Allocation Update: Q4 2022 | Ethereum Foundation Blog

Community & educationBlockchain Education in NepaleSatyaSupport to host free meetups and their blockchain course that aims to familiarize Nepalese developers with the key elements of blockchain through project-based learning.Community & educationCryptoStatsCommunity-driven project that provides neutral crypto metrics and develops tools for gathering data and building websites that visualize the data in practical ways for the community.Community & educationDeFi LATAM MeetupMeetup with educational talks and workshops to celebrate the end of the year and foster enthusiasm to continue building together in the next year.Community & educationDevcon Satellite Events GrantsSponsorship of Devcon-related meetups and watch parties around the globe, with the purpose of decentralizing Devcon VI and boosting local Ethereum communities.Community & educationDevcon VI Quadratic Funding Side EventEthereum ColombiaSide event during Devcon VI to bring together the builders and organizers of the Latin American projects that participated in the quadratic funding round.Community & educationETHBKK 2022Online conference in Bangkok, Thailand that aims to highlight Southeast Asian projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.Community & educationEthereum HondurasSupporting Ethereum Honduras in their community-building efforts, which include hosting meetups, creating educational content, and organizing grants programs.Community & educationEthereum Hungary MeetupsMeetups to bring the Hungarian Ethereum community together, with talks and discussions on Ethereum’s development.Community & educationEthereum Miami MeetupMeetup to learn more about Colombia’s tech ecosystem and Devcon VI through panel discussions.Community & educationEthereum San Diego MeetupsSeries of five technical meetups covering topics such as self-custody, Solidity security fundamentals, and Scaffold-eth.Community & educationEthereum Virtual Machine BookJoshua TrujilloFull zero-to-one resource on the EVM covering information on areas such as the instruction set, assembly languages, and security considerations.Community & educationEthereum Uruguay at Punta TechSupport for Ethereum Uruguay to bring web3 content to Punta Tech for the first time via educating attendees, onboarding them to web3, and organizing workshops.Community & educationETHLatam MeetupSide event held during LABITCONF to spotlight the various Ethereum LatAm communities, bringing newcomers and existing community members together.Community & educationETHVietnam Community BuildingEfforts to grow the community of Ethereum developers in Vietnam through running workshops, a hacker house, and a three-day event and hackathon.Community & educationHack.labs() CTFCapture the Flag (CTF) security competition held at the end of ETH Medellín in which participants break, optimize, and hack smart contracts.Community & educationKyiv Ethereum MeetupsMeetups and workshops organized in Kyiv, Ukraine, covering topics such as EVM smart contracts, zero-knowledge (ZK), and non-custodial wallets.Community & educationMerge Data ChallengeChallenge that rewarded data analysts who could document the best Merge data insights into the most readable blog post possible.Community & educationPeoples’ Cooperative EventPhysical event held in Lagos, Nigeria geared towards introducing high school students and teachers to blockchain and Ethereum, and a virtual event educating the general public on Ethereum’s developments and layer 2s.Community & educationSin Fronteras TechWorkingUpHackathon focused on developing solutions to the problems that Ecuador’s migrant population experiences.Community & educationSmart Contracts Online Course and LecturesDistributed LabOnline course in Ukrainian covering the fundamentals of blockchain technology, smart contracts, and Solidity, with lecture videos accessible on Prometheus and Youtube.Community & educationStudent Blockchain HackathonHongo Web3 ValleyHackathon for students in Japan focusing on the intersection between blockchain and social issues, with workshops and talks to guide beginners.Community & educationTech4Democracy BogotáIE UniversityShowcasing Latin American projects that are developing blockchain and web3 technologies that have the potential to further democratic values.Community & educationWeb3 Onboarding EventCripto CuriosasTalks and workshops in Peru aimed at onboarding women to web3.Community & educationZK Hack IIIFour-week virtual event featuring weekly workshops on key ZK concepts and tools, and advanced puzzle solving competitions to find bugs in protocols.Community & education5th ZKProof WorkshopWorkshop held in Tel Aviv, Israel, to promote the standardization of ZK proof cryptography and increase the engagement of companies and researchers worldwide.Community & education13th Bar Ilan University Winter School on CryptographyProgram comprising lectures and tutorials that explore recent advances in blockchain technology, including consensus protocols, smart contracts, and bridges. Hosted in Tel Aviv, Israel.Consensus layerData Availability Sampling Networking RFPCodexResearching, modeling, and simulating a double-layer Kademlia protocol for Data Availability Sampling (DAS).Consensus layerDendrETHMetacraft LabsProject developing ZK circuits for verifying claims regarding the current state of Ethereum, backed by the signatures of the entire Ethereum validator set. These ZK circuits will then be utilized in light client smart contracts.Consensus layerEthereum PoolsDashboard that aggregates and monitors Ethereum validators belonging to well-known entities, such as staking pools and exchanges. Further develop an open-source Golang tool to allow monitoring validators at scale.Consensus layerLighthouseSigma PrimeContinued development of the Lighthouse consensus client.Consensus layerOpen ZeppelinOpen Zeppelin to audit the security of Ethereum’s codebase.Consensus layerSecure-SignerPufferValidator client that prevents equivocation enforced through trusted hardware and remote attestation, is compatible with existing consensus clients and MEV-Boost.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsBenchmarking Modern ZK Proof Systems with AI PrimitivesModulus LabsWhitepaper that provides comprehensive guidance on the selection of ZK proofs for given AI use cases, elaborating on topics such as performance metrics for the different proof systems (across prove time and memory) and the common AI primitives/bench-objects which meaningfully test these systems.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsBLISH Cryptography CourseSeries of free, cryptography-related lectures and workshops for students in Ukraine with strong mathematical skills.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsBlockWalletBuilding a robust product-market fit roadmap for BlockWallet—a privacy-focused, non-custodial browser extension wallet that enables users to store funds and interact with blockchain applications privately.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsECDSA Set Membership CircuitsBlake McAlevey-ScurrWrite Circom circuits to perform ZK proofs of ECDSA signatures. To be used in an application that will allow users to anonymously prove membership of a group of addresses on the fly.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsExploring the Feasibility of MACI in MPCLev Alexandrovich Soukhanov and Yaroslav Rebenko AlekseevichResearch on the mathematical issues that need to be understood and prototypes that need to be built in order to estimate whether minimal anti-collusion infrastructure (MACI) in multi-party computation (MPC) is feasible.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsP2P ZK-ChatKaylee GeorgeLibrary and browser extension that creates a decentralized anonymous chat with spam protection and some resistance to Sybil attacks.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsRLN Library in RustRasul IbragimovFurther development of a user-friendly and WASM-compatible rate limiting nullifier (RLN) library in Rust with the Vac team that allows users to generate proofs and witnesses, build provers and verifiers, and verify proofs. Build a Persistent Merkle Tree implementation for Rust.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsTemporary Anonymous Zone (TAZ)Colleen Rose, Danilo Kim, Falco Rodenburg, Lee Poettcker, and Rich WarnerContinued development of TAZ, which will enable end-users to easily try anonymity apps and developers to use the codebase as a starting point to learn, customize, or build their own applications.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsTraining Optimization on Neural Networks with ZKPSeiya KobayashiDeveloping a protocol that implements a commit-reveal scheme where provers try to prove that the evaluation score of their testing data fits inside predetermined error bounds, thus lowering the costs of generating proofs of validity for neural networks.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsUncloakBuilding a knowledge base for cryptography, supporting the growth and education of ZK developers and the broader cryptography community.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsZero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML)Cathie SoPlatform for machine learning developers to quickly convert their models trained in Tensorflow and PyTorch into a ZK-compatible one. Will include a library of Circom circuits, a Python-Circom translator, and a dapp that hosts, verifies, and pays out bounties.Developer experience & toolingERC-4337 Bundler for GoHazim Jumali and John RisingBounties for independent audits and contributions to a modular Go implementation of an ERC-4337 Bundler.Developer experience & toolingRust Ethereum Virtual Machine (revm)Dragan RakitaRust implementation of the EVM that is easy to integrate and use, supports all past forks, passes all Ethereum state tests, and is as fast as EVMone.Developer experience & toolingSolhintProtofireSolidity linter that enables Solidity developers to write standardized smart contract code through improved code quality, order, readability, style guides, preventing known bugs, and providing security alerts.Developer experience & toolingWTF Academy0xAAFree, open-source, and community-reviewed tutorials on Ethereum development (e.g. Solidity, Ethers.js) in Mandarin Chinese, with bilingual (English-Chinese) translations in progress.Execution layerResearch on ‘Commitment’ Against Front-Running AttacksAndrea Canidio and Vincent DanosGame-theoretic analysis of front-running attacks, specifically studying the feasibility of using new commit-reveal methods as a potential remedy to the issue.General researchAccessibility ResearchHaptics DAOResearch assessing the issues encountered by those with accessibility needs when navigating the web3 ecosystem, to generate a set of tailored community- and WCAG-informed best practices.General researchDeScanGeorgy Ishmaev and Martijn de VosResearch into the development and implementation of an improved Skip Graph algorithm for decentralized search that can tolerate adversarial peers, and how this tool can be used to store a complete Ethereum transaction history.General researchStablecoin Risks ResearchTammy YangResearch and analytics for an information hub related to stablecoins risk factors.Indirect fundingTechnical Challenges in Enterprise EthereumContinued exploration of issues and solutions for enterprise users of Ethereum in areas including decentralized identity, NIST standards alignment, Baseline protocol specification, and layer 2 standards and specifications.Layer 2BLS SnapA MetaMask Snap which integrates BLS Wallet to MetaMask, thus allowing users to manage assets, bundle transactions, and lower gas fees.Protocol growth & supportEthereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF)Stipends for cohort members of the EPF, a program designed to onboard developers to the process through which protocol development happens.User experienceNiceNodeOpen-source, open license, and free GUI application that enables users to easily run an Ethereum node of their choice at the click of a button.