Conference hosted in Buenos Aires, Argentina revolving around RealFi: financial infrastructure designed for real-world coordination, access, and public goods funding.
Workshop organized in Taipei, Taiwan bringing together cryptographers, cryptographic software engineers, and formal verification experts to improve the security and correctness of real-world cryptographic software.
Collaborating on and supporting a range of academic activities, such as scholarships for the MSc in Blockchain Technology program, the Asiacrypt 2026 conference, guest lectures, and joint research activities.
Collaborative grant round with Localism Fund designed to sustain post-Devconnect momentum across Latin America by empowering local Ethereum communities to host consistent, educational, and inclusive monthly meetups for one year.
Cross-industry ideathon designed to surface and accelerate solutions that employ stablecoins—specifically JPYC—to solve real business challenges across sectors such as e-commerce, logistics, real estate, and accounting.
Translation contest that aims to incentivize translation contributions in less-active languages, increase the number of languages and amount of content available on ethereum.org, and onboard new contributors while rewarding existing ones.
Supporting PhD students in the research lab working on foundational and applied cryptography research, which addresses core limitations in current SNARK designs including recursion security and the exploration of tradeoffs between proof size and security.
Continued development of LLZK to strengthen it as shared, verification-oriented infrastructure for the ZK compiler ecosystem, enabling more robust tooling, interoperability across ZK DSLs, and improved correctness guarantees for ZK circuits.
Formal verification of OpenVM focused on establishing the functional correctness of all RV32IM opcode circuits, with the goal of reducing the risk of soundness or completeness issues in OpenVM’s circuit design and contributing reusable formal verification infrastructure to the broader zkVM ecosystem.
Creating a prototype of a minimal, open-source app-specific L2 rollup for private stablecoin transfers, using lightweight ZK circuits and a simplified sequencing model.
Researching the security of recursive composition in SNARKs, focusing on the recursive extraction problem that arises when security proofs require repeated application of knowledge extractors.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Rust Verification Through Lean 4 Tooling Investigation
Investigating Lean 4-based formal verification of Rust components used in zkEVM and zkVM stacks, with a focus on establishing a practical Rust to Lean verification pipeline using the hax toolchain.
Solving bounties listed in the Poseidon Cryptanalysis Bounty Program, which has the twin goals of ensuring that the interpolation attack is the fastest preimage attack on Poseidon, and verifying that the complexity of the interpolation attack on the reduced round versions matches the theoretical estimates.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Technical Review of Fiat–Shamir from Duplex Sponges
Technical review of the recent analysis of the Fiat–Shamir transformation instantiated via duplex sponges, focusing on carefully auditing the underlying security arguments, identifying any gaps or ambiguities, and clarifying the key abstractions needed for rigorous reasoning.
Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs
Tightening the Hash Size in Round-by-Round Sound IOPs
Investigating whether multi-round, round-by-round sound SNARKs can safely use smaller hash digests, beginning with a feasibility study in both the Random Oracle Model and the Quantum Random Oracle Model.
Delivering an improved, reproducible, and publicly auditable view of Ethereum developer ecosystem data along with a sustainable mechanism to keep it updated.
Developer experience & tooling
solc-mlir Middle End Optimization Layer for Solidity
Focused research effort to add an MLIR middle-end to the Solidity compiler, with the aim of yielding measurable gas savings and enabling richer correctness and safety analyses.
Integrating Helios with the Kohaku browser extension, improving performance, and ensuring it is a portable and easily integrable part of the Kohaku SDK.
Multiscalar prediction market where model builders bet on the value an open-source repository would receive if it were to be professionally evaluated, used in Gitcoin Grants 24.
Co-funding for the GG24 Public Goods R&D Domain. The grant supports concrete academic and other forms of research that advance the insights and knowledge on Ethereum public goods and their funding, while supporting the development of neutral, open-source solutions rooted in these insights, with a focus on interoperability between tools.
Establishing a juror evaluation process, creating an app for collecting data from jurors, and integrating the results into the Deep Funding voting app.
Capture the Flag (CTF) competition where participants tackle 12 increasingly challenging Solidity puzzles to hunt for vulnerabilities, exploit smart contract weaknesses, and solve cryptographic challenges.
Solidity based CTF-style security competition, where participants compete against one another to exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols and earn the highest score.
Hosting a Kaggle competition for LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection built on the Bastet dataset, with the goal of attracting both crypto security talent and non-crypto AI/LLM talent.
Incorporating network-level privacy into a high-performance, self-hosted RPC load-balancer that distributes requests across multiple blockchain providers or nodes, optimizing for latency, error rate, and cost.
Designing and implementing LLM-enabled differential testing on Ethereum clients to speed up the ability to find vulnerabilities on the Ethereum protocol.
Doctoral work focused on using tools from economics and computation to deepen the understanding of blockchain mechanism design, generating high-impact academic research and educational content such as public explainers on protocol changes and teaching a new blockchain course at Princeton University.
Building a system that accepts a wide variety of different vulnerability reports in various formats from multiple sources, massaging them into a schema, and then outputting it into a publicly available dataset.
Providing technical support to the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy Cluster to overcome technical barriers of integrating Tor at the edge and the infrastructure of the Ethereum ecosystem. Work includes improving scalability of bridging to Tor, and adapting Arti Tor client into wasm such that it can be integrated in wallets[sdks] and frontends. The collaboration aims to unlock Tor particularly in constrained environments like browser wallets, bringing privacy to RPC calls like transaction broadcasting (eth_sendRawTx).
Facilitating WiEP Cohort 4 through activities such as developing workflows, coordinating mentors, tracking participant contributions, and supporting the organization of the WiEP Brunch at Devconnect.
Supporting WiEP Cohort 4 by coordinating communications with mentors, students, and speakers, managing social media posts, and assisting with the organization and publication of session recordings.
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