Drops-of-Diamond/diamond_drops

Raise funds

jamesray1 opened this issue · 4 comments

jamesray1 commented

We need to raise funds for R&D.

Summary:

I haven't received a grant yet for sharding development (to now deprecated specifications) and gossipsub work. I've tried to clarify with the grants team how much more progress is needed to get a grant, e.g. specific milestones to achieve, but I didn't receive a reply.

It seems to me that the Ethereum Foundation may have a preference for funding development of clients that it owns: Geth, Py-EVM, Java, JavaScript, etc. This is based on the lack of funding so far, as well as Vitalik seeming to favour promoting Prysmatic Labs without mentioning the names of other teams.

Other devs have contributed such as @ChosunOne, Luke Scoen, and Tim Siwula, but they have understandably dropped out, while many more others may have contributed if funds were available. I have changed careers from renewable energy and left a full time job.

I can't fathom why a grant was given to Prysmatic Labs for Geth-sharding back in March, yet no grant has been received yet for any other sharding team. Nor do I know how long a lack of funding will drag out for. Is the Ethereum Foundation trying to manipulate developers? Given that the sharding aspect of the software of a client is a public resource and has no inherent revenue, funding needs to be obtained via alternative means, e.g. grants, donations, employment from the organisation that owns the client, etc. Having an ICO, DAICO, DAII, VC funding, etc. seems to be out of the question since it's a public resource without revenue directly related to sharding development, only indirectly e.g. via the below forms of revenue and driving ecosystem growth (and thus potentially portfolio growth). I have sought grants and donations and even VC funding, and approached Parity and the Web3 Foundation, but people have been non-responsive or at best apologetic. There are ways for clients to generate revenue, e.g. full nodes serving light clients to access data, VIP node, EIP 908, Pocket Network, etc.

We've already applied with the EF and ECF. I think we'll be much more likely to be considered for a grant for other programs if we get a grant from these two parties, whereas I think other grant programs will be reluctant to fund us when they look into us and find out that the EF and ECF has not funded us yet.

Therefore I think it's best to continue working away until we get a grant from them, then we can apply for more grants.

Key selling/pitching points:

  • Sharding is necessary for the long-term scalability and sustainability of Ethereum. Layer 2 solutions reduce the security of layer 1 solutions, see also here.
  • Why Rust?
  • Why open source? So that anyone can freely scrutinize the code for security, optimize it for performance, or adapt it for their own needs (for instance, another blockchain project that competes with Ethereum which may develop unique ideas that Ethereum can then use).
  • This project will not just work on sharding, in the long-term it will work on everything in the sharding roadmap, which includes the EVM with EWasm, better incentivization of protocol resources such as storage and bandwith, Casper FFG and CBC, state minimization, etc.

Grants have been applied for with the Ethereum Foundation, the Ethereum Community Fund, and others listed here:

To apply:

The project may be considered as a public good, so may not be considered to be monetizable (although there are potential revenue streams for clients as linked to below).

One option is to build a Decentralized Autonomous Iterative Investment (DAII, pronounced dai-yee or die-yee). It may be simpler to wait for Dogezer to launch a beta in July or a stable release in December (2018) rather than independently develop our own.

Information that influenced this idea includes:

However, this may not be practical since we plan on merging with Parity eventually, so at the least they would have to agree to such a scheme, and this project is developing a public good, so raising funds via selling tokens may not necessarily be the best option.

Potential revenue streams are included in this EIP, as well as being an enabler for quadratic and potentially exponential growth of Ethereum and the Ethereum ecosystem, powering virtually any activity that has an economic or governance aspect, thus enhancing portfolio opportunity.

jamesray1 commented

Also keep an eye on https://colony.io.

jamesray1 commented

So I applied for a grant in January, spent two months learning, and started development after the workshop in late February, while I have since spent some time learning since then, e.g. for research and P2P. Before the workshop I got an email from the Ethereum team advising me that they would like to see more progress before a grant can be awarded. So presumably, they will award a grant to us some time after some amount of more work is done. Raising funds from a DAII may not be feasible, since the plan is to integrate with Parity eventually.

jamesray1 commented

Reached out to XYO network and sent an email to info@socialalphafoundation.org.

Also there are more here: https://app.tettra.co/teams/ethereum/pages/grants-for-ethereum-related-work#. I gave my details to be contacting for future rounds for the Mozilla Fellowship. The Ford Foundation link is dead. Applications for the next round for the Shuttleworth Foundation open on November 1, so I've added that date to my calendar. https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/apply/form/.

I've already applied for the list here: https://github.com/bokkypoobah/BokkyPooBahsEthereumWorkshop/wiki/Trinkets-&-Items-of-interest#community-grant-funding.