ZK Tech Gitcoin GR13 Recap
The second ZK Tech side round took place in March 2022 during Gitcoin GR13, in collaboration with 0xParc. $275k in matched funding, jointly provided by 12 matching partners, is to be distributed to 26, high quality projects furthering the usability of zero knowledge proofs or implementing such technology in novel applications. The matching partners this time around were 0xParc, ZKValidator, Ethereum Foundation, Gnosis, Anoma, Mina Foundation, Polygon, Penumbra, Geometry, Aleo and Aztec. This post will give some details of the highlights of the round and some information on notable projects that received funding.
TL;DR
- $275k in matched funding was distributed to 26 grants in the ZK Tech side round for GR13.
- A matching fund cap of $27.5k was implemented to prevent an excessive amount of funding going to a single project. Five grants in the side round reached this limit.
- The projects in the side round were diverse and ranged from open source contributors to ZK libraries as well as the libraries themself, ZK applications and initiatives onboarding people into the zero knowledge space.
- Data on the final results from GR13 can be viewed in the spreadsheet here
GR13 saw a decreased public appetite for funding compared to GR12, as mentioned in the GR13 summary blog post, but this was likely attributed to market sentiment and the fall in ETH price compared to the previous round. Grants in GR13 received $1.4M in public donations which is 27% more than the public donations received in GR10, where ETH was trading at a similar price which is encouraging growth considering this was 9 months earlier. Despite the broader context of GR13, the ZK Tech side round had much to celebrate: the matched funding provided by 12 matching partners increased by 175% compared to GR12; that the number of projects receiving grant funding in the ZK Tech side round went from 19 to 26; and that this round through the implementation of a matching cap funding was spread more evenly between grants with five projects reaching the $27.5k capped threshold.
Grants in the GR13 ZK Tech Side Round
The quality of grants in this side round was high and in wrapping up GR13 we wanted to feature some notable grants furthering the zero knowledge space.
ZK Travel Scholarships
View the grant here
Connecting with and meeting peers in your field is an invaluable way for new collaborations to form and ideas to propagate through a community. Within the field of cryptography and zero knowledge research, students engaging with these subject areas frequently face the barrier of high travel costs to attend relevant in person events. This grant alleviates this burden by funding the travel expenses of students with a direct connection to the Stanford Centre for Blockchain Research.
Circom
View the grant here
Creating arithmetic circuits for zero knowledge proofs is a complicated task. Circom is a dedicated programming language with an associated rust compiler designed with this specific use case in mind. The open source and community driven libraries have contributions from developers across the globe and have already been used for many Ethereum projects including Dark Forest, Tornado Cash and Polygon Hermez
Blaine Bublitz
View the grant here
Funding open source and public goods is the core ethos behind the Gitcoin funding platform and the new paradigm of retroactive funding can be seen in action in funding Blaine’s open source contributions to ZK infrastructure. Blaine has worked on numerous projects including the hardhat-circom plugin and snarkjs.
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so that wraps up the GR13 ZK Tech side round. If you want to contribute to future rounds, or just keep up to date with our future plans for funding zero knowledge based technology, you can follow ZKValidator and 0xParc on Twitter or head over to the ZKValidator website or 0xParc website.
