Allocation Update – Q4 2024

Community & education Aleph de Verano Crecimiento 2-week event in Buenos Aires, Argentina featuring a ZK and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) bootcamp, hackathon, demo day, and talks on DeFi, infrastructure, governance, and regulation. Community & education Aleph ZK Week 3-day conference hosted during the Aleph pop-up city in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that provided a deep dive into programmable cryptography, multi-party computation (MPC), FHE, and decentralized identity systems. Community & education Algebraic Aspects in the Design and Cryptanalysis of Modern Symmetric Cryptography (ALPSY) 2025 Research workshop that unites experts in arithmetic oriented symmetric-key primitives and their cryptanalysis to foster collaborations on significant research problems, including special sessions on Poseidon. Community & education bETHink Hackathon Hackathon organized in Shanghai, China with tracks focused on rebuilding social trust systems, open-source and public goods, and human verification. Community & education Bucharest Ethereum Hub ETH Bucharest Supporting activities run at the local Ethereum hub in Bucharest, Romania including hackathons, meetups, a Solidity bootcamp, and a university module. Community & education Blockchain Foundations Textbook Dionysis Zindros Updating the Blockchain Foundations textbook with chapters on PoS and accountability, which will be used to teach a course at the University of Athens. Community & education Cohort-Based Ethereum Education Program BlockHeader Web3 Cohort-based Solidity training and hackathon in Kaduna, Nigeria. Community & education DeFi Security Summit Event held in Bangkok, Thailand that delved into the education and technical advances in securing decentralization applications on top of blockchain technology. Community & education Devcon Satellite Events Funding round to support events that spotlight Devcon SEA programming or experiences. Community & education EOF V1 Educational Materials in Chinese Hung-Ying Tai Articles and video tutorials in Mandarin Chinese to cover the details of proposed EOF v1 (EIP-7692) and any related background knowledge. Twitter, Email Community & education ETH Belgrade ETH Belgrade University and community initiatives, including meetups in Serbia and other Balkan countries, lectures at the University of Belgrade, and courses on Solidity, security, and ZK. Email Community & education Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress Web3Privacy Now Cypherpunk conference hosted in Bangkok, Thailand that delved into themes such as practical privacy and self-sovereignty tooling, the moral role of cryptography, and the political culture of Ethereum. Community & education Ethereum Day Series – Mysteries of the Blockchain Black Ice Hackerspace Series of events organized in Kazakhstan exploring topics such as privacy, security, and the EVM. Community & education Ethereum Hackathon Support & Archives Alina Latinina Providing community-building and operations support to Ethereum hackathon organizers, while documenting the process to create hackathon archives. Community & education Ethereum Melbourne Series of local Ethereum meetups run in Melbourne, Australia, focusing on topics such as EVM security, account abstraction, and MEV. Community & education Ethereum Security Research Bootcamp Guild Audits Free security developer training program in Nigeria conducted through lectures, events, and hackathons. Community & education Ethereum Slovenia Monthly meetups delving into themes such as infrastructure, security, and developer tooling, alongside quarterly events to foster collaboration among web3 businesses and encourage web2 companies to enter the web3 ecosystem. Community & education ETHIndia Devfolio Hackathon hosted in Bengaluru, India focused on developing decentralized applications for the future in India. Community & education ETH Kipu Series of community and education initiatives across 2025 including learning hub, staking initiatives, Kipu Impact, and the annual ETH Latam conference. Community & education Formal Verification of ZKP Workshop ZKProof Workshop bringing together formal verification experts to foster collaboration, share insights, and advance formal verification efforts in ZKP systems. Community & education Latincrypt 2025 Week-long cryptography-focused event that will feature the Latincrypt conference alongside educational events such as ASCrypto and CatioCrypt in Medellín, Colombia. Community & education Mempool Guru Fan Zhang Public service system that collects, persists, and analyzes the Ethereum mempool data for research. Community & education Modular Carnival 2025 Modular Crypto Event in Belo Horizonte, Brazil that will explore topics such as L2s, staking, and ZK, featuring a conference, hackathon, and debate competition. Community & education Programmable Cryptography Research Workshop 0xPARC Programmable cryptography workshop hosted during the Research Workshop and Symposium in Stanford that identified key research priorities and discussed important problems in the field. Community & education The Red Guild Enhancing Ethereum’s ecosystem resilience through security research, education, and public awareness initiatives. 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 SEED Org Implementing a series of community-building programs in Argentina and Latin America, including SEEDLatam, SEEDNodes, and more. Community & education Student Research at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stipends for students conducting blockchain research at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Community & education Women in Blockchain Conference Blockchain & Web3 Community Network Event in Lusaka, Zambia that featured talks by women in tech communities, highlighting the transformative power of blockchain and Ethereum in Africa and the vital role women play in this journey. Community & education Yul Puzzles RareSkills Set of 80 puzzles for players to become comfortable with writing Yul assembly where players fill out a code block and see if the unit tests pass. Twitter Community & education ZKProof 7 ZKProof Event focused on ZK standardization efforts with an entire day dedicated to the zkEVM formal verification project, held in Sofia, Bulgaria. Consensus layer Combining Logic & Consensus via Semitopologies Murdoch Gabbay Using semitopologies to design new declarative methods of specifying and reasoning about consensus protocols. Consensus layer Hashcaster Exploration Thomas Coratger Creating developer-friendly documentation that simplifies Hashcaster’s mathematical foundations and building an open-source implementation to facilitate community adoption and the exploration of potential CPU optimizations. Twitter, Email Consensus layer libp2p libp2p Foundation Continued development of libp2p and support for various libp2p improvements critical to the Ethereum roadmap. Consensus layer Optimize Merkle Proving in ssz-rs Håvard Anda Winninge Optimizing merkleization performance for ssz-rs through studying other merkleization libraries, creating robust benchmarks to measure performance improvement, and switching to Prysm’s hashtree library to enhance hashing efficiency. Consensus layer Transaction Fee Mechanism for Inclusion Lists Nethermind Developing a transaction fee mechanism for inclusion lists that would enable researchers to better understand the flow of value through the Ethereum network, potentially impacting the user experience and effectiveness of FOCIL. Consensus layer Vero Serenita Updating Vero to prepare for the Pectra network upgrade and address popular community requests, while contributing to widely-used community tools for testing, managing, and monitoring Vero before and during the Pectra upgrade. Twitter, Telegram Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Authenticated Garbling MPZ Nakul Khambhati Implementing authenticated garbling in MPZ to complement ongoing efforts to extend MPZ for supporting malicious security. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Blockchain Powered eSIM Dungeon, Manul Singh Parihar, & GuyPhy4 Mobile-based hardware crypto wallet using eSIMs with remote provisioning of accessibility. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Commit-and-prove Lookup Research Chaya Ganesh Research into commit-and-prove lookup to potentially augment and improve the modularity of SNARK and STARK designs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Community Link Embedded Software Engineer Giammarco Casanova Full stack engineer for Community Link, focused on enhancing wireless connectivity while providing expertise in cryptography to bridge the gap between connectivity and smart contracts. Please note that this project has been sunset by PSE, you may visit this page for more information. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Community Link & Pollen Labs Smart Contract Engineer geeloko Developed smart contracts based on real user feedback, community needs, and collaborated closely with other engineers in the Community Link and Pollen Labs teams. Please note that these projects have been sunset by PSE, you may visit this page for more information. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Cursive Connections Cursive Design and development of a privacy-preserving application, piloted at Edge City Lanna and Devcon, which uses cryptographic computation on private data to surface meaningful connections between users without revealing any information publicly. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Cursive Design Contributions Tessa Maneewong Design work for Cursive‘s fall activations, including Devcon « Cryptographic Connections » booth and production/print designs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Cursive Technical Contributions Steven Elleman Technical contributions to Cursive Connections, assisting in development of a production-grade app. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ECIES Implementation in Circom Crema Building a secure and efficient ECIES encryption system in Circom with ZKP features and creating an example use case for the ECIES scheme. Twitter Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs cLean zkSecurity Developing a framework in Lean to write circuits and verify that they meet a given specification, with the goal of demonstrating an AIR arithmetization and precompiles useful to RISC-V zkVMs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Mobile edDSA Key Management Library Yash Goyal Exploring the feasibility and implementation of a secure, reusable mobile library for managing edDSA keys. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs mopro Hao-Chen Tsai, Fu-Chuan Chung, Yaroslav Yashin, & Oskar Toolkit designed for ZKPs that leverages the growing power of mobile GPUs to deliver a fast, scalable, and secure proving experience directly on client-side applications. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Multilateral Trade Credit Set-off in MPC via Graph Anonymization and Network Simplex Masato Tsutsumi (co-author) Contribution to the paper by designing an MPC algorithm that efficiently solves the minimum cost flow problem in a privacy-preserving way. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs OpenPassport Identity wallet that lets users generate privacy-preserving proofs from government-issued IDs such as passports. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Pollen Labs Core Contributor Nicole Yeh Non-technical research and project management for Pollen Labs. Please note that this project has been sunset by PSE, you may visit this page for more information. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs PSE Impact Framework Research LauNaMu Co-creating concrete impact definitions and metrics that will enable PSE teams to measure their success and support them in improving their short- and long-term strategy to achieve real world impact. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Quantum Computer Canary Kanguk Lee Investigating the potential threats that quantum computers pose to the Ethereum cryptosystem, providing a good introduction to the math and notation around quantum algorithms, and mechanical descriptions of how they work. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Replicating circom-MP-SPDZ to Support MOTION Producing documentation for MOTION and replicating circom-MP-SPDZ to circom-MOTION. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Replicating circom-MP-SPDZ to Support tfhe-rs Vishal Kulkarni & Changmin Cho Creating comprehensive documentation for tfhe-rs and adapting circom-MP-SPDZ to circom-tfhe-rs. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Semaphore Modular Smart Contract Validator Module Jimmy Chu Developing a Semaphore ERC-7579 validator module and frontend demo that enables users to install the module to their smart accounts, add members (identity commitments) to the Semaphore group, and send ZKPs on testnet. Twitter, Telegram Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Semaphore Paymaster Jihoon Song & Alfredo Bonilla Open-source tools and modular components, including a Semaphore paymaster and frontend elements, specifically designed for building account abstraction applications. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs zkintro Oskar Articles centered on ZK and programmable cryptography designed to bridge the gap between the ZK community and a broader audience with no or limited exposure to crypto and ZK. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK IR Veridise Designing an Intermediate Representation (IR) for circuit languages to address the fragmentation that exists in the circuit ecosystem, with a focus on developing the initial ZK IR library that is integrated with a proof-of-concept frontend and verification backend. Email Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs zkLean Galois Developing a Lean DSL for specifying ZK statements and a tool to automatically extract Jolt’s statements into this DSL. James’ Email, Decker’s Email Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZKLib Gregor Mitscha-Baude (zkSecurity) & Devon Tuma Establishing a Lean library for formally verified cryptographic proof systems based on Interactive Oracle Proofs (IOPs). Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK Research Engineering Study Group Team of developers in Nigeria focused on researching, implementing, and teaching the core and fundamentals of ZK protocols to onboard new and well-seasoned ZK research engineers. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs ZK & Attestation Research EAS Foundation Researching integrations between attestations and ZK to inform the potential development of open-source tools for generating proofs from attestations. Twitter, Telegram Developer experience & tooling Aderyn Cyfrin Open-source, Rust-based Solidity smart contract static analyzer designed to help protocol engineers and security researchers find vulnerabilities in Solidity code bases. Developer experience & tooling Sail to Lean University of Cambridge, Galois, & Lindy Labs Enabling the use of RISC-V semantics defined in Sail for verifying zkVMs, making the Lean backend accessible to the wider formal methods community and providing extracted semantics for teams verifying RISC-V zkVMs. Developer experience & tooling Sonatina Enhancements Lane Biocini Developing formal semantics for Sonatina, a Rust-based compiler backend, with the goal of achieving formal verification at the level of Sonatina’s IR to enhance security, efficiency, and robustness in smart contract development on the Ethereum platform. Email Developer experience & tooling tevm Will Cory TypeScript (TS) library that aims to complement existing EVM-TS browser tooling by providing typesafe low-level EVM tooling for executing bytecode in TS and enabling the bundling of Solidity Application Binary Interfaces (ABIs) into TS. Developer experience & tooling txtx Ludo Galabru & Micaiah Reid Tooling to abstract and manage multi-EVM-chain smart contract deployment and operations, including integrations with Hardhat and Foundry. Developer experience & tooling Verification of revm using KEVM & Lean Backend for K Runtime Verification Ensuring the correctness of revm when compiled to RISC-V against KEVM (the formal specification of the EVM written in K) and developing a Lean backend for K. Developer experience & tooling Web3j Web3 Labs Lightweight, highly modular, reactive, typesafe Java and Android library for working with smart contracts and integrating with clients (nodes) on the Ethereum network. Execution layer Besu Stateless Implementation ConsenSys Active contributions to statelessness research and development, including spec/design work and Besu implementations. Execution layer Certified Compilation with Precompiles Bas Spitters (Aarhus University) Supporting a 3-year project at Aarhus University, during which a PhD student will work on certified compilation with precompiles applied to the EVM and zkVMs. Execution layer EIP-7736 Prototype Wei Han Ng Prototyping EIP-7736, an elegant and simple proposal to leverage verkle trees to implement state expiry. Discord/Telegram: @ngweihan_eth Execution layer EVM in Coq Karl Palmskog (KTH) & Bas Spitters (Aarhus University) Developing a canonical, maintainable, and validated EVM specification in Coq that can be the basis for a verified implementation of the EVM specification for RISC-V via certified compilation. Execution layer karalabe-ssz Fuzzer DongHyeon Hwang Researching and developing an effective fuzzer for testing the serialization and deserialization processes in Go-based karalabe-ssz. Execution layer ROP-14: Transaction Fee Market Design for Parallel Execution Lioba Heimbach & Andrei Constantinescu Designing a transaction fee market for Ethereum that accommodates parallel execution by charging transactions based on resource utilization and demand. Execution layer Zevem Jordan Ellis Coppard Expanding Zevem, the EVM implemented with Zig, to support all current instructions and stateless gas costs. General research Crystal-Clear CHAINS Research Group at KTH Research project that aims to map interconnections between smart contracts and track changes to smart contracts to increase security. General research Optimization of Honest Block Building ALPACAS Research Group at HKUST Research into the optimization of honest block building (no toxic MEV) to maximize total gas fees, using gas dependence relations among transactions, sparsity of gas dependence graphs, and the design of a parameterized algorithm for optimization. General research Restaking Economic Model CADLabs Developing a public, open-source simulation model to evaluate cryptoeconomic security and the yield/risk parameters within the restaking protocol ecosystem. Email Indirect funding Devcon SEA Quadratic Voting Round Quadratic voting round to support key Ethereum dashboards that help the community understand relevant Ethereum data. Every Devcon SEA attendee had the opportunity to vote. Indirect funding Ethereum TGU Academia QV Round Public goods funding round using MACI Platform aimed at onboarding and tapping into university communities in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with a focus on projects in research, education, social good, and academia that foster blockchain adoption. Layer 2 Blob-Sharing Protocol for Based Rollups Nethermind Building a blob-sharing tool for based rollups, which will involve defining a standard for how to lay out L2 blocks of different rollups in a shared blob, a standard in the L2 inboxes to consume the shared blob, and running test cases to validate the design. Layer 2 growthepie Expanding metrics to include the Ethereum chain and incorporating contracts deployed to Ethereum into their contract labeling solution, enabling users to compare Ethereum L1 chain statistics with L2s. Other DeFRIDA Nethermind Novel data availability sampling protocol for L2 applications and light clients. Other European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) Support for EUCI’s blockchain advocacy work in the EU. Other Formal Verification Model of revm in Coq Formal Land Developing a Coq version of revm for formal verification, with tests to compare the Coq and Rust versions covering each instruction and proof that the formalization of revm is equivalent to the Rust source code. Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog Other Foundation for American Innovation Support for the Foundation for American Innovation’s continued work on blockchain, decentralization, and privacy policy research and advocacy.