prysm Client.
Receiving $485,000 for the development of the Lighthouse client is Sigma Prime. Sigma Prime specializes in blockchain technology and information security. The award was funded by Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys.
Status received for the Nimbus Client the sum of $500,000 while another $150,000 was co-funded by Ethereum Foundation and Protocol Labs for the Status Networking Protocol development.
The sum of $184,000 was funded by both ConsenSys and the Ethereum Foundation for the Whiteblock project. The project is to continue the Ethereum 2.0 testnet and interoperability support.
For research and development purpose, Dmitry Khovratovic was awarded $10,000 to produce an expert report about the security of some parts of the first phase of Ethereum 2.0
Chainsafe received $217,500 for Lodestar light-client and JavaScript development.
Ethereum Foundation also revealed that bounties are open for further research and development efforts to help the future of the Ethereum platform. According to the Ethereum Foundation, it is offering 5 ETH bounties (or 1000 DAI, whichever is larger) for any recommendations for substantive changes that make it into the Phase 0 ETH 2.0 specifications prior to the ETH 2.0 genesis. These include changes for the state transition function, fork choice rule, or deposit contract.
Ethereum being the first smart contract platform has been a great boost and accelerated growth in the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. As the increasing volume impacted the network, it put a strain on it since it has been using the Proof of Work POW Consensus.
The challenges it has faced using POW and the drive to be the world biggest decentralized application platform necessitated the migration to POW. The transition of Ethereum Network to Ethereum 2.0 is expected to take place in January, 2020.
