Builds an Oblivious server to handle requests from the Kohaku extension's embedded execution client, enabling private state reading.

Automatic tools to verify the equivalence between witness computation semantics and polynomial constraint systems for zkVMs.

Optimizes the developer funnel, leading enterprise certification efforts, and shaping ecosystem funding strategy for developer growth.

Validates zk-based attestation in a live Ethereum staking environment by operating a mainnet validator running the Lighthouse zkAttester branch.

Supports the Use Case Lab in identifying and unblocking high-potential Ethereum use cases beyond finance through research and pilot interventions.

Advances the LLZK intermediate representation with support for formal specifications, polymorphic free functions, and witness generation.

Developes a verifiable on-chain runtime for managing time-bound access to digital resources, supporting subscriptions and privacy-preserving linkage.

Researches local mixing as a new approach to practical obfuscation, aiming to prove its security and develop a new cryptographic primitive.

Addresses scalability issues with Tor bridges to support the EF Privacy Team's integration work and advance network-level privacy.

Developes a library and POC wallet to solve the blind signing problem, enhancing transaction security and user transparency.

Supports the operations and systems rollout for Specialized Events in H1 2026, including planning coordination and invoicing workflows.

Investigates the formal verification of Rust components in zkEVM/zkVM stacks using Lean 4 and the hax toolchain.

Establishes a Lean-based formal verification system for OpenVM to prove the functional correctness of RV32IM opcode circuits.

An academic conference at Cornell Tech convening researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to examine U.S.-based crypto innovation and its implications for financial systems and public infrastructure.

Support for Invisible Garden, a developer pop-up city in Buenos Aires focused on Ethereum, ZK, AI, and cybersecurity.

A private, high-signal gathering of Layer 2 teams in Singapore focused on roadmap alignment, L1–L2 coordination, and collaborative R&D, strengthening long-term protocol collaboration across APAC and global ecosystems.

Support for the Security Alliance (SEAL) in tracking, blocking, and mitigating crypto drainer malware attacking EVM-based chains.

The Summer of Protocols (SoP) is a seasonal research program exploring protocol design across disciplines and advancing the study of decentralized coordination systems. Curriculum grants fund the development of open educational materials.

Investigates the feasibility of reducing hash sizes in round-by-round sound IOPs to optimize proof size and verification costs.

Funding PhD students at EPFL to conduct foundational research on probabilistic proofs, efficient SNARKs, and post-quantum security.

Adds an MLIR middle-end optimization layer to the Solidity compiler to improve gas efficiency and enable richer safety analyses.

Awarded for solutions to the Poseidon team's Bounty Program: 64-6-7, 64-6-8, 64-6-10.
More details on the bounties can be found here: https://www.poseidon-initiative.info/

Advances the Ream consensus client prototype by implementing post-quantum cryptography and supporting Lean Consensus specifications.

Developes the juror voting interface for Deep Funding to improve data collection consistency and quality for funding decisions.

Formally verifying Powdr's autoprecompiles, covering constraint semantics, SMT encoding, and automodularization.

Integrates privacy features into the Kohaku browser extension, including Privacy Pools support for private sending and receiving of assets.

Support for the Local Meetups LATAM round during Gitcoin Grants 24 to foster community growth in Latin America.

Supports the Connect and Compute Foundation to build an Ethereum-based marketplace for connectivity and computation credits to support Giga's mission.

Co-funding a prototype for a minimal, app-specific Layer 2 rollup focused on private stablecoin transfers using lightweight ZK circuits.

Accelerates the WHIR polynomial commitment scheme and upstreaming it into Plonky3 to support post-quantum signature aggregation.

Piloting an onchain prediction market where model builders bet on the value of open-source repositories to determine funding allocations.

A Solidity-based capture-the-flag competition challenging participants to exploit vulnerable DeFi protocols, strengthening applied smart contract security expertise.

Builds a system to aggregate, normalize, and publish a public dataset of smart contract vulnerability reports to aid security research.

Improvements to the Open Source Observer dataset to provide a clean, reproducible, and auditable view of the Ethereum developer ecosystem.

A Kaggle competition to develop AI/LLM models for detecting smart contract vulnerabilities, utilizing a public vulnerability dataset.

Enhances the Besu client for enterprise stability and researching privacy technology integration to support future institutional adoption.

A prize track encouraging experimentation with chain abstraction and ERC-4337-based interoperability tooling, advancing practical integration across Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem.

A major global Ethereum conference in Osaka featuring keynotes, workshops, and community-hosted sessions, designed to bridge Asian ecosystems with global networks and advance policy, startup, and protocol collaboration.

Prizes for the BuidlGuidl CTF at Devconnect 2025 to incentivize developer participation and skill testing.

DeFi Security Summit (DSS) is a yearly technical conference focused on decentralized application security, fostering deep research dialogue among auditors, white-hat hackers, and protocol developers.

Formalizing STIR and WHIR protocols in Lean within ArkLib, including executable specifications and necessary coding theory dependencies.

EthSamba is a hackathon in Brazil focused on onboarding new builders into the Ethereum ecosystem.

Specifies and formally verifying the Fiat-Shamir transformation in Lean to bridge soundness gaps and provide a reference implementation.

Support for a PhD candidate at Princeton to conduct research on blockchain mechanism design, MEV taxonomy, and validator incentives.

Building and hosting the frontend for the Gitcoin Grants 24 Privacy round, utilizing MACI for private voting and tallying results.

Supports the continued development of hax's Lean backend to enable formal verification of Rust code in Lean.

Selected as part of the Pectra Round, this CLI tool enables validator consolidation and batch partial withdrawals via execution-layer requests, supporting home stakers and operators in adopting new staking capabilities.

Improves the RISC-V specification in Lean and enhancing Lean/MLIR interoperability to support the LLZK intermediate representation.

Sponsoring Cal Hacks 2025 to host a tech prize and skill-building workshop, engaging university students with Ethereum development.

A global convening exploring RealFi and public goods funding infrastructure, bringing together builders and funders to showcase interoperable tools emerging from hackathon and residency programming.

Two-month Protocol R&D internship supporting Ethereum formal verification and cryptography work, contributing to Lean-based signature research and related protocol verification efforts under EF researcher supervision.

Funding for 12 weeks of coordinating, facilitating, and monitoring participants contributions to the workstudy course.

Developes standardized security documentation, handbooks, and checklists for smart contract development under the OWASP umbrella.

Matching funds for the Gitcoin Grants 24 Privacy round using a smart contract to support public goods in the privacy domain.

Funding for a co-faciliator for the Women in Ethereum Protocol Cohort 4, responsible for creating workflows, organizing mentors, leading weekly standups.

Updates OpenRPC tooling and documentation to support v1.3.x, improve conformance testing, and ensure long-term maintainability for Ethereum infrastructure.

Implements post-quantum signatures (Falcon, Dilithium) and zk-friendly cryptography for hardware wallets, including SIMD optimizations.

Funding for the Women in Ethereum Protocol Cohort #4 Marketing Coordinator, responsible for communications to mentors, students, speakers, and social media.

Develops a stateful fuzzing framework to detect vulnerabilities in Ethereum’s transaction propagation layer, contributing open-source tooling to improve client robustness and network-layer security.

Funding various zkVM-related projects at Lita, including BigInt exploration, .NET compiler feasibility, distributed proving, and MLIR exploration.

Improves efficiency of post-quantum zero-knowledge proofs by combining code-based and lattice-based constructions to reduce proof size and verification costs while maintaining quantum resistance.

Integrates the Helios light client into the Kohaku browser extension to enable trust-minimized access to Ethereum data.

Develops ZKVM-agnostic fuzzing techniques to detect critical bugs across RISC-V–based ZKVM implementations, improving the reliability and security of zkEVMs, rollups, and interoperability systems built on Ethereum.

Develops a practical research guide mapping cryptographic primitives to mechanism design challenges, clarifying how proofs and secure computation tools can reduce coordination frictions in decentralized markets.

Developes an LLM-enabled differential testing framework to automatically generate test inputs and identify vulnerabilities in Ethereum clients.

Develops a formal economic theory of staking entry barriers, modeling their effects on liveness guarantees, validator composition, and the share of tokens staked independent of reward levels.

Support for an Ethereum Community Hub in London to provide a dedicated space for coworking, meetups, and founder discussions, strengthening the local ecosystem.

Founder Success Builder Competition award enabling a founder team to attend Devconnect, validate their protocol with builders, recruit early integrators, and refine product assumptions through direct engagement with the Ethereum community.

Formally analyzes the tradeoff between censorship resistance and throughput in multi-proposer designs, proving lower bounds and proposing minimally disruptive protocol modifications for flexible resistance guarantees.

Collaboration with Audrey Tang to explore and realize the public benefit potential of Ethereum and related technologies.

A regional conference uniting students, researchers, and industry practitioners to explore blockchain innovation, fostering dialogue and developer engagement across the U.S. Midwest.

Dedicated technical expertise to the Funding Coordination team to accelerate co-funding efforts for initiatives like Privacy Grants and Noir Acceleration.

The Ethereum Season of Internships is a paid, fully remote summer program connecting emerging contributors with ecosystem projects, providing structured, hands-on experience in development, research, design, and operations.

Support for building bridges between the Ethereum ecosystem and aligned groups to foster broader collaboration and understanding.

Funds the maintenance of eRPC, a widely used Execution Layer load balancer, to ensure the tool remains reliable and up-to-date.

Assesses the security of Poseidon and Poseidon2 hash functions against algebraic attacks in classical and quantum settings as part of the Poseidon Cryptanalysis Initiative.

A conference and 52-hour hackathon in Istanbul focused on protocol research, AI x blockchain, interoperability, and rollup architecture, convening global researchers and up to 500 builders for sustained technical collaboration.

Improves Execution Spec Tests (EEST) coverage for evmone by implementing missing Osaka fork features and contributing new test cases, including EIP-7212.

Extends Nethermind performance benchmarking work to include JsonRPC, stateful EEST testing, and repricing analysis to ensure safe gas limit increases.

Develops the first systematic fuzzing framework and rigorous test oracles for zkVMs, targeting soundness and completeness bugs in zero-knowledge execution environments to prevent catastrophic failures.

Researching and championing native rollups through design specifications, smart contract prototypes, and engagement with L2 teams to enable future adoption.

Produces a MOOC on the foundations of probabilistic proofs, providing high-quality pedagogical resources like lecture slides, recordings, and exercises.

A zero-knowledge focused educational program in Brazil aimed at expanding applied cryptography expertise and fostering sustained participation in Ethereum-aligned research and development.

Support for an educational zero-knowledge initiative aimed at strengthening Ethereum developer education and sustaining local community coordination in Taiwan.

Support for an educational zero-knowledge initiative designed to cultivate Ethereum developer skills and strengthen long-term community capacity across Argentina.

Updating the zkBugs project to provide a vulnerability corpus focused on zkVMs, a live advisory for critical ZK projects, and a benchmarking suite for security tools.

Supporting the development and delivery of a lecture by Jevon as part of the Infinite Garden Artists Cohort to shape the cohort's intellectual development.

Optimizes Besu's EVM performance by implementing specialized 256-bit arithmetic to improve execution efficiency.

A regional zero-knowledge focused gathering designed to connect developers and researchers around applied cryptography, strengthening local engagement with Ethereum’s ZK ecosystem.

Continuing stewardship of the MEV ecosystem, coordinating across builders and relays for hard forks, and funding R&D for mev-boost and relays.

Funds the productionizing of leanMultisig, a post-quantum aggregate signature library for Lean consensus, focusing on performance and simplicity.

Providing a comprehensive view of client performance and interoperability to help node operators and client teams make better infrastructure decisions.

The EPF is an open fellowship program for developers aspiring to work on Ethereum core protocol, clients, research and related tooling.

A hybrid zero-knowledge training program combining online coursework with in-person mentorship to build applied cryptography skills and strengthen Ecuador’s emerging Ethereum research community.

Supports Dev3Pack's initiatives to transition women and students from Web2 to Web3 through mentorship, coding challenges, and workshops.

Project Name	Domain	Output	Date
Oblivious Labs server <> Kohaku	Privacy	Developer tooling	2026 Q1
AVAZAR: Automatic verification tools for zkVM arithmetization	Zero-knowledge Proofs	Research	2026 Q1
Developer Growth 2026 Support	Community	Ecosystem development	2026 Q1
Ethproofs zkAttester	Nodes and Clients	Research	2026 Q1
Use Case Lab - Program Specialist	UX/UI	Research	2026 Q1
The Evolution of the LLZK IR	Zero-knowledge Proofs	Developer tooling	2026 Q1
Open Creator Rails	Application layer	Developer tooling	2026 Q1
Local mixing approach to obfuscation	Cryptography	Research	2026 Q1
Unblocking Tor bridge scalability	Privacy	Developer tooling	2026 Q1
Walletconnect clear signing library	Application layer	Developer tooling	2026 Q1
Specialized Event Support	Community	Ecosystem development	2026 Q1
Rust Verification Through Lean 4 Tooling Investigation	Zero-knowledge Proofs	Research	2026 Q1
Axiom + OpenVM Formal Verification Grant	Zero-knowledge Proofs	Research	2026 Q1
Cornell Blockchain Conference 2025	Community	Ecosystem development	2026 Q1
Invisible Garden	Community	Ecosystem development	2026 Q1

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