PhD Fellowship Program
The Ethereum Foundation is launching a fellowship-style grant program to support Ethereum-related academic work led by current PhD students. Selected Fellows will receive $24,000 USD over one year, intended as a supplement to their existing stipend, with 7-8 Fellowships awarded in total. Proposals are due 23:59 AoE April 1st, 2026.
PhD Fellowship Program
The Ethereum Foundation is launching a fellowship-style grant program to support Ethereum-related academic work led by current PhD students. Selected Fellows will receive $24,000 USD over one year, intended as a supplement to their existing stipend, with 7-8 Fellowships awarded in total. Proposals are due 23:59 AoE April 1st, 2026.
Economic Models Enabled by Decentralized Trust Systems
This RFP seeks research proposals exploring novel economic and organizational models at the application layer that are made possible by the ability to rely on decentralized, credibly neutral trust infrastructure. We are interested in how blockchains enable new forms of coordination, commitment, value allocation, and reduced rent-seeking that are difficult or impossible to achieve using centralized platforms or traditional institutional arrangements.
Tags
- Research
- Enterprise Readiness
- PhDFP
Ecosystem Need
Many economic systems today rely on centralized platforms or institutions that act as trusted intermediaries. While efficient at early stages, these systems often suffer from: - Rent-seeking behavior, enabled by asymmetric control over infrastructure and governance - Commitment failures, where platform operators can change rules, revoke access, or extract rents ex post - Unclear or rigid value allocation, where participants have limited agency in how value flows are structured - Fragile trust assumptions, requiring participants to rely on the ongoing goodwill or incentives of a single operator Decentralized trust systems introduce a new design space: economic arrangements where rules, interfaces, and commitments can be made durable, transparent, and non-discretionary, allowing participants to build with confidence that the system will behave tomorrow as it does today. This RFP aims to surface and formalize economic models that leverage these properties in meaningful, non-trivial ways.
Hard Requirements
Proposals must adhere to this template: https://notes.ethereum.org/@s_VsCoN-RHCQdMf6bFLJ8g/H1Tsh8sSWx Proposals Requirements: 1. Focus on application-layer economic or organizational models, not protocol-level cryptoeconomic mechanisms 2. Clearly articulate what becomes possible due to decentralized trust that would be infeasible or unstable under centralized control 3. Specify the economic actors, incentives, and value flows involved 4. Identify the commitment or trust problem being addressed and how decentralization changes the equilibrium 5. Be grounded in economic reasoning, formal modeling, empirical analysis, or well-specified conceptual frameworks
Soft Requirements
Preference will be given to proposals that: 1. Examine flexible value allocation rather than maximizing value capture by any single actor 2. Analyze how decentralized trust can minimize rent-seeking or rebalance power between participants 3. Engage with existing economic literature (platform economics, contract theory, institutional design) and extend it meaningfully 4. Produce insights that are transferable beyond a single application or case study
Resources
Timeline
Opens: Feb 2, 2026
Closes: Apr 1, 2026
Estimated Project Duration: 1 Year
