Next Billion

Every year, the Ethereum ecosystem welcomes thousands of builders through community events, hackathons, courses, bootcamps, and campus clubs. However, many newcomers struggle to remain engaged, as they face challenges securing structured early-career opportunities. The Ethereum Season of Internships directly addresses this retention gap by creating a coordinated collection of internship opportunities across the ecosystem.

Across different disciplines and geographies, builders are exploring how Ethereum fits into their work and communities. The Devcon SEA Scholars Program brought together 93 of these individuals in Bangkok who are bridging Ethereum with other worlds and pushing Ethereum's boundaries. This community of builders, thinkers, and creators was selected from over 800 applicants representing 86 countries. The program consisted of four categories: (1) Ethereum Community Organizers; (2) Law Students & Legal Professionals; (3) Artists and Sci-fi Writers, and (4) Other Builders. Each category was guided by a mentor and included a series of online gatherings leading up to Devcon. After attending Devcon for the first time – with financial support for those who needed it – the Scholars created "Learning Artifacts" to document their experiences and

The following is an update from Next Billion Fellow Mulenga Kapwepwe and her initiative "Summitshare". For more about the Next Billion Fellowship Program and to apply, please visit https://nxbn.ethereum.foundation/. Mulenga Kapwepwe, founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia posed a question in 2022 to a small group of younger tech enthusiasts in Zambia: Can something called “blockchain technology” offer any new usefulness for the preservation of history? She had started a new initiative aimed at digital humanities, and engaging with young people excited by technology who might want to apply their talents to the world of arts, culture, and history. The group of developers, designers, and artists she was working with shared their enthusiasm for “web3”, and together they discussed some of the properties

We’re excited to announce that applications for the Next Billion Fellowship Program are now open!

As a global public resource, technology must remain open, accessible, and dedicated to promoting the greater good. The Next Billion Fellowship Program is a testament to this vision, seeking to capture stories of communities whose lives are changing for the better. Today, we are proud to introduce seven individuals with remarkable stories to share. Their narratives offer a glimpse into their diverse contexts and possible futures — ones we cannot fully foresee but where humanity is uplifted. By drawing inspiration from the Next Billion Fellows’ stories, we hope to imagine a future where this open protocol of human coordination serves as a public good for billions of people.

Ethereum is growing, and diversity of human participation creates resilience throughout the ecosystem. The Devconnect Scholars Program is one small effort that aims to create resilience through community diversity. Better representation across human geography and demographics leads to diverse experiences and new perspectives that help the Ethereum protocol serve the coordination needs of all humans, not just a lucky few. Not only does better representation - leading to better geographical distribution of Ethereum nodes for example - help the security of the network, but we believe it is crucial in enriching our community and in making Ethereum stories tangible for more people. The Scholars Program brought to Devconnect Istanbul 22 builders from communities that are currently underrepresented in Ethereum. This post highlights just a few of

Decades from now, there will be many stories to tell about the early days of Ethereum. We will remenisce about how a peculiar and powerful technology began to change the landscape of trust on the internet. Some will remember being skeptical, while others may claim to have known all along that it would change the world. Those future stories are out of reach for us – obscured as all things are by the challenges and uncertainties of the present moment. But there are other stories out there, right now, that we need to listen to. Stories of people; of their learning, growth, hope, and experience. The Next Billion Fellowship at the Ethereum Foundation is a search for individuals with stories to tell us about today, and

Crisis is a cruel teacher. It can draw us together in our shared fragility, but paradoxically it can also distance us from our shared humanity. In times of great crisis, the institutions and structures of society that are supposed to protect and support us may become twisted, corrupted, or rendered impotent – and sometimes, the very things that make us humans can play a role in our collective dehumanization. In Syria, my political activism became the grounds for denying me the most basic forms of identification. I was detained and tortured as a means of political repression. My academic pursuits forcibly halted, and any semblance of proof of my existence was stripped away. And I, along with millions of others like me, had to