The Ethereum Foundation announced the distribution of more than $32 million in grants in the first quarter of 2025.
According to the May 8 update, funds have been issued through the Ecosystem Support Program and spread across 94 projects. The report categorized recipients by theme and focus area, but did not disclose specific grant amounts for each initiative.
Meanwhile, this marks a prominent increase of 63% from the $11.6 million awarded in the last quarter of 2024, indicating a strong commitment to growth and improvement in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The Ethereum Foundation focuses on community and education
The largest share of the grant was funded by 32 initiatives and sent to the project under the Community and Education category. These included research, workshops, meetings and bootcamps to promote learning and network engagement.
Focusing on education outreach and community development, the foundation demonstrates its efforts to enhance understanding and ecosystem participation among Ethereum users.
Meanwhile, the foundation allocated 16 grants to developer experience and tools. Blockchain security company Certik has received two grants among beneficiaries in this category.
Certik is working to simplify the verification process for ZKVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine) circuits. The company’s efforts include improving modular arithmetic operations and optimizing scenarios where multiple values are stored in a single field element.
Other key grant categories include encryption and zero knowledge proof, supporting 14 projects.
The consensus layer received seven grants, but both the execution layer and protocol growth and support categories were supported by five initiatives each. General growth and support secured four grants and awarded two more under indirect funding.
The remaining 10 projects were awarded under the “Other” category. Funded entities in this category focus on advocating for decentralization, in-depth research into stubcoin, and integrating Ethereum in traditional financial systems.
In particular, L2Beat, a well-known Layer 2 data aggregator, also received a grant. The award forms part of the Ethereum Foundation’s continued financial support for Ethereum’s data provision efforts. This is considered essential to the transparency and scalability of Ethereum’s Layer-2 solution.