KZG Ceremony Grant Round

The Protocol Support team is organizing a grant round to support the upcoming Ethereum KZG Ceremony.

The KZG Ceremony is a coordinated public ritual that will provide a cryptographic foundation for Ethereum scaling initiatives like EIP-4844. Learn more about the Ceremony and participate in the test version at ceremony.ethereum.org. If you'd like funding support to contribute at a deeper level, there are two ways to qualify:

writing your own implementation
submitting entropy generated by non-traditional sources or through a unique process

→ APPLY BY JAN 31 or learn more below

Writing your own implementation

The best way to avoid a bug affecting the entire ceremony is to have as many different implementations as possible. This eliminates the possibility for single points of failure due to software implementation bugs, and reduces other correlated risks. To that end, we're interested in funding different implementations, especially ones that feature:

custom / bespoke BLS implementations
auditable code
easy to use interfaces
good randomness generation
unique languages & compilers
implementations ready for use early in the contribution phase (which starts early Jan and runs for ~2 months)

This ceremony has specifically been designed to be as simple to contribute to as possible, and we'd encourage everyone to take a look at the specs.

Our suggested funding requests for basic >> fully featured implementations ranges from 500 and up to 10k USD.

Unique contribution methods

Another way to help assure that the the final output of the Ceremony is unbiased is to collect entropy (randomness) and ensure its destruction in a creative manner. We welcome proposals that:

collect unique forms of entropy
contributes this entropy to the Ceremony
destroys the entropy afterwards
documents the above in a credible/verifiable manner (e.g. video proof, a blog post with pictures, detailed written records)

Submit proposal

Anyone who thinks they could achieve some of the above points is encouraged to apply to this grants round, as an individual or with a team.

Grants will be awarded on a case-by-case and rolling basis. You may enter more than one proposal as long as each proposal is unique and meets the requirements.

→ APPLY BY JAN 31

Requirements

Proposals must be in English
Work must be open source
Proposals should aim to be complete before the end of the general contribution period

Selection criteria

Surprise us with your creativity! Here are a few selection criteria considerations to help guide your proposal:

Uniqueness of proposal
Quality of work and experience of contributors
Clarity, conciseness and organization of the proposal
Contributions that help a non-technical audience gain insight into the ceremony: why is it important and how does it work

Deadline

Submit by 31 Jan 2023 to be considered! We will follow-up regarding your submission by email. The general public contribution period will likely start in early January and run for two months, followed by the special contribution period which is specifically for the projects funded in this grants round.