Three New Ecosystem Grants Awarded

Grant submissions have been fast and furious since the program launched in January. This month we are thrilled to welcome three new projects to our ecosystem: SECBIT Labs, Synapse, and Obsidian Systems.

SECBIT Labs

Goal: Zero knowledge proof toolkit for CKB

SECBIT Labs hopes to bridge the existing gap between cryptographic academic research and dApp development with the zkp-toolkit-ckb. Cryptographers have been working with zero-knowledge proofs for years and they have become increasingly relevant in the blockchain space due to their potential to validate data on the blockchain, while preserving privacy and anonymity.

The SECBIT team believes more exploration and implementation in this area is needed — a point of view shared by Nervos — ZK proofs have been a strong focus of interest and area of research for the Nervos team. Through this grant award, we hope to foster the use of cutting edge cryptographic research; zkp-toolkit-ckb will help generalize the programming interface to provide a more developer-friendly experience.

The completion of this effort will ensure CKB is equipped with the most advanced zero knowledge primitives, and at the frontier for zero knowledge based research and engineering.

Learn more about the team at SECBIT Labs and the project’s scope through their grant RFC on Nervos Talk.

Synapse

Goal: Browser extension that is both crypto wallet and Keyper agency

To enable users to manage their assets and interact with dApps in a more convenient way, the Synapse team intends to add wallet functionality plus Keyper agency support; wallet functionality will include receiving and transferring CKB, creating and importing/exporting a passphrase, importing/exporting private keys, UDT management and more, as well as full support in both English and Chinese. The Keyper agency is an ownership layer unique to CKB— it is a JavaScript library that includes different lock plugins and allows users to conveniently manage cells secured by different lock scripts. In order to interact with dApps, Synapse will enable different lock scripts to be input into one transaction and establish a standard for how to communicate between Keyper and a Keyper agent (Synapse and others), as well as between a Keyper agent and a dApp.

The Synapse team — Harry Liu, Orange Ma, Shooter Lui and River Zhou — all have rock star names and deep roots in the blockchain space, including experience with Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Learn more about Synapse, including the project’s architecture, timeline and roadmap outlined in their grant RFC on Nervos Talk

Obsidian Systems

Goal: CKB integration with Ledger Wallets

Obsidian Systems will build an application to make it possible to hold CKB in Ledger hardware wallets. This application will support sending, receiving, importing keys, and DAO deposits and withdrawals on the Ledger Nano S and X. Both devices will support communication through web browsers, and the Nano X application will be usable over bluetooth. With Ledger wallets widely acknowledged as some of the most secure consumer hardware wallets available, this functionality is a tremendous step forward for the Nervos Ecosystem, adding new much needed functionality for managing CKB.

Obsidian Systems was founded in 2014 by Ali Abrar and Ryan Trinkle, who continue to serve as its managing partners. Their team has grown to more than 35 software developers, quality assurance engineers and others, and their existing solutions secure millions of dollars in cryptographic assets (Tezos Baking/Wallet Ledger applications 1), lower the technical barrier to participation in consensus (Kiln), and facilitate the development of smart contracts (Pact and Chainweaver).

Learn more about Obsidian Systems and the scope of their project outlined in their grant RFC on Nervos Talk.

The first two Nervos Foundation grants were awarded in February, to Summa, working on Bitcoin<>CKB interoperability, and Obsidian Labs, building CKB Studio, a developer IDE.

Our goal is to understand the needs of blockchain developers entering the Nervos ecosystem and look for great projects who will help facilitate developer on-boarding.

Have a great project or idea? We invite you to read more about our Grants Program process and apply.

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