Grantee Roundup: July 2021 | Ethereum Foundation Blog

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees!

InterRep

For a user switching to a new social media platform, one of the biggest points of friction is rebuilding their reputation. InterRep aims to reduce this friction by allowing a user to link a social media account with an Ethereum address, which can be used to confirm their identity on a new platform.

Grantees Jay Graber and Raphael Roullet implemented the UI and smart contracts for an InterRep MVP (you’ll need to connect with MetaMask on Ropsten in order to interact with the UI). The initial version, launched to Ropsten on June 30, allows a Twitter account to be verified via an API and privately linked to an Ethereum address. An NFT “badge” is minted to the linked address which acts as an attestation of ownership of the associated reputation. See the launch post for more details on how InterRep works, use cases and future plans.

Statebox, Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges for Compositional Game Engine

Game theory, which studies strategic interactions between rational actors, is at the heart of mechanism design for decentralized systems. However, the “games” involved in real-world interactions such as validating a blockchain or voting in a DAO are extremely complicated and difficult to reason about.

Enter Compositional Game Theory, which treats large, complex games as composites of smaller, simpler games. The equilibrium (i.e. an outcome in which any given player has no incentive to change their strategy as long as all other players’ strategies remain the same) of a complex game can be defined on the basis of its simpler components.

Although these concepts are highly relevant to Ethereum, the underlying theory is extremely complex. Philipp Zahn and Jules Hedges aim to make the theory more accessible by creating a software engine for both modeling and analyzing strategic interactions via modular programming. The recent release post shares more details on the system, which uses a small domain-specific language along with Haskell for defining functions, and an illustration of the process using an auction format as an example.

This introduction is only the beginning – the project is in early stages and will continue to evolve and add new functionality. Follow @Statebox for updates, and head to the project’s Github to keep up with progress or contribute.

Blogs blogs blogs!

The Ethereum Foundation privacy and scaling team has launched a blog where they’ll be sharing what they discover and develop, often working closely with grantees, along with guest posts from grantees themselves.

The inaugural guest post, An Introduction to Optimism’s Optimistic Rollup, came from Kyle Charbonnet, who received a grant to assess the security properties of Optimism’s optimistic rollup implementation. This was not an audit, but an opportunity to learn more deeply about a construction that is anticipated to be heavily used and emulated. The results of the assessment will be published soon; meanwhile Kyle’s post provides an overview of the protocol to put it all into context!

A few other recent posts from grantees:

• Scotty Poi, SSZ Visualizer Online: an introduction to the new visualization playground at ssz.dev.
• Blagoj, Rollup Diff Compression: tl;dr on research into reducing the L1 data footprint of a rollup for the specific use case of airdrops.
• Dark Forest, v0.6 Round 2 Wrapup: results, resources, emergent strategic and economic models, special contributions and more from the most recent round.
• Geoff Lamperd, Trusted Setup UI Update: improvements to the UI for a general trusted setup infrastructure.

Are you working on something you think could change Ethereum for the better? Head to our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.