Conference hosted in Vienna, Austria dedicated to crypto safety, learning and sharing best practices, and setting new benchmarks for trust and transparency.
Conference focused on Ethereum infrastructure, DeFi primitives and protocols, AI agents, and new financial rails for digital assets organized in San Francisco, USA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Event in Jos, Nigeria comprising a builders conference, products showcase, and hackathon to showcase high-quality research findings and web3 apps built across Africa.
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.
Immersive residential bootcamp focused on web3 technologies such as Ethereum, smart contracts, ZKPs, and decentralized architectures, hosted at the Petnica Science Center in Serbia.
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
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.
High-performance simulation framework for testing lean consensus signature aggregation protocols with support for multiple network backends and communication topologies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Supporting the team behind OpenVM, a performant and modular zkVM framework built for customization and extensibility, to meet the L1 realtime proving requirements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Formally verifying ZK protocols through contributing some proofs to ArkLib using their AI tool, including formalization of theorems from the Ligero paper.
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).
Deploying freely accessible bundlers (within usage thresholds) that use the UserOp mempool to promote decentralization and censorship resistance for wallets adopting EIP-7702.
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.
Documentation overhaul, specification upgrade, and improved conformance testing for OpenRPC, an Apache-licensed open standard for JSON-RPC APIs that underpins critical Ethereum infrastructure.
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.
Maintaining and enhancing the Besu client while researching and developing capabilities that make future public network adoption feasible for institutions.
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.
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.
Funding for Erigon’s continued work on the Ethereum mainnet, specifically their execution client development and applied R&D on Ethereum’s execution layer.
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.
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.
Developing the concept of native rollups through progressive research, design, and implementation across execution specs, precompiles, fee markets, and sequencing strategies.
Listing and maintenance of Ethereum Mainnet data, including key data modules such as fundamentals, economics, blockspace usage, application metrics, and DA metrics.
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.
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.
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.
Providing a comprehensive, independent view of client performance and interoperability in the Ethereum ecosystem, helping node operators and client teams make better infrastructure decisions.
Open-repository of EVM-compatible wallets, providing reviews to help ensure the Ethereum wallet ecosystem remains competitive, interoperable, and upholds Ethereum values.
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