A new year means new momentum, and new grants! Take a look at the projects that received support in Q1 2025, listed below:
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description | Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | Account Abstraction Afterhours - Season 2 | Mirko Garozzo & Francesco Andreoli | 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. | |
| Community & education | ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC) | Scientific conference on advances in theory, empirics, and applications at the interface of economics and computation. | ||
| Community & education | A General Forum on Ethereum Localism (GFEL): Boulder 2025 | OpenCivics | 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. | |
| Community & education | Arabic Blockchain Developer Bootcamp | Blokkat | 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. | |
| Community & education | Centrum Node | Centrum | 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). | |
| Community & education | Community Privacy Residency | 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. | ||
| Community & education | Crowdsourced Community-Organizing Resources | Tanja Mladenovic | Creating a collection of crowdsourced insights that serve as a comprehensive Ethereum event-planning guide, hosted on the ethereum.org website. | |
| Community & education | Devcon Satellite Events | Funding round to support events that spotlight Devcon SEA programming or experiences. | ||
| Community & education | Escuela de Ciencias Informáticas (ECI) Summer School | 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. | ||
| Community & education | ETHBratislava | Supporting the ETHBratislava community to host the ETHBratislava hackathon and conference, meetups, and community calls to grow the Central and Eastern Europe Ethereum ecosystem. | ||
| Community & education | ETHCluj | 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. | ||
| Community & education | Ethereum Argentina Cordoba Edition | Beginner-friendly conference organized in Cordoba, Argentina covering topics such as the Ethereum roadmap, use cases, and layer 2s (L2s). | ||
| Community & education | Ethereum Tegucigalpa | Supporting Ethereum Tegucigalpa for a series of community-building activities in Honduras. | ||
| Community & education | EthereumZuri.ch | 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. | ||
| Community & education | ETHiopia Hackathon & Conference | First Ethereum conference and hackathon in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia focused on government tech and scaling Ethereum across Africa. | ||
| Community & education | ETHPrague | 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 & education | EthStaker | Community providing guidance, education, support, and resources for existing and potential stakers, with the principle goal of maximizing the Ethereum network's decentralization. | Discord | |
| Community & education | Hacklahoma | Hackathon hosted by students at the University of Oklahoma in USA, with workshops and a track dedicated to building on Ethereum. | ||
| Community & education | High-Assurance Crypto Software (HACS) Workshop | Aspiration Tech | 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. | |
| Community & education | International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad Ethereum Education Explorations v2 | Ankit Gangwal | 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. | |
| Community & education | International Workshop on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) | Workshop run in Glasgow, UK with the goal of exchanging ideas between SMT solver developers and users of SMT, and motivating new research in SMT. | ||
| Community & education | ETHKyiv | Supporting the community to host mini-hackathons, meetups focused on use cases, and hackathon events. | ||
| Community & education | NapulETH Open Village | Conference and hackathon organized in Naples, Italy, featuring tracks such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), privacy, and scaling. | ||
| Community & education | National Workshop & Bootcamp on Cybersecurity & Blockchain | 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. | ||
| Community & education | Road to ETHPrague Meetups | EthereumCzech & ETHPrague | 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. | |
| Community & education | StackTooDeep | Blockchain Society IIT Roorkee | 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. | |
| Community & education | The House of Ether | Bluechain Research Cooperative | Ethereum community education initiative aimed at engaging university students, researchers, and academics, as well as the general public in northeastern Greece. | |
| Community & education | The Midwest Block-a-Thon | KU Blockchain Institute | Blockchain hackathon hosted at the University of Kansas in USA with Ethereum-focused workshops. | |
| Community & education | The Wellbeing Protocol | 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. | ||
| Community & education | Uzumaki | Titania Research | Research hub in Japan working to solve Ethereum's most critical problems, in domains such as consensus, zkVM, and proposer-builder separation (PBS). | |
| Community & education | Web3 Development Internship Program | Web3 Institute | 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. | |
| Community & education | Zu-Grāma | Residency in Kerala, India dedicated to exploring advancements and conducting experiments in thematic tracks such as impact and public goods, cryptography, and longevity. | ||
| Consensus layer | Fabric | 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. | ||
| Consensus layer | GotEth | Miga Labs | 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. | |
| Consensus layer | jvm-libp2p QUIC Transport Support | Peergos | 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. | |
| Consensus layer | Lighthouse | Sigma Prime | Support for the Lighthouse consensus client to continue protocol R&D towards upcoming network upgrades, work on PeerDAS, and networking engineering on mainnet. | |
| Consensus layer | Liveness Accountability | Andrew Lewis-Pye | 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. | |
| Consensus layer | Lodestar | ChainSafe | Continued development and maintenance of the Lodestar TypeScript implementation of the Ethereum beacon chain, development of the Ethereum protocol, and TypeScript/JavaScript ecosystem tooling. | |
| Consensus layer | ROP-9.3: FOCIL Implementation, Tests, & Devnets | Jihoon Song | Implementing and testing FOCIL prototypes in Prysm and Geth, and running local devnets using Kurtosis. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Cursive | Supporting the Cursive team's app development, cryptography research, design work, and user expansion strategy. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Dimitri Koshelev | 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. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Lean Blueprint for FRI | Nethermind | 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). | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Lean Blueprints for STIR & WHIR | Least Authority | 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. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Machina iO | Pia Park | 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. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Phantom Zone | 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. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | plonky3 & Lean | Nethermind | Developing an interface between plonky3 (widely used by zkVMs to implement STARKs) and Lean to enable the verification of plonky3 AIR circuits. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Poseidon Algebraic Cryptanalysis | Luca Campa & Stefano Trevisani | 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. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Semaphore in Noir | HashCloak | 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 | Simula UiB | 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. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | VOLE in the Head (VOLE-itH) | Shouki Tsuda | 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. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ZK Email | Aayush Gupta | Extensive set of open source SDKs, libraries, and protocols that enable email-based proofs. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ZKEmail.nr | ZK Email written in Noir to push forward the capabilities of client-side, privacy-preserving email proving. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | ZKNOX | 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. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | AndroidPortal | Dirk Jäckel | 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. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Buidl Guidl | Educational community of builders creating products and prototypes, and providing Ethereum developer education. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | Commit-Boost | 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. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | EIPs Ontology | David Hyland-Wood | 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. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Ethereum Ecosystem GitHub Categorization | Open Source Observer | 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. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Ethereum for Ruby | Straightforward Ruby library to build, sign, and broadcast Ethereum transactions that allows the separation of key and node management. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | Fe Language | Ongoing development of the Fe v2 language server and editor plugins, along with broader work on various aspects of the compiler. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | OpenSauced | Enhancing the open-source analytics tooling and dashboard by introducing key Ethereum developer metrics, namely library usage analytics and languages by TVL and fees. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | Vyper | Supporting the Vyper team's core development activities in 2025. | ||
| Developer experience & tooling | Web3.js | ChainSafe | Web3.js was sunset with a structured support plan to ensure security, successful migration, and continuity for users as they transitioned to new tooling. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Kurtosis Engine Kubernetes Logging Support | Tedi Mitiku | Adding centralized/persistent logging support to the Kurtosis Kubernetes backend. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Kurtosis Support for Log Aggregation via External Services | Bloctopus | 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. | Twitter, Telegram |
| Developer experience & tooling | Simplifying the Verification of zkVM Circuits | CertiK | 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. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Solhint | Protofire | 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. | Discord |
| Developer experience & tooling | STK2Chain | Carlos Muriithi | 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. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Verus Evaluation | CertiK | Evaluating the usefulness of Verus (a tool for Rust verification) in verifying circuits and EVM precompiles written in Rust. | |
| Execution layer | Erigon | Funding for Erigon's continued work on the Ethereum mainnet, specifically their execution client development and applied R&D on Ethereum's execution layer. | ||
| Execution layer | Gas Cost Estimator | imapp | 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. | |
| Execution layer | Geth Rollup | Nethermind | Continued development of the Geth rollup project. | |
| Execution layer | ROP-15: EVM Gas Metering | Maria Inês Silva | Determining how changes to the gas metering rules impact block throughput and utilization through empirical analysis and simulation. | |
| Execution layer | Samba | meldsun0 & Derek Sorken | Ethereum portal client written in Java language based on Teku and Besu. | Email, Discord: meldsun |
| General growth & support | EcoDev Research Fellowship | Anna M., Jelilat Anofiu, Nick Potts, & Ori Shimony | 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. | |
| General growth & support | EF Internship Program | Bosul Mun, Souradeep Das, Louis Tsai, Shantikiran Chanal, Wonbin Jin, & Harsh Karia | 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. | ||
| General growth & support | The European Decentralization Think Tank | European decentralization think tank that produces tangible outputs (policy briefs/events) to strengthen corporate engagement and policy influence in Europe. | ||
| Indirect funding | Gitcoin Grants 23 | Matching funding for Gitcoin Grants 23, focusing on ecosystem and community-driven rounds. | ||
| Indirect funding | StackTooDeep Quadratic Voting Round | 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. | ||
| Layer 2 | L2BEAT | Continued financial support for L2BEAT to provide transparent and reliable information about Ethereum's L2 ecosystem. | ||
| Other | Decentralization Research Center | 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. | ||
| Other | DeFi Scan | DeFi Collective | Increasing the coverage and pace of covered DeFi projects on DeFi Scan, improving the website frontend design, and supporting education efforts. | |
| Other | Etherealize | Institutional business development and marketing for Ethereum to educate and onboard institutions into the Ethereum ecosystem. | ||
| Other | Ethereum Financial Institute | Global, credibly neutral organization dedicated to integrating the traditional financial system with Ethereum, fostering collaboration and strategic alignment. | ||
| Other | FORYU: FORmal semantics for YUL in Coq | Enrique Martin, Samir Genaim, & Elvira Albert | Developing formal semantics for Yul in Coq prover. | |
| Other | Local-First Dapps | rotki | 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. | |
| Other | Payments Report | Bluechip | In-depth stablecoin report incorporating insights from real conversations with industry practitioners, in addition to secondary research. | |
| Other | Verifereum | 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. | Website, Zulip | |
| Protocol growth & support | eODS Specs | Dan Goron | Developing initial specifications for enshrined operator-delegator separation, as well as community feedback on the mechanism. | |
| Protocol growth & support | ETH Rangers Program | Amber Group, Alexandre Melo, David, Ho Nhut Minh, Jean-Loïc Mugnier, Kelsie Nabben, NFT_Dreww, Nick Bax, Oskar (blackbigswan), Palina Tolmach, Peter Kacherginsky, Sergio Garcia, Sina Pilehchiha, SomaXBT, SunSec, & Tim Fan | Program supporting individuals dedicating time to working on public goods security efforts within the Ethereum ecosystem. | |
| Protocol growth & support | PebbleDB for Geth | jsvisa | Benchmarking, optimizing, and demonstrating improvement in PebbleDB performance for Geth. | |
| Protocol growth & support | Pectra Proactive Grant Round | Grants round to support the Ethereum ecosystem in preparation for the Pectra network upgrade. | ||
| Protocol growth & support | PeerDAS & FOCIL Metrics | Katya Ryazantseva | Metric specifications for PeerDAS and FOCIL. |
Total awarded in Q1 2025: $32,647,065.32
Are you working on something you think could change Ethereum for the better? Head to our grants page to learn more about what we look for in the projects we fund.