The Ethereum Foundation is funding the creation of tools, documentation, and resources to make for a delightful staking and validator experience. While the spirited staker ecosystem has already made great progress with respect to public good community resources, we are still in the early days and there's more work to do!
Anyone is free to participate (individuals and teams) in this grants round.
If you want to submit something but need some inspiration, check out the examples and the wishlist.
Ideas and projects at any stage of development are welcome:
Idea phase.
Proof-of-concept.
Work in progress.
Fleshed out project.
Grants are decided on a case-by-case basis and you may enter more than one proposal! So long as each proposal is unique and meets the requirements.
Deadline
The deadline for proposals is any time the day of Tuesday, December 22, 2020. We will follow-up with you about your submission by email.
Requirements
Proposals must be in English.
Work must be open source with a free and permissive license.
If published work, it must be accessible by a url.
Selection criteria
Surprise us with your creativity! But here are a few selection criteria considerations (depending on the submission type some criteria might not be applicable):
Potential impact on broadening the staker community
Quality of contribution to the staking tooling ecosystem
Clarity, conciseness and organization of documentation
Novelty in reducing the barrier of entry to staking
Insights that lead to substantive changes in client implementations or specifications
Analyses or visualizations that help a non-technical audience gain insight into the network
Overall quality and clarity of data analysis or data visualization.
Examples
Here are some prompt questions that may help inspire you:
Are you building end-to-end staking guides for different clients on various platforms?
Are you writing crisp, clear staking documentation?
Are you teaching stakers of all levels, from beginner to advanced, through video and written tutorials?
Are you building a staking wiki focused on best practices and security? What novel ways can you dream up to encourage people to contribute?
Are you experimenting with sophisticated staking setups and detailing out guides/tools for the community to reproduce and understand tradeoffs?
What engaging diagrams or illustrations of the Beacon Chain are you creating?
How can you make it easier to retrieve live data from the Beacon Chain?
What data analyses and visualizations can give stakers live insights into the network?
What new staking tools are you building?
How can you make a stakers life easier, more productive, or just generally more delightful?
Other topic areas are welcome too! Be it research, testing frameworks, infographics, and so on. The point of the program is to help contribute to the long term health of the Eth2 staking and validator community. If your proposal advances this aim, tell us about it!
In addition to the prompt questions above, here's a wishlist of avenues to explore.
Wishlist
The Ethereum Foundation are interested in the following things, but don't let this restrict your creativity.
For example:
Education quickstart: What are the essential things for someone new to staking to learn? What's the most effective way to deliver that information, to bring someone from "starting from scratch" to "I know how this works" in thirty minutes? – For example: high quality blog posts, diagrams, illustrations, or videos for understanding Eth2 and staking
End-to-end staking guides for different clients on various platforms. In particular, guides that provide context and education to understand the "why" behind certain commands.
Best practices for staking safely and securely? What are the tradeoffs between different methods? – Do these details change across different clients? Across different operating systems?
Build a staking wiki focused on best practices and security.
Write guides for safely porting validator keys between different clients.
Experiment with sophisticated setups and write guides for community to reproduce and understand the tradeoffs, for example:
Building on exotic hardware
A validator client load balanced between multiple nodes
Using a VPN to dynamically change IP every N days
Safely porting validator keys between different clients using validator interchange format
Configuring SystemD and logging for Eth2 clients (with sample configuration files)
For example:
Dashboards, alerts or other monitoring for validators that plug into beacon node APIs.
A single installer/manager for all client types that include redundancy, failure detection and auto-fallback.
BLS signing and validator client integration on hardware security modules.
Scripts for easily swapping node type:
Can this be done automatically by detecting degraded performance?
VC to load balancing across multiple beacon nodes using the standard API.
Consider having two beacon nodes (one for attestation publishing, one for proposal publishing) to try to mitigate denial of service attacks.
web3 library extensions for Eth2 functionality using the common Eth2-api.
Additional and extended Eth2 deposit/key management tooling.
Tool to allow validators to "sanity check" their withdrawal credentials validity.
Off-the shelf solutions to make staking more secure and robust.
Run validator client on separate hardware that is not directly connected to the Internet.
Add networking fail-safe via 3G/4G connections.
Develop lightweight staking hardware security models that keeps keys secure and supports a basic validator client.
Standard android builds for beacon node and/or validator client.
Decentralized validators.
Secret shared validator implementations aimed at enhancing security of single user setups.
Decentralized staking pool research and development.
hamradio-net and other experimental network resilience projects.
Deploy a version of p2p networking on ham radio so even in the case of ocean fiber optic cable failure the network will not become partitioned.
Any other project that can increase the resilience of the Eth2 network even in the event of major global internet disruptions (satellites, mesh networks, etc)
For example:
Consider applying Medalla Data Challenge wishlist ideas to Mainnet with enhanced scripts, extended analysis, or live monitoring.
Simplify, through tutorials or tools, collection of network attestation data.
Build support tools for live insights and visualisations into the network.
Use rumor agents to analyze and/or visualize gossip subnets in real time.
Build a website for visualizing/querying the validator activation and exit queue
Build a website for visualizing the FFG finality process.
Build a client-agnostic Eth2 fork/branch monitor to aid in debugging when difficulties arise.
Build a mechanism to monitor Eth1 voting.
Tips on how to access data to analyze – for example: tooling for building public datasets.
Analyze client performance under various conditions.
For technical questions about Eth2 staking, ideas or direction for proposals, and all things eth2, we invite you to head over to the community-driven ethstaker Discord.
Frequently asked questions
Feel free to submit as teams or individuals.
In short, we need enough information to understand your goals, your motivation and your challenges. The more details you provide, the more likely we’ll be able to help.
For example:
Showing a clear grasp of the problem you're trying to solve
Clearly identifying your project's impact and how it would help the Eth2 staking ecosystem
Detailed description of your project
If you have an idea or project that benefits the Eth2 staking community, we want to hear about it! The goal is to support regular, consistent work that pushes forward the Eth2 staking ecosystem.
Eth2 Staking Community Grants is an open call for proposals. Which means, it's expected that some ideas or projects won't be fully shipped before the deadline, but instead require ongoing efforts.
If you're new to staking, we encourage you to practice first on a testnet before moving to Mainnet. Follow the steps to set up a validator on the Medalla testnet via the Medalla launchpad.
Once you're ready for real ETH, head on over to the Eth2 launchpad to set up your Eth2 validator.
