The Ethereum Foundation's Devcon Scholars program brought 50 builders from underrepresented regions to its flagship conference in Bogotá, Colombia in October 2022, covering the full cost of attendance for participants who could not otherwise afford to go. The cohort, the program's second since a 2019 pilot in Osaka, reflected a deliberate push to shift Ethereum's center of gravity southward. Devcon VI was the first Devcon ever held in Latin America, and the foundation had supported roughly 14 community events across the region in the months preceding the conference. Roughly half of the scholar cohort came from Latin America alone, a figure that reads less as coincidence than as a statement of intent.

Devcon VI drew more than 6,000 in-person attendees and 60,000 livestream viewers across four days. For the scholars, the support package included a conference ticket, round-trip airfare, accommodation, a daily stipend, and visa application assistance. The Ethereum Foundation also organized pre-event community-building calls to help scholars connect with one another before arriving in Bogotá. The program is administered by the foundation's Next Billion (NXBN) team and targets builders facing real financial or logistical barriers, not those who can already cover the costs themselves. "The most talented builders in our ecosystem should be able to attend Devcon regardless of their circumstances," the Devcon team stated when announcing the program's return.

Seventy percent of scholars also participated in ETHBogota, the co-located hackathon that ran October 7 to 9 with a prize pool exceeding $300,000. Multiple scholars won prizes in the competition. Beyond the event itself, each scholar was required to produce a learning artifact: a project, written reflection, or piece of documentation intended to extend the impact of their attendance beyond the event.

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Who Attended, and Why It Matters

The scholar cohort reflected a range of backgrounds that rarely appear together at crypto conferences. Yasmin, a Peruvian economist at the Ministry of Education, was exploring how Ethereum could function as civic infrastructure rather than a speculative asset. Harry, a biochemist from the UK, was researching decentralized science (DeSci), a nascent field focused on reforming how academic research is funded and peer-reviewed. His interest carries direct relevance for research institutions across the Global South, where underfunding and barriers to Western journal publishing are persistent structural problems.

Anya, a 17-year-old Canadian cryptography researcher, was working on SMS-based blockchain implementations and cryptographic automation. That technical direction matters in contexts where 4G and 5G coverage is uneven, including rural Bangladesh, Nepal, and interior India. A blockchain system that works over basic text messaging could prove a prerequisite for meaningful adoption in those environments, rather than a niche experiment.

Pakistan's Mashal Waqar brought media experience as co-founder of The Tempest, a global digital media company for women. After Devcon VI, she went on to take roles at the Ethereum Foundation, BanklessDAO, and Gitcoin, and co-authored one of the first in-depth studies on Web3 grants with MetaGov. Her trajectory after the program illustrates what the Ethereum Foundation says it is trying to cultivate. "We support individuals that have the potential to unlock parts of Ethereum's story that are still unwritten," the foundation wrote in its post-event recap.

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The Developer Pipeline Behind the Program

Electric Capital's developer geography data shows that North America's share of global crypto developers fell from 44 percent in 2015 to around 24 percent by 2022. Separately, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America collectively grew their share of global crypto developers by more than 20 percent since 2018. India accounts for roughly 12 percent of global crypto developers. Nigeria, with over 300,000 active builders, now represents approximately 3 percent of the worldwide total.

Those numbers reflect genuine demand. The structural barriers have not matched the pace: visa restrictions, foreign currency controls, and the cost of international travel continue to keep builders from emerging markets away from the events where protocol decisions get made and professional networks form. The Scholars program directly targets that gap.

The Ethereum Foundation's parallel Next Billion Fellowship offers further context on what access-focused programs can produce. Benson Njuguna, a fellow from Kenya working with ACRE Africa, used Ethereum to automate crop insurance payouts for more than 17,000 smallholder farmers, cutting payout times from months to days. Kuldeep Aryal, another Next Billion fellow, designed a blockchain-based beneficiary identification system through BRAC with direct applications across South Asia and Africa. That kind of application, Ethereum as operational infrastructure for people outside the financial mainstream, is the model the Next Billion team is working to expand.

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What Comes Next

The Scholars program has grown since the 2022 Bogotá cohort. Devcon VII in Bangkok in 2024 supported 93 scholars, nearly double the Bogotá figure. The growth in developer participation across Africa and South Asia has led some analysts to argue that the next logical step would be a cohort or dedicated funding stream specifically oriented toward those regions, where the builder base is growing fastest but access to flagship events remains the most constrained.

The 2022 program demonstrated that demand exists across geographies the industry has historically overlooked. Whether the Ethereum Foundation deepens that commitment in the years ahead is a question the developer data makes increasingly difficult to defer.