The 5th Cohort of IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund Grantees
Over the last few months, we’ve worked very hard to improve the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund and to make sure we use the funds in the best way possible to benefit the whole Ecosystem.
Today, the IOTA Ecosystem team is very happy to announce that we have six great new grantees and a brand new EDF website to share with you!
The funded projects range among a full node software written in Go, a new semi-permanode solution, a swift library and awareness building & educational material.
With the help of the grantees, the growth of the IOTA community can be ensured and the current network is strengthened and used to its full potential.
We look forward to seeing the progress of these new projects and will make sure to keep you updated about their development.
Hornet (€154,500)
Sebastian Fuchs (IoTMOD), Maximilian Hase (muXxer) and Alexander Sporn (alexsporn) are the three founders of “TangleKit GbR”, a company created specifically for building products and providing services based on IOTA technology. Their first service enables fast “Proof of work as a service” for devices with limited computational power and can be found here.
As part of the grant, the three grantees will create an IOTA fullnode for the mainnet called Hornet. It is written entirely in Go and will allow to install and run an IOTA fullnode on low-end devices such as a Raspberry Pi with significantly increased performance.
Sebastian Fuchs, Maximilian Hase and Alexander Sporn are all excited to grow the IOTA Ecosystem even further:
“By supporting the development of different fullnode implementations like IRI, cIRI and Hercules, and also by creating a high performance IOTA transaction spammer with multiple attack strategies, we gained a lot of knowledge about the IOTA technology. We want to give this knowledge back to the community in the form of an optimized open-source full node software.
The main goal of this project is to achieve feature parity with IRI v1.8.0. In addition, HORNET will try to solve currently known bottlenecks which exist in IRI’s implementation (i.e. tip-selection).”
The main goal of this project is to achieve feature parity with IRI v1.8.0. In addition, HORNET will try to solve currently known bottlenecks which exist in IRI’s implementation (i.e. tip-selection).”
– Fuchs, Hase & Sporn
AION (€56,240)
Olaf van Wijk is a software developer with a broad interest in everything data, security, privacy and AI-related. Some might know him from his work on IOTA-Pay. Similar to many other projects, he was looking for a solution to keep his needed data in the Tangle alive instead of snapshotting it away.
Olaf’s recent work on separating storage & retrieval, as well as his work on path descriptors, led him to a solution for the problem with the ‘Selective Permanode’.
The EDF funds will be dedicated to creating AION, a fully open-source method of managing IRI so that it knows which transactions and solid paths to selectively store.
With the new open-source method, Olaf envisions the following benefits to the wider IOTA Ecosystem:
- Developers can host-specific data relevant for their use-case
- Direct incentive to host your own IOTA node
- Users can ask nodes to keep data alive
- Anyone could host their own application data
- Opens up a financial incentive structure for node operators
- “Self Sovereign Data”
- Self-referencing MAM/Data streams
“After I built a few test applications and proof of concepts on top of IOTA, I kept on running against the same problem: Where has my data gone? Snapshots! It is either: host the entire tangle or delete everything. After my research on separating the API calls from the internal storage of IRI, it struck me!
When AION is finished, I believe it will provide a great boost in IOTA development, and with the EDF grant I can make sure it is open source and available for the entire community!”
When AION is finished, I believe it will provide a great boost in IOTA development, and with the EDF grant I can make sure it is open source and available for the entire community!”
– Olaf van Wijk
IOTAKit ($7,000)
Pasquale Ambrosini is an Italian software developer who has been working with iOS since 2010. He is also a very passionate member of the IOTA community. In the past, his work was successfully used in the Trinity Wallet for native proof-of-work and to speed up the address generation on iOS.
With this grant, Pasquale will create a fully written IOTA library in Swift and an example application for iOS devices utilizing this library.
“I think IOTA has made great strides in recent years, but there is still a lot to do and IOTAKit wants to help developers make it easier to integrate IOTA in iOS/macOS applications.
About 40% of smartphones use Swift (iOS). Offering the right tools to native developers means improving adoption, and at the same time simplify the life for developers by making the tools more efficient.
This is IOTAKit, a great library made (with love) from developers to developers.”
This is IOTAKit, a great library made (with love) from developers to developers.”
– Pasquale Ambrosini
Learn more about IOTAKit here.
IOTA Developer Essentials and Lab ($8,160)
Petr Zizka (known in IOTA community as Hribek25) is the man behind the IOTA Developer Essentials project.
As a part of the grant, he will complete his self-study onboarding material to cover at least three different programming languages. On top of that, he will set up an IOTA interactive experience lab that turns the self-study onboarding materials into a complete, interactive experience for anyone that wants to get their hands on the IOTA protocol.
“I personally believe in learning-by-doing. I also strongly believe that having top-notch learning onboarding materials is the key attribute to wide adoption and success. I want the IOTA protocol to succeed and this is my contribution to that goal. Thanks to the EDF grant the IOTA interactive lab will be a great addition to the project.”
“I personally believe in learning-by-doing. I also strongly believe that having top-notch learning onboarding materials is the key attribute to wide adoption and success. I want the IOTA protocol to succeed and this is my contribution to that goal. Thanks to the EDF grant the IOTA interactive lab will be a great addition to the project.”
– Petr Zizka
To learn more about IOTA Developer Essentials and Lab, check out:
https://github.com/Hribek25/IOTA101
https://iota101.info/
Everything Tangle — Season 2 ($13,475)
David Florio’s Everything Tangle YouTube channel is widely known in the IOTA community for providing high-quality, educational YouTube videos about IOTA.
To date, the channel has amassed nearly 20,000 subscribers and surpassed 500,000 views. 11 original videos have been published. They cover a wide range of IOTA topics, with the most popular topics being translated and re-released in three additional languages.
For this Ecosystem project, Everything Tangle is currently developing five new videos scheduled to be released throughout the last quarter of 2019. These new productions will discuss emerging IOTA topics and address gaps in public educational resources.
The IOTA Foundation is happy to continue to support Everything Tangle in providing high-quality, informative videos and their mission to inspire, educate and grow the IOTA Ecosystem.
“The goal of Everything Tangle is to create educational content that is both engaging and easy to digest. From inside the IOTA community, it is easy to forget how foreign the concepts behind IOTA must seem to the wider crypto space and the general population. I make my videos in hopes of breaking down that knowledge barrier, so that any viewer can begin to grasp the innovation that IOTA is delivering. As global understanding increases, so too will support and adoption. I am grateful and honoured to continue working with the IOTA Foundation in pursuit of this goal.”
“The goal of Everything Tangle is to create educational content that is both engaging and easy to digest. From inside the IOTA community, it is easy to forget how foreign the concepts behind IOTA must seem to the wider crypto space and the general population. I make my videos in hopes of breaking down that knowledge barrier, so that any viewer can begin to grasp the innovation that IOTA is delivering. As global understanding increases, so too will support and adoption. I am grateful and honoured to continue working with the IOTA Foundation in pursuit of this goal.”
– Everything Tangle
Watch all of Everything Tangle’s YouTube videos here.
Integrating physical devices with IOTA ($12,000)
Hugo Gregersen (known in IOTA community as huggre) is a hobby developer and IOTA enthusiast. He likes to explore different use cases and to solve everyday problems using IOTA technology. He proved in his previous Coinmonks Medium posts that he is very capable of writing easy-to-use tutorials that can be used by anyone without prior experience in electronics or programming.
The EDF grant will allow Hugo to continue his work on creating awareness and knowledge about IOTA and IOTA development among tinkerers, hobbyists, academia, etc. In addition to writing tutorials, the grant also covers the authoring and publishing of an “IOTA for Dummies” style book that will be available to the community for free.
“I believe that easy-to-use documentation and tutorials are essential for the adoption and success of the IOTA project. If my work can help anyone (especially kids) start playing around with electronics, programming and IOTA, then my main motivation for writing these tutorials has been accomplished.”
“I believe that easy-to-use documentation and tutorials are essential for the adoption and success of the IOTA project. If my work can help anyone (especially kids) start playing around with electronics, programming and IOTA, then my main motivation for writing these tutorials has been accomplished.”
–Hugo Gregersen
Learn more about Integrating physical devices with IOTA here.
With this blog post, we also introduce the newly updated EDF website. The application process was simplified and the design was aligned to fit the IOTA brand guidelines. Additionally, all requests for proposals will be listed on the website from now on.
Feel free to check it out. Hope you like it!
Any grants paid out by the Ecosystem Development Fund are visible on the EDF Transparency Tracker, which stores an immutable record of the agreements on the Tangle.