The Ethereum Foundation opened applications on June 26, 2023 for its inaugural Devconnect Istanbul Scholars Program, a fully funded participation grant designed to bring contributors and researchers from underrepresented regions to the week-long technical gathering held November 13 to 19 at the Istanbul Congress Center. The program ultimately delivered on that goal: 22 scholars attended the event, which drew more than 3,500 participants to its open Cowork space.

Unlike Devcon, the Ethereum Foundation's flagship general conference (which operates on a roughly biennial cadence, with Devcon 6 held in Bogotá in 2022, Devcon 7 in Bangkok in 2024, and Devcon 8 planned for Mumbai in 2026), Devconnect is a workshop-style event built around specialist sessions for protocol researchers, security engineers, and governance practitioners. The Cowork pass was priced at just €10 for the full week, though individual specialist sessions within Devconnect were separately accessed components of the programming. International travel, accommodation, and visas remain prohibitive for contributors across much of the Global South. The Scholars Program covered the full cost package: flights, housing, per diem, visa application fees, event access, and sponsored entry to individual specialist sessions. Participants also committed roughly two hours per week from September through November 2023 for preparatory virtual programming before arriving in Istanbul.

The program was administered by the Ethereum Foundation's Team Next Billion, an internal unit focused on identifying barriers to Ethereum's adoption among the world's next wave of users, particularly in emerging economies. The team runs a parallel initiative, the Next Billion Fellowship, which by mid-2023 was funding individuals working on financial inclusion in Indonesia, tokenized cultural heritage in Zambia, and UX adoption research in Ukraine. The Scholars Program extended that regional focus into conference access specifically.

Eligibility targeted people working across protocol development, Web3 development, privacy, security, cryptoeconomics, UX, and governance, with priority given to applicants from countries "currently lacking representation in Ethereum" as well as Turkey and its neighbors. The Foundation also prioritized demographic minorities across gender, ethnicity, and other identities.

The regional context makes the program's design choices more legible. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded 52% year-over-year crypto growth and peer-to-peer crypto trading on the continent grew 300% over the same period, according to Yellow.com adoption research, though the precise reference year for both figures has not been independently confirmed. Wallet ownership in Nigeria reached roughly 84% and 66% in South Africa, figures that compare favorably with the roughly 42% global crypto ownership rate recorded in the Consensys global survey. Yet participation in Ethereum's technical governance has remained concentrated in Western Europe and North America. Scholar Alphonce, a software engineer from Kenya, described Ethereum as "powerful for fostering financial inclusion" and said his goal after Istanbul was to bring the open-source collaborative culture he experienced back to the African blockchain ecosystem.

The barriers are not only financial. Scholar Elnaz, a Java backend and smart contract developer from Iran, described having her centralized exchange account banned based on her geographic location. Her experience illustrates a structural point relevant to developers in economies facing financial restrictions: decentralized infrastructure can function as a practical requirement rather than an ideological preference. "Communities need better education on decentralized networks," she said.

Smart contract deployment data from the same period reinforces why developer inclusion carries real stakes. Alchemy's Q2 2023 Web3 Developer Report recorded 1,106% year-over-year growth in smart contract deployments on Layer 2 networks and Polygon. That growth is happening globally, but the teams shaping the underlying protocol standards are not yet representative of where adoption is occurring. Scholar Ovia, a blockchain researcher from India working on zero-knowledge cryptography, described the event as generating "ideas and potential collaborations" and subsequently published technical writing on ZKVMs and ZKSNARKs. Her profile can reflect a broader pattern: technically sophisticated contributors in South Asia who engage deeply with Ethereum's most complex open problems but lack institutional funding to participate in the conferences where those problems get worked out.

The Ethereum Foundation framed the program's purpose plainly: to find "talented and values-aligned individuals from communities currently geographically and demographically underrepresented in Ethereum" and give them both financial support and substantive preparation to engage meaningfully, not simply to attend.

Istanbul's selection as host city was itself an inclusion signal, given its geographic position between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, its visa accessibility for a wide range of nationalities, its major airport infrastructure that facilitated travel from a broad range of origins (including a notable influx of developers from Russia and Ukraine), and its growing local blockchain community anchored by institutions such as the BlockchainIST Center at Bahçeşehir University. The Scholars Program explicitly listed Turkey and neighboring countries as a targeted category, acknowledging that even the host country's developers can face structural barriers to participation.

The program has since been extended beyond its Istanbul debut. The Ethereum Foundation has reportedly run scholars initiatives at Devcon Bangkok in 2024 and Devconnect Buenos Aires in 2025, though both programs await confirmation against primary Ethereum Foundation sources. If verified, what began as a pilot is becoming a standard part of the Foundation's event infrastructure. With Devcon 8 scheduled for Mumbai in 2026, the question of whether the scholars model can scale to match demand from South Asia's fast-growing developer base will be a practical test of that commitment. Worth noting: the Ethereum Foundation has not publicly disclosed a regional breakdown of the 22 Istanbul scholars, leaving it impossible to assess precisely which geographies benefited most from the program's inaugural cohort.