The Ethereum Foundation has unveiled a comprehensive suite of grants and initiatives designed to propel the expansion and refinement of the Ethereum ecosystem. Spanning community building, cutting-edge cryptography, developer experience, and core protocol advancements, these investments underscore a strategic commitment to fostering a more robust, secure, and accessible decentralized future. The funded projects highlight a global effort to onboard new builders, enhance developer tooling, and push the boundaries of blockchain technology.
Fostering Community and Education Globally
A significant portion of the Foundation’s investment targets community development and educational outreach across diverse geographical regions. Cal Hacks 12.0, held at the University of California, Berkeley, exemplifies this by bringing together collegiate innovators to explore themes such as Artificial Intelligence and Web3. This event, a staple in the hackathon circuit, typically draws thousands of students eager to apply their technical skills to emerging technologies, providing a crucial pipeline of future developers.
In Latin America, the focus is on bringing the region "onchain." Destino Devconnect is a grants round specifically aimed at empowering community-led events and initiatives that facilitate this digital transformation. Following this, the ETH Latam Hackathon Brasil 2025, hosted in São Paulo, will prioritize real-world Ethereum applications and the onboarding of new builders. The organizers, ETHSamba, have a proven track record of cultivating local developer talent. This initiative is particularly timely, as Latin America has shown a growing interest in blockchain technology for financial inclusion and innovation.
Argentina is also becoming a hub for these efforts. Funding the Commons: Buenos Aires 2025 is a conference dedicated to RealFi, a concept that seeks to build financial infrastructure for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding. Complementing this, Invisible Garden, a developer pop-up city in Buenos Aires, focuses on Ethereum, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), AI, and cybersecurity, creating an immersive environment for collaboration and learning. 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 decentralized approach to community building is crucial for long-term network growth.
Beyond Latin America, the 2025 ethereum.org Translatathon aims to broaden access to information by incentivizing translation contributions in less-active languages. This contest will significantly increase the availability of content on ethereum.org, a vital resource for developers and users alike, and onboard new contributors. Meanwhile, in Asia, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Center for Blockchain Technology is actively collaborating on and supporting academic endeavors, including scholarships for its MSc in Blockchain Technology program, the Asiacrypt 2026 conference, guest lectures, and joint research activities. This academic engagement is fundamental for fostering deep technical understanding and long-term research advancements.
Advancing Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs
A substantial portion of the funding is directed towards strengthening the cryptographic foundations of Ethereum, particularly in the realm of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). These technologies are critical for enhancing privacy, scalability, and security.
AVAZAR: Automatic Verification Tools for zkVM Arithmetization, led by Albert Rubio, focuses on developing tools for verifying circuits in LLZK (Lightweight Zero-Knowledge). This is a critical step towards ensuring the integrity and security of zkVMs, which are essential for scaling solutions. The EPFL Laboratory for Computation Security is supporting PhD students engaged in foundational and applied cryptography research. Their work addresses core limitations in current SNARK designs, including recursion security and the exploration of trade-offs between proof size and security, aiming to enhance the efficiency and robustness of ZK systems.
The Evolution of the LLZK IR project by Veridise seeks to fortify LLZK as shared, verification-oriented infrastructure for the ZK compiler ecosystem. This initiative aims to enable more robust tooling, improve interoperability across ZK Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), and enhance correctness guarantees for ZK circuits. The formalization of the Fiat-Shamir Specification in Lean, based on the established Fiat-Shamir transformation, is another key project. This work contributes to the rigorous mathematical underpinnings of ZKP protocols.
Cryspen is continuing the development of a Lean backend for Hax, a project that will allow Rust code to be formally verified in Lean. This integration is vital for building trust in the security of cryptographic software written in widely used languages. Axiom is undertaking the formal verification of OpenVM, focusing on the functional correctness of its RV32IM opcode circuits. The goal is to reduce soundness and completeness risks in OpenVM’s circuit design and contribute reusable formal verification infrastructure to the broader zkVM ecosystem.
Furthering privacy-preserving transactions, Vienhage Cybersecurity UG is creating a prototype of a minimal, open-source app-specific L2 rollup for private stablecoin transfers, utilizing lightweight ZK circuits and a simplified sequencing model. This project could pave the way for more private and efficient on-chain financial interactions. Privote, developed by Shashank Trivedi, is a private on-chain voting protocol powered by MACI (Minimalistic Assumed Cryptographic Infrastructure), which is currently hosting the frontend for the Gitcoin Grants 24: Privacy domain.
Research into the Recursive Extraction Problem by Nicholas Spooner delves into the security of recursive composition in SNARKs, specifically addressing challenges arising from repeated application of knowledge extractors. This is a nuanced area critical for the security of advanced ZKP constructions. Runtime Verification is investigating Lean 4-based formal verification of Rust components used in zkEVM and zkVM stacks, aiming to establish a practical Rust to Lean verification pipeline via the Hax toolchain. This effort is crucial for bridging the gap between high-level smart contract languages and formal verification.
Nethermind is working on STIR & WHIR in ArkLib, formalizing key theorems in Lean and providing an executable specification. This contributes to the foundational components of proving systems. The Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program, coordinated by Jintai Ding and Ziyu Zhao, aims to ensure the security of the Poseidon hash function by verifying theoretical estimates against interpolation attacks. Kasra Abbaszadeh is conducting a technical review of the Fiat-Shamir transformation from duplex sponges, meticulously auditing security arguments and clarifying necessary abstractions for rigorous reasoning.
Nethermind is also investigating the possibility of tightening hash sizes in round-by-round sound IOPs (Interactive Oracle Proofs), beginning with feasibility studies in both the Random Oracle Model and the Quantum Random Oracle Model. powdr labs and Certora are collaborating on verifying autoprecompiles for powdr, a project designed to enhance performance and accelerate adoption. Onur Kılıç, through the WHIR project, aims to accelerate WHIR and upstream it into Plonky3, contributing to the low-level proving system stack for post-quantum signatures on Ethereum.
Enhancing Developer Experience and Tooling
The Ethereum Foundation recognizes that a thriving ecosystem depends on a seamless developer experience. Several initiatives are focused on improving the tools and resources available to builders.
The Ethereum Developer Ecosystem Dataset, developed by Open Source Observer, aims to provide an improved, reproducible, and publicly auditable view of the Ethereum developer ecosystem data, along with a sustainable mechanism for updates. This data is invaluable for understanding trends, identifying bottlenecks, and guiding future development efforts. Walnut is undertaking a focused research effort to add an MLIR middle-end optimization layer to the Solidity compiler. The goal is to achieve measurable gas savings and enable richer correctness and safety analyses for smart contracts written in Solidity, the primary language for Ethereum development.
The Helios Integration in Kohaku project, led by Karen Sarkisyan, involves integrating the Helios privacy-preserving light client with the Kohaku browser extension. This integration aims to improve performance and ensure Helios is a portable and easily integrable component of the Kohaku SDK, making privacy-enhancing technologies more accessible to end-users through their browsers.
Driving Protocol Growth and Support
Beyond technical development, the Foundation is investing in initiatives that foster broader protocol growth, community engagement, and essential support structures.
Deep Funding Markets, powered by Seer, is a multiscalar prediction market where model builders can bet on the evaluated value of open-source repositories. This platform was utilized in Gitcoin Grants 24, demonstrating its potential for decentralized funding and evaluation mechanisms. The European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) is conducting EU-focused policy advocacy and educational campaigns targeting key regulators and policymakers, a crucial step in navigating the complex regulatory landscape for blockchain technology.
Gitcoin Grants 24 received significant support, with co-funding for both the Privacy Domain and the Public Goods R&D Domain. The Privacy Domain supports solutions that enhance the security and privacy of the Ethereum ecosystem. The Public Goods R&D Domain, in particular, champions academic and other forms of research that advance insights into Ethereum public goods and their funding mechanisms, while supporting the development of neutral, open-source solutions with a focus on interoperability. Allan Niemerg is establishing a juror evaluation process for Deep Funding, creating an app for collecting juror data and integrating it into the Deep Funding voting app, further refining the decentralized governance and funding processes.
The Tor Project is providing technical support to the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Cluster, aiming to overcome technical barriers in integrating Tor with the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly at the edge. This collaboration focuses on improving the scalability of bridging to Tor and adapting the Arti Tor client for WebAssembly integration into wallets and frontends. The goal is to unlock Tor’s privacy benefits, especially in constrained environments like browser wallets, for RPC calls such as transaction broadcasting.
The Women in Ethereum Protocol (WiEP) initiative is seeing continued support. Mercy Boma Naps-Nkari and Arunima Chaudhuri are facilitating Cohort 4, developing workflows, coordinating mentors, tracking contributions, and supporting events like the WiEP Brunch at Devconnect. Meenakshi Singh serves as the Marketing Coordinator for WiEP Cohort 4, managing communications and social media to amplify the program’s reach and impact. Divya Ranjan Pattanaik is undertaking an informal internship focused on Ethereum protocol R&D, contributing to the ongoing research efforts within the ecosystem.
Strengthening Security and Developer Tools
A robust security posture is paramount for any blockchain network. The Foundation is supporting initiatives that directly address security vulnerabilities and improve developer understanding.
BuidlGuidl’s Builder Bootcamp Capture the Flag (CTF) is a competition designed to challenge participants with increasingly difficult Solidity puzzles, focusing on identifying and exploiting smart contract vulnerabilities. Similarly, Certora’s Capture the Funds is a Solidity-based CTF-style security competition where participants exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols. These events are invaluable for training security talent and identifying real-world vulnerabilities.
WalletConnect is building a library and proof-of-concept wallet to address the issue of "blind signing," a common security concern where users approve transactions without fully understanding their implications. OneSavie Lab is hosting a Kaggle competition for Large Language Model (LLM)-based smart contract vulnerability detection, utilizing the Bastet dataset. This initiative aims to attract both crypto security experts and non-crypto AI/LLM talent to the field.
dRPC is incorporating network-level privacy into NodeCore, a high-performance, self-hosted RPC load-balancer. This aims to optimize latency, error rates, and cost while enhancing the privacy of blockchain interactions. ChainSafe is developing Open Creator Rails, a minimal, verifiable on-chain runtime for managing time-bound access to digital resources using deterministic entitlements, which has implications for digital rights management and content distribution.
The Smart Contract Vulnerability Database (SCVD), under Truscova, is building a system to collect, standardize, and publicly release vulnerability reports from various sources, creating a valuable resource for developers and security auditors. The Summer of Protocols (SoP) Program Management, overseen by Timber Stinson-Schroff, is crucial for managing the logistics and community engagement of the 2025 program, shaping its long-term roadmap.
Finally, Chiachih Wu is leading the development of LLM-Enabled Differential Testing on Ethereum Clients, a project focused on leveraging LLMs to speed up vulnerability discovery within Ethereum clients. Mike Neuder‘s doctoral work as a Protocol Fellow focuses on using economic and computational tools to deepen the understanding of blockchain mechanism design, generating academic research and educational content, including public explainers and a new blockchain course at Princeton University.
These diverse investments collectively represent a strategic and comprehensive approach by the Ethereum Foundation to cultivate a vibrant, secure, and scalable ecosystem for years to come. The breadth of initiatives, from global community building to advanced cryptographic research, underscores a commitment to both immediate progress and long-term foundational strength.
