Lean, Mean Ethereum 2.0 Machine: Nimbus Team Gets Big Grant for Key Client Work
The early and continued health of Ethereum 2.0 will depend on having at least a few robust client implementations the community can choose from. Nimbus is well poised to be one of these implementations.
Why? Nimbus, an infrastructure effort of The Status Network project, has already progressed considerably in much of its client and infrastructure work and has received key early grants from the Ethereum Foundation to keep the pace up.
Keeping that high motor fine-tuned will be even easier now, too, as the EF has doubled down with another $650,000 USD grant to Nimbus’s builders.
Money Where It Counts
Announced on January 28th, the new EF grant will help its recipients continue to follow through on their mission to build out an Ethereum 2.0 client that will lend itself well to decentralization in being usable on a variety of mobile devices, even weaker ones.
The Nimbus team has been awarded a follow up grant from the Ethereum Foundation to continue work on the public multi-client ready testnest, prep for production use, and more engineers who can broaden the scope of work to key new areas.
Learn more https://t.co/54UB8meave
— Nimbus (@ethnimbus) January 28, 2020
“The grant will enable the team to continue development of 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,” the Nimbus team said.
It’s precisely because Nimbus is mobile-centric and made with the Status Mobile App in mind that it’s an attractive and productive effort for the EF to send funding to. But Nimbus is about more than just accessibility. The client is being “built to be extensible, configurable, and modular,” so it can also offer its users superior flexibility and thus that much more utility.
All that said, the grant is toward a win-win-win situation for the Nimbus, Status, and Ethereum projects. In the short-term, the Nimbus team plans to put the new funds to use in finishing its public multi-client Ethereum 2.0 testnet, running audits, and backing other related in-house efforts, e.g. hiring further engineers.
Accordingly, Nimbus will now have a much better war footing going forward, the project’s research lead Jacek Sieka said:
“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.”
The More the Merrier
Nimbus is written in the Nim programming language and emphasizes accessibility and flexibility. Other Ethereum 2.0 client projects have their own unique focuses and rely on other languages.
For example, Prysmatic Labs’s Prysm client is written in Go, Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse in Rust, and Chain Safe Systems’s Lodestar in TypeScript. These are but a few of the Ethereum 2.0 clients currently in the works, but their variety is a testament to the breadth of talented teams in the trenches building out the future of Ethereum in the here and now.
The continued progress of these clients will make the upgraded Ethereum more resilient in general. The cryptoeconomy has seen the value of multipolar client ecosystems in the past when bugs affecting one client didn’t affect others, which allows for blockchains to continue on in spite of such localized problems.
Eyes on the Prize
With the beginning of the transition to Ethereum 2.0 slated to occur this year, perhaps even by the end of Q1 2020, many key stakeholders around the smart contract platform’s ecosystem are making finishing touches and watching their anticipation grow.
“Ethereum developers have already proven their ability to work wonders, and that this decentralized team is now in the stride of hitting ambitious roadmap targets is the best indicator in all of blockchain for future success,” ConsenSys co-founder Andrew Keys said in his recently published 2020 predictions post.
Now, it’s all about executing, and the builders are up for the task.
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