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The Ethereum Foundation has announced a grant of $5 million to Parity Technologies, a blockchain startup founded by Gavin Wood and Jutta Steiner.
Founded in 2015, Parity Technologies is an infrastructure and innovation focused company that aims to enable businesses and organisations to capitalise on blockchain technology. One of the notable projects includes the development of blockchain technology for the UN World Food Programme, allowing transfer of cash assistance in a faster, cheaper, and more secure manner.
The company is also known for its Ethereum client ‘Parity Ethereum,’ which, it said, is used by exchanges, miners, Dapp developers and service providers “as an essential part of Ethereum’s core infrastructure.”
“Parity Technologies has been actively contributing to Ethereum 2.0, launching a Casper testnet last summer and implementing an Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain with Substrate in September 2018,” the company said in an online post.
The Ethereum Foundation acknowledged the contribution of Parity Technologies to the Ethereum ecosystem and said:
“The Ethereum Foundation is committed to funding teams and individuals building the common infrastructure around scalability, usability and security. To that end, we couldn’t think of a more applicable fit for a grant given Parity’s constant push to raise the technical bar and their pinpointed focus on next generation advancements like proof-of-stake, sharding and WebAssembly.”
According to the announcement, the “scalability, usability and security” grant will fund Parity’s work on Casper, sharding, light clients, developer tools, QA, audits and infrastructure improvements.
“Funding will be delivered in several tranches, the first of which supports development that Parity has already completed,” it said, adding that “others are contingent upon reaching explicit milestones” including the completion of eWasm compatibility work, shipping a light wallet for mainnet, and the completion of sharding’s first two phases.
