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.
Coordination Rails for City Governments & Urban Systems
An RFP to design and implement verifiable, privacy-preserving infrastructure for local governments and municipalities to improve efficiency, reliability and flexibility, of urban services and systems. The primary focus is on enabling privacy-preserving coordination across government organizations and partners to allow necessary information to be shared, verified or otherwise acted upon, without exposing sensitive underlying data. These workflows should operate across agencies and vendors without introducing new centralized platforms or data aggregation and disclosure risks that many cities are currently legally constrained by. Projects should deliver deployable primitives, standards, and/or scoped pilots that enable cities to coordinate shared multi-actor processes while preserving institutional and citizen privacy., These deliverables could include the use of stablecoins, smart contract automation, zero-knowledge credentials, and other forms of lower-level cryptographic verifiability, such as merkle proofs, to real urban workflows (e.g. permitting, mobility networks, reporting, public finance, elections, etc). The focus is on pragmatic, incremental implementations that run alongside current tools and institutional processes rather than replace them.
Tags
- Research
- PhDFP
- Ethereum Use Cases
Ecosystem Need
Cross-agency coordination often requires excessive data sharing, manual reconciliation between untrusted parties, and bespoke software integrations that together increase the risk and cost of multi-actor coordination within government services and operations. As a result cities face structural coordination failures that force trust to be managed through slow and error-prone administrative processes. At the same time, cities increasingly rely on data-driven and AI-assisted systems that increase dependence on big tech and expand the surface area for data misuse and surveillance, putting citizen privacy and trust at risk. The absence of shared, privacy-preserving coordination rails forces cities to choose the tradeoff between operational effectiveness and data minimization.
Hard Requirements
Proposals must adhere to this template: https://notes.ethereum.org/@s_VsCoN-RHCQdMf6bFLJ8g/H1Tsh8sSWx Proposals Requirements: 1. Demonstrated collaboration with a real city, public agency, or urban ecosystem partner (live or committed pilot context). 2. Demonstrate cross-department or cross-actor coordination, not a single-silo solution. 3. Clear trust model and permissions: who writes, verifies, reads, and audits what. 4. Alignment with existing standards (e.g. verifiable credentials, open data formats, identity frameworks). 5. A privacy model describing what information must be shared for coordination versus what can remain private 6. Clear documentation, architecture description, and deployment guidance. Engagement with policy, legal, or operational constraints alongside technical design
Soft Requirements
- Deliver a working implementation addressing at least one concrete city workflow (e.g. permits, reporting, mobility coordination, project tracking). - Clear pathway from pilot to broader adoption or standardization. - Layers into existing city systems rather than full platform replacement. - Modularity and composability so solutions can interoperate between city domains. - Focus on primitive reuse or interoperability across multiple cities.
Resources
Timeline
Opens: Feb 2, 2026
Closes: Apr 1, 2026
Estimated Project Duration: 1 Year
