Completed Grants
Recently completed grant projects include Urbit micro-blogging, Hoon-native Discord bridging, Urbit’s first arcade-style game, Port application improvements, Ethereum bookkeeping and eth-provider infrastructure.
- Trill↗ and sister application Urbit Feed Aggregator↗ give you a way to escape from Twitter’s algorithms while still being able to share your shower thoughts with your followers.
- Faux↗ is a transformation of the python-based Urbit to Discord bridge, turning it into a Hoon native app and offering a front-end that takes you through the setup experience, letting you to bring your Discord friends a little taste of Urbit.
- Slam↗, everyone’s favorite new arcade game, integrates with Gora↗ and pals↗, utilizing a mechanism whereby the number of gorae held by your pals will influence the way your game is played.
- The Ethereum Provider↗ grant gets the network a step closer to decentralized Ethereum access, particularly for those who don’t wish to rely on an infura node.
- A bounty for Port Maintenance↗ delivered iterative improvements to the Port application for those who run their ships on a local machine.
- And Quartus delivered Books↗, an Ethereum address and transaction manager for you to easily append notes and memos to your on chain transactions without having to rely on a third party (as a friendly reminder, Urbit is not yet a secure environment so please be careful↗ what information you store on your ship).
Proposals
As the above grants wrap up, more grants are coming to life. Proposals are community generated and selected projects which offer contributors the space to build whatever tooling or applications they believe Urbit needs. Each of the following projects was funded in August:
- Herd↗ - Dependency management for Citadel
- Full Stop↗ - A menstruation tracker for Urbit
- Peat↗ - Urbit’s first backup utility
- Quorum↗ - A clone of stack exchange on Urbit
- Gather↗ - an Urbit native meetup tool
- Olif↗ - Olfactive rendering of Urbit address space
- Urbit Interface Framework↗ - Framework for alternative web browser interface
- Whom↗ - A profile and contacts manager
Apprenticeships
Apprenticeships are also bringing opportunities for hands-on developer education and enabling seasoned contributors to share knowledge through real world projects. And contributors get to earn address space as they learn the stack and grow their network.
Three new apprenticeships began in August:
- Loom Pointer Compression↗ - Work to double the size of the loom
- Build a UI for Volt↗ - An interface for %volt, Urbit’s lightning wallet agent
- Vere Profiling↗ - Uncovering and visualized performance bottlenecks in the runtime
Bounties
August also brings with it the assignment of previously open bounties to developers looking to grow their portfolio of Urbit projects. Many of bounties that found contributors are a part of Holium’s App Dev Summer↗, and are slated to be completed by Assembly in Miami:
- Minesweeper↗ - A classic desktop game, now natively in hoon
- Abacus↗ - A basic calculator app with the ability to convert units
- Chronicle↗ - A news app that links articles from group channels
- Lexicon↗ - A simple dictionary app with custom definitions for a group
- Chess Improvements↗ - An enhanced chess experience with timing and ELO servers
Even with all the claimed bounties, there remain a variety of projects which currently seek developers. Check out the following grants and apply to those that fit your skills and interests:
- Trove↗ - A group file sharing tool
- Urbit Native Ethereum wallet↗ - An ETH wallet for Urbit maxis
- UrbitSwap↗ - An Urbit-hosted Uniswap instance
- Tune slaw/scot jets↗ - Tuning jets for better performance
- New Mars Persistent Memory↗ - Development of a persistent memory arena
Have a project that you want to help fund and think would make a good bounty? Want to propose a project about which you are passionate? Looking for a mentor to better learn a part of the Urbit ecosystem? For more information on current projects and opportunities from the Urbit Foundation’s grant program, visit urbit.org/grants or reach out to ~sarlev-sarsen to get involved.
