Author: Sophia Brown
Today we are proud to announce a new leadership structure for privacy-related efforts at the Ethereum Foundation: Igor Barinov joins as coordinator of Privacy @ EF, guiding strategy and alignment across privacy-focused efforts including PSE and more. Igor has over a decade of experience in the Ethereum ecosystem as founder of Blockscout, Gnosis Chain, and zkBob, and is a strong advocate for open-source and privacy. Andy Guzman will now serve as coordinator of the (PSE) team, taking over from Sam Richards and leading applied cryptography, research, and development. Andy has been with PSE/EF since 2022 and has led various key…
Privacy is the freedom to choose what you share, when you share it, and who you share it with. We all take this for granted in daily life: closing the door to a room, casting a secret ballot, or speaking privately with a friend. But online and onchain, these protections are often missing. Ethereum was created to be the foundation of digital trust, one that is worthy of civilizational scale. For that trust to remain credible, privacy must be part of its core, the EF, along with dozens of Ethereum teams focused on privacy, are proud to support this cause..…
The Funding Coordination team is excited to announce a joint initiative with Keyring Network that introduces a new approach to impact funding in the Ethereum ecosystem. Directly support privacy-focused developers Keyring’s zkVerified permissioned vaults on mainnet provide compliant and privacy-preserving access to DeFi lending markets. For the first two months, all protocol fees from Keyring’s zkVerified vaults will go to the legal defense funds of Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developers currently on trial for publishing open-source code. This model ensures that the first users of a vault directly support the legal protection of privacy-focused developers. By…
The Ethereum Foundation has opened applications for the 2026 Internship Program: a paid, full-time opportunity to work directly with teams advancing the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem. Interns will join EF teams for 12 weeks over the summer, contributing to active R&D and ecosystem-oriented projects across a wide range of focus areas. The internship is open to candidates worldwide and can be completed remotely or from EF’s offices. A summer meetup will bring the cohort together to connect in person. The Goal Ethereum continues to evolve; each upgrade, research initiative, and experiment depends on people willing to dive into complex problems…
Community & educationBluechip25Conference hosted in Vienna, Austria dedicated to crypto safety, learning and sharing best practices, and setting new benchmarks for trust and transparency.Community & educationBuildETHConference focused on Ethereum infrastructure, DeFi primitives and protocols, AI agents, and new financial rails for digital assets organized in San Francisco, USA.Community & educationDeFi Security SummitTechnical conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina diving into the education and technical advances in securing dapps on top of blockchain technology.Community & educationDestino DevconnectGrants round focused on supporting community-led events and initiatives that help bring Argentina and the broader Latin America region onchain.Community & educationdEVMatch 2025APU Blockchain & Cryptocurrency…
Devconnect Buenos Aires wrapped up as the largest Ethereum Foundation event yet, bringing together a global mix of developers, founders, creators, and curious newcomers. Key numbers from the week 14,000+ attendeesfrom 130+ countries45% from Argentina53% first-time EF event attendees1,000+ visas issued in collaboration with Argentina’s Dirección Nacional de Migraciones80+ application exhibitors40+ deep-dive events15 Community Hubs200 volunteers500+ community-run side events across the city 📸 Find the Devconnect photo gallery here.📋 Share your feedback with us and fill out the survey. 🎡 A World’s Fair for Ethereum with La Rural as the Schellingpoint For the first time, Devconnect introduced a World’s Fair-style…
During Devconnect Buenos Aires, the Ethereum Foundation and Secureum TrustX brought together Ethereum security practitioners for Trillion Dollar Security Day, a focused event exploring what it would take to securely support a trillion-dollar Ethereum economy. The event brought together around eighty participants from across the Ethereum Security Ecosystem—spanning Infrastructure, Interoperability, Layer 1 & 2, Onchain, Offchain, Privacy, and Wallets—to assess the current security landscape, surface shared challenges, and identify concrete next steps across the stack. The discussions and outputs from this event contribute to the Ethereum Foundation’s ongoing One Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) initiative. Why a Trillion Dollar Security Day?…
The EF’s Academic Secretariat team is proud to announce the launch of the inaugural PhD Fellowship Program, a pioneering initiative aimed at empowering and expanding the frontiers of Ethereum-related academic research, by supporting Ethereum-related academic work led by PhD students. Round Scope The scope of this round includes work that is broadly relevant to students interested in pursuing research that are at the intersection of Institutional Design, Corporate Governance, Political Economic, Decentralized AI, and Ethereum. We are seeking proposals that align with the RFP topics listed on our webpage. We encourage researchers to use these RFPs as a starting point,…
tl;dr I am stepping down from my co-ED role at the EF at the end of February 2026. Bastian Aue is taking over the co-ED role alongside Hsiao-Wei. The future is bright for builders, for Ethereum, for the EF, and for me. Future of Ethereum As competing ideas emerge and fail and the markets jump up and down, we have never been given too much certainty. The conviction about Ethereum that comes from a deep understanding of its technology, its governance, its meaning for the future, and the values we share will always make us converge intermittently, even when our…
Today, we are announcing a transition in the executive leadership team at the Ethereum Foundation. After extensive contributions to the Foundation’s mission and operations, Tomasz Stańczak has decided to step down from his role as Co-Executive Director. The Foundation’s Board has appointed Bastian Aue to serve as interim Co-Executive Director, effective immediately. Tomasz joined the management team during a critical period of growth and maturation for the Foundation. His strategic guidance helped expand our ability to reach out to broad groups of people and teams, and for the EF to understand businesses in the ecosystem more deeply. He also brought…