The Ethereum Foundation's Ecosystem Support Program published its May 2022 grantee roundup on June 1, spotlighting two projects aimed at reducing the resource and security burdens facing Ethereum developers and node operators worldwide. This roundup is a focused two-project update rather than a broad quarterly disbursement, and does not represent the full scope of EF grant activity for the period. The featured grantees are the Status-affiliated Nimbus team's Fluffy Portal Network client and independent cryptographer Paul Miller's complete rewrite of the ethereum-cryptography JavaScript library.

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Fluffy targets the hardware barrier to running Ethereum nodes

Running a full Ethereum node in 2022 required approximately 2TB of local disk storage, a figure that climbs above 10TB for archive nodes. This hardware requirement effectively excludes most individual users and small operators from participating directly in Ethereum's network layer. The Portal Network is a cross-team protocol initiative designed to allow nodes to participate using minimal CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and storage.

The Nimbus team's Fluffy client, written in the Nim programming language, became the first Portal Network implementation capable of both storing and serving network content. Unlike earlier light client designs, every Portal client functions as a server simultaneously, contributing resources proportional to its capacity. Fluffy served as the backbone for the first Portal Network test networks at the time of the roundup's publication.

"Running a full client from within a wallet or dapp has huge implications, not only for the health of the network but also for decentralization and privacy as it reduces reliance on the centralized infrastructure that most wallets currently use to access Ethereum data," the Nimbus team wrote in a post on the Nimbus Blog titled "Fluffy Ultra-Light Client for Ethereum."

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ethereum-cryptography v1.0 cuts dependencies by 87 percent

Paul Miller released version 1.0 of the ethereum-cryptography library in January 2022 after a complete overhaul of the package. Originally created by the Nomic Foundation in 2020, the library is the canonical cryptographic dependency for JavaScript and TypeScript Ethereum developers, handling private key operations, transaction signing via the secp256k1 elliptic curve, and HD wallet key derivation following BIP32 and BIP39 standards. Miller's contribution was a ground-up rewrite of that existing foundation.

Before the rewrite, the package carried 38 transitive dependencies. Each additional dependency in a cryptographic library is a potential supply chain attack vector, meaning that any one of those packages could be compromised to expose user keys or tamper with signed transactions. Miller reduced the dependency count to five. Package size fell from 10.2MB to 650KB, source lines dropped from 23,799 to 5,225, and the npm install payload per download shrank from 3.6MB to 324KB. The JavaScript bundle added to each dapp fell roughly 84 percent, from approximately 793KB to around 130KB.

"ethereum-cryptography pulled in 38 different dependencies and downloaded 3.6MB of source code with tests. Production builds required 793KB of JavaScript per dapp," Miller wrote, describing the state of the library before his overhaul.

Security firm Cure53 completed a full audit of the rewritten code before release. According to Miller's documentation, every vulnerability identified during the review was patched and the fixes were verified by the auditors. Cure53 brings relevant prior experience to this work: the firm had previously audited the Mist wallet for the Ethereum Foundation and had also audited Miller's noble-secp256k1 library.

The ethereum-cryptography package now receives approximately 3.75 million weekly downloads on npm, as of early 2026.

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Practical implications for developers in South Asia and Africa

Both grants carry specific relevance for developers and users outside North America and Europe. India recorded the highest year-on-year growth in developer participation globally according to the Electric Capital Developer Report, accounting for approximately 17 percent of all new Web3 developers entering the ecosystem.

Nigeria's developer base, which by 2024 had grown to account for approximately 3 percent of global blockchain developers with over 300,000 active builders, reflects the continent's expanding role in the Web3 ecosystem, according to 2024 data from Mariblock.

The bandwidth reduction from Miller's rewrite has direct practical consequences in markets where mobile internet is the primary access method and data costs remain significant relative to income. A library that previously required approximately 4 minutes 43 seconds to load on a 2G connection now loads in around 25 seconds.

For developers building dapps targeting users in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Nigeria, or Kenya, the smaller bundle size lowers both build costs and end-user data consumption.

The Portal Network architecture addresses a different but equally structural constraint: the cost of running a node. A participation model that scales with available hardware aligns with the resource profiles of low-cost Android devices that dominate internet access across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

It is worth noting, however, that neither Nigeria nor any other African country appeared among the recipients of the EF Academic Grants 2022 round. This points to a continued geographic gap in formal EF funding that the Ecosystem Support Program has acknowledged but not yet resolved. The practical benefits of both featured grants may reach African developers, but formal grant inclusion has remained uneven.

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What comes next

The Portal Network was not production-ready at the time of the May 2022 roundup, but Fluffy's status as the first Portal client capable of both storing and serving content marked a concrete step toward mainnet deployment.

The Nimbus team has stated a goal of integrating Fluffy directly into the Status mobile application, which would deliver a trustless Ethereum light client to Android and iOS users without reliance on centralized RPC providers.

JavaScript and TypeScript developers still running older versions of ethereum-cryptography should migrate to v1.x or later. The reduction in supply chain exposure and the smaller install footprint make the case on security grounds alone.

For broader context on the Foundation's funding scale: the ESP disbursed $30.043 million to 220 projects across all of 2022, averaging roughly $137,000 per grant. Over a five-year period, the program has allocated more than $148 million to 917 projects in total.