The Ethereum Foundation awarded approximately $2 million to 39 research teams across 18 countries through its Academic Grants Round, the Foundation announced on July 29, 2022. Administered by the Foundation's Ecosystem Support Program (ESP), the round was open to academics, PhD students, independent researchers, research centres, and think-tanks worldwide. The final funding total came in at roughly 167 percent above the original $750,000 cap, a sign that demand from global academia significantly outpaced initial estimates. The academic round represented approximately 7.8 percent of the Foundation's total grant disbursements across Q1 through Q3 of 2022 (roughly $25.6 million in total), according to ESP allocation data published for that period.

Budget More Than Doubled as Demand Exceeded Expectations

When the Foundation opened applications in March 2022, it set an upper funding limit of $750,000. After reviewing submissions, it chose to expand the budget rather than cut eligible teams. The final $2 million was distributed across seven research categories. Consensus layer security received the largest share, with nine projects splitting roughly $483,000. Research into peer-to-peer networking (five projects, $386,000) and MEV, short for maximal extractable value (a practice encompassing the reordering, insertion, or exclusion of transactions and the deployment of strategies such as sandwich attacks, liquidations, and cross-domain arbitrage to capture profit), ranked second and third. Cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs received the smallest allocation at $120,000 across two projects.

The timing carried operational weight. The announcement came 47 days before The Merge on September 15, 2022, the event that shifted Ethereum from proof-of-work mining to a proof-of-stake validation model and reduced the network's energy consumption by an estimated 99.95 percent. Several funded projects, including Beacon Chain formal verification work and research into the Casper FFG consensus algorithm (the mechanism that finalizes transaction history on Ethereum), were directly relevant to validating the security of a live protocol change rather than purely theoretical problems.

At the time of the announcement, ETH traded in a range of roughly $1,000 to $1,600, a depressed level following the collapse of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem in May 2022. The network had also burned more than 2.5 million ETH since EIP-1559 took effect in August 2021. That mechanism burns the base fee component of every transaction rather than routing it to miners; the priority fee (the tip) continues to go to miners and validators. By July 2022, the resulting accumulation of on-chain fee market data had created enough empirical material for economic research to begin in earnest. Multiple economics-track grantees, including teams from Soongsil University and Seoul National University in South Korea, built their proposals around analysing post-EIP-1559 fee market dynamics and related protocol questions.

"The diversity and quality of this round of grants reflects the interest of Academia in catalyzing shared knowledge in solving major problems," the Foundation wrote in its announcement post.

South Korea's Dual Research Focus

South Korea stood out as one of the more analytically ambitious contributors in the cohort, with two funded teams from Soongsil University and Seoul National University addressing distinct areas of the Ethereum protocol. One team focused on gas fee market dynamics using post-EIP-1559 transaction data; the other examined centralisation risks tied to Danksharding and proposer-builder separation, questions that would take on greater urgency as the post-Merge roadmap progressed. South Korea's inclusion reflects a domestic environment shaped by a large and active retail crypto market and an emerging regulatory framework in the Digital Asset Basic Act, both of which have pushed academic institutions to engage with blockchain infrastructure at a technical rather than purely economic level.

A Pakistani University Produces Foundational Security Research

One of the most consequential regional signals in the cohort is the inclusion of Information Technology University (ITU) of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. The team received funding to apply formal verification methods to the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain, specifically checking whether the Casper FFG algorithm correctly handles checkpoint justification and validator exit conditions. Formal verification uses mathematical proofs to confirm that software behaves as specified, rather than relying on testing alone. The ITU Punjab team's work eventually produced a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Scientific Reports in 2025, covering safety properties of the Beacon Chain's epoch processing. Pakistan has one of the world's highest rates of informal remittance flows and significant retail crypto usage despite a historically hostile regulatory posture. A South Asian institution contributing protocol-level security research to a global Layer 1 network, rather than application or adoption studies, is an uncommon outcome and one with practical utility for the broader Ethereum developer community.

Vietnam's Regulatory Grey Zone Gets Academic Coverage

RMIT Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City received funding to study monetary policy in cryptocurrency contexts, examining how crypto functions as a parallel or substitute currency in economies where it has achieved high adoption. Vietnam consistently ranks in the global top five for raw crypto adoption by population (Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index), yet the State Bank of Vietnam prohibits crypto as a legal payment method while allowing ownership and trading to exist in an unresolved legal space. RMIT Vietnam's FinTech-Crypto Hub has since used this research foundation to advocate for formal regulation, calling in December 2024 for Vietnam to establish clear legal frameworks for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Africa Absent Despite Fastest-Growing Blockchain Funding Environment

None of the 39 funded teams came from an African institution, a notable gap given that African blockchain venture funding grew 429 percent between 2021 and 2022, the fastest rate of any region globally. Africa's share of total global blockchain funding rose from 0.3 percent in 2021 to 1.8 percent in 2022, a significant proportional gain that nonetheless reflects a low starting base. By mid-2022, Nigerian, Kenyan, and South African users were among the most active adopters of DeFi tools and stablecoins, driven by currency depreciation and remittance costs (Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index, 2022). Of the 18 countries represented in the cohort, only Vietnam, Pakistan, and Costa Rica fall outside the high-income OECD and East Asian research bloc. Those three countries account for roughly 8 percent of the 39 funded teams, even though they represent regions where the majority of actual crypto usage by volume originates. Several structural factors help explain the absence of African institutions: limited awareness of EF grant programmes among African academics, lower Ethereum research infrastructure density across the continent, and a proposal process that tends to favour teams with established publication records.

The Foundation published a follow-up in December 2024 showing that 31 of the 39 projects had completed and published their findings, with eight still active. The ESP has since announced a 2024 Academic Grants Round, giving institutions in underrepresented regions, particularly across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, a concrete opportunity to close the participation gap in the next cycle.