Ethereum Foundation

From the Internet to the iPhone, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990—well before the Internet was on most people's radar—and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights. Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 140,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight—and win—more cases.

Gitcoin is a platform to enable open source developers to monetize their work when it is used. Gitcoin was borne of the community in Boulder, Colorado's thriving tech scene. One of the most amazing things about the Boulder community is the #givefirst mantra. The founding team has built their careers off of advice, mentorship, and relationships in the local tech community. Gitcoin is built upon the Ethereum network, and the solidity smart contract programming language. Ethereum provides opportunities to align incentives across actors in the ecosystem. By programming rights of stakeholders directly into smart contracts, actors are incentivized to provide value, and edge cases are handled _without_ having to involve legacy legal enforcement mechanisms. The founder of Gitcoin, Kevin Owocki, has experience as an organizer of Boulder Startup Week, Ignite Boulder, StartupCTO.io, Boulder Blockchain Meetup, and the open-source projects by trader, adblock-to-bitcoin, YouveGotETH, and ColoradoCoin. The stronger the community is, the more successful open source projects are. The stronger open source projects are, the stronger the community is. Gitcoin is a project that combines the #givefirst mantra of the Boulder community with capitalistic incentives to write great software. By enabling Repo Maintainers, developers, and financiers to find one another, Gitcoin pushes open-source software forward.

Fight for the Future is a non-profit advocacy group that is dedicated to protecting and expanding the Internet's transformative power in the lives of people by creating civic campaigns that are engaging for millions of people. Its staff consists of technologists, educators, organizers, advocates, and artists. Fight for the Future believes that outdated and overzealous copyright and patent laws, slow speed and limited access, and tracking and spying as the major threats to freedom of expression online. Its objective is to build a public movement to ensure that everyone can access the Internet’s many resources affordably, free of interference or censorship, and with full privacy. Fight for the Future also provides its users with online tools that make it easy and compelling to take action and share with friends. In 2012, hundreds of thousands of websites, including sites like [Google](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/google), [Craigslist](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist), and [Wikipedia](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wikipedia), joined the protest which was organized by Fight for the Future to stop SOPA and PIPA. Fight for the Future was formed in 2011 and is headquartered in Boston, M.A.

Court Innovations develops and implements online negotiation systems for courts and constituents. The company’s online solutions enable its customers to extend their courts to provide online resolution options for litigants charged with relatively-minor offenses; help litigants with outstanding issues to understand their options and navigate the court online without needing to hire an attorney; and more. Court Innovations is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Nimbus is a research project and 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.

Parity is an infrastructure and innovation focused company building platforms and applications. Parity's work combines cutting-edge cryptography, cellular system, peer-to-peer technology and decentralised consensus architectures.

Connext is an interoperability protocol that enables fast, fully-trustless communication between blockchains. It leverages groundbreaking distributed systems technology to to power the creation of an internet of blockchains. The company was founded in 2017 by Arjun Bhuptani, Layne Haber, and Rahul Sethuram.

Trueblocks is a strong proponent of blockchain technology and strives for increased adoption of cryptocurrencies and services on the blockchain. They provide support for worthwhile projects by making the right connections with potential commercial partners in South Korea. In addition, Trueblocks facilitates community expansion, helps develop exchange relationships, assists in finding the right meetups & events and provides advice on marketing strategies.

StarkWare Industries Ltd, founded in 2017 and based in Netanya, Israel, specializes in developing software and hardware for generating and verifying computational integrity proofs. The company has created STARK, a zero-knowledge proof protocol that enhances scalability and privacy in blockchain applications. This technology allows for increased transaction throughput and enables off-chain computation while ensuring that sensitive underlying data remains confidential. StarkWare's solutions are designed to improve the efficiency, security, and overall user experience of blockchain systems, making them a key player in the field of cryptographic proof platforms.