Layla Zulfa
The Ethereum Foundation has announced a significant allocation of grants, reinforcing its commitment to fostering innovation, enhancing security, and expanding global accessibility across the Ethereum ecosystem. These strategic investments span a diverse array of categories, including community and education, core protocol development, advanced cryptography, developer tooling, and critical security initiatives. The funding is poised to accelerate research and development, empower local communities, and onboard a new generation of builders and users, underscoring a holistic approach to the network’s long-term health and decentralization. The grants reflect a proactive stance in addressing both immediate technical challenges and long-term strategic growth vectors for the world’s leading programmable blockchain. This comprehensive funding round is designed to solidify Ethereum’s infrastructure, amplify its privacy features, and cultivate a robust, inclusive global community, ultimately paving the way for a more resilient and widely adopted decentralized future.
Fostering Global Communities and Educational Outreach
A substantial portion of the grants targets community building and education, with a strong emphasis on emerging markets and academic collaboration. These initiatives are crucial for cultivating a diverse talent pool and ensuring equitable access to blockchain knowledge.
Latin America, in particular, stands out as a focal point for several key initiatives. Destino Devconnect is a grants round specifically designed to support community-led events and initiatives aimed at bringing Argentina and the broader Latin American region "onchain." This effort acknowledges the vibrant developer scene in the region and seeks to capitalize on the momentum generated by major events like Devconnect. Complementing this, the ETH Latam Hackathon Brasil 2025, organized by ETHSamba in São Paulo, will prioritize real-world Ethereum applications and the onboarding of new builders. This hackathon is expected to draw hundreds of participants, fostering practical skills and innovative solutions relevant to local economies. Further bolstering the region’s profile, Funding the Commons: Buenos Aires 2025 is a conference set to revolve around RealFi – financial infrastructure designed for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding. This event will bring together thought leaders to explore how blockchain can solve tangible economic and social challenges in Argentina and beyond. The Invisible Garden project, a developer pop-up city in Buenos Aires, focuses on Ethereum, ZKPs, AI, and cybersecurity, providing an immersive environment for collaborative development and knowledge exchange. Additionally, the Local Meetups LATAM Grant Round, in collaboration with the Localism Fund, is designed to sustain post-Devconnect momentum by empowering local Ethereum communities to host consistent, educational, and inclusive monthly meetups for a full year. This distributed approach ensures that the impact of larger events resonates at the grassroots level, fostering enduring local ecosystems. To facilitate participation, Lancerium is providing travel assistance to enable its two founders to attend Devconnect ARG, highlighting the Foundation’s commitment to supporting individual contributors from diverse backgrounds. These regional investments are critical for diversifying the global developer base and ensuring that the benefits of decentralized technologies are widely distributed.
Beyond Latin America, global educational initiatives are also receiving significant backing. Cal Hacks 12.0, a collegiate hackathon organized at the University of California, Berkeley, will cover themes such as AI and web3, serving as a vital pipeline for attracting young talent into the blockchain space. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Center for Blockchain Technology is collaborating on and supporting a range of academic activities, including scholarships for its MSc in Blockchain Technology program, the Asiacrypt 2026 conference, guest lectures, and joint research. This academic partnership underscores the Foundation’s belief in the importance of fundamental research and formal education in advancing the field. The High Assurance Crypto Software (HACS) Workshop 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan, will convene cryptographers, cryptographic software engineers, and formal verification experts to enhance the security and correctness of real-world cryptographic software, addressing a critical need for robust implementations. In Japan, the Stablecoin (JPYC) Innovation Challenge, organized by the Crypto Asset Community, is a cross-industry ideathon designed to accelerate solutions employing stablecoins, specifically JPYC, to solve real business challenges across sectors like e-commerce, logistics, and real estate. This initiative demonstrates an interest in practical, market-driven applications of blockchain technology. Finally, the 2025 ethereum.org Translatathon is a translation contest aimed at incentivizing contributions in less-active languages, increasing the multilingual content on ethereum.org, and onboarding new contributors while rewarding existing ones, thereby making Ethereum resources accessible to a broader global audience. These efforts collectively signify a strategic push to democratize access to blockchain education and foster innovation on a global scale.
Strengthening Core Protocol Layers: Consensus and Execution
The foundational layers of Ethereum – the consensus and execution layers – are receiving targeted investment to ensure their continued robustness, scalability, and decentralization. These technical advancements are paramount for the network’s long-term health and ability to handle increasing transaction volumes and user demand.
In the consensus layer, Ream Labs is receiving support for the continued development of Ream, a modular, contributor-friendly, and fast implementation of the Lean Consensus specification. This project is crucial for advancing the efficiency and maintainability of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, which underpins the security and integrity of the entire network. A more modular and faster consensus client can lead to improved network performance, greater client diversity, and a more resilient overall system. Experts suggest that a diverse array of well-maintained clients is vital for preventing single points of failure and enhancing the network’s censorship resistance.
For the execution layer, Karen Sarkisyan is leading the integration of Helios with the Kohaku browser extension. This integration aims to improve performance and ensure Helios is a portable and easily integrable part of the Kohaku SDK. Helios is a trust-minimized light client for Ethereum, meaning it allows users to interact with the Ethereum blockchain without running a full node, significantly reducing the resource requirements. This advancement is particularly important for enhancing user experience in browser-based applications and mobile environments, making Ethereum more accessible and efficient for a wider user base. The project directly contributes to the goal of "light client ubiquity," which is a key part of Ethereum’s roadmap for scaling and decentralization, allowing more users to verify the chain with minimal trust assumptions.
Pioneering Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs
A significant portion of the grants, reflecting a strategic imperative, is dedicated to advancing cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). ZKPs are a cornerstone of Ethereum’s future, offering solutions for scalability, privacy, and enhanced security. These projects delve into foundational research, formal verification, and practical applications of ZKP technology.
Formal verification, a rigorous method of mathematically proving the correctness of software, is a dominant theme. Albert Rubio is supporting AVAZAR: Automatic Verification Tools for zkVM Arithmetization, focusing on the verification and tooling for circuits in LLZK. Veridise is continuing the Evolution of the LLZK IR, strengthening it as shared, verification-oriented infrastructure for the ZK compiler ecosystem. This aims to enable more robust tooling, interoperability across ZK DSLs, and improved correctness guarantees for ZK circuits, which are complex and prone to subtle errors. Cryspen is developing a Lean Backend for Hax, allowing Rust code, commonly used in ZKP implementations, to be formally verified in Lean. Similarly, Axiom is undertaking OpenVM Formal Verification, establishing the functional correctness of all RV32IM opcode circuits, with the goal of reducing soundness or completeness issues in OpenVM’s circuit design and contributing reusable formal verification infrastructure to the broader zkVM ecosystem. Runtime Verification is investigating Rust Verification Through Lean 4 Tooling, with a focus on establishing a practical Rust to Lean verification pipeline for zkEVM and zkVM stacks. Nethermind is formalizing key theorems for STIR & WHIR in ArkLib in Lean, supplementing them with an executable specification, contributing to the security of proving systems. Finally, powdr labs and Certora are collaborating on Verifying Autoprecompiles for powdr to help improve performance and speed up adoption of ZKP technologies. These efforts collectively aim to ensure the mathematical integrity and security of the complex cryptographic systems underpinning Ethereum’s scaling solutions.
Further research into SNARKs and ZKP primitives is also heavily funded. A project focuses on the Fiat-Shamir Specification, formalizing the Fiat-Shamir transformation in Lean, a critical component for many ZKP systems. Nicholas Spooner is researching The Recursive Extraction Problem, focusing on the security of recursive composition in SNARKs, which is crucial for understanding the limits and guarantees of recursive proof systems. Kasra Abbaszadeh is conducting a Technical Review of Fiat-Shamir from Duplex Sponges, auditing underlying security arguments and clarifying key abstractions. Nethermind is also investigating Tightening the Hash Size in Round-by-Round Sound IOPs, exploring whether multi-round SNARKs can safely use smaller hash digests, which could lead to more efficient proofs. Onur Kılıç is working to accelerate WHIR and upstream it into Plonky3, contributing to the low-level stack for Ethereum post-quantum signatures, a forward-looking security measure. The EPFL Laboratory for Computation Security is supporting PhD students in foundational and applied cryptography research, addressing core limitations in current SNARK designs, including recursion security and proof size/security tradeoffs. This academic research is vital for pushing the boundaries of what ZKPs can achieve.
In terms of applied ZKP technology, Vienhage Cybersecurity UG is creating a prototype of a minimal, open-source app-specific L2 rollup for Private Payments L2, using lightweight ZK circuits and a simplified sequencing model. This project aims to bring practical privacy to stablecoin transfers, addressing a significant user demand. Shashank Trivedi‘s Privote is a private on-chain voting protocol powered by MACI, currently hosting the frontend for the Gitcoin Grants 24: Privacy domain. This demonstrates a commitment to enabling private, verifiable decision-making on-chain. Lastly, the Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program, led by Jintai Ding and Ziyu Zhao, offers bounties to cryptanalysts. This program has the twin goals of ensuring that the interpolation attack is the fastest preimage attack on Poseidon, and verifying that the complexity of the interpolation attack on reduced round versions matches theoretical estimates. This proactive cryptanalysis is essential for continuously validating the security of widely used cryptographic primitives.
Enhancing Developer Experience and Tooling
A thriving developer ecosystem relies on robust tools and insightful data. The Foundation’s grants in this category aim to improve the developer experience, making it easier and more efficient to build on Ethereum.
Open Source Observer is delivering an Ethereum Developer Ecosystem Dataset, providing an improved, reproducible, and publicly auditable view of Ethereum developer ecosystem data, along with a sustainable mechanism to keep it updated. This dataset is invaluable for understanding trends, identifying gaps, and making data-driven decisions about resource allocation and strategic planning within the ecosystem. Informed decision-making based on transparent data is critical for the sustainable growth of open-source projects.
Walnut is undertaking a focused research effort to add an MLIR middle-end to the Solidity compiler (solc-mlir Middle End Optimization Layer for Solidity). The aim is to yield measurable gas savings and enable richer correctness and safety analyses for smart contracts. This advancement could significantly impact the cost and security of deploying and interacting with smart contracts on Ethereum, making the network more efficient and reliable for users and developers alike. Optimizing the compiler stack is a long-term investment in the network’s fundamental efficiency.
Fostering Ecosystem Growth and Broader Support
Beyond direct technical development, the Ethereum Foundation is investing in initiatives that support the broader growth, funding mechanisms, and regulatory engagement of the ecosystem.
Seer‘s Deep Funding Markets introduces a multiscalar prediction market where model builders bet on the value an open-source repository would receive if professionally evaluated. This innovative funding mechanism was notably used in Gitcoin Grants 24, providing a novel approach to valuing and funding public goods. Complementing this, Allan Niemerg is establishing a Juror Voting for Deep Funding process, creating an app for collecting data from jurors and integrating results into the Deep Funding voting app, thereby refining the evaluation process for grants. These initiatives represent an evolution in how decentralized public goods can be identified and funded.
The European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) is receiving support for conducting EU-focused policy advocacy and education campaigns aimed at key regulators and policymakers. This proactive engagement is vital for shaping a favorable regulatory environment for blockchain technology, ensuring that innovation is not stifled by outdated or ill-informed policies.
The Foundation is also co-funding two critical domains within Gitcoin Grants 24: the Privacy Domain and the Public Goods R&D Domain. The Privacy domain specifically supports solutions for a secure onchain Ethereum ecosystem, recognizing the increasing demand for privacy-preserving technologies. The Public Goods R&D Domain supports academic and other forms of research that advance insights and knowledge on Ethereum public goods and their funding, while fostering the development of neutral, open-source solutions rooted in these insights, with a focus on interoperability between tools. These co-funding efforts underscore a commitment to sustainable public goods funding and the development of privacy as a core feature of the Ethereum network.
Ecosystem Security and Novel Applications
Several grants fall under a broader category of "Other," focusing on critical security operations, novel applications, and infrastructure enhancements that protect users and expand the utility of Ethereum.
The Security Alliance (SEAL) is leading Anti-Crypto-Drainer Operations, actively tracking, discovering, and blocking crypto drainers that target EVM-based chains. This vital work directly protects users from malicious actors and enhances the overall security posture of the ecosystem. The rise of sophisticated phishing and draining attacks necessitates such dedicated security efforts.
Developer skill-building and vulnerability hunting are promoted through two Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions: BuidlGuidl’s Builder Bootcamp Capture the Flag, where participants tackle challenging Solidity puzzles to hunt for vulnerabilities and exploit smart contract weaknesses, and Certora’s Capture the Funds, a Solidity-based CTF-style security competition where participants exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols. These CTFs are excellent mechanisms for training security talent and identifying emerging vulnerabilities.
To combat the prevalent issue of "blind signing," WalletConnect is building a Clear Signing Library and a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) wallet. This initiative aims to provide users with clear, human-readable information about the transactions they are signing, significantly improving user security and reducing the risk of being tricked into approving malicious transactions.
OneSavie Lab is hosting a Kaggle Competition for LLM Identification of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities. Built on the Bastet dataset, this competition aims to attract both crypto security talent and non-crypto AI/LLM talent, leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance smart contract auditing and identify vulnerabilities at scale. This innovative approach harnesses the power of AI to bolster smart contract security.
dRPC is developing NodeCore, a high-performance, self-hosted RPC load-balancer that incorporates network-level privacy and distributes requests across multiple blockchain providers or nodes, optimizing for latency, error rate, and cost. This infrastructure project is crucial for improving the reliability, privacy, and efficiency of RPC calls, which are fundamental to how applications interact with the blockchain.
Finally, ChainSafe is developing Open Creator Rails, a minimal, verifiable on-chain runtime for managing time-bound access to digital resources using deterministic entitlements. This project aims to empower creators with transparent and programmable mechanisms for digital rights management and access control, opening new avenues for digital content monetization and interaction within the web3 space.
Strategic Protocol Growth and Support
This category encompasses grants focused on the long-term strategic growth, research, and inclusivity within the Ethereum protocol development sphere.
Chiachih Wu is designing and implementing LLM-Enabled Differential Testing on Ethereum Clients to speed up the ability to find vulnerabilities on the Ethereum protocol. This innovative application of large language models seeks to enhance the robustness and security of client software, which is critical for the network’s stability.
Mike Neuder is undertaking doctoral work for a Protocol Fellowship, focusing on using tools from economics and computation to deepen the understanding of blockchain mechanism design. This will generate high-impact academic research and educational content, including public explainers on protocol changes and teaching a new blockchain course at Princeton University, thereby contributing to both theoretical advancements and practical education.
Truscova is building a Smart Contract Vulnerability Database (SCVD), a system that accepts a wide variety of vulnerability reports from multiple sources, massages them into a schema, and then outputs them into a publicly available dataset. This centralized database will be an invaluable resource for developers, auditors, and security researchers, improving the collective knowledge base on smart contract security.
Timber Stinson-Schroff is managing the Summer of Protocols (SoP) Program Management, overseeing 2025 program logistics, supporting community management, and helping shape SoP’s longer-term roadmap. SoP is a vital initiative for fostering new talent and research in protocol development.
The Tor Project is receiving support to provide technical assistance to the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Cluster. This collaboration aims to overcome technical barriers to integrating Tor at the edge and within the Ethereum ecosystem infrastructure. The work includes improving scalability of bridging to Tor and adapting the Arti Tor client into WebAssembly (Wasm) for integration into wallets and frontends, bringing crucial privacy to RPC calls like transaction broadcasting. This is a significant step towards enhancing user privacy at the network level.
Diversity and inclusion within the protocol space are also a key focus. Mercy Boma Naps-Nkari and Arunima Chaudhuri are facilitating Women in Ethereum Protocol (WiEP) Cohort 4, developing workflows, coordinating mentors, tracking participant contributions, and supporting events like the WiEP Brunch at Devconnect. Concurrently, Meenakshi Singh is serving as the WiEP Cohort 4 Marketing Coordinator, managing communications, social media, and session recordings. These initiatives are crucial for building a more inclusive and representative developer community, ensuring diverse perspectives contribute to Ethereum’s future.
Finally, Divya Ranjan Pattanaik is undertaking an informal two-month internship to work on Ethereum protocol R&D, providing hands-on experience and mentorship to emerging talent in core protocol development.
Broader Impact and Future Outlook
The extensive portfolio of grants announced by the Ethereum Foundation represents a multifaceted investment in the network’s future. By simultaneously bolstering foundational research in cryptography, enhancing core protocol stability, empowering global developer communities, and fortifying security measures, the Foundation is laying robust groundwork for Ethereum’s continued evolution. The strong emphasis on Latin America signals a strategic pivot towards global inclusivity and regional decentralization, while the deep dive into ZKP technology underscores a long-term vision for scalability and privacy.
These investments are expected to yield tangible results, from more secure and efficient smart contracts to a more diverse and globally distributed developer base. The commitment to formal verification in cryptography will raise the bar for security standards across the industry, while initiatives like the Deep Funding Markets explore innovative models for sustaining public goods. Furthermore, supporting programs like WiEP and academic fellowships ensures a steady pipeline of talent and intellectual capital for years to come. The integration of privacy-enhancing technologies like Tor signifies a proactive approach to user protection and digital sovereignty.
In essence, these grants are not merely financial allocations but strategic catalysts designed to accelerate Ethereum’s journey towards a more robust, decentralized, and globally accessible future. The Foundation’s approach is characterized by a blend of immediate practical solutions and visionary long-term research, ensuring that Ethereum remains at the forefront of blockchain innovation while upholding its core values of openness, security, and decentralization. The ripple effects of these diverse initiatives are anticipated to strengthen the entire ecosystem, benefiting users, developers, and researchers worldwide.
