The Ethereum Foundation opened applications for the second cohort of its Next Billion Fellowship on June 21, 2022, citing measurable outcomes from four inaugural fellows working in Kenya, Mexico, Bangladesh, and on UNICEF's Giga initiative, a school connectivity program focused substantially on Rwanda. The Cohort 2 deadline is July 24, 2022. The six-month, self-directed program provides mentorship, domain expertise, and stipends to individuals already leading projects that serve populations underrepresented in Ethereum's ecosystem. First announced on May 7, 2021, the fellowship is now entering its second iteration, reflecting a deliberate multi-year strategy rather than an exploratory new program.

Cohort 1 Delivered Operational Results

The Foundation's decision to publish a full project roundup before opening new applications signals an approach unusual in institutional Web3 grant-making: accountability before expansion.

At least two of the four Cohort 1 fellows produced outcomes beyond pilot stage, while the remaining projects were at earlier but significant phases of development. In Kenya, fellow Benson Njuguna worked on a blockchain-based crop insurance project built on a partnership between Etherisc and ACRE Africa, a collaboration backed by a Chainlink Community Grant that funded the oracle infrastructure. The system uses parametric smart contracts (self-executing agreements triggered by predefined conditions rather than manual claims review) combined with weather data delivered via Chainlink's decentralized oracle network. When a weather event crosses a threshold, payouts fire automatically and land in farmers' M-Pesa accounts, a widely used mobile money platform in Kenya. More than 17,000 farmers were enrolled at the time of the roundup, with premiums as low as $0.50 per installment, a figure that had grown to approximately 22,000 by mid-2022. According to the Foundation, processing time for insurance payouts dropped from months to days.

That figure matters in context. Chainalysis data covering July 2021 through June 2022 shows Sub-Saharan Africa recorded $100.6 billion in on-chain crypto volume, up 16% year over year. Eighty percent of transfers in the region were under $1,000, the highest share of small-value transactions globally, and peer-to-peer exchange activity accounted for more than double the share seen in any other region. Kenya ranked 19th globally for crypto adoption. These figures describe a population engaging with crypto out of practical necessity, not speculation: residents use it to hedge against volatile local currencies, to send and receive remittances, and to navigate capital controls that restrict access to foreign exchange. Infrastructure like parametric crop insurance fits that reality directly.

School Connectivity and Digital Identity

Fellow Naroa Zurutuza worked with UNICEF's Giga initiative, which maps and connects unconnected schools. The model used two Ethereum-based tools: an NFT collection called Patchwork Kingdoms, which raised $550,000 in three hours at auction, and a validator staking experiment in which the Ethereum Foundation donated 32 ETH. Staking rewards from that validator, approximately 0.43 ETH per year at the time of the experiment (equivalent to roughly $550 USD annually at late-2022 ETH prices), were directed toward school internet costs in Rwanda. Those yield figures reflect a specific ETH price point in late 2022; current staking returns in dollar terms would differ depending on prevailing ETH prices. Sixty-three schools in Rwanda had been connected at the time of the roundup, against a national target of 1,796. Giga also reported a 55% reduction in the price per megabit per second for participating schools.

In Latin America, fellow Chuy Cepeda, working through the fellowship, helped accelerate OS City's deployment of a Spanish-language blockchain wallet for storing government-issued digital credentials. The project reached approximately 650,000 people across Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico, building on earlier work from a UNICEF Innovation Blockchain Cohort engagement.

The Bangladesh Story Carries the Largest Potential Scale

The least-covered project in Cohort 1 may ultimately have the widest reach.

Kuldeep Bandhu Aryal, a Technology for Development specialist at BRAC's Social Innovation Lab, was tasked with designing a cross-service blockchain beneficiary ID system. BRAC operates across more than 11 countries and serves roughly 100 million people annually through programs covering health, education, microfinance, and livelihood programs. A shared Ethereum-based identity layer across BRAC's services could reduce duplication, improve targeting, and enable automated disbursements without depending on national ID infrastructure, which remains incomplete in parts of Bangladesh, South Sudan, and Myanmar.

"We congratulate Kuldeep Aryal of BRAC Social Innovation Lab on being selected for the Ethereum Foundation Fellowship Programme," BRAC said in an official statement via X, formerly Twitter, published at the time of Aryal's selection to the fellowship. "He will be developing a blockchain strategy for BRAC and piloting Ethereum blockchain-based solutions in the organisation."

What Cohort 2 Could Look Like

The program targets applicants who are already leading operational projects serving underrepresented populations. Based on the Cohort 1 selection pattern, fellows have tended to bring existing organizational backing to their work, though the program's formal criteria focus on the communities served rather than the institutional profile of the applicant. The program is not a grants program and explicitly does not connect fellows to investors. The Next Billion team described the program's purpose as enabling "the flourishing of populations, communities, or individuals under-represented in the Ethereum ecosystem today" (Ethereum Foundation, 2021).

The fellowship is one of the more substantive attempts to test whether public blockchain infrastructure can do practical work in low-income and underserved economies. The Cohort 1 results suggest the model is viable at small scale. Whether it can influence institutional deployments at BRAC's or Giga's full scope, affecting tens of millions of people rather than tens of thousands, is the open question the next round of fellows will begin to answer.