Walletbeat 2026 EF ESP grant application

Walletbeat’s application to the Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program direct grant form.

Each section below corresponds to one field of that form, in the order the form presents them. The italicized text under each heading is the form’s own prompt for that field.

Contact information

Applicant profile

Briefly provide a biography of yourself and your team including relevant experience and expertise.

Walletbeat is a collective of contributors building the L2BEAT of wallets. As a fully open source project we have had various contributors who have helped to improve Walletbeat over time.

Core contributors:

  • polymutex — core developer
  • darrylyeo — frontend architecture, UI/UX
  • 0xMattmatt — core developer
  • ren2140 — wallet research, data collection, and outreach
  • lucilajuliana — communications, conferences, community
  • Teresa — branding and visual identity
  • thegeekygrower — developer

Other community contributors from the Ethereum ecosystem work alongside them.

Budget request

  • Amount: 90,000
  • Currency: USD

Project summary

Describe your project in a few sentences, including what is being built and why it matters. Provide links to any existing public or published work.

Walletbeat is an open source public good dedicated to bringing transparency to the Ethereum wallet ecosystem. As L2BEAT has done for Layer 2 networks, Walletbeat does for wallets: providing objective, verifiable evaluations that help users make informed decisions. Walletbeat exports Ethereum’s CROPS values to the wallet layer.

Project overview fields

Project structure

Provide a detailed breakdown of the project scope of work and timeline including milestones, deliverables, and expected outcomes.

Walletbeat’s current development pace is $10k per month, and conference travel adds an additional $5k per attendee. We expect our current treasury to carry us to September, so the $90k budget request will afford us nine more months of runway from Oct 2026 - Jun 2027 and allow us to attend Devcon and EthCC.

Completed prior to October

  • Finishing up the top-5 software wallet ratings
  • All pre-launch issues are closed
  • Existing hardware wallet attributes are all refactored or deleted
  • The clear signing relaunch happens
  • UI improvements: legibility (especially on smaller screens), responsiveness, and polish
  • Grow ecosystem presence and tangible impact (ongoing)

October 2026

  • A Walletbeat donation page exists and has badge NFTs
  • The Kohaku partnership is active, and Kohaku is tested for privacy leaks
  • At least one grant matching round is ongoing

November 2026

  • Devcon Mumbai talks, workshops, and booth programming have happened
  • OpenGraph preview images exist for wallet pages
  • Coinspect data is ingested
  • EIP tracker pages exist
  • The formal launch on walletbeat.eth happens

December 2026

  • SheFi and Cyfrin Updraft curriculum materials are created
  • We reach at least 2,000 followers on the X platform
  • A progress slider on wallet pages shows each wallet’s position along the stage ladder

January 2027

  • Walletbeat has a track record of pushing wallets to become more CROPS aligned; the impact log has several net new additions
  • Work begins on the hardware and embedded wallet methodology and ratings

February - May 2027

  • Work continues on the hardware and embedded wallet methodology and ratings
  • Talks, workshops, and booth programming at EthCC in April

June 2027

  • Long term stable funding is established
  • The hardware wallet methodology and ratings are finished
  • We reach at least 5,000 followers on the X platform

Sustainability plan

Share plans towards achieving sustainability (both financial and non-financial) for this project in future.

  • We aim to diversify funding sources across the Ethereum ecosystem, for example Giveth, Octant, and The DAO Fund. We plan to capture funding sources that are not grant based, for example by accepting crypto donations.
  • We plan to reduce our monthly expenses by automating more aspects of our workflow.
  • Walletbeat is already being built with sustainability in mind. Every part of Walletbeat was built to be future-proof, in the spirit of the walkaway test. The rating pipeline is highly modular and can be adapted for rating projects that are not about wallets. The site is hosted on IPFS with hosting costs paid upfront, so the site will not disappear. The domain is on ENS and prepaid for decades as well. The wallet test tooling is future-proof, and some of it, such as the network traffic analysis, can be repurposed for uses that have nothing to do with wallets.

Funding

Have you received or discussed funding for this project from other parties?

  • We have received funding from other parties, most recently from Giveth’s The DAO Fund security round. We plan to continue to apply to funding sources outside the Ethereum Foundation, such as Giveth, The DAO Fund, and Octant rounds.
  • Walletbeat funding history

Problem being solved

Within this domain, what is the problem identified, who is affected by it, and how does this project provide a solution? Provide concrete examples.

Ethereum is built around a clear set of CROPS values. Users experience Ethereum through wallets, yet most wallets today do not live up to these very values. No CROPS in wallets results in no CROPS for users.

Walletbeat is a public good that aims to shine a light on this CROPS last mile problem. By providing a dashboard and a rating system for how CROPS aligned wallets are, we help to increase the adoption of CROPS values at this critical ecosystem access layer. Concretely, Walletbeat pushes wallet teams to adopt ecosystem initiatives like clear signing, EIP-7702, and many others.

See the impact log.

Measured impact

Depending on the stage of this project, provide metrics for the project’s current impact on the ecosystem, e.g. users, page visits, code contributors.

Effects on wallets

  • 2025-12: We publish the L1 Provider Independence Test; two major wallets shipped fixes in response. Ambire made its L1 RPC option available at wallet setup (2026-01), and MetaMask quietly removed its hard reliance on a Consensys token metadata service when sending tokens (2026-07).
  • 2026-07: We show how wallets handle a malicious Ethereum transaction that cost a user ~$300k; Ambire and WalletChan both shipped fixes within days, and Ambire thanked Walletbeat for bringing the issue to their attention.
  • 2026-08: We point out that flagging IPFS gateways such as .eth.limo discourages apps from moving to IPFS, which would make them more secure and censorship-resistant. Ambire unflagged them: https://x.com/borislavItskovv/status/2090563980549042476 and https://x.com/ambire/status/2090483593407529375
  • 2026-08: We show how wallets handle unlimited token approvals that cost a user ~$500k: https://x.com/0xMattmatt/status/2089770628828237918. Ambire pushed an update flagging unlimited approvals to untrusted contracts and credited Walletbeat’s research: https://x.com/borislavItskovv/status/2090566092808982840

Ecosystem adoption and presence

Success metrics

What quantifiable measurements will be used to gauge the success of this project after completion?

  • A growing number of wallets adopting CROPS centric features and values.
  • A reduction in exploits at the wallet level, such as address poisoning, malicious transaction signing, and unlimited approval exploits.

Ecosystem fit

Compare your project to 2–3 similar projects in the ecosystem. How is your work unique or novel?

Comparable projects: L2BEAT and DeFiScan.

Where L2BEAT assesses Layer 2 networks, Walletbeat assesses wallets. Much like L2BEAT has played a major role in pushing the Layer 2 ecosystem towards better security and decentralization over time, Walletbeat aims to push the Ethereum wallet ecosystem towards similar Ethereum aligned values.

Community feedback

What domain expert or community feedback have you received for this project?

Open source license

Select the open source license for this project.

MIT

Internal EF contact

Provide the name of the Ethereum Foundation team member or team who directed you to complete this application.

Hester Bruikman, Nico