The ESP, the Foundation's primary public grant mechanism, published the roundup on January 31, 2022. Rather than announcing new awards, the update tracked progress on existing grants, giving the public a view into how funded work was developing. The two featured projects, GASOL and L2BEAT, address different and complementary bottlenecks in the Ethereum developer and user experience.

GASOL: Academic Gas Optimization Reaches v0.1.3

GASOL, short for GAS Optimization TooLkit, was built by researchers Elvira Albert, Pablo Gordillo, and Albert Rubio at the COSTA research group inside Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The project received its ESP grant in February 2021 and shipped version 0.1.3 by the time the roundup published.

The tool works at the bytecode level, the raw instruction layer that the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) executes. After a developer compiles a smart contract, GASOL applies a technique called super-optimization to search for an alternative instruction sequence that produces identical results while consuming less gas. Gas is the fee unit paid for every computation on Ethereum. The team published two technical reports and generated bytecode logs verifiable through Etherscan.

The GASOL methodology was first published as a peer-reviewed academic paper at TACAS 2020, before the ESP grant was awarded, lending strong prior academic credibility to the project's foundations. Earlier versions of GASOL handled only stack operations. Version 0.1.3 extended coverage to memory and storage operations, which are typically among the most gas-intensive parts of any contract. Subsequent studies building on the same methodology have shown gas reductions of approximately 11.2% on real-world contracts, though this figure reflects research extending beyond GASOL v0.1.3 itself rather than the tool's directly documented output.

This matters most where fees are hardest to absorb. In May 2021, the average Ethereum transaction fee peaked near $196. Deploying a smart contract on mainnet cost between $675 and $1,350 depending on congestion. For developers earning in rupees or naira, those figures represent weeks or months of income. Open-source, academically rigorous tooling that chips away at those costs has an outsized impact in lower-income markets. GASOL operates downstream from the Solidity or Yul compiler, so developers using any major language can benefit without changing their workflow.

L2BEAT Doubles Protocol Coverage With Second Grant

L2BEAT, the analytics platform tracking Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem, received its first ESP grant in spring 2021 and a second in December 2021. Between those two awards, the platform expanded from tracking 10 Layer 2 protocols to 20, adding detailed financial breakdowns and technical risk assessments for each.

Layer 2 solutions are networks that generally process transactions off Ethereum's main chain and periodically settle activity on-chain. They were attracting significant capital by late 2021. Total value locked (TVL) across all Ethereum L2 protocols reached approximately $6.16 billion in December 2021, a then-all-time high. Arbitrum alone held roughly 43% of that total. dYdX, Boba Network, and Loopring were also major players.

L2BEAT's second grant funded plans to add a backend database, live transaction volume metrics, uptime tracking, block production data, and upgrade logs. The platform's value proposition is independence: it provides risk factor breakdowns for each protocol without conducting security audits, positioning itself as an impartial and independent watchdog rather than an advocate for any particular project.

As the platform describes its role: "L2BEAT is a public goods company dedicated to providing onchain transparency, with an unwavering commitment to delivering accurate and reliable information, striving to be an impartial and independent watchdog that acts in the best interest of users and the broader ecosystem."

Why This Matters Outside Europe

The regional stakes for both projects are real. South Asia and Africa recorded some of the highest cryptocurrency adoption growth globally in 2021, with Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya all ranking among the top adopting nations according to Bankless Times, citing Chainalysis data. A large share of those users migrated toward Layer 2 networks specifically to escape high mainnet fees.

Without independent, readable risk data, users in markets with less regulated financial infrastructure have fewer tools to distinguish between a well-secured L2 and a marketing-forward one. L2BEAT's expansion to 20 protocols, with consistent risk breakdowns, fills that gap directly.

GASOL's academic origin also signals something broader. The project demonstrates that formal-methods researchers at universities can receive Ethereum Foundation support for open tooling. That pathway is available to PhD students and faculty globally through the ESP Academic Grants Round, including at institutions in Nigeria, India, South Africa, and beyond.

Looking Ahead

The Ethereum Foundation distributed approximately $19.6 million in grants across 2021, with $7.79 million flowing in Q2 alone. Both GASOL and L2BEAT represent the Foundation's stated model for that funding: free and open-source, non-commercial work that creates positive-sum outcomes for the broader ecosystem. As Ethereum's L2 ecosystem has continued to grow and fragment in the years since, the kind of transparent monitoring L2BEAT provides has only become more relevant. L2 TVL fell to around $4.25 billion by late 2022 following the broader market downturn. In the time since, L2BEAT's role has evolved from early-stage experiment toward a baseline expectation for ecosystem infrastructure, a trajectory that reflects how central independent risk monitoring has become to how developers and users navigate the space.