ICF Q3–2020 Funding Recipients
Our third quarter of funding proposals closed submissions on August 31st. This is the second time this new process has been followed since the update earlier this year. We spent another month reviewing the applications internally, compiling the proposals that the Board of Management decided to recommend. 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.
The following proposals have now been finalized and work has begun by the respective teams. This comes in tandem with another Q3 Financial Transparency Report. Applications for Q4 closed on October 31st in order to give time during the holidays to review all submissions. To apply for Q1 2021 please submit applications by February 14th at apply.interchain.io.
Keplr Wallet — Chainapsis
Chainapsis, recipients of a previous service agreement to develop IBC Interchain Accounts, has received another service agreement to continue development on their open source wallet and browser extension, Keplr. Chainapsis is committed to implementing Keplr on several fronts: supporting more projects, further integrating the smart contracting platform CosmWasm and WalletConnect, and finally supporting an embeddable popup modal that allows dapp developers to choose which wallet to sign transactions with.We’re very excited about the progress Chainapsis has been making and seeing them lead the way in open source wallet development.
Multi-Chain WalletConnect
WalletConnect is a protocol for securely communicating between applications and wallet signing solutions that utilizes a decentralized p2p network called Vac. It is the most popular wallet transport solution in the Ethereum space and the core contributor, Pedro Gomes, has spent the last year working on multi-chain standards as part of the Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals that enable Wallet Connect to work within an Internet of Blockchains. This extension to the protocol enables multi-chain support, including Polkadot Network, and as such is being co-funded with Web3 Foundation.
Quicksync — Chainlayer
Syncing Cosmos sentries and validators can take a long time. Quicksync from Chainlayer, solves that issue by providing daily downloadable snapshots at great download speed. This service agreement will ensure that Cosmos snapshots remain available and easy to access.
Governance Working Group — Gavin Birch
Gavin Birch has shepherded the Governance Working Group since making the first successfully funded community spend proposal to improve the legibility of Cosmos Hub Governance. Grassroots efforts that increase the social coordination capacity of on-chain organizations are crucial for realizing a self-sufficient Cosmos ecosystem, however there are still significant gaps to fill before on-chain funding and protocol development becomes the norm.
This grant aims to help the Governance Working Group bootstrap a community working group model that catalyzes the emergence of more on-chain funding, development, and standards- development entities and. Gavin will be hosting regular meetings, inviting key voices like Regen, SimplyVC, UniFi DAO, Peggy JV and others to co-develop working group governance processes, soliciting feedback from the community on norms and best practices, and discuss how to leverage upcoming technologies like Regen’s groups module that can improve on-chain coordination. Gavin will also be documenting these governances in the Cosmos Hub docs and the new governance github repo.
Cosmos SDK Time Bank — Hong Kong Impact Data Consortium
The Hong Kong Impact Data Consortium is a socially-conscious and civic-minded community that brings together people and resources with data, takes action to solve Hong Kong’s most pressing issues, and advocates for a new paradigm of bottom-up crowd-solutions for poverty alleviation and social inclusion. This funding proposal is to develop P2P economics for low-income Asian communities, helping them to achieve self-determinism & economic resilience through programmable results-based-finance & collateralized community currencies, to grow sustainable forms of local economy. This will take shape as a digitalization of a currently running time bank program using the Cosmos SDK and begin adding capabilities for Community Inclusion Currency issuance with a linked fractional reserve currency pool.
Map of Zones — Ztake
During the adversarial IBC enabled test network Game of Zones, participants, ztake and Bitquasar, created a beautiful visualizer for all the interconnected networks called Map of Zones. This service agreement is to continue development on the visualizer in preparation for the live IBC launch as part of the Stargate network upgrade.
Cross Chain Validation Masters Thesis — EPFL
This funding proposal is for Jovan Komatovic, a second year doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), to research and produce an academic paper on cross-chain validation under the guidance of Rachid Guerraoui. The project is devoted to formally defining the cross-chain validation problem that aims to allow securing new chains in the system by reusing the trust in some highly secure chains, determining which system models allow solving the problem, and developing a concrete algorithm.
Celo Bridge — Chorus One
In coordination with the Celo Foundation, Chorus One will begin building a bridge between Celo and the Cosmos Hub. This work is split between a service agreement with Celo Foundation and the Interchain Foundation. The agreement with us will cover a WASM-based light client for the Celo consensus that will allow Celo transactions to be verified on the Cosmos Hub in order to utilize IBC. On the Celo side, work will go towards creating access to a tendermint light client via an EVM precompile. This will allow IBC packets to eventually be verified within Celo smart contracts.
Keep an eye out for more regular updates from the Interchain Foundation as more funding recipients are announced as part of Q4 2020 🚀
