Allocation Update – Q4 2023

Community & education AAvolution House Istanbul Community-run event organized in Istanbul, Türkiye to push forward account abstraction (AA) standards, ideas, and projects to mainstream adoption. Community & education BuildETH Patterns Ethereum developer event that explored the top web3 development patterns hosted in San Francisco, California. Community & education Ethereum Costa Rica Day Event in San José, Costa Rica that focused on onboarding users and developers while covering topics such as public goods, cryptography, and Solidity. Community & education ETH Macedonia Support for ETH Macedonia’s grassroots activities, including engaging with the community on Discord and organizing meetups in Skopje, Macedonia. Community & education Ethereum Lima Day Conference in Lima, Peru to onboard new Ethereum users with basic talks and educate developers through technical sessions and workshops. Community & education Eurocrypt 2024 Scientific conference bringing together researchers in cryptography and IT security, from academia and industry. Community & education Fast Software Encryption (FSE) Conference 2024 Academic conference focusing on fast and secure primitives for symmetric cryptography that covers a broad range of practical and theoretical topics. Community & education Global Governance Gathering 2 Event organized in Istanbul, Türkiye covering topics related to governance and the technology surrounding it. Community & education India Ecosystem Development Manbir Singh Ethereum ecosystem development in India, with a focus on outreach to developers, community builders, and universities. Twitter, Telegram Community & education International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC) 2024 Workshop to discuss the possibilities and limitations of formal methods for blockchain technology. Community & education Nethermind Summit Istanbul Builder event that featured technical explorations around the cornerstones of blockchain: security, scalability, and decentralization. Community & education Onboarding to Ethereum Web3 Academy Free educational initiative that focuses on educating high school students in smaller cities around Serbia about Ethereum. Community & education Rhino Review 0xarmagan Journal dedicated to providing home stakers with the latest developments in Ethereum staking and distributed validator technology (DVT). Community & education SNARK Fundamentals Errol Drummond Online course and resource aimed at explaining the core concepts and modular components inherent in zero knowledge (ZK) systems from first principles. Community & education Southeast Asia Run-A-Validator Workshops Samuel Chong Series of workshops aiming to grow the grassroots solo node operator community in Southeast Asia. Community & education Vyper Day Event dedicated to demonstrating the latest developments within the Vyper language and developer tooling, hosted in Istanbul, Türkiye. Community & education ZK Auditing Fellowship yAcademy A free full-length ZK auditing fellowship for advanced developers that comprises trial-by-fire ZK audits of pre- and in-production code. Community & education ZK Hack Istanbul Hackathon organized in Istanbul, Türkiye to build new projects that showcase what ZK can do. Community & education #aPRENDOcripto Latam Proof of Integrity Educational program providing training on blockchain technology, Ethereum educational material, and financial literacy to vulnerable communities across 14 Latin American countries. Consensus layer Kurtosis Add Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) support to the Kurtosis Kubernetes featureset, to allow devops and others to restart instances for enhanced testing and shadowforks. This is also a precursor to support syncing public devnets and testnets. Consensus layer PBS/ePBS Research & Prototyping Stefan Lindberg Series of articles describing the current proposer-builder separation (PBS) landscape and the latest developments around improving PBS and ePBS, such as optimistic relays, pepc-boost, MEV-Boost+, and MEV-Boost++. Consensus layer ROP-6: Stackelberg Attacks & MEV Daji Landis & Nikolaj I. Schwartzbach Research on the effects that Stackelberg attacks can have on miner extractable value, to illuminate the underlying complexity of games on the blockchain and emphasize the care needed in designing good transaction fee mechanisms. Consensus layer Towards a Holistic Formalization of Ethereum’s Economics Brett Palatiello Building a macroeconomic model of Ethereum with a focus on staking and understanding equilibria and dynamics. The goal is to better understand the effects of liquid staking and similar constructions (e.g. restaking) in order to minimize their undesirable effects on e.g. stake concentration. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Acceleration Program Ecosystem Development & Coordination Paul Yu Ecosystem development and coordination for PSE‘s Acceleration Program, which seeks to onboard promising talent to the ZK and cryptography world. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Acceleration Program & ZK Contribution Program Mo Jalil Streamlining the Acceleration Program’s processes and scaling the educational curriculum of the ZK Contribution Program to provide robust, open-source learning resources to the community. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Chiquito Rute Figueiredo & Steve Wang Chiquito is a high-level structured language for implementing zero knowledge proof (ZKP) applications. Most ZKP domain specific languages (DSLs) are based on writing constraints, witness generation, and some abstraction for DRY like templates or gadgets. Chiquito allows the developer to think in more high-level and structured abstractions than most ZKP DSLs, while not sacrificing performance. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Daimo ERC-4337 smart contract wallet that runs on stablecoins only, is non-custodial, and does not require any seed phrases. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Efficient Batch Verification of ECDSA Signatures Implement an efficient batch verification of ECDSA signatures using P-256, as part of a larger project to develop a circuit in a user-friendly DSL and use aggregation- or recursion-friendly proof systems to output succinct proof of verification. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Email Wallet Sora Suegami, Aayush Gupta, Elo Mukoro, & Wataru Contract wallet using emails that allows users to send crypto assets simply by sending emails without any actions from recipients (powered by ZK Email). Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Folding Schemes Research Pierre Reviewing modern folding schemes research and enhancing the development experience with the folding-schemes library. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs FRI Security Research & Educational Resources Colin Roberts & Waylon Jepsen Research on the security of algebraic hash functions and Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proofs of Proximity (FRI) and developing a curriculum for learning the necessary mathematics to understand ZK cryptography and its primitives. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Front-End Development for PSE Projects Kalidou Diagne Front-end development for PSE projects, including the PSE website, learning courses, and jubmoji.quest. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Groth16 Verifier in Fe onurinanc Developer-friendly Groth16 Verifier written in Fe which can be used by Circom users to build ZK applications. GitHub, Twitter Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Jubmoji Project deployed at Devconnect Istanbul that utilizes NFC chips to give out ZK-friendly Baby JubJub signatures to participants as a form of provable private data, providing an educational experience about the possibility of personal control over private data using ZKPs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs MPC Research 0xvon Research on multi-party computation (MPC), especially Threshold ECDSA, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and publicly auditable MPC, which will be summarized into explainer articles. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs NFC x ZK Development Supported the technical development of PSE‘s Devconnect Istanbul NFC x ZK activations, including Jubmoji. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs On-Chain AAA for DePin Improving and deploying a dapp that represents the on-chain authentication, administration, and authorization (AAA) for decentralized internet networks. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs pylookup Yu-Ming Hsu, Jing-Jie Wang, Paul Yu, & Harry Liu Implementing a simple, educational Python lookup argument. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs P-256 WebAuthn Circom Implementation SleepingShell P-2556 WebAuthn Circom implementation, which will be integrated in a smart contract wallet that validates WebAuthn ES256 attestation within a zkSNARK verifier. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Starky Implementation of BLS12-381 Signatures Electron Labs Developing ZK-recursion circuits for the BLS12-381 signatures using the plonky2 framework. Twitter Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs T-FHE Research Alex Kampa (AZKR Research) Elaborated on existing documentation of FHE over the torus (T-FHE) to make the materials more accessible to newcomers with little mathematical background. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs TLSN-ONRAMP Jomo & Ryan MacArthur Privacy-preserving mobile web application allowing anonymous peers to exchange fiat for ETH using TLSNotary. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Torus-Based Cryptography Techniques Research Robert Granger Exploring the applicability of existing and potentially new torus-based cryptography techniques to determine the efficiency of Whisk and Curdleproofs when instantiated in the target group G_T, in terms of both time and space. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Towards Efficient ZKML Models Saeyoon Oh Research on the fundamental concepts essential for proving the integrity of machine learning (ML) models using ZKPs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs UniRep Halo2 R&D Bhargav Annem Circom-STARK prover development and FHE-related research for UniRep Protocol. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Unsound Halo2 Jaewon In Establish a repository featuring small Halo2 circuits, each presenting a unique soundness bug and a way to fix it. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK Email Aayush Gupta, Sora Suegami, & Elo Mukoro A protocol for creating proof of email by selectively disclosing information contained in the email. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK-Friendly ML Model Explorations Saeyoon Oh Exploring different ZK-applicable ML algorithms that can perform the Heart Failure Prediction Dataset and comparing them. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK Learning Grant Seongsu Jeon Research on Liam Eagen’s Elliptic Curve Inner Product, inner pairing product, and lattice-based ZKP, which will be summarized and shared publicly. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZKML Benchmarking Jingchi Zhang Developing a ZKML benchmark that aids developers in discerning the trade-offs and performance nuances among various frameworks. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs zkMobileNet Semar Augusto Implement a MobileNet model using Nova and perform analyses on different quantization methods that can be used on a neural network. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZKP Math Theories Lectures Matan Prasma (AZKR Research) Weekly lectures on a mathematical course from the basics of sets, groups & fields up to the pairing construction of Elliptic Curves. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK Soundedness Research Tomoki Ono Research on how R1CS-based ZKP systems achieve soundedness, which will be summarized into explainer articles in both English and Japanese. Developer experience & tooling AA MEV Monitor BlockPI Network AA browser focusing on maximal extractable value (MEV) analysis and data visualization that will show basic AA statistics and provide analyses of the bundler transaction frontrun and AA MEV incidences. Developer experience & tooling Fe Language Server Build a language server implementation for Fe and integrate it with the VSCode plugin. Developer experience & tooling Fe Repository Contributions Saif Katout Support for contributions made to the Fe repository. Developer experience & tooling Iron Wallet Developer-centric wallet that has the usual functionality of a crypto wallet, as well as additional built-in tooling to speed up builders’ development workflows. Developer experience & tooling Solhint v4 Protofire DAO Continued development of Solhint, an open-source Solidity linter. Execution layer Account Abstraction Developer Team Supporting the AA developer team’s continuous work on ERC-4337 and its implementation, infrastructure, documentation, supporting the ecosystem, RIP-7560 (native AA), and additional AA research. Execution layer Nethermind 2023 Internship Program Support for Nethermind’s internship program, with a focus on core protocol contributors. Execution layer ROP-7: Economic Models of Signature Aggregation in Account Abstraction Davide Rezzoli Investigating the design of a mechanism to align the Aggregator and User incentives in AA, in which the Aggregator should perform as much aggregation as possible and the User should pay the lowest fee necessary to compensate the Aggregator for its service. Execution layer Verkle Tries Implementation Support OnlyDust Support for OnlyDust community contributors to continue working on a Verkle Tries implementation for Hyperledger Besu. General growth & support African Digital Repatriation Project Mulenga Kapwepwe African digital repatriation project that seeks to find a mechanism to bring African artifacts (and the ticket revenue they generate) closer to their communities of origin, as part of the Next Billion Fellowship Cohort #3. General growth & support Data Collection Grants Round Grants round to encourage research and development around data collection and visualization of the Ethereum network. General growth & support Road to Devcon Grants Round Grants round to support the growth of local Ethereum communities, initiatives, and projects in Southeast Asia. General growth & support 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. General growth & support UNICEF CryptoFund Financial vehicle allowing UNICEF to receive, hold, and disburse cryptocurrency to increase their operational efficiency, cost effectiveness, and transparency. Other IC3 Academic blockchain research initiative based at Cornell Tech with researchers across multiple universities with the goal of bringing the science of blockchains to the forefront and delivering blockchain innovation in code. Other Security Alliance (SEAL) Common good infrastructure for coordination between security professionals, protocols, and the community to collaborate on and launch ambitious and impactful security initiatives.