Naming it “a major technical contributor to the Ethereum project,” the foundation praised the firm for its “pinpointed focus on next generation advancements like proof-of-stake, sharding and WebAssembly.”
In fact, although Parity received some $5 million right away, the rest depends on its abiliy to continue promoting projects through the completion of eWASM, releasing a light wallet for use on the Ethereum mainnet, and completing sharding phases 0 and 1.
Some of these have already been progressed by Parity. The alpha of a light wallet, the Parity Fether, was released in November which enables users interacting with the Ethereum network without using a full node or using Infura.
As for eWASM, designed to accelerate and otherwise improve network performance (Ethereum flavored Web Assembly), Parity has incorporated it with its Parity Ethereum v2.0 customer, released in July.
Meanwhile, sharding was an ecosystem-wide issue of interest.
In short, this is a way to scale the Ethereum blockchain, which means the network is broken up into smaller parts so that not every node needs to process every transaction. Phase 0 consists of the development of a beacon proof of stakes. Phase 1, which uses sharding to collect blobs without transactions and without Ethereum Virtual Machine, is something of a proof-of-concept.
The company is self-funded, according to the announcement and the blog of Parity Technologies. Over the past year, the foundation has given substantial sums to categories of client diversity (1.15 million dollars), hackternships (75k dollars), BUIDL (50k dollars) and training (35k dollars), as well as to key areas of scalability, usability and security.