ICF Q1–2021 Funding Recipients
Our first quarter of funding proposals closed submissions on February 14th, 2021. We reviewed the applications internally and compiled the proposals recommended by the Board of Management. These were included with comments from the Technical Advisory Board and submitted to the Foundation Council for approval. The time spent since then was on finalizing service agreements and getting the required signatures in place.
The following proposals have now been finalized and work has begun by the respective teams. This comes in tandem with the Q1 Financial Transparency Report. Applications for Q2 2021 closed May 14th. To apply for Q3 2021 please submit applications by August 14th at apply.interchain.io.
Adoriasoft — Cosmos SDK Governance Module Features & Improvements
Adoriasoft received a service agreement to work on a number of items that were outlined in the ICF Request For Proposal — Governance Module Improvements. These should go towards improving the governance capabilities within the Cosmos SDK as well as eventually the Cosmos Hub itself.
Agoric — SES & Core Funding
Agoric is ensuring that the Keplr and CosmJS libraries are compliant with SES Secure Javascript implementations. This will prevent supply chain attacks like those seen with NPM upon some of the most important utilities in our ecosystem. Agoric has also received a core funding agreement for further IBC consulting from their team of experts.
Althea Network — Core Funding
Althea has received a core funding agreement to continue building out the Gravity Bridge that will connect Cosmos Hub to Mainnet Ethereum.
B-Harvest — Core Funding
B-Harvest received a core funding grant from the Interchain Foundation as thanks for a variety of important contributions to the Cosmos Ecosystem over many years of participating as a validator and engineering company.
Brookings Institution — Central Banking Research Report
This research grant was awarded to the Brookings Institution to support the research of economist Eswar Prasad in his work on Central Bank Digital Currencies.
Chainapsis — Core Funding
Chainapsis, creators of Keplr, received a core funding agreement to continue development of the Keplr wallet. They are currently working on a mobile version and integrating with WalletConnect V2.
ChainSafe / Trail of Bits — Schnorkel Audit
Initiated by ChainSafe, Trail of Bits will perform an audit on the go-schnorrkel codebase that implements schnorr signatures in golang which could be used by the Cosmos SDK for privacy and storage improvements.
Chorus One — Core Funding
Chorus One received a core funding agreement to continue work on WASM based IBC light clients and Bridges.
Christian Cachin, University of Bern — Threshold Cryptography Graduate Research
The ICF will be working with Christian Cachin’s distributed systems and cryptography laboratory at the University of Bern on an initiative to develop threshold cryptography capabilities for Cosmos. Christian will be collaborating with the Heliax and Sikka teams to design and specify a threshold cryptography library that will allow Tendermint and Cosmos SDK chains to leverage threshold cryptographic capabilities. Christian’s work will primarily focus on specification and correctness, while Heliax and Sikka work on a distributed key generation and threshold decryption implementation leveraging this collaborative work.
Christopher Swenor — Reach
Reach is an increasingly popular formal verification based smart contract language based on JS that compiles to different blockchain backends. Christopher Swenor and his team have received a service agreement to provide initial support for Cosmos-SDK modules written in Reach.
Coin Center — Policy Grant
Coin Center is a non-profit research and advocacy center focused on the public policy issues
facing cryptocurrency and open blockchain networks. They are leaders in educating policymakers and the media about cryptocurrency technology; engaging in policy research to develop smart regulatory approaches to questions raised by the technology; and advocating for those solutions in order to keep cryptocurrency networks open, decentralized, and permissionless. They have received a grant from the Interchain Foundation to continue their important work.
Confio — Key Derivation Spec Research & Core Funding
Simon Warta, on behalf of Confio, has received a service agreement to work on an HD key derivation standard for the Cosmos multi-blockchain ecosystem based on BIP-32 and BIP-43. Deliverables are a spec that will be presented to the community and also an implementation in CosmJS. Confio has also received a core funding agreement as thanks for a variety of important contributions to the Cosmos Ecosystem over many years.
Connor Spelliscy — Crypto Law Cooperative
Connor Spelliscy has received a grant to begin research with the goal to ultimately help crypto startups avoid some of the significant cost and delay stemming from legal uncertainty, by providing them with free curated open source legal materials, with a focus on practical solutions and tools.
Daniela Pavin (CATDOTFISH) — Core Funding
Daniela Pavin received a core funding entity agreement to continue her valuable work across the myriad of social channels that she administers. She’s a huge asset to this ecosystem and a shining example of a true cosmonaut 👩🚀💫
Forbole — Juno
Forbole received another service agreement to push the development of the Juno codebase further. Juno is a Cosmos SDK tool originally developed by Interchain engineer Aleksandr Bezobuchuk that allows developers to cache data from a chain into a Postgres database so it can be accessed via GraphQL. This service is similar to The Graph and Vulcanize, two popular tools that target the EVM. It improves the developer experience for wallets and clients especially.
HashCloak Inc. — IT-PIR Integration for Tendermint
Mikerah Quintyne-Collins has received a grant on behalf of Hashcloak to continue research on IT_PIR Integration for Tendermint. This would integrate information theoretic private information retrieval into Tendermint with the aim to provide light clients with the ability to hide what transactions they are requesting from Tendermint full clients.
Hong Kong Impact Data Consortium — Decentralized Development Finance Framework (DDFF) Phase 2
The Hong Kong Impact Data Consortium has received approval for part two of their original funding proposal from Q3 2020 to implement and deploy community time bank programs using the Cosmos SDK.
Hypha Workers Co-operative — Governance Research
The Hypha Workers Co-op has received a service agreement from the Interchain Foundation to do research on the various governance related efforts across the Cosmos Ecosystem. They are working closely with relevant stakeholders to take stock of the current status and propose improvements on tools, technologies, structures and processes.
Informal Systems — Core Funding
Informal Systems has received a core funding agreement to continue on the myriad of contributions they make across the Cosmos Ecosystem, including ibc-rs and the Hermes Relayer as well as formal verification, devops and infrastructure, research and engineering.
Interchain GmbH — Core Funding
Interchain GmbH has received a core funding agreement to continue on the myriad of contributions they make across the Cosmos Ecosystem, including maintaining Tendermint Core, IBC, Gaia, Grants and Developer Relations.
Interlay — Trustless Bitcoin via IBC
Interlay will do a technical feasibility report for InterBTC to Cosmos IBC and a proof of concept implementation. They will use the ibc-rs module and the IBC substrate library to build towards an IBC bridge to the Cosmos Network.
Iqlusion — Core Funding
Iqlusion has received a core funding agreement to continue supporting work around Gaia and network upgrades as well as work around the distribution module and staking derivatives.
KYVENetwork — Decentralized Block Explorer
KYVE has developed an archiving and caching solution that stores any data stream, with built-in validation. This is being used for a number of networks including Cosmos, Arweave, Avalanche, Polkadot, and Solana leveraging the Arweave decentralized storage network.
NCCGroup / Crypto.com — Cosmos SDK Audit
NCCGroup performed a security audit of the Cosmos SDK that was co-funded by the Interchain Foundation and Crypto.com.
Orijtech Inc. — Core Funding
Orijtech Inc., headed by Emmanuel Odeke, has made contributions to the Cosmos ecosystem since the beginning of the project. They now have a core funding agreement to continue doing integrity and security check at the lower levels of Golang. This includes work on benchmarking and auditing Tendermint Core.
Regen Network — Core Funding
Regen Network has received a core funding agreement to continue their work maintaining the Cosmos SDK as well as a new product called Keystone that leverages new features of the Cosmos SDK that allow for key rotation and social recovery of accounts.
Riccardo Montagnin — Alan.dart
Riccardo Montagnin received a follow up service agreement to further push the development of the Alan.dart codebase. Alan.dart is a mobile development framework written in dart that targets flutter as a cross platform environment that allows developers to quickly make mobile applications that interact with Cosmos SDK based blockchains. The mooncake application and the starname application are built with this framework.
Shanghai Bianjie AI — Core Funding
Shanghai Bianji AI, creators of IRIS Network, has received a core funding agreement to provide miscellaneous engineering support around NFTs, IBC, relayer incentivisation, dev adoption in China and Bridges.
Sikka — Core Funding
Sikka has received a core funding agreement to provide support around threshold decryption research and engineering.
Vulcanize — Core Funding
Vulcanize has received a core funding agreement to provide support around SMT storage work.
zkValidator — ZK Session
The Interchain Foundation was proud to sponsor the ZK Session put together by zkValidator in Q1 20201. The session focused on privacy in the Cosmos ecosystem.
