Background
Vyper is a pythonic smart contract programming language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It is currently the second most popular EVM programming language with over 30,000 contracts deployed across a dozen chains.
Lido is using Vyper contracts for different integrations & ops contracts and the Lido Vyper code at one point held more than 600k ETH worth of user funds.
Ensuring the continued development and security of the language is therefore essential to the future of the protocol. Vyper also benefits the larger Ethereum ecosystem by offering developers a readable, simple and highly-optimized language and fostering language diversity.
Grant Details
We are asking the LEGO council for a 100k DAI grant to help support the cost of development and audits for Vyper for 2024-2025 to be paid to the Vyper Multisig (0x70CCBE10F980d80b7eBaab7D2E3A73e87D67B775).
Scope
Vyper’s annual budget covers salaries for the core team, audits with our audit partners as well as costs related to the branding, promotion and documentation of the language as well as support for the growing tooling being built for Vyper. Our roadmap for the upcoming year includes:
- New language features such as traits, generics, abstract functions, built-ins for proxies
- Continued development of the Venom backend with better code analysis and optimizations
- Enhanced security with the implementation of state of the art compiler verification methods and work towards a full formal verification of the compiler
- Development and support of tooling such as Titanoboa, Gaboon or Snekmate
- Outreach events, communications and branding
Previous Grants and Achievements
Vyper previously received a $100k grant from Lido in 2022 to support development, and $100k in 2023 to support a bug bounty and security contest. The team is extremely thankful to Lido for its continuous and generous support.
These grants have allowed Vyper to achieve major milestones, most notably the release of v0.4.0 with its composable module system and a new highly optimized backend (Venom). The 2023 grant kickstarted a sustained, intensive effort to enhance the language’s security which has resulted in 13 audits, 2 security experts on retainer and 2 bug bounty programs.
Vyper at a Glance
- Vyper contracts secure close to $2 billion in TVL across multiple chains for major protocols such as Curve, Lido, Yearn, Frax and Velodrome (https://defillama.com/languages).
- Vyper’s latest version, 0.4.0 introduced modules to allow developers to reuse code without having to rely on inheritance patterns.
- Vyper’s focus on readability and simplicity makes contracts easier and cheaper to audit, roughly 20% cheaper than an equivalent Solidity contract, based on auditors’ feedback.
- Vyper’s compiler offers exceptional performance, producing binaries that are consistently 50% smaller than Solidity and much less gas-intensive (x.com, GitHub - benber86/vyper_bytecode). This lets developers write longer, more complex contracts than they could in other languages such as Solidity.
- Vyper frameworks like Titanoboa and Gaboon use an interpreter to offer considerable speed-ups when testing smart contracts (up to 10 times faster than other frameworks). These tools also include features such as automated fuzzing and integration with other testing tools to make testing much more efficient for developers.
Team
The Vyper team is composed of highly experienced web3 engineers with expertise in compilers and security, with an extensive understanding of the EVM, smart contract development, and the associated security considerations. They have collaborated extensively with auditors and security researchers, contributed to the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem via EIPs, and their expertise is widely recognized within the EVM developers and security communities.