You Won’t Believe What Ethereum Foundation Did With $32.65 Million! 🤑

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Big news, crypto nerds and people who pretend to understand what “Layer 2” means: the Ethereum Foundation squirrelled away $32.65 million in grants through its Ecosystem Support Program. And all in just Q1 of 2025—because why buy a yacht when you can reinvent the internet…or at least throw some money at people who’ll try? 💸

On May 8, they gave us a peek behind the funding curtain: categories, recipients, and a reminder that nobody gets to know how much their neighbor got (awkward family dinners at the blockchain, anyone?).

Project Details

They spread the love across areas with names that sound like rejected Marvel characters: community and education, cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs (that’s the thing you say when you totally didn’t forget your friend’s birthday), and of course those mysterious Layer 2s. And how could we forget, “execution layers”—which is not as ominous as it sounds, unless you’re inefficient code. 😉

“Community and Education” hoarded most of the loot. 37 projects in this category are now flush enough to host more hacker sleepovers—I mean, hackathons—ETHPrague, ETHiopia (yep, Ethereum is going to Addis Ababa, because why not), and more. If you ever needed an excuse to add “blockchain thought leader” to your LinkedIn, now’s your chance.

The Arabic Blockchain Developer Bootcamp got in on the action, cooking up fresh community programs for actual developers (and not just the guy in accounting who talks about mining at lunch).

The second biggest slice? “Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge Proofs.” 16 teams are elbow-deep in math so complicated, even your calculator would break a sweat. They’re tackling ZKP techniques, post-quantum this and that, and probably building Skynet as a side hustle.

Over in the “Consensus Layer” corner, Andrew Lewis-Pye (no relation to chicken) and six other mathemagicians are making Ethereum’s consensus mechanism more secure, or as close as you can get to unhackable in a world with teenagers and Red Bull.

Let’s not forget 17 projects under “Developer Experience and Tooling.” Think mobile SDKs, analytics platforms, language support libraries—basically everything needed to make developers whine less on Twitter.

If you like your crypto with extra gas (fees), don’t worry, five “Execution Layer” geniuses are looking to optimize gas costs and toy with metering changes. Meanwhile, “Overall Growth and Support” is handing out fellowships and internships—because your little brother deserves a shot at Web3, too.

And in the “miscellaneous, but we still want to brag about it” pile: projects advocating for decentralization (fight the power!), making DeFi data less terrifying, onboarding institutions, and verifying things so formally that your high school English teacher would be impressed.

Ecosystem Developments

Didn’t get enough change? Buckle up: the Pectra upgrade just dropped, fusing the “Prague” and “Electra” layers like a blockchain PB&J, plus 11 fresh Ethereum Improvement Proposals—because 10 would be basic. 🍞💡⚡

Vitalik Buterin—Ethereum’s answer to a Silicon Valley supervillain—dropped a new roadmap, too. He’s focused on Layer 1 scalability, blobs (no, not a typo), and “user experience,” which we can only hope means fewer late-night panic attacks for users. In short, Ethereum’s spending big so you can maybe buy a coffee with crypto… someday!

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2025-05-09 07:00