Nimbus gets follow-up grant from Ethereum Foundation to continue R&D work on Eth2.0

This latest round of grant funding from the Ethereum Foundation (totaling $1.65M) not only proves the importance of Nimbus on the future of Ethereum, but also the successful collaboration between the two teams...

Nimbus gets follow-up grant from Ethereum Foundation to continue R&D work on Eth2.0

Nimbus, an infrastructure project of The Status Network, announced today it has been awarded a follow- up grant of $650k by the Ethereum Foundation, bringing their total commitment to date to $1.65 million.

The grant will enable the team to continue developing a client implementation for Ethereum 2.0 designed to perform well on embedded systems and personal mobile devices, including older smartphones with resource-restricted hardware.

Brief History

Nimbus was introduced in March of 2018 by The Status Network as an effort to push the scalability of Ethereum and build a client designed to work well on mobile and embedded systems. In October of 2018, Nimbus was awarded $500k as part of the 4th wave of the Ethereum Foundation Scalability Research and Development Subsidy Program.

In August, 2019, the Nimbus team was then issued an additional $500k to continue R&D along with $150k by the Ethereum Foundation and Protocol Labs to create an implementation of libp2p focusing on mobile devices as well as future private, secure messaging protocols.

What is Nimbus

Nimbus is a research project and a client implementation for Eth2.0 and light clients addressing the concerns of scalability and wide access to Ethereum. Nimbus is designed to perform well on embedded and personal mobile devices, including older smartphones with resource-restricted hardware. It is also built to be extensible, configurable, and modular. It was first conceived by The Status Network as a means of ensuring the accessibility of the Status Mobile App on a multitude of smartphones.

Nimbus chose to use Nim as the programming language because it is lightweight and therefore well suited to run efficiently on resource-restricted devices. Nimbus has also funded and supported the development of the Nim programming language, creating a strong tie between the implementation and language teams.

Notable Successes

The Nimbus team, comprised of Eugene Kabanov, Andri Lim, Mamy Ratsimbazafy, Yuriy Glukhov, Zahary Karadjov, Dustin Brody, Ștefan Talpalaru, and Kim De Mey, have made great progress since kicking off work in 2018. Emerging as one of the premier Eth2.0 R&D teams in the ecosystem, they have:

Upcoming Roadmap

The Nimbus team will use these funds to continue development on their client focusing on 3 primary areas, all leading up to and supporting an eventual release of Ethereum 2:

Potential Expansions

Follow-up funding will also allow the Nimbus team to bring on additional engineers who can help broaden the scope of work to key new areas. New hires can expand work to:

“We have been making good progress on Nimbus and this grant enables us to not only continue our R&D of the Eth2.0 client, but also explore additional areas of focus which can make Nimbus an even more versatile and important piece of infrastructure and accelerate the upcoming development phases.”
– Jacek Sieka, Head of Research at Nimbus

Get Involved

The Nimbus client is entirely open-source and open to contribution and testing from those who want to get involved. Learn more about Nimbus, the team and ways to get involved at nimbus.team, check out the documentation and repos on Github.

About The Status Network

Nimbus is part of The Status Network – a globally distributed collective working to build products, tools, and infrastructure for resilient, sustainable and inclusive communities:

The Status Network team is working in regions to research how to combat financial and political oppression using blockchain and other emerging technologies.

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