The Ethereum Foundation Awards Developers a $2M Grant

In its recently held Academic Grants Round, the Ethereum foundation awarded a $2 million grant to encourage research on Ethereum and related network technologies.

The Ethereum Foundation stated earlier this year that it would provide a $750,000 grant to finance numerous “formal, scientific, and systematic” research initiatives targeted at enhancing the Ethereum network.

Before April 2022, ideas were requested from academic think tanks, research institutions, Ph.D. students, and anybody interested in investigating and increasing their understanding of Ethereum.

Recently, 39 of the several scholarly applications submitted during this time span have been deemed acceptable for funding. Following a follow-up announcement by the foundation on Friday, the award projects span seven of Ethereum’s core categories: Economics, Consensus Layer, P2P Networking Maximum Extractable Value, Formal Verification, Cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, and other fields.

Teams for these research initiatives are reportedly from Canada, China, the United States, Vietnam, and fifteen other nations.

The original grant allocation of $750,000 was significantly increased to $2 million. The rationale given by the foundation was that the number of high-quality project ideas submitted surpassed their expectations. In addition, it was said that a few of the projects had tremendous potential, therefore justifying the increase in cash.

The Ethereum Foundation said, “We anticipate the outcomes of the several academic studies funded in this round…We are pleased to follow these research teams and see their wide influence on extending academic knowledge across the Ethereum community.”

This is not the first time the Ethereum Foundation has awarded research grants totaling millions of dollars.

In fact, the non-profit organization was founded for the primary purpose of funding research initiatives on Ethereum and related fields.

In 2020, the Foundation provided grants totaling $2.4 million to about 25 companies, including Dark Forest, Web 3 Labs, Hardhat, and Bitfly. These companies were active at the time on Ethereum initiatives spanning the community, education, cryptography and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), developer experience, Ethereum 1. x, Ethereum 2.0, Layer 2, and user experience indirect financing.

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