Parity progresses with $5 million grant from Ethereum Foundation
Parity Technologies has received a $5 million grant from The Ethereum Foundation - its largest award to date. The first portion of the grant has already been awarded, while the second tranche will be dependent on reaching a series of technical milestones.
Peter Mauric, Parity's Head of Public Affairs, told The Block that the size of the grant demonstrated the Foundation's "utmost trust" in Parity's commitment to building the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain called Serenity (a more scalable, secure version of the original). He said the firm was confident the new funds would "go a fairly long way" given the learning that occurred while building its Substrate framework, which will allow developers to “focus on the Ethereum 2.0 specification rather than building the client from scratch”.
Parity made headlines in 2017 after an exploited vulnerability in its Ethereum client resulted in 513k ether being frozen across nearly 600 wallets that had been deployed using Parity's popular multi-sig library. However, Parity clarified that while it would continue to work towards recovering its users' stuck funds, it would only use its own capital to do so.
"Parity does not have stuck funds resulting from the Devops199 hack, but we’re committed to working with the community to finding a solution that will allow these 600 Ethereum users and development teams to regain access to their property," said Mauric.
Parity will now focus its resources about equally between its Ethereum work and building the Polkadot protocol, which it has been commissioned to do by the Web3 Foundation.
Update: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Parity used to host crypto wallets