Producing educational videos with thought leaders in the account abstraction ecosystem, with Season 2 focusing on the application layer and how dapps are using account abstraction.
Event in Boulder, USA that explored Ethereum's real-world use cases in the realm of social impact and public goods through talks, unconference sessions, and a quadratic funding allocation to local community groups.
Arabic-language, online bootcamp equipping computer science students and web2 developers in the MENA region with the technical skills needed to become proficient blockchain developers.
Running an Ethereum node and holding regular beginner-friendly events aiming to expand the reach of decentralized technology (e.g. node construction workshops, dapp development introductions, study sessions).
Residency in Taipei, Taiwan focused on researching, co-designing, and building open-source applications for community privacy, with emphasis on applications for vulnerable communities, community co-design, and privacy infrastructure.
Summer school hosted at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, featuring courses presented by professors from across the globe with some topics closely related to Ethereum.
Supporting the ETHBratislava community to host the ETHBratislava hackathon and conference, meetups, and community calls to grow the Central and Eastern Europe Ethereum ecosystem.
Supporting ETHCluj for a series of community-building activities in Cluj-Napoca, Romania including Ethereum think tank sessions, workshops for university students, and technical presentations.
Conference hosted in Zurich, Switzerland that aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry, focusing on topics such as consensus mechanisms, dapps, and security.
Conference hosted in Prague, Czech Republic focusing on topics such Ethereum core and EVM, developer ecosystem and tooling, sustainable futures, and societal challenges and opportunities.
Community providing guidance, education, support, and resources for existing and potential stakers, with the principle goal of maximizing the Ethereum network's decentralization.
Workshop hosted in Sofia, Bulgaria bringing cryptographic developers together with experts in formal verification and high assurance methodologies, fostering collaboration towards making cryptographic software flawless.
Running a dedicated Ethereum course as part of IIIT Hyderabad‘s main curriculum, and guiding 2 PhD students and a research associate on Ethereum-related research.
Event that explored theoretical knowledge of evolving cyber threats and blockchain security along with Ethereum-focused, hands-on practical sessions and interactive bootcamp exercises, organized by IIIT, Hyderabad in India.
Series of meetups organized in Prague and Brno, Czech Republic to onboard more locals to the Ethereum ecosystem in the lead-up to ETHPrague, focused on topics such as security, AI agents, and UX/UI.
Ethereum-focused hackathon that aimed to foster a culture of web3 development and promote decentralized innovation at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in India.
Ethereum community education initiative aimed at engaging university students, researchers, and academics, as well as the general public in northeastern Greece.
Designing and developing an “end-to-end money flow” on Ethereum rails for local community funding allocation, including improvements towards more intuitive and user-friendly UI/UX for quadratic voting.
Internship program focused on Ethereum ecosystem development in Ukraine, bridging the gap between technical education and industry needs by connecting students with practical development opportunities.
Residency in Kerala, India dedicated to exploring advancements and conducting experiments in thematic tracks such as impact and public goods, cryptography, and longevity.
Community-driven initiative focused on standardizing based rollup infrastructure by defining common components, improving proposer commitments, and creating shared specifications for rollup teams to adopt.
Continued development of the open-source Ethereum data indexing client, expanding existing features by filling in missing onchain data, improving slashing event tracking, indexing Ethereum deposits, and optimizing validator rewards data storage, followed by ensuring full compatibility with the upcoming Pectra upgrade to enhance its long-term reliability and impact.
Adding support for the QUIC transport protocol to the jvm-libp2p library, as QUIC has inherently faster handshake latency and generally better performance characteristics than TCP transport.
Support for the Lighthouse consensus client to continue protocol R&D towards upcoming network upgrades, work on PeerDAS, and networking engineering on mainnet.
Developing a proof-of-concept approach that delineates the settings in which some form of liveness accountability is possible, aiming to establish both possibility and impossibility results where possible.
Continued development and maintenance of the Lodestar TypeScript implementation of the Ethereum beacon chain, development of the Ethereum protocol, and TypeScript/JavaScript ecosystem tooling.
Exploration of isogenies and other cryptographic areas essential to Ethereum's roadmap, working closely with Ethereum Foundation researchers to accelerate learning and align efforts with Ethereum's goals.
Developing a Lean blueprint for FRI, along with the mathematical pre-requisites that are needed for it and currently missing from Lean's mathlib (primarily coding theory).
Developing a Lean blueprint for STIR and WHIR by laying out all the definitions, lemmas, and theorems required to prove the properties of completeness and soundness for STIR and WHIR, and producing a dependency graph relating them all.
Supporting the team in implementing new theoretical ideas and resolving bottlenecks in both theory and implementation of iO that improve either its security or efficiency.
Advancing practical iO by strengthening the local mixing approach, developing an obfuscated AES program for white-box hacking contests, creating an encrypted RISC-V virtual machine using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and exploring improvements to functional encryption schemes based on evasive LWE for publicly verifiable FHE.
Algebraic cryptanalysis of Poseidon specifically focusing on the Groebner basis cryptanalysis of the Poseidon instances suggested in the bounty program, as part of the Poseidon Grants Round.
Implementing Semaphore in Noir, which requires a Noir circuit, additional software development kit (SDK) functionality that does proof generation and proof verification for the Noir circuit, and additional versions of the Semaphore Solidity contracts where the verifier for UltraHonk is included.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Understanding the Algebraic Security of Multi-Output CICO-Problems from Poseidon
Determining the security of Poseidon in the multi-output CICO context by deriving concrete estimates of algebraic attacks in this setting, as part of the Poseidon Grants Round.
Enabling on-chain verification of VOLE-itH ZKP, specifically encapsulating VOLE-itH ZKP within SNARK to achieve succinctness and enable verification with smart contracts. The cost of verification on Ethereum is measured and analyzed, with benchmarks covering circuits such as hash functions and including execution on mobile clients. These will be used to identify bottlenecks and explore further improvements.
Supporting ZKNOX to implement post-quantum signatures and ZK-friendly cryptography, improve hardware wallets, and implement and optimize EIP-616 for cryptographic and ZK verification efficiency.
Developing a decentralized mobile SDK for Android that operates without a JSON-RPC provider or any other centralized backend. By integrating a Portal Network client and a Trueblocks client, the SDK will enable users to access Ethereum data in a trustless and verifiable manner.
Open-source platform enabling Ethereum validators to securely execute MEV-Boost and other community-built commitment protocols, actively working to increase adoption by providing validators with a proposer commitment sidecar that enables preconfirmations and out-of-protocol inclusion lists.
Open-source project aiming to produce EIP content that is more accessible and usable by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to process AllCoreDev meeting summaries, EIP metadata, and additional documentation.
Building an automated classification system for open-source GitHub repositories in the Ethereum ecosystem to enable easier discovery, more informed decision-making, and better resource allocation across Ethereum development efforts.
Enhancing the open-source analytics tooling and dashboard by introducing key Ethereum developer metrics, namely library usage analytics and languages by TVL and fees.
Web3.js was sunset with a structured support plan to ensure security, successful migration, and continuity for users as they transitioned to new tooling.
Adding support for Kurtosis to export logs to an external log aggregation platform, allowing for seamless integration into existing systems as well as using external compute resources for more complicated analytics.
Developing tactics that will simplify the verification of zkVM circuits, with a focus on modular arithmetic and cases where multiple numbers are packed into one field element.
Ongoing maintenance and support for Solhint, the Solidity linter, including actively managing community contributions, addressing questions, and resolving bug reports to ensure the tool remains robust, up-to-date, and valuable for the Ethereum developer ecosystem.
Researching and developing open-source smart contracts (building on existing AA-437 implementations), middleware, and backend to allow authenticating and sending of 4337 UserOps over GSM USSD (using STK interface) without using the internet.
Funding for Erigon's continued work on the Ethereum mainnet, specifically their execution client development and applied R&D on Ethereum's execution layer.
Benchmarking BLS12-381 precompiles, exploring the impact of different repricing approaches on mainnet transaction throughput, and drafting an EIP to adjust the pricing of one or more operations based on the benchmark results.
Six-month research fellowship positions investigating a research proposal focused on one or two nascent Ethereum use cases which materially and uniquely benefit from the affordances of Ethereum, exploring the key blockers and enablers to making these use cases a reality.
The EF's first formal summer internship program aimed at nurturing the next generation of Ethereum developers and researchers, with interns working in the following teams and domains: Applied Research Group (ARG), Ethereum Execution Layer Specifications (EELS), Ethereum Execution Specification Tests (EEST), Geth, Portal, and Protocol Security.
General growth & support
EU Grants Research
Conducting a comprehensive analysis of the available EU programs and initiatives that can support blockchain non-profits.
European decentralization think tank that produces tangible outputs (policy briefs/events) to strengthen corporate engagement and policy influence in Europe.
Bounty prize contribution to support a hackathon organized via Privote—a universal no-code platform built on MACI. MACI is a private, on-chain, voting system leveraging ZKPs.
Non-profit that advocates for decentralization as a fundamental characteristic of emerging technologies. This includes the development of blockchain protocols and applications that are immutable, censorship resistant, transparent, secure, and enable data self-sovereignty.
Institutional business development and marketing for Ethereum to educate and onboard institutions into the Ethereum ecosystem.
Other
Ethereum Monetary Forum
Global, credibly neutral organization dedicated to integrating the traditional financial system with Ethereum, fostering collaboration and strategic alignment.
Steps towards local-first dapps within rotki and other containers, including developing a secure proxy architecture that bridges the local application with wallet extensions or other signers, and general research into local-first applications as a vision.
Establishing a formal specification for a subset of the Vyper programming language, which involves defining a definitional interpreter in logic that excludes EVM state operations.
