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.
Software-Defined Operations for Small Businesses
An RFP to research how the core operations of small and medium enterprises can be improved with Ethereum-based solutions. Applicants should focus on a specific SME context and study how firms in that domain organize, coordinate, and execute everyday business processes today, as well as where existing operational stacks break down in practice. Research should explore how Ethereum’s properties as a programmable, credibly neutral settlement and coordination layer could enable new operational primitives that reduce administrative overhead, improve reliability, and enable automation that is currently inaccessible to SMEs. Areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, commercial agreements with smart contract defined conditions, escrow and dispute resolution mechanisms, tokenized role-based access controls and permissions, inventory tokenization, automated or streaming payments, payment splits, and triple entry accounting. The emphasis is on understanding where these primitives could meaningfully reshape operational workflows in practice, how they would interact with existing legal and financial systems, and which combinations offer the highest leverage for the chosen vertical. 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
Small and medium enterprises are the economic backbone of most economies, yet their internal operations remain fragmented and inefficient. While large firms can invest in complex ERP systems, SMEs rely on disconnected SaaS tools and manual processes to manage ownership, payments, contracts, procurement, and compliance. These solutions expose firms to ongoing platform risk through lock-in, pricing changes, outages, and more. This fragmentation also obscures accountability, increases reconciliation and compliance overhead, and makes the organization difficult to reason about as a coherent system, preventing both humans and AI systems from coordinating firm activity efficiently.
Hard Requirements
Proposals must adhere to this template: https://notes.ethereum.org/@s_VsCoN-RHCQdMf6bFLJ8g/H1Tsh8sSWx Proposals Requirements: 1. Conduct qualitative research with real firms in a specific SME vertical. 2. Map how key operations are handled today (e.g. ownership tracking, permissions, payments, contracting, reporting) and surface recurring pain points, bottlenecks, and failure modes. 3. Analyze where coordination, trust, or reconciliation costs are highest and why current systems fail to address them. 4. Articulate how Ethereum’s technical affordances (e.g. programmability, shared state, neutrality, verifiability) could address these gaps in principle. 5. Evaluate existing blockchain-based solutions (Safe, Aragon, Colony, Hats, OpenZeppelin, Governor, Kleros, and others) and flag any technical shortcomings why SMEs might refrain from adopting them. 6. Document barriers to adoption and hypothesise ways to overcome them, drawing from literature in information systems, microeconomics, organizational psychology, law, and other relevant disciplines.
Soft Requirements
- Engage with projects building different layers of the onchain firm stack to understand the design space, current limitations. - Develop conceptual models, architectures, or design frameworks translating operational needs into onchain primitives. - Identify candidate workflows suitable for incremental experimentation or piloting. - Develop prototypes, simulations, or reference implementations illustrating feasibility.
Resources
Timeline
Opens: Feb 2, 2026
Closes: Apr 1, 2026
Estimated Project Duration: 1 Year
