Allocation Update: Q4 2022 | Ethereum Foundation Blog

Community & education Blockchain Education in Nepal eSatya Support to host free meetups and their blockchain course that aims to familiarize Nepalese developers with the key elements of blockchain through project-based learning. Community & education CryptoStats Community-driven project that provides neutral crypto metrics and develops tools for gathering data and building websites that visualize the data in practical ways for the community. Community & education DeFi LATAM Meetup Meetup with educational talks and workshops to celebrate the end of the year and foster enthusiasm to continue building together in the next year. Community & education Devcon Satellite Events Grants Sponsorship of Devcon-related meetups and watch parties around the globe, with the purpose of decentralizing Devcon VI and boosting local Ethereum communities. Community & education Devcon VI Quadratic Funding Side Event Ethereum Colombia Side event during Devcon VI to bring together the builders and organizers of the Latin American projects that participated in the quadratic funding round. Community & education ETHBKK 2022 Online conference in Bangkok, Thailand that aims to highlight Southeast Asian projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. Community & education Ethereum Honduras Supporting Ethereum Honduras in their community-building efforts, which include hosting meetups, creating educational content, and organizing grants programs. Community & education Ethereum Hungary Meetups Meetups to bring the Hungarian Ethereum community together, with talks and discussions on Ethereum’s development. Community & education Ethereum Miami Meetup Meetup to learn more about Colombia’s tech ecosystem and Devcon VI through panel discussions. Community & education Ethereum San Diego Meetups Series of five technical meetups covering topics such as self-custody, Solidity security fundamentals, and Scaffold-eth. Community & education Ethereum Virtual Machine Book Joshua Trujillo Full zero-to-one resource on the EVM covering information on areas such as the instruction set, assembly languages, and security considerations. Community & education Ethereum Uruguay at Punta Tech Support for Ethereum Uruguay to bring web3 content to Punta Tech for the first time via educating attendees, onboarding them to web3, and organizing workshops. Community & education ETHLatam Meetup Side event held during LABITCONF to spotlight the various Ethereum LatAm communities, bringing newcomers and existing community members together. Community & education ETHVietnam Community Building Efforts to grow the community of Ethereum developers in Vietnam through running workshops, a hacker house, and a three-day event and hackathon. Community & education Hack.labs() CTF Capture the Flag (CTF) security competition held at the end of ETH Medellín in which participants break, optimize, and hack smart contracts. Community & education Kyiv Ethereum Meetups Meetups and workshops organized in Kyiv, Ukraine, covering topics such as EVM smart contracts, zero-knowledge (ZK), and non-custodial wallets. Community & education Merge Data Challenge Challenge that rewarded data analysts who could document the best Merge data insights into the most readable blog post possible. Community & education Peoples’ Cooperative Event Physical event held in Lagos, Nigeria geared towards introducing high school students and teachers to blockchain and Ethereum, and a virtual event educating the general public on Ethereum’s developments and layer 2s. Community & education Sin Fronteras Tech WorkingUp Hackathon focused on developing solutions to the problems that Ecuador’s migrant population experiences. Community & education Smart Contracts Online Course and Lectures Distributed Lab Online course in Ukrainian covering the fundamentals of blockchain technology, smart contracts, and Solidity, with lecture videos accessible on Prometheus and Youtube. Community & education Student Blockchain Hackathon Hongo Web3 Valley Hackathon for students in Japan focusing on the intersection between blockchain and social issues, with workshops and talks to guide beginners. Community & education Tech4Democracy Bogotá IE University Showcasing Latin American projects that are developing blockchain and web3 technologies that have the potential to further democratic values. Community & education Web3 Onboarding Event Cripto Curiosas Talks and workshops in Peru aimed at onboarding women to web3. Community & education ZK Hack III Four-week virtual event featuring weekly workshops on key ZK concepts and tools, and advanced puzzle solving competitions to find bugs in protocols. Community & education 5th ZKProof Workshop Workshop held in Tel Aviv, Israel, to promote the standardization of ZK proof cryptography and increase the engagement of companies and researchers worldwide. Community & education 13th Bar Ilan University Winter School on Cryptography Program comprising lectures and tutorials that explore recent advances in blockchain technology, including consensus protocols, smart contracts, and bridges. Hosted in Tel Aviv, Israel. Consensus layer Data Availability Sampling Networking RFP Codex Researching, modeling, and simulating a double-layer Kademlia protocol for Data Availability Sampling (DAS). Consensus layer DendrETH Metacraft Labs Project developing ZK circuits for verifying claims regarding the current state of Ethereum, backed by the signatures of the entire Ethereum validator set. These ZK circuits will then be utilized in light client smart contracts. Consensus layer Ethereum Pools Dashboard that aggregates and monitors Ethereum validators belonging to well-known entities, such as staking pools and exchanges. Further develop an open-source Golang tool to allow monitoring validators at scale. Consensus layer Lighthouse Sigma Prime Continued development of the Lighthouse consensus client. Consensus layer Open Zeppelin Open Zeppelin to audit the security of Ethereum’s codebase. Consensus layer Secure-Signer Puffer Validator client that prevents equivocation enforced through trusted hardware and remote attestation, is compatible with existing consensus clients and MEV-Boost. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Benchmarking Modern ZK Proof Systems with AI Primitives Modulus Labs Whitepaper that provides comprehensive guidance on the selection of ZK proofs for given AI use cases, elaborating on topics such as performance metrics for the different proof systems (across prove time and memory) and the common AI primitives/bench-objects which meaningfully test these systems. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs BLISH Cryptography Course Series of free, cryptography-related lectures and workshops for students in Ukraine with strong mathematical skills. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs BlockWallet Building a robust product-market fit roadmap for BlockWallet—a privacy-focused, non-custodial browser extension wallet that enables users to store funds and interact with blockchain applications privately. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ECDSA Set Membership Circuits Blake McAlevey-Scurr Write Circom circuits to perform ZK proofs of ECDSA signatures. To be used in an application that will allow users to anonymously prove membership of a group of addresses on the fly. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Exploring the Feasibility of MACI in MPC Lev Alexandrovich Soukhanov and Yaroslav Rebenko Alekseevich Research on the mathematical issues that need to be understood and prototypes that need to be built in order to estimate whether minimal anti-collusion infrastructure (MACI) in multi-party computation (MPC) is feasible. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs P2P ZK-Chat Kaylee George Library and browser extension that creates a decentralized anonymous chat with spam protection and some resistance to Sybil attacks. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs RLN Library in Rust Rasul Ibragimov Further development of a user-friendly and WASM-compatible rate limiting nullifier (RLN) library in Rust with the Vac team that allows users to generate proofs and witnesses, build provers and verifiers, and verify proofs. Build a Persistent Merkle Tree implementation for Rust. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Temporary Anonymous Zone (TAZ) Colleen Rose, Danilo Kim, Falco Rodenburg, Lee Poettcker, and Rich Warner Continued development of TAZ, which will enable end-users to easily try anonymity apps and developers to use the codebase as a starting point to learn, customize, or build their own applications. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Training Optimization on Neural Networks with ZKP Seiya Kobayashi Developing a protocol that implements a commit-reveal scheme where provers try to prove that the evaluation score of their testing data fits inside predetermined error bounds, thus lowering the costs of generating proofs of validity for neural networks. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Uncloak Building a knowledge base for cryptography, supporting the growth and education of ZK developers and the broader cryptography community. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML) Cathie So Platform for machine learning developers to quickly convert their models trained in Tensorflow and PyTorch into a ZK-compatible one. Will include a library of Circom circuits, a Python-Circom translator, and a dapp that hosts, verifies, and pays out bounties. Developer experience & tooling ERC-4337 Bundler for Go Hazim Jumali and John Rising Bounties for independent audits and contributions to a modular Go implementation of an ERC-4337 Bundler. Developer experience & tooling Rust Ethereum Virtual Machine (revm) Dragan Rakita Rust implementation of the EVM that is easy to integrate and use, supports all past forks, passes all Ethereum state tests, and is as fast as EVMone. Developer experience & tooling Solhint Protofire Solidity linter that enables Solidity developers to write standardized smart contract code through improved code quality, order, readability, style guides, preventing known bugs, and providing security alerts. Developer experience & tooling WTF Academy 0xAA Free, open-source, and community-reviewed tutorials on Ethereum development (e.g. Solidity, Ethers.js) in Mandarin Chinese, with bilingual (English-Chinese) translations in progress. Execution layer Research on ‘Commitment’ Against Front-Running Attacks Andrea Canidio and Vincent Danos Game-theoretic analysis of front-running attacks, specifically studying the feasibility of using new commit-reveal methods as a potential remedy to the issue. General research Accessibility Research Haptics DAO Research assessing the issues encountered by those with accessibility needs when navigating the web3 ecosystem, to generate a set of tailored community- and WCAG-informed best practices. General research DeScan Georgy Ishmaev and Martijn de Vos Research into the development and implementation of an improved Skip Graph algorithm for decentralized search that can tolerate adversarial peers, and how this tool can be used to store a complete Ethereum transaction history. General research Stablecoin Risks Research Tammy Yang Research and analytics for an information hub related to stablecoins risk factors. Indirect funding Technical Challenges in Enterprise Ethereum Continued exploration of issues and solutions for enterprise users of Ethereum in areas including decentralized identity, NIST standards alignment, Baseline protocol specification, and layer 2 standards and specifications. Layer 2 BLS Snap A MetaMask Snap which integrates BLS Wallet to MetaMask, thus allowing users to manage assets, bundle transactions, and lower gas fees. Protocol growth & support Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF) Stipends for cohort members of the EPF, a program designed to onboard developers to the process through which protocol development happens. User experience NiceNode Open-source, open license, and free GUI application that enables users to easily run an Ethereum node of their choice at the click of a button.