The Ethereum Foundation recently announced the Ecosystem Support Program (EFESP) for the second quarter of this year. This is a program created by the Ethereum Foundation to encourage the developer community to continue to innovate and support new projects with ideals and potential.
It can be seen that in the second quarter of 2024, the Ethereum Foundation allocated a total of approximately US$8.47 million and funded 98 projects. Among them, we found that in addition to supporting offline gatherings (such as ETH Dublin), the Ethereum Foundation’s intensive funding areas in the second quarter of this year were related to cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, which is also consistent with Vitalik Buterin’s own thoughts. We might as well understand from the perspective of developers what topics the future development of the blockchain industry will focus on.
Recruiting more developers, Ethereum Season 2 keywords: account abstraction, privacy, zero-knowledge proof
In the second quarter, the Ethereum Foundation funded 41 community and education-related projects, including events such as ETH conferences and global small gatherings. In the second season alone, it has already blossomed in the Czech Republic, Kenya, Honduras, Croatia, Ukraine, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Ghana and Ecuador. Each event has its own theme and mission. Take the Digital Democracy Day held in Croatia as an example. This event aims to delve into the future of collaborative technology and plural democracy, such as digital elections.
The hackathon in Kenya encouraged participants to create projects with real-world impact and explored topics such as zero-knowledge (ZK), account abstraction and privacy. In fact, the activities in cooperation with the Kyiv Federal Polytechnic and ETH Roma also focused on discussing issues such as zero-knowledge proofs, account abstraction, and privacy.
In addition to thematic discussions, the Ethereum Foundation is also actively recruiting more developers through educational activities. For example, IBF Blockchain Week conducted a 6-day training camp at Bennett University in India to introduce Solidity programs to students through practical experience. design. Ethereum Kyiv also hosts a series of meetups and workshops to promote Ethereum to a wider audience and educate more developers.
There are also projects such as the Road to Devcon Grants Round that support the development of local Ethereum communities, initiatives and projects in Southeast Asia in the form of money.
Zero-knowledge proof focuses on identity authentication applications, and Taiwanese projects were also selected.
The second biggest topic on the list is cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, such as Anon Aadhaar, a protocol powered by ZKP on the Ethereum blockchain to prove ownership of Aadhaar identities (Indian residential IDs) in a privacy-preserving manner.
Also in the spotlight is MACI Anonymized Poll Signup , an electronic voting solution. Re-engineering the identity authentication of eligible voters through blockchain ensures that they can vote securely and anonymously to mitigate attacks where anonymity is compromised by malicious actors colluding with external bribers.
Other popular keywords include FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and MPC (Multi-Party Computation) multi-party secure computation.
It is worth mentioning that there are projects related to Taiwan on the list: UniRep Social Taiwan is a completely anonymous social media platform that protects users’ identities from surveillance and caters to the Taiwanese community. Also sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation in the field of cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs.
This article Q2 spent US$8.47 million to support the ecosystem. What projects does the Ethereum Foundation fund? Taiwan UniRep Social Taiwan was also selected. First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.
