The Ethereum Foundation has unveiled a comprehensive suite of grants and initiatives aimed at bolstering the Ethereum ecosystem, spanning critical areas from community engagement and education to advanced cryptography and developer tooling. This broad-based funding effort underscores a strategic commitment to fostering innovation, decentralization, and the long-term growth of the Ethereum protocol. The allocations demonstrate a clear focus on empowering developers, researchers, and community organizers worldwide, with particular emphasis on expanding the reach of Ethereum into new regions and strengthening its core technological foundations.
Empowering Global Communities and Education
A significant portion of the Foundation’s recent funding is dedicated to Community & Education initiatives, reflecting a recognition that widespread adoption and robust development are intrinsically linked to accessible learning and active community participation.
In North America, Cal Hacks 12.0, a collegiate hackathon hosted at the University of California, Berkeley, is set to explore cutting-edge themes such as Artificial Intelligence and Web3. This event aims to inspire the next generation of developers by providing a platform for hands-on innovation and learning in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
The Latin American region is a focal point for several key initiatives. Destino Devconnect is a grant round specifically designed to support community-led events and projects that are instrumental in bringing Argentina and the wider Latin American region "onchain." This aligns with a broader trend of increasing Web3 adoption and development within emerging economies. Following this, the ETH Latam Hackathon Brasil 2025, organized by ETHSamba in São Paulo, Brazil, will prioritize real-world Ethereum applications and the onboarding of new builders. This hackathon represents a crucial step in solidifying Brazil’s position as a hub for Ethereum development in South America.
Further cementing the presence in Argentina, Funding the Commons: Buenos Aires 2025 will convene a conference centered around RealFi, focusing on financial infrastructure built for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding. Simultaneously, Invisible Garden, a developer pop-up city in Buenos Aires, will delve into Ethereum, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), AI, and cybersecurity, fostering a concentrated environment for knowledge exchange and project development. The Local Meetups LATAM Grant Round, a collaboration with the Localism Fund, aims to sustain the momentum generated by events like Devconnect by empowering local Ethereum communities to host consistent, educational, and inclusive monthly meetups for an entire year. This initiative is particularly vital for fostering grassroots engagement and knowledge dissemination across diverse geographical areas.
Beyond Latin America, Lancerium is providing crucial travel assistance to enable founders to attend Devconnect events, ensuring broader participation from emerging talent. In Asia, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Center for Blockchain Technology is actively 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 endeavors. Looking further ahead, the High Assurance Crypto Software (HACS) Workshop 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan, will convene experts in cryptography, software engineering, and formal verification to enhance the security and correctness of real-world cryptographic software.
The 2025 ethereum.org Translatathon represents an effort to democratize access to information about Ethereum by incentivizing translation contributions in less-represented languages. This initiative seeks to significantly expand the multilingual content available on ethereum.org, thereby onboarding new contributors and rewarding existing ones for their efforts in making Ethereum knowledge universally accessible.
Advancing Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs
The Cryptography & Zero-Knowledge Proofs sector is receiving substantial investment, highlighting the Ethereum Foundation’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of privacy, security, and scalability through advanced cryptographic techniques.
AVAZAR: Automatic Verification Tools for zkVM Arithmetization, spearheaded by Albert Rubio, focuses on developing verification tools for circuits within zkVMs (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines). This work is critical for ensuring the integrity and security of ZK-based systems. The EPFL Laboratory for Computation Security is supporting PhD students in foundational and applied cryptography research, addressing limitations in current SNARK designs, including recursion security and the exploration of trade-offs between proof size and security.
The Evolution of the LLZK IR by Veridise aims to strengthen LLZK as shared, verification-oriented infrastructure for the ZK compiler ecosystem. This will enable more robust tooling, improve interoperability across ZK Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), and enhance correctness guarantees for ZK circuits. The Fiat-Shamir Specification, formalized in Lean, builds upon the established Fiat-Shamir transformation for duplex sponges and spongefish constructions, providing a formal basis for cryptographic protocols.
Cryspen is continuing the development of a Lean Backend for Hax, enabling the formal verification of Rust code in Lean. This is a significant step towards enhancing the security assurances of critical software components. Axiom is undertaking the Formal Verification of OpenVM, focusing on the functional correctness of all RV32IM opcode circuits. The goal is to minimize soundness and completeness risks in OpenVM’s circuit design and contribute reusable formal verification infrastructure to the broader zkVM ecosystem.
Private Payments L2, developed by Vienhage Cybersecurity UG, is prototyping a minimal, open-source app-specific L2 rollup for private stablecoin transfers, utilizing lightweight ZK circuits and a simplified sequencing model. This project has the potential to significantly enhance privacy for on-chain transactions. Privote, developed by Shashank Trivedi, is a private on-chain voting protocol powered by MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure), currently hosting the frontend for the Gitcoin Grants 24: Privacy domain.
Research into The Recursive Extraction Problem by Nicholas Spooner investigates the security of recursive composition in SNARKs, particularly the challenges arising from repeated application of knowledge extractors. Runtime Verification is exploring Lean 4-based formal verification of Rust components for zkEVM and zkVM stacks, aiming to establish a practical Rust to Lean verification pipeline using the hax toolchain.
Nethermind is contributing to STIR & WHIR in ArkLib by formalizing key theorems in Lean and providing an executable specification. This work is crucial for the development of robust ZK proving systems. The Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program, associated with Jintai Ding and Ziyu Zhao, aims to validate the efficiency of interpolation attacks as the fastest preimage attack on Poseidon and verify theoretical estimates. Kasra Abbaszadeh is conducting a Technical Review of Fiat-Shamir from Duplex Sponges, auditing security arguments and clarifying abstractions for rigorous reasoning.
Nethermind is also investigating Tightening the Hash Size in Round-by-Round Sound IOPs, exploring the feasibility of using smaller hash digests in multi-round, round-by-round sound SNARKs within both the Random Oracle Model and the Quantum Random Oracle Model. Powdr labs and Certora are collaborating on Verifying Autoprecompiles for powdr, aiming to enhance performance and accelerate adoption through formal verification. Onur Kılıç is working on WHIR, aiming to upstream it into Plonky3, contributing to the low-level proving system stack for Ethereum’s post-quantum signatures.
Enhancing Developer Experience and Tooling
Improvements to the Developer Experience & Tooling are fundamental to accelerating innovation and adoption within the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Ethereum Developer Ecosystem Dataset initiative by Open Source Observer aims to provide an improved, reproducible, and publicly auditable view of the Ethereum developer ecosystem’s data, supported by a sustainable update mechanism. Walnut is undertaking a focused research effort on the solc-mlir Middle End Optimization Layer for Solidity. This initiative seeks to integrate an MLIR middle-end into the Solidity compiler, with the goal of achieving measurable gas savings and enabling more sophisticated correctness and safety analyses for smart contracts.
Strengthening the Execution Layer
While details are nascent, the Execution Layer is seeing focused development through the Helios Integration in Kohaku. Karen Sarkisyan is working on integrating Helios with the Kohaku browser extension, which aims to improve performance and ensure portability within the Kohaku SDK. This integration is vital for enhancing the user experience and efficiency of decentralized applications.
Driving General Growth and Support
General Growth & Support initiatives are crucial for fostering a vibrant and sustainable Ethereum ecosystem.
Deep Funding Markets, powered by Seer, is a multiscalar prediction market that allows model builders to bet on the valuation of open-source repositories. This platform has been utilized in Gitcoin Grants 24 and serves as an innovative mechanism for resource allocation and project evaluation. The European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) is actively engaged in EU-focused policy advocacy and educational campaigns targeting key regulators and policymakers, aiming to foster a more favorable and informed regulatory environment for the cryptocurrency sector.
Gitcoin Grants 24 continues to be a significant funding vehicle, with dedicated domains for Privacy and Public Goods R&D. The Privacy domain co-funds solutions that enhance on-chain privacy for a secure Ethereum ecosystem. The Public Goods R&D Domain supports academic and other research advancing insights into Ethereum public goods and their funding, with a focus on developing neutral, open-source solutions and promoting interoperability. Allan Niemerg is establishing a juror evaluation process for Deep Funding, creating an app for data collection and integrating results into the Deep Funding voting application, thereby refining the governance and funding mechanisms.
Addressing Other Critical Areas
The Other category encompasses a diverse range of projects addressing immediate challenges and opportunities within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Anti-Crypto-Drainer Operations, managed by the Security Alliance (SEAL), are actively tracking, discovering, and blocking crypto drainers that target EVM-based chains, a critical effort in safeguarding user assets. BuidlGuidl’s Builder Bootcamp Capture the Flag (CTF) competition challenges participants to exploit smart contract vulnerabilities and solve cryptographic puzzles, fostering a practical learning environment for security. Certora’s Capture the Funds is a Solidity-based security competition where participants exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols, promoting a competitive and educational approach to smart contract security.
WalletConnect is developing a Clear Signing Library and a proof-of-concept wallet to address the issue of blind signing, a significant concern for user security and transparency. OneSavie Lab is hosting a Kaggle Competition for LLM Identification of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities, aiming to attract both crypto security talent and non-crypto AI/LLM talent to develop innovative solutions for vulnerability detection. dRPC is incorporating network-level privacy into NodeCore, a high-performance, self-hosted RPC load-balancer designed to optimize request distribution across blockchain providers for improved latency, error rates, and cost efficiency. ChainSafe is developing Open Creator Rails, a minimal, verifiable on-chain runtime for managing time-bound access to digital resources using deterministic entitlements.
Driving Protocol Growth and Support
Protocol Growth & Support initiatives are vital for the long-term health, security, and evolution of the Ethereum protocol itself.
Chiachih Wu is designing and implementing LLM-Enabled Differential Testing on Ethereum Clients to accelerate the identification of vulnerabilities within the Ethereum protocol. Mike Neuder‘s doctoral work through the Protocol Fellowship focuses on applying economic and computational tools to deepen the understanding of blockchain mechanism design, generating high-impact academic research and educational content, including public explainers and a new blockchain course at Princeton University.
Truscova is building a Smart Contract Vulnerability Database (SCVD), a system designed to ingest, standardize, and publicly release vulnerability reports from various sources, creating a valuable resource for the security community. Timber Stinson-Schroff is managing the Summer of Protocols (SoP) Program, overseeing logistics, community management, and roadmap development for the 2025 program.
A significant collaboration is underway with The Tor Project, providing technical support to the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Cluster. This partnership aims to overcome technical barriers in integrating Tor at the edge of the Ethereum ecosystem, improving the scalability of bridging to Tor and adapting the Arti Tor client for integration into wallets and frontends. The goal is to enhance privacy for RPC calls, such as transaction broadcasting, especially in constrained environments like browser wallets.
The Women in Ethereum Protocol (WiEP) initiative continues its impactful work. Mercy Boma Naps-Nkari and Arunima Chaudhuri are facilitating WiEP Cohort 4, developing workflows, coordinating mentors, tracking contributions, and supporting events like the WiEP Brunch at Devconnect. Meenakshi Singh serves as the WiEP Cohort 4 Marketing Coordinator, managing communications, social media, and the publication of session recordings, thereby enhancing the program’s reach and impact. Divya Ranjan Pattanaik is undertaking an informal internship focused on Ethereum protocol R&D, contributing to ongoing research efforts.
This multifaceted funding strategy by the Ethereum Foundation demonstrates a robust and forward-looking approach to ecosystem development. By investing in a diverse range of projects and initiatives, the Foundation is actively cultivating innovation, enhancing security, promoting global participation, and solidifying Ethereum’s position as a leading decentralized platform for years to come. The emphasis on community empowerment, advanced research, and developer tooling signals a clear path towards a more scalable, secure, and accessible Ethereum.
