https://ift.tt/pNl4WaE Update: Q3 and Q4, 2021

Community & education Web3 Lagos   Conference in Lagos, Nigeria covering a variety of topics including making the switch from Web2 to Web3. Community & education Blockchain Fellowship ESatya Three month online course aiming to familiarize Nepalese developers with the key elements of blockchain technology through instruction and project-based learning. Community & education Ethereum Eje Cafetero Meetups Ethereum Eje Cafetero Community talks and meetups in Colombia’s Coffee Region. Community & education ETH CUBA   Kickstarting community growth in Cuba. Community & education Ethereum Medellín Platohedro Community development in Medellín, Colombia. Community & education Ethereum Tegucigalpa   Support for Ethereum community development in Honduras including meetups, developer events and Spanish-language Ethereum content. Community & education 0xPARC   Organization supporting applied cryptography research and development. Community & education ETHGlobal   Virtual and in-person hackathons focused on building the Ethereum developer community through learning opportunities and hands-on support for hackers. Community & education   Electronic Frontier Foundation Nonprofit dedicated to promoting digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. Community & education   Fight For The Future Grassroots activism group that fights for a future where technology is a force for liberation and not oppression. Community & education   Coin Center Nonprofit promoting sensible regulatory approaches to cryptocurrency technology through research, advocacy and educating policymakers. Consensus Layer Lighthouse grant through April 2022 Sigma Prime Continued development of the Lighthouse consensus client. Consensus Layer Lodestar, light clients and JS tooling Chainsafe Continued development of the Lodestar JS consensus client, with goals including light client R&D, improved tooling and documentation, and Merge readiness. Consensus Layer Prysm client Prysmatic Labs Continued development of the Prysm consensus client. Consensus Layer Stereum Q4 2021 Rock Logic Continued development of the Stereum “one click installer” for solo stakers to install a beacon chain client and dependencies in a single setup, with support for all production clients on testnet and mainnet. Consensus Layer EthStaker   Continued support for ETHStaker, a community group promoting and supporting Ethereum staking through education, advocacy, technical support, tooling, etc; and funding of a mainnet ETHStaker validator to be used for demonstrations, client metrics, and more. Consensus Layer Investigation of Delay for Applied Boolean Functions Moscow State University, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics Investigation of circuit latency bounds, a crucial security consideration for Verifiable Delay Functions. Consensus Layer DiscV5 Research DataHop Research and optimization of the DiscV5 service discovery mechanism; current goal is the publication of a report including performance evaluation of the proposed mechanism and an evaluation of its resistance against attacks. Consensus Layer SSZ SimpleSerialize   Continued development of ssz.dev, a website documenting and demonstrating the SSZ serialization standard, including a visualization playground and React-based SSZ implementation. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Identity, Reputation and ZKP research Justin Martin Development of proofs of cryptographically-verifiable truth claims, such as ownership of web2 identities or government issued credentials. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Prediction markets for content curation Janmajaya Mall Content sharing platform demonstrating the use of a prediction market mechanism for collaborative curation. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs zkEVM Research and Development Ying Tong Lai, Electric Coin Company Contributions to research and development on the zkEVM project, which aims to build both a zk rollup that directly supports smart contracts, and a proof of validity for the EVM that could verify Ethereum’s entire history in one proof. Cryptography & zero knowledge proofs Maci: Coordinator Service Chao Ma API to manage MACI proof generation using messages signed with the coordinator’s private key, a more straightforward and scalable interface allowing users to construct correct proofs by running commands in the cli. Developer experience & tooling Obsidian On Ethereum Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Continuation of research and proof-of-concept development by a group of students and professors from the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science to demonstrate that key features of the Obsidian smart contract language can translate successfully to Ethereum. Developer experience & tooling Formal Verification of Contracts Library OpenZeppelin Formal verification by Certora of OpenZeppelin’s library of template contracts for commonly-used components and standards. Developer experience & tooling ZK Rollup and L2 Developer Tools Ryodan Work on Layer 2 and zk rollups including a zk rollup design that eliminates transaction history data for contract execution and zkCloud, a service which aims to help developers use zero-knowledge proofs to write smart contracts and programs more easily. Execution Layer Low-level optimization of a bigint library for IPA base field calculations Dag Arne Osvik Optimized field-operation library in Go, intended to replace Go’s bigint library in Verkle tree implementation for improved performance following the switch from KZG to IPA commitment scheme. Layer 2 L2BEAT   Maintenance and expansion of L2BEAT, a website offering statistics, analysis and risk factors for comparison between Layer 2 scaling solutions. Other Startrail   Infrastructure for recording the distribution and appraisal of physical artworks. User experience w3a.io a42 Inc. Ethereum-based authentication and authorization of usage rights to physical devices.