Supports internet freedom and anti-censorship tools through a quadratic funding matching round. Funds are distributed to ten open-source projects, strengthening the digital commons.

Performs a rigorous, adversarial security evaluation of the Poseidon1 hash function. This includes mathematical analysis, complexity estimates for algebraic attacks, and a leanVM review, with findings publicly released.

Enforces consistent Solidity code style across the ecosystem. This Prettier plugin supports all Solidity versions since 0.5.0, streamlining development workflows for thousands of projects.

Supports new talent in core Ethereum protocol development through mentorship and project support. This five-month fellowship fosters the next generation of contributors.

Develops WEBCAT, an open protocol for cryptographically verifiable enrollment state. This funding supports continued maturation and independent operation, enabling seamless Ethereum project interaction.

Supports the next generation of Ethereum core developers. This fellowship provides mentorship and project support to onboard new talent into protocol development.

Supports the next generation of Ethereum core developers through a five-month fellowship, providing mentorship and project support to onboard new talent to the protocol.

Supports new core developers through a five-month fellowship, providing mentorship and project support to foster protocol development.

Develops a machine-readable intermediate representation and tooling for Fiat-Shamir transcripts. This project delivers a closure checker, certificate tooling, and a Plonky3-oriented backend, enhancing verifiable computation.

Advances ethp2p's core capabilities, including erasure-coded broadcast for execution payloads in Hegota. Raúl Kripalani continues to steward networking EIPs like EIP-8243 and EIP-8070, enhancing protocol maturity.

Onboards new talent to core protocol development through mentorship and project support. This five-month fellowship fosters the next generation of Ethereum contributors.

Nimbus continues its work on critical Ethereum client infrastructure. It provides essential beacon node, validator, and execution layer clients, uniquely offering both consensus and execution light clients.

Nimbus continues its critical work on Ethereum light clients, expanding network decentralization. It provides essential infrastructure, including beacon node and validator clients, for a robust and accessible Ethereum.

Enables synchronous, atomic composability across participating rollups and Ethereum mainnet. This open-source framework uses ETH as its default gas token, offering L1 execution guarantees.

Supports promising developers with mentorship and resources to accelerate their journey into Ethereum core protocol development.

Enhances Ethereum's peer-to-peer networking with PeerDAS cell-level deltas, gossipsub topic streams, and Encrypted Client Hello for libp2p QUIC, boosting mainnet readiness and network efficiency.

Supports new developers joining core protocol development. This five-month fellowship provides mentorship and project support to grow the Ethereum builder ecosystem.

Supports the next generation of Ethereum core developers. This fellowship provides mentorship and resources to onboard new talent into protocol development.

Supports new developers entering core protocol development through a five-month mentorship and project support program.

Builds an open, neutral RFP Hub to aggregate Ethereum ecosystem funding opportunities. This off-chain system will feature a standard data format, public API, and transparent governance.

Explores participatory budgeting in decentralized funding contests and researches Condorcet voting for block reward distribution. This work will inform an EIP on public goods funding.

Fabric supports synchronous composability research, guiding the EF and community on based rollups and preconfirmations. Their work helps inform Ethereum L1 to L2 synchronous composability efforts, like EEZ.

Enables Prof. Strnad to dedicate substantial research time to Ethereum-focused problems, including DAO governance, decentralized system administration, and optimistic rollup challenge periods, while advising OpenLab scholars.

Enhances Ethereum's security by proactively identifying vulnerabilities in execution and consensus layer clients ahead of the Glamsterdam upgrade. This research strengthens the network's resilience.

Develops Ream, a Rust-based Lean Consensus Client, to advance post-quantum-ready consensus with fast finality and 4-second slots. This renewal supports core client development, testing infrastructure hardening, and scaling devnets to 10,000 validators.

Lighthouse client development continues with ePBS, Gloas, and partial messages networking for mainnet. This work expands tree sync, the Diamond testing framework, and ZK-verified consensus. Formal verification and client hardening efforts also progress.

Maps Ethereum consensus specifications to client implementations, ETHeorem enables systematic security assessment across Lighthouse, Prysm, geth, and Reth. This agentic system combines LLMs with program analysis for full-stack coverage.

Develops and maintains the Lodestar consensus client, implementing hard forks and contributing protocol research. This supports operator UX and ecosystem tooling for TypeScript and Zig Ethereum communities.

Develops a production-grade, Rust-based Private Information Retrieval library. This enables efficient, batched queries for key-value databases up to 32GB, optimizing server and client communication without requiring state.

Enhances quic-go, the Go QUIC implementation underpinning Ethereum's consensus layer networking. This work improves performance, transport capabilities, and connection efficiency for go-libp2p.

Models economic incentives and participant behavior to optimize protocol game theory, enhancing network stability and efficiency.

Enhances AI models with current Ethereum development tooling and ethskills data. This improves LLM accuracy and strengthens Ethereum's appeal for developers seeking a blockchain to build on.

Brevis is building an on-premise, multi-GPU L1 block-proving stack to stress-test real-world operational resilience. This initiative will generate an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook for future provers.

Audits the security arguments of Fiat-Shamir transformations instantiated via duplex sponges. This work clarifies key abstractions to support future Lean formalization, strengthening zero-knowledge proof systems.

Enables ZisK to transition their L1 block-proving stack to on-premise, multi-GPU configurations. This initiative will generate an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook to reduce ecosystem dependency on centralized cloud providers.

Develops novel cryptographic primitives and security protocols, enhancing Ethereum's foundational security and privacy for all users.

Indexes on-chain data into a local SQLite database, accessible via TUI and MCP. This tool enables flexible local querying and IPFS sharing of results for developers and LLM agents.

Keeps Web3j, the dominant JVM client library, in sync with upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork. This ensures continued seamless integration for Java, Kotlin, and Android applications, alongside AI-targeted documentation.

Builds Steward, a fully local macOS Ethereum smart account wallet. Every component, from the light client to the AI assistant, runs on-device, ensuring end-to-end verifiable security and sovereignty.

Succinct is moving L1 block-proving to on-premise, multi-GPU setups. This will stress-test operational resilience and reduce cloud dependency, generating an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook for future provers.

Enhances Matter Labs' L1 block-proving stack by transitioning to on-premise, multi-GPU configurations. This initiative stress-tests operational resilience and reduces cloud dependency, generating an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook.

Enables users to programmatically verify transaction outcomes before signing with EIP-7906. This includes positive and negative conditions against any smart contract, enhancing security and user control.

Enables 8 Philippine academic institutions to develop blockchain curricula. Supports faculty in becoming trainers, fostering local Ethereum education through a 6-day program.

Enables unlinkable access to gated API services, starting with AI inference. This open-source modular stack uses blind signatures and TEE-friendly servers for anonymous credit verification.

Verifies cryptographic protocols and zkVM circuits, ensuring mathematical correctness for Ethereum's scaling infrastructure through formal methods.

Develops Verity, a Lean 4-based smart contract language and formally verified compiler. It enables developers to write, formally specify, and prove contract properties, compiling to EVM bytecode with verified semantics.

Explores zkVM runtime behavior across diverse hardware to optimize proving performance. This research aims to identify bottlenecks and enable more practical, near real-time proving for Ethereum mainnet applications.

Investigates unique Ethereum use cases with real-world impact. This research also explores novel organizational structures beyond traditional crypto setups.

Develops onchain ESG funding instruments for Digital Public Goods, leveraging Ethereum to shift public goods funding from grants to scalable capital markets. This initiative designs bond-like mechanisms for large-scale infrastructure.

Formalizes the security model of Encrypted Mempools, enhancing transaction privacy and network resilience for Ethereum users.

Builds Ethereum's long-term resilience with Gean, a new Go-based consensus client. This open-source implementation replaces quantum-vulnerable cryptography and diversifies the client ecosystem from Africa.

Enhances Quixote, a Rust EVM event indexer, with Tor-based private reads and GraphQL support. Demonstrates its value by integrating it into the Aave frontend, replacing TheGraph for improved data access.

Supports Geth's core protocol development, client maintenance, and the implementation of new Ethereum Improvement Proposals.

Enables ZisK to transition L1 block-proving to on-premise, multi-GPU setups. This initiative stress-tests operational resilience and reduces cloud dependency, generating an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook for the ecosystem.

Develops an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook, enabling L1 block provers to transition from cloud-hosted environments to resilient multi-GPU configurations, reducing centralized dependencies.

Enhances Ethereum client security by deploying AI agents to scan Geth, Nethermind, Lighthouse, and Prysm against EIP specifications, identifying divergences and edge-case bugs.

Optimizes polynomial evaluation in CompPoly using Horner, batch, and NTT methods. Implements and verifies the Guruswami-Sudan algorithm for zkVMs, complete with Lean proofs and benchmarks.

Enables offline verification of Gnosis Safe multisig transactions. SafeLens generates evidence packages for signatures, hashes, and enriched proofs, allowing local transaction replay and human-readable details via built-in interpreters.

Translates novel protocol research into working code. This enables empirical testing of theoretical assumptions and quantifies design trade-offs for future Ethereum upgrades.

Develops efficient, verified implementations of prime and binary tower fields in Lean4. This work covers small STARK fields, large SNARK/curve fields, and binary tower fields, all proven correct via RingEquiv.

Fostering the AI x Ethereum intersection, Urbe Hub in Rome hosts recurring workshops, demos, and builder sessions. This initiative cultivates cross-pollination events, strengthening both communities and collaborating with the EF dAI Team.

Optimizes leanVM's post-quantum signature aggregation for Ethereum's consensus layer. This work enhances speed, improves efficiency, and ensures Bitcoin compatibility to establish an industry-wide standard.

Enhances Ethereum's security posture with 52 AI-powered smart contract scans for client and protocol repositories over the next year.

Develops an LLM-powered system to automate Ethereum client spec compliance checking and bug discovery. This includes formal verification of Gasper Lean 4 and a pipeline to bridge SPECA outputs into Lean 4 formal specifications.

Optimizes protocol game theory by applying mechanism design and economic modeling to understand and improve participant incentives.

Evaluates modern Private Information Retrieval schemes for Ethereum data access. This work will specify a state-of-the-art scheme, complete with reusable tests, to enhance user privacy and reduce MEV risks.

Enables safe, well-tested network upgrades by building custom tooling, deployment scripts, and data pipelines for Protocol R&D.

Cultivates a new cohort of Ethereum developers in Bhutan through an intensive residency. This program fosters local talent and seeds a self-sustaining developer community in the region.

Refactors the Kohaku browser extension wallet and Railgun SDK integration. This work enhances maintainability and modularity, advancing the wallet for broader adoption and community contributions.

Extends CompPoly with advanced bivariate polynomial operations, including Guruswami-Sudan infrastructure and performance optimizations like Kronecker substitution, enhancing cryptographic primitive development.

Enhances Ethereum's core Python specifications (EELS) and test suites (EEST). This critical work ensures client compatibility and strengthens network consensus.

Decentralizes L1 block-proving by moving infrastructure from cloud to on-premise, multi-GPU setups. This initiative will open-source an On-Prem Ops Playbook, providing a blueprint for future provers to enhance resilience.

Develops efficient post-quantum signature schemes for Ethereum's execution layer, leveraging Poseidon-based constructions to prepare the network for the post-quantum transition.

Investigates the security of recursive SNARKs, probing the limits of knowledge extractors in deep recursion. This research will analyze SNARK variants with superpolynomial extractor complexity to inform new proof frameworks for real-world systems.

Analyzing consensus mechanisms to strengthen long-term decentralization. This research helps close the gap between current protocol guarantees and future network goals.

Advances ZK-EVM research, developing scaling solutions and integrating ZK-proofs directly into Ethereum's execution layer for enhanced efficiency.

Analyzes and designs advanced consensus mechanisms. This work strengthens protocol guarantees, fostering long-term network decentralization.

Fosters academic excellence in blockchain technology through scholarships for outstanding MScBT students. Supports talent development and engagement with Devconnect/Devcon, alongside sponsoring Asiacrypt 2026.

Supports research into advanced cryptographic primitives and security protocols, ensuring Ethereum's continued leadership in secure, privacy-preserving technology.

Refines the Kohaku browser extension for a robust, privacy-first wallet UX on Sepolia. Integrates Privacy Pools and Railgun, optimizing the Ambire fork and user flows.

Advances Ethereum's cryptographic security by designing and analyzing new primitives and protocols. This ensures robust, privacy-preserving technology for the future.

Enhances smart contract security with AI-powered vulnerability detection. This subscription provides 25 comprehensive scans, a project dashboard, and VIP support for up to four client projects.

Enables decentralized provers to transition from cloud to on-premise, multi-GPU setups. This initiative will yield an open-source On-Prem Ops Playbook, strengthening ecosystem resilience and reducing reliance on centralized infrastructure.

Develops the Open Intents Framework, enhancing cross-chain liquidity rebalancing and supporting ERC-7683 specification development. This expands multi-chain capabilities and tooling for Ethereum.

Optimizes exponentiation and proves multilinear transform equivalence for CompPoly. Integrates error-correcting interpolation via Berlekamp-Welch, enhancing the protocol's robustness.

Expands ZKP standardization efforts by bringing together over 1,000 practitioners at ArkLib Day at ZKProof 8. This event fosters collaboration on formal verification and applied zero-knowledge proofs.

Develops a Noir to LLZK compiler, bridging two critical SNARK ecosystems. This enhances interoperability and expands the developer base for LLZK tooling, strengthening Ethereum's SNARK security efforts.

Enables dynamic smart account batching and predicate-based execution. This project standardizes and open-sources a production orchestration stack, making composable multi-step, multi-chain transactions a public good for the Ethereum ecosystem.

Advances ZK-EVM research, developing scaling solutions and integrating ZK-proofs directly into the Ethereum execution layer.

Enhances Ethereum's security posture through proactive code reviews, advanced tooling, and robust bug bounty program management.

Verifies SP1 Hypercube zkVM's arithmetization using Lean 4, formally proving its constraint systems correctly implement RISC-V ISA semantics for each instruction.

Facilitates connections between EF grantees and external funding sources. This helps essential public goods projects secure vital support from government, philanthropic, and ecosystem partners.

A focused, strategic Forum and networking mixer in HK to bring together institutional capital, leading VCs, and Ethereum mainnet founders to define the future of the EVM landscape toward 2026.

Ensuring the mathematical correctness of Ethereum's scaling infrastructure, this work applies formal verification to cryptographic protocols and zkVM circuits.

Develops the Open Intents Framework and Interop SDK, advancing Ethereum interoperability standards like ERC-7930. This work improves cross-chain UX, supporting token standards, balance consolidation, and messaging for wider adoption.

Expands cryptanalysis of Poseidon2, exploring advanced round-skipping techniques and extending attacks to new parameter sets and modes. This research also investigates countermeasures like improved round constant selection.

Awarded for solutions to the Poseidon team's Bounty Program: M31-6-4
More details on the bounties can be found here: www.poseidon-initiative.info

Project Name	Domain	Output	Date
Contribution to Tor × FTC Quadratic Funding Round	Application Infrastructure	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
Poseidon1 Cryptanalysis & LeanVM Security Evaluation	Cryptography	Research	2026 Q3
Prettier Solidity - KH	Application layer	Developer tooling	2026 Q3
EPF7	Ethereum Protocol	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
WEBCAT: Verifiable, Censorship-Resistant Frontends for Web Applications	Security	Developer tooling	2026 Q3
EPF7	Ethereum Protocol	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
EPF7	Ethereum Protocol	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
EPF7	Ethereum Protocol	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
Protocol IR	Cryptography	Developer tooling	2026 Q3
ethp2p maturity	Ethereum Protocol	Research	2026 Q3
Prettier Solidity	Application layer	Developer tooling	2026 Q3
EPF7	Ethereum Protocol	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3
Nimbus Client 2025	Nodes and Clients	Application	2026 Q3
Nimbus Client 2026	Nodes and Clients	Application	2026 Q3
Ethereum Economic Zone	Layer 2	Ecosystem development	2026 Q3

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