Q4 2025 closed out the year with exciting growth across the ecosystem! Dive into the projects and community initiatives we supported this quarter and see what our grantees have been building:
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description | Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | Cal Hacks 12.0 | Collegiate hackathon organized at the University of California, Berkeley covering themes such as AI and web3. | ||
| Community & education | Destino Devconnect | Grants round focused on supporting community-led events and initiatives that help bring Argentina and the broader Latin America region onchain. | ||
| Community & education | ETH Latam Hackathon Brasil 2025 | ETHSamba | Hackathon hosted in São Paulo, Brazil prioritizing real-world Ethereum and onboarding new builders. | |
| Community & education | Funding the Commons: Buenos Aires 2025 | Conference hosted in Buenos Aires, Argentina revolving around RealFi: financial infrastructure designed for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding. | ||
| Community & education | High Assurance Crypto Software (HACS) Workshop 2026 | Workshop organized in Taipei, Taiwan bringing together cryptographers, cryptographic software engineers, and formal verification experts to improve the security and correctness of real-world cryptographic software. | ||
| Community & education | Hong Kong Polytechnic University Research Center for Blockchain Technology | Collaborating on and supporting a range of academic activities, such as scholarships for the MSc in Blockchain Technology program, the Asiacrypt 2026 conference, guest lectures, and joint research activities. | ||
| Community & education | Invisible Garden | Developer pop-up city focused on Ethereum, ZKPs, AI, and cybersecurity organized in Buenos Aires, Argentina. | ||
| Community & education | Lancerium | Providing travel assistance to enable the two founders to fly to and attend Devconnect ARG. | ||
| Community & education | Local Meetups LATAM Grant Round | Localism Fund | Collaborative grant round with Localism Fund designed to sustain post-Devconnect momentum across Latin America by empowering local Ethereum communities to host consistent, educational, and inclusive monthly meetups for one year. | |
| Community & education | Stablecoin (JPYC) Innovation Challenge | Crypto Asset Community | Cross-industry ideathon designed to surface and accelerate solutions that employ stablecoins—specifically JPYC—to solve real business challenges across sectors such as e-commerce, logistics, real estate, and accounting. | |
| Community & education | 2025 ethereum.org Translatathon | Translation contest that aims to incentivize translation contributions in less-active languages, increase the number of languages and amount of content available on ethereum.org, and onboard new contributors while rewarding existing ones. | ||
| Consensus layer | Ream | Ream Labs | Continued development of the modular, contributor-friendly, and fast implementation of the Lean Consensus specification. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | AVAZAR: Automatic Verification Tools for zkVM Arithmetization | Albert Rubio | Supporting work on the verification (and tooling to do so) of circuits in LLZK. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | EPFL Laboratory for Computation Security | Supporting PhD students in the research lab working on foundational and applied cryptography research, which addresses core limitations in current SNARK designs including recursion security and the exploration of tradeoffs between proof size and security. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Evolution of the LLZK IR | Veridise | Continued development of LLZK to strengthen it as shared, verification-oriented infrastructure for the ZK compiler ecosystem, enabling more robust tooling, interoperability across ZK DSLs, and improved correctness guarantees for ZK circuits. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Fiat-Shamir Specification | Specification and formalization in Lean of Fiat-Shamir based on the Fiat-Shamir transformation from duplex sponges/spongefish construction. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Lean Backend for Hax | Cryspen | Continued development of a Lean backend for Hax, allowing Rust code to be formally verified in Lean. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | OpenVM Formal Verification | Axiom | Formal verification of OpenVM focused on establishing the functional correctness of all RV32IM opcode circuits, with the goal of reducing the risk of soundness or completeness issues in OpenVM’s circuit design and contributing reusable formal verification infrastructure to the broader zkVM ecosystem. | X (Twitter) |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Private Payments L2 | Vienhage Cybersecurity UG | Creating a prototype of a minimal, open-source app-specific L2 rollup for private stablecoin transfers, using lightweight ZK circuits and a simplified sequencing model. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Privote | Shashank Trivedi | Private on-chain voting protocol powered by MACI that is hosting the frontend for the Gitcoin Grants 24: Privacy domain. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | The Recursive Extraction Problem | Nicholas Spooner | Researching the security of recursive composition in SNARKs, focusing on the recursive extraction problem that arises when security proofs require repeated application of knowledge extractors. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Rust Verification Through Lean 4 Tooling Investigation | Runtime Verification | Investigating Lean 4-based formal verification of Rust components used in zkEVM and zkVM stacks, with a focus on establishing a practical Rust to Lean verification pipeline using the hax toolchain. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | STIR & WHIR in ArkLib | Nethermind | Formalizing key theorems for STIR and WHIR in Lean and supplementing them with an executable specification. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program | Jintai Ding & Ziyu Zhao | Solving bounties listed in the Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program, which 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 the reduced round versions matches the theoretical estimates. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Technical Review of Fiat–Shamir from Duplex Sponges | Kasra Abbaszadeh | Technical review of the recent analysis of the Fiat–Shamir transformation instantiated via duplex sponges, focusing on carefully auditing the underlying security arguments, identifying any gaps or ambiguities, and clarifying the key abstractions needed for rigorous reasoning. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Tightening the Hash Size in Round-by-Round Sound IOPs | Nethermind | Investigating whether multi-round, round-by-round sound SNARKs can safely use smaller hash digests, beginning with a feasibility study in both the Random Oracle Model and the Quantum Random Oracle Model. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Verifying Autoprecompiles | powdr labs & Certora | Formally verifying powdr's autoprecompiles to help improve performance and speed up adoption. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | WHIR | Onur Kılıç | Accelerate WHIR and upstream it into Plonky3, to contribute to the low-level stack of proving system for Ethereum post-quantum signatures. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Ethereum Developer Ecosystem Dataset | Open Source Observer | Delivering an improved, reproducible, and publicly auditable view of Ethereum developer ecosystem data along with a sustainable mechanism to keep it updated. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | solc-mlir Middle End Optimization Layer for Solidity | Walnut | Focused research effort to add an MLIR middle-end to the Solidity compiler, with the aim of yielding measurable gas savings and enabling richer correctness and safety analyses. | |
| Execution layer | Helios Integration in Kohaku | Karen Sarkisyan | Integrating Helios with the Kohaku browser extension, improving performance, and ensuring it is a portable and easily integrable part of the Kohaku SDK. | |
| General growth & support | Deep Funding Markets | Seer | Multiscalar prediction market where model builders bet on the value an open-source repository would receive if it were to be professionally evaluated, used in Gitcoin Grants 24. | |
| General growth & support | European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) | Conducting EU-focused policy advocacy and education campaigns aimed at key regulators and policymakers. | ||
| General growth & support | Gitcoin Grants 24: Privacy Domain | Co-funding for the Privacy domain, which supports privacy solutions for a secure onchain Ethereum ecosystem. | ||
| General growth & support | Gitcoin Grants 24: Public Goods R&D Domain | Co-funding for the GG24 Public Goods R&D Domain. The grant supports concrete academic and other forms of research that advance the insights and knowledge on Ethereum public goods and their funding, while supporting the development of neutral, open-source solutions rooted in these insights, with a focus on interoperability between tools. | ||
| General growth & support | Juror Voting for Deep Funding | Allan Niemerg | Establishing a juror evaluation process, creating an app for collecting data from jurors, and integrating the results into the Deep Funding voting app. | |
| Other | Anti-Crypto-Drainer Operations | Security Alliance (SEAL) | Tracking, discovering, and blocking crypto drainers attacking EVM-based chains. | |
| Other | BuidlGuidl's Builder Bootcamp Capture the Flag | Capture the Flag (CTF) competition where participants tackle 12 increasingly challenging Solidity puzzles to hunt for vulnerabilities, exploit smart contract weaknesses, and solve cryptographic challenges. | ||
| Other | Capture the Funds | Certora | Solidity based CTF-style security competition, where participants compete against one another to exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols and earn the highest score. | |
| Other | Clear Signing Library | WalletConnect | Building a library and PoC wallet that aims to solve the issue of blind signing. | |
| Other | Kaggle Competition for LLM Identification of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities | OneSavie Lab | Hosting a Kaggle competition for LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection built on the Bastet dataset, with the goal of attracting both crypto security talent and non-crypto AI/LLM talent. | |
| Other | NodeCore | dRPC | Incorporating network-level privacy into a high-performance, self-hosted RPC load-balancer that distributes requests across multiple blockchain providers or nodes, optimizing for latency, error rate, and cost. | |
| Other | Open Creator Rails | ChainSafe | Minimal, verifiable on-chain runtime for managing time-bound access to digital resources using deterministic entitlements. | |
| Protocol growth & support | LLM-Enabled Differential Testing on Ethereum Clients | Chiachih Wu | Designing and implementing LLM-enabled differential testing on Ethereum clients to speed up the ability to find vulnerabilities on the Ethereum protocol. | |
| Protocol growth & support | Protocol Fellowship | Mike Neuder | Doctoral work focused on using tools from economics and computation to deepen the understanding of blockchain mechanism design, generating high-impact academic research and educational content such as public explainers on protocol changes and teaching a new blockchain course at Princeton University. | |
| Protocol growth & support | Smart Contract Vulnerability Database | Truscova | Building a system that accepts a wide variety of different vulnerability reports in various formats from multiple sources, massaging them into a schema, and then outputting it into a publicly available dataset. | |
| Protocol growth & support | Summer of Protocols (SoP) Program Management | Timber Stinson-Schroff | Managing SoP by overseeing the 2025 program logistics, supporting community management, and helping to shape SoP's longer-term roadmap. | |
| Protocol growth & support | The Tor Project | Providing technical support to the Ethereum Foundation's Privacy Cluster to overcome technical barriers of integrating Tor at the edge and the infrastructure of the Ethereum ecosystem. Work includes improving scalability of bridging to Tor, and adapting Arti Tor client into wasm such that it can be integrated in wallets[sdks] and frontends. The collaboration aims to unlock Tor particularly in constrained environments like browser wallets, bringing privacy to RPC calls like transaction broadcasting (eth_sendRawTx). | ||
| Protocol growth & support | Women in Ethereum Protocol (WiEP) Cohort 4 Facilitator | Mercy Boma Naps-Nkari & Arunima Chaudhuri | Facilitating WiEP Cohort 4 through activities such as developing workflows, coordinating mentors, tracking participant contributions, and supporting the organization of the WiEP Brunch at Devconnect. | |
| Protocol growth & support | WiEP Cohort 4 Marketing Coordinator | Meenakshi Singh | Supporting WiEP Cohort 4 by coordinating communications with mentors, students, and speakers, managing social media posts, and assisting with the organization and publication of session recordings. | |
| Protocol growth & support | Divya Ranjan Pattanaik | Informal 2-month internship to work on Ethereum protocol R&D. |
Total awarded in Q4 2025: $7,385,528.84
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.