Q3 2025 brought an exciting wave of innovation and community energy! Explore the projects we funded this quarter and the work they’re advancing:
| Category | Project | Recipient | Description | Contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community & education | Bluechip25 | Conference hosted in Vienna, Austria dedicated to crypto safety, learning and sharing best practices, and setting new benchmarks for trust and transparency. | ||
| Community & education | BuildETH | Conference focused on Ethereum infrastructure, DeFi primitives and protocols, AI agents, and new financial rails for digital assets organized in San Francisco, USA. | ||
| Community & education | DeFi Security Summit | Technical conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina diving into the education and technical advances in securing dapps on top of blockchain technology. | ||
| 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 | dEVMatch 2025 | APU Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Club (APUBCC) | Student-run hackathon organized in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to equip developers with the skills and knowledge to solve real-world blockchain challenges. | |
| Community & education | dev3pack | Community initiative supporting women+ and student developers transitioning from web2 to web3 through coding challenges, mentorship, open-source contribution support, and product-oriented learning, with the goal of strengthening developer engagement in the Ethereum ecosystem. | X (Twitter) | |
| Community & education | Digibastion | Chirag Agrawal | Public good security platform with step-by-step guides on security practices and real-time threat feeds on the latest exploits, CVEs, dependency supply chain attacks, etc. | Telegram |
| Community & education | EDCON | Conference hosted in Osaka, Japan exploring topics such as core protocol development, cypherpunk and privacy, and public goods. | ||
| Community & education | Edinburgh Decentralized Finance Summit | Blockchain Scotland | Conference focused on DeFi, tokenization, and agentic finance hosted in Edinburgh, Scotland. | |
| Community & education | ETHAccra | Developer summit and hackathon organized in Accra, Ghana diving into themes such as identity, onchain finance, and scaling. | ||
| Community & education | ETH Bishkek | First Ethereum hackathon in Central Asia to catalyze the local web3 ecosystem, connect global builders with regional talent, and empower builders to create meaningful blockchain-based solutions, hosted in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. | ||
| Community & education | Ethereum Brasil | Conference in São Paulo, Brazil focused on bridging TradFi with DeFi. | ||
| Community & education | Ethereum for the World | Kolektivo Labs | Highlighting and accelerating Ethereum-based projects contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through producing case studies, supporting teams in the UNDP SDG Blockchain Accelerator, and ecosystem-building efforts. | |
| Community & education | Ethereum Protocol Day | Dapp-Learning & Panta Rhei | Meetup in Shenzhen, China exploring Ethereum research and development, including recent and upcoming EIP upgrades, as well as topics such as cryptography and ZK on Ethereum. | |
| Community & education | Ethereum University Circles | Cripto Curiosas | 12-week pilot program hosted at Universidad San Pablo in Arequipa, Peru designed to introduce students to Ethereum’s technical foundations and philosophical principles through workshops, mentorship, and project-based learning. Outcomes will be documented in an open-source playbook to support replication across other universities in Latin America. | |
| Community & education | ETH Huangshan | KeyMapDAO | Co-living hackathon organized in Huangshan, China exploring open source, ZK and privacy, and the intersection between AI and crypto. | |
| Community & education | ETHIstanbul | ModaPalas | Conference and hackathon focusing on themes such as AI agents, privacy and security, and ZKPs hosted in Istanbul, Türkiye. | |
| Community & education | ETHSafari | Conference in Kenya exploring topics such as DeFi, ZK and privacy, and security. | ||
| Community event | ETHShanghai | Conference and hackathon discussing themes such as AI × Ethereum, DeFi × Infrastructure, and Public Goods × Open Source in Shanghai, China. | ||
| Community & education | ETH Shenzhen | OpenBuild & ETHTAO | Conference and hackathon hosted in Shenzhen, China focusing on topics such as infrastructure, enterprise adoption, and scaling. | |
| Community & education | ETHSofia | Conference diving into topics such as AI and blockchain, web3 security, and scaling organized in Sofia, Bulgaria. | ||
| Community & education | ETHTokyo | Conference and hackathon hosted in Tokyo, Japan exploring topics such as AI, privacy and security, and scaling. | ||
| Community & education | Midwest Blockchain Conference | University-run conference hosted in Michigan, USA discussing themes such as infrastructure, regulation, and RWAs. | ||
| Community & education | Onchain City | Participating in Edge City Patagonia to explore the future of digital societies and engage in discussions on working directly with governments to bring their services onchain. | ||
| Community & education | OWASP Smart Contract Security | Shashank | Project developing standardized security documentation for smart contract development and auditing under the OWASP umbrella. | X (Twitter), Email |
| Community & education | ProdFest | Blockfuse Labs & EthJos | Event in Jos, Nigeria comprising a builders conference, products showcase, and hackathon to showcase high-quality research findings and web3 apps built across Africa. | |
| Community & education | University of Málaga Blockchain Course | Decentralized Security | Funding three scholarships for the Blockchain: Smart Contracts and Cryptoeconomy course that offers a strong technical foundation in blockchain systems, cryptographic protocols, and Ethereum smart contracts to foster Ethereum-aligned talent and research in Spain. | |
| Community & education | Web3 Kamp | Immersive residential bootcamp focused on web3 technologies such as Ethereum, smart contracts, ZKPs, and decentralized architectures, hosted at the Petnica Science Center in Serbia. | ||
| Community & education | Women Web3 Wave | Herstory | Bootcamp in Dali, China for women to learn and build projects related to topics such as DeFi and RWAs, ZKP and privacy, and AI and vibe coding. | |
| Community & education | ZK Core Program in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, & Vietnam | ArgCryptoHub, ERC55, ETH Ecuador, Blockchain Society IIT Delhi, ZK Tokyo, & ZKP Labs | Supporting the local ZK community and kickstarting its growth through a 6-week educational program and weekly meetups, targeted towards students and early-career developers. | |
| Consensus layer | AI-Assisted Testing Framework for Detecting Synchronization Vulnerabilities Across CL Clients | Tsinghua CryptoEconomics Lab | Designing a testing framework dedicated to uncovering synchronization vulnerabilities between different consensus layer clients, using AI techniques (RL, LLM) to enhance both the accuracy and efficiency of detection. | |
| Consensus layer | BEAMSIM | Quadrivium | High-performance simulation framework for testing lean consensus signature aggregation protocols with support for multiple network backends and communication topologies. | |
| Consensus layer | Constantine PeerDAS | Mamy Ratsimbazafy | Replicating the interfaces defined in c-kzg-4844 v2.1.1 and making them available in C, Go, Nim, and Rust, along with extending Constantine's existing Ethereum KZG support to include PeerDAS. | |
| Consensus layer | FOCIL Rebase & Testing | Jihoon Song | Working on FOCIL and other Glamsterdam EIPs. | |
| Consensus layer | leanMultisig | Tom Wambsgans | Developing leanMultisig (the PQ aggregate signature library for lean consensus) with a focus on performance and simplicity. | |
| Consensus layer | Lighthouse | Sigma Prime | Support for the Lighthouse consensus client to continue protocol R&D with large network adoption. | |
| Consensus layer | PBS Foundation | Continued stewardship of the MEV ecosystem, including coordination across the MEV ecosystem for current and future hard forks, along with R&D for mev-boost and mev-boost-relay that supports hard fork development. | ||
| Consensus layer | ProbeLab | Providing observability tooling and insights into the L1 p2p layer in the form of research, analyses, and code. | ||
| Consensus layer | Teku ZK Stateless Client | Consensys | Enabling the Teku consensus client to implement the necessary logic to receive, sync, and verify execution proofs for zkEVM deployment on mainnet. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Automated Verification of ZK Circuits | Veridise | Supporting the development of an automated tool for verifying the consistency between witness generation and arithmetic constraints in ZKPs. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Ethproofs Contribution | Fara Woolf | Taking responsibility for Ethproofs development, including in-browser proof verification and benchmark visualisation. | Telegram |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Foundations of Probabilistic Proofs MOOC | Production of a massive open online course (MOOC) on the foundations of probabilistic proofs, an essential part of SNARKs for which there is a lack of high-quality pedagogical resources. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | High-Performance ARithmetic for Polynomials (HARP) | Development of an open-source library for optimized polynomial arithmetic over prime fields with explicit support for primes of varying bit lengths, as part of the Poseidon Grants Round. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Lita Foundation | Working on several projects related to zkVMs that will clarify feasibility questions around compilers, precompiles, and distributed proving, while also generating prototype implementations where appropriate and strengthening the zkVM ecosystem by reducing attack surfaces, improving interoperability with mainstream languages, and informing the design of performant, ZK-friendly compilers. | ||
| 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 | OpenVM | Supporting the team behind OpenVM, a performant and modular zkVM framework built for customization and extensibility, to meet the L1 realtime proving requirements. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Phantom Zone | Advancing two complementary efforts critical to Ethereum's long-term vision of secure, private, and decentralized computation: Phantom, an encrypted RISC-V virtual machine that executes encrypted RISC-V binaries on encrypted inputs, and Poulpy, a fast and modular FHE library written in Rust. | ||
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Privacy Features for Kohaku | Wonderland | Integration of privacy-related features into Kohaku, allowing the browser extension to support basic functionalities from the privacy pool SDK. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Sail to Lean & Lean/MLIR for LLZK | Peter Sewell | Further improve the state of the RISC-V specification in Lean (extracted via the Sail backend) and proof automation related to this, along with improving Lean/MLIR interoperability targeting LLZK in particular. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | SP1 ALU Chip PoC Proofs | Nethermind | Verifying the correct implementation of SP1's ALU chip against the official Sail RISC-V specification in Lean. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | Verifying the Jolt zkVM | Galois | Further polishing to the Sail RISC-V specification extracted to Lean, integration of zkLean (a Lean DSL for R1CS/Jolt-ish lookups) with LLZK (an MLIR dialect for circuits), and proof of concept proofs using zkLean. | |
| Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs | zkBugs | zkSecurity | Providing a comprehensive update of the vulnerability corpus with a focus on zkVMs, a live and updated advisory for critical ZK projects, an open and reproducible benchmarking suite for ZK security tools, and a practical guide to help developers choose the right tools. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | ArkLib Contributions | Logical Intelligence | Formally verifying ZK protocols through contributing some proofs to ArkLib using their AI tool, including formalization of theorems from the Ligero paper. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Bluebell in Lean | Nethermind | Implementing the Bluebell program logic in Lean to support reasoning about cryptographic protocols in VCV-io/ArkLib. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | EthereumJS Maintenance & Development | Gabriel Rocheleau | Ongoing maintenance and evolution of the EthereumJS monorepo's core libraries (block, common, evm, mpt, tx, util, and vm), which are foundational to the Ethereum developer tooling ecosystem, ensuring they remain reliable, secure, and up to date with the latest protocol changes). | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Free & Censorship-Resistant EIP-7702 Infrastructure | Etherspot | Deploying freely accessible bundlers (within usage thresholds) that use the UserOp mempool to promote decentralization and censorship resistance for wallets adopting EIP-7702. | X (Twitter), Discord, Email, Newsletter |
| Developer experience & tooling | IntelliJ Solidity | Paul-Alexandre Tessier | Improvement and reinvigoration of the IntelliJ Solidity plugin and community. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Oblivious Server for Kohaku | Oblivious Labs | Developing an Oblivious server that can handle requests from a minimal execution client embedded in the Kohaku browser extension. | |
| Developer experience & tooling | Open Labels Initiative | Project dedicated to developing transparent trust scoring and labeling infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, with a focus on core research on trust algorithms, enhancing platform tooling such as APIs and dashboards, and growing ecosystem adoption through integrations, outreach, and community support. | X (Twitter) | |
| Developer experience & tooling | OpenRPC | Documentation overhaul, specification upgrade, and improved conformance testing for OpenRPC, an Apache-licensed open standard for JSON-RPC APIs that underpins critical Ethereum infrastructure. | X (Twitter), Discord | |
| Execution layer | Accelerating Besu EVM Performance | Thomas Zamojski | Designing and implementing a specialized arithmetic library for UInt256 and Int256, covering core EVM operations with systematic testing and benchmarking to enable Besu to further scale L1 gas limit. | |
| Execution layer | Besu for Enterprise | Kaleido | Maintaining and enhancing the Besu client while researching and developing capabilities that make future public network adoption feasible for institutions. | |
| Execution layer | Compiling Besu to RISC-V | Consensys | Compiling Java programs to RV64 to evaluate the feasibility of compiling the Besu execution client to RISC-V for proving in a zkEVM, alongside switching out the runtime. | |
| Execution layer | Coverage of the ethereum/execution-specs Reference Tests Against evmone | Paweł Bylica & Piotr Dobaczewski | Improving ethereum/execution-specs reference test coverage and ensuring full compatibility with evmone by implementing missing Osaka fork features, contributing new test cases (including for EIP-7212), and integrating automated coverage reporting into the ethereum/execution-specs CI. | |
| Execution layer | EF Internship Program Extension (EEST) | Louis Tsai | Continued work and testing for the Ethereum Execution Specification Tests (EEST). | |
| 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 | execution-apis Standardization & Improvements | acolytec3 | Updating the execution-apis OpenRPC documentation so that it's easily usable by individuals proposing spec updates to the JSON-RPC. | |
| Execution layer | Fast Ethereum Storage Cache (FESCache) | Experiment in low-latency indexing of smart contract storage on Ethereum mainnet (and any other EVM chain in principle), which involves developing a software implementation written in C11, a hardware platform that will build and host an index of the entirety of the Ethereum mainnet, and publishing a pre-print paper documenting the entire process with performance benchmarks. | ||
| Execution layer | Gas Limit Performance Benchmarking | Nethermind | Building tooling to help with Stateful EEST tests, benchmark runners, json-rpc compatibility, repricing analysis, and ensuring that the upcoming hardfork has everything in place for a gas limit increase. | |
| General research | Academic Grants Round | Grants round funding formal research that aims to create more knowledge about Ethereum, blockchain technology, and related domains. | ||
| Layer 2 | Championing Native Rollups | L2BEAT | Developing the concept of native rollups through progressive research, design, and implementation across execution specs, precompiles, fee markets, and sequencing strategies. | |
| Layer 2 | growthepie | Listing and maintenance of Ethereum Mainnet data, including key data modules such as fundamentals, economics, blockspace usage, application metrics, and DA metrics. | X (Twitter) | |
| Other | Audrey Tang | Continued collaboration with the EF to realize the public benefit potential of Ethereum and related technologies. | ||
| Other | Columbia-Ethereum Research Center for Blockchain Protocol Design | Conducting advanced research and workforce training across critical infrastructure topics (e.g. consensus mechanisms, protocol architecture, incentive and staking economics). The Center's activities include research grants, postdoctoral and graduate student fellowships, an industry research-in-residence program, and several events that disseminate research results to the wider community including the annual Columbia CryptoEconomics Workshop and summer school. | ||
| 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 | Ethereum Season of Internships | Summer internships offered across the Ethereum ecosystem to help establish more paths for the next generation of contributors to connect with Ethereum projects and apply their skills. | ||
| Other | Gisele Chou | Continued collaboration with the EF on building bridges between Ethereum and groups outside the Ethereum ecosystem. | ||
| Other | Node Requirements for PeerDAS & Beyond | StereumLabs | Providing a comprehensive, independent view of client performance and interoperability in the Ethereum ecosystem, helping node operators and client teams make better infrastructure decisions. | |
| Other | Walletbeat | Open-repository of EVM-compatible wallets, providing reviews to help ensure the Ethereum wallet ecosystem remains competitive, interoperable, and upholds Ethereum values. | ||
| Protocol growth & support | Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF): Cohort 6 | Stipends for cohort members of the EPF, a program designed to onboard developers to the process through which protocol development happens. |
Total awarded in Q3 2025: $14,347,918.55
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.