Allocation Update – Q3 2024

Community & education Blockchain Summer Bootcamp Africa Blockchain Institute Bootcamp introducing teenagers to blockchain through hands-on learning, workshops, and collaborative projects organized in Cotonou, Benin and taught in French. Email Community & education BlockHack Kerala Blockchain Academy Hackathon hosted in Trivandrum, India with tracks focused on Ethereum onboarding and inclusion, blockchain for Sustainable Development Goals, and building dapps on Ethereum and layer 2s (L2). Community & education Building Builders Web3Clubs 3-month Solidity program and in-person Solidity bootcamps organized in Nairobi, Kenya. Community & education Crecimiento Activities SEED Org Supporting SEED Org’s Ethereum-focused activities at the Crecimiento pop-up city in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Community & education EEA Industry Day Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Conference exploring how Ethereum is powering enterprises globally, hosted in Bangkok, Thailand. Community & education ERC55 Community Meetups Developer-focused meetups organized both online and in-person in São Paulo, Brazil, focusing on the latest technical topics in Ethereum. Community & education Ethereum for Everyone: Learn & Build Danny Thomx 3-month free technical and non-technical Ethereum training program run in Rwanda. Twitter Community & education Ethereum Hungary Meetups Monthly Ethereum meetups in Budapest, Hungary with technical talks, presentations, group discussions, and workshops. Community & education Ethereum México 2024 Conference delving into topics such as smart contracts, zero knowledge (ZK), and public goods, hosted in Mérida, Mexico Community & education Ethereum & Web3 Security Bootcamp DeFiHackLabs Hybrid bootcamp delving into writing, debugging, testing, and auditing smart contracts organized in Taiwan. Community & education ETH Pura Vida Ethereum Costa Rica Conference and hackathon hosted in San José, Costa Rica that explores topics such as developer onboarding, cryptography, and real-world use cases. Community & education ETHShanghai Conference organized in Shanghai, China, discussing topics such as scaling solutions, privacy-preserving technologies, and on-chain security. Community & education ETHTaipei Community development and educational outreach in Taipei, Taiwan through regular meetups, educational blog posts, and engaging with academics. Telegram Community & education Fast Software Encryption (FSE) Conference 2025 Academic conference focusing on fast and secure primitives for symmetric cryptography that covers a broad range of practical and theoretical topics. Community & education Home Staking Summit Stakesaurus Summit in Singapore dedicated to Ethereum solo and home stakers, discussing topics such as staking tooling and infrastructure, distributed validator technology, and the importance of home staking for the Ethereum network. Community & education Invisible Garden 6-week developer residency in Chiang Mai, Thailand focusing on Ethereum and zero knowledge proofs (ZKPs) through bootcamps, workshops, and office hour sessions. Community & education magma2 Borderless Africa Supporting the second cohort of magma, a 2-week residency organized in Kenya for African builders and founders comprising office hour sessions, peer-to-peer coordination, and workshops. Community & education MEV Shanghai Panta Rhei MEV-focused event in Shanghai, China that combines a 7-day research house with 2 days of side events delving into MEV supply chain and redistribution. Community & education MEV TOKYO Titania Research Ethereum research house and event exploring issues such as MEV, staking, and loss versus rebalancing (LVR), organized in Tokyo, Japan. Community & education Onchain Builder Lab EducatETH 14-week online program taught in Spanish for developers to learn about blockchain and build on-chain dapps on Ethereum. Community & education ProgCrypto Camp Program in Tokyo, Japan with beginner workshops followed by more advanced sessions led by researchers and Ethereum developers in fields such as ZKP, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC). Community & education Road to Devcon Grants Round Grants round to support the growth of local Ethereum communities, initiatives, and projects in Southeast Asia. Community & education Serbian and the Balkans Ecosystem Development Bogdan Jovićević Serbia and wider Balkan ecosystem development initiatives, focusing on university activities (e.g. fundamental research, blockchain student clubs, hackathons) and developer communities. LinkedIn Community & education Shenzhen Researcher House Panta Rhei Researcher house in Shenzhen, China revolving around ZK rollup economics, exploring research topics such as pre-confirmations, based rollups, and forced inclusion lists. Community & education Technical Governance Working Group DAOstar Establishing a working group to research good practices and applicable controls for web3 projects, with the goal of enhancing the security and governance of technical assets. Community & education Verifiable Summit zkWarsaw Conference in Warsaw, Poland dedicated to applied cryptography, focusing on the trustless verifiability of data as a fuel of utility within the decentralized world. Community & education Web3Bridge Support for Cohorts XI and XII of the Web3Bridge program, a 16-week hybrid course focused on training developers in Solidity and other web3 technologies. Community & education Web3Privacy Now Meetup Web3Privacy Now Event hosted in Rome, Italy centered on digital ethics, public goods, and grassroots movements. Community & education zkCity Cryptography and ZK bootcamp in Buenos Aires, Argentina covering topics such as cryptographic fundamentals, proof systems, and zkSNARKS through theoretical and practical sessions. Community & education ZKP Cryptography Course Mathematical Academy ZKP cryptography course organized in Belgrade, Serbia delving into theoretical knowledge and practical exercises. Consensus layer Ethereum Peer Scoring Research Lioba Heimbach, Yann Vonlanthen, Lucianna Kiffer, & Roger Wattenhofer Research to understand the drivers behind a node’s performance in the network in terms of peer score, and the effects this may have on the rewards earned at the consensus layer. Consensus layer GossipSub Analytics Towards PeerDAS ProbeLab Developing or extending the current set of tools to measure the performance of the network and the GossipSub protocol in the Ethereum network as it gears up to the PeerDAS transition. Using these tools to perform analysis to understand the p2p network and suggesting improvements such as IDONTWANT messages. Consensus layer Grandine Continued development of the Grandine consensus client written in Rust. Consensus layer Lighthouse Sigma Prime Continued development of the Lighthouse consensus client. Consensus layer Nimbus Consensus Layer Client Status Continued development of the Nimbus consensus layer client. Consensus layer ROP-9.2: FOCIL Specs & Implementation Jihoon Song Contributing to the publication of the EIP, consensus and execution specs, and the implementation of the first prototype of Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Backend & Development Support for Pollen Labs Sero Backend development, TypeScript, and blockchain application building for IOU and blockchain-powered eSIM. Please note that this project has since been sunset by PSE, you may visit this page for more information. @0xsero on Discord Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Backpocket Cursive Development of infrastructure and applications for making private queries across personal data to discover commonalities between participants, using MPC and FHE in collaboration with Gauss Labs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Bandada Han Development of Bandada, including integrating on-chain credentials, improving the credentials TypeScript package, and enhancing the user and developer experience. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs CCS+ Tomoki Ono Implement an extension of the customizable constraint system (CCS) which supports lookup operations, focusing on halo2 style lookups. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Circuitscan Ben Green Circuit verifier explorer that enables users to check that the deployed circuit source code matches the expected source code, and to interact with applications directly if the frontend becomes unusuable. Telegram Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Decentralized Identity Foundation Supporting the Decentralized Identity Foundation in advancing ZK standardization efforts. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ECPDKSAP 3327 Elliptic Curve Pairing Dual-Key Stealth Address Protocol (ECPDKSAP) designed to enhance transaction privacy on Ethereum by using advanced elliptic curve pairing techniques. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Email Wallet Auditing for Email Wallet, an Ethereum smart contract wallet that can be controlled by sending emails. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Fe Special Projects Continued development of a language server implementation for Fe and other projects under Fe. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Halo2 Starter teddav Write examples of halo2 circuits presenting soundness bugs to educate users on understanding halo2 circuit bugs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Implementing & Accelerating Torus-Based Cryptography for SSLE Mamy Ratsimbazafy Implementing new primitives and accelerating Torus-based cryptography for Single Secret Leader Election, making the research more concrete, measurable, and practical. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Learning Grant on Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation Hy Ngo Learning grant to study foundational and advanced Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE). Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs PLUME arkworks Sergey Kaunov Bump the PLUME signature scheme arkworks implementation dependency, develop internal module instead of deprecated dependency, improve the implementation, and publish the results. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Porting Real-World ML Model(s) into ZK Li@only4sim Integrating advanced machine learning (ML) models, specifically designed for predicting hourly rainfall distribution using polarimetric radar data, with blockchain oracles through ZKPs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Porting ZK-Kit Circuits Yash Bharti Porting circomlib circuits from Circom to Noir for integrating with the ZK-Kit circuit repo for Noir. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Rapidsnark Mobile Prover Antoni Martin Project providing a toolset to simplify development of ZK applications on mobile and make ZK on mobile a developer-friendly technology. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs SNARK to Prove X Prime Numbers Exist Below Y Logan Norman & Subhasish Behera Producing a SNARK using IVC to prove that X prime numbers exist below a threshold Y. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Sonobe winderica Implement ProtoGalaxy modules for Sonobe, a modular library to fold arithmetic circuit instances in an incremental verifiable computation (IVC) style. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs zk-mpc Yoii Inc. Use ZKPs to extend the SPDZ MPC protocol, enabling third-party verification of the constraints on secret input values and the correctness of output values. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Community Link Connectivity Specialist Javier Aubert Connectivity specialist for Community Link, who provided hardware recommendations, supported the execution of trial runs, and refined the system by analyzing data from the trial runs. Please note that this project has since been sunset by PSE, you may visit this page for more information. Developer experience & tooling Account Abstraction Contracts OpenZeppelin Developing modular implementations of key ERC-4337 contracts and focusing on account abstraction solutions by creating secure, open-source libraries for new signature schemes and cryptographic primitives, along with comprehensive developer tooling and documentation. Developer experience & tooling BuidlGuidl Nodes Community building and education effort to improve the geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes. Developer experience & tooling Commit-Boost Open-source platform enabling Ethereum validators to securely execute MEV-Boost and other community-built commitment protocols. Twitter Developer experience & tooling Decentralized Storage Backends for OCI Registry Aata Hokoridani, Alok Nerurkar, Andrew Macpherson, Chris Hobcroft, & Pavel Research and create community educational materials on currently available decentralized storage backends in the context of usage in decentralized OCI registry. Developer experience & tooling Web3.js ChainSafe Continued development and maintenance of Web3.js, an extension platform for building decentralized peer-to-peer applications in TypeScript/JavaScript to interact with Ethereum. Execution layer Caplin SSF Benchmarking Erigon Performance benchmarks and prototyping of SSF-related consensus layer changes in Caplin. Execution layer EEST Fuzzer Danno Ferrin Implementation of a code-block based fuzzer working with the Ethereum Execution Spec Tests. Execution layer Erigon Funding for Erigon’s continued work on the Ethereum mainnet, specifically their execution client development and applied R&D on performance optimizations. Execution layer Nimbus Execution Layer Client Status Continued development of the Nimbus execution layer client. General growth & support CiviCue Civic technology platform experimenting with citizen participation and direct democracy through various voting mechanisms using blockchain technology. General research Formal Modelling & Generic Fuzzer for Mempool Exploit Discovery Yuzhe Tang Based on previous research output, develop formal methods and models with more automated fuzzer software tools to discover exploit patterns, synthesize attacks, and inform security efforts in the Ethereum mempool. General research State of Web3 Grants Report 2024 Metagov Research reviewing 13 grant programs and 5 tooling companies to analyze the trends, challenges, and opportunities within the ecosystem of web3 grants. Layer 2 Improvements to 2D Reed-Solomon Codes in DAS Birenjith Sasidharan & Emanule Viterbo Improving the 2D Reed-Solomon Codes in DAS via a new family of block circulant codes stitching together many copies of generalized Reed-Solomon code as its component codes. Layer 2 L2s Forced Inclusion Mechanisms Nic Lin & Anton Cheng Research on L2s‘ forced inclusion mechanisms and the development of a software development kit (SDK) that wallets can integrate to force include transactions of the user’s choice to improve censorship resistance. 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 Signature Token (SigToken) George Mason University & Shandong University Novel session protocol for decentralized web3 login, designed to be compatible with existing applications. Protocol growth & support Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF): Cohort 5 Stipends for cohort members of the EPF, a program designed to onboard developers to the process through which protocol development happens. Protocol growth & support WiEP Internship Support for Women in Ethereum Protocol‘s growth and development activities (e.g. study groups, community calls, in-person events). Protocol growth & support 4844 Data Challenge EIP-4844 data analysis and visualization blog post challenge.