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Eth2 at ETHWaterloo: Prizes for Eth2 education, tooling, and research

December 2, 2025
5 min
2,391 views
By ZadeNor AI Team
Eth2 at ETHWaterloo: Prizes for Eth2 education, tooling, and research

Eth2 at ETHWaterloo: Prizes for Eth2 education, tooling, and research

Unlocking the Potential of Eth2: A Comprehensive Guide to the Ethereum Foundation's Hackathon Prizes

The Ethereum Foundation is taking a significant step forward in the development of Eth2, the highly anticipated upgrade to the Ethereum network. For the first time, the foundation is sponsoring a range of hacker prizes related to Eth2 at a major hackathon, with a focus on education, tooling, and research. This move is a testament to the foundation's commitment to fostering innovation and collaboration within the Ethereum community.

Education: Visualizing the Beacon Chain and Beyond

The first set of prizes is focused on education, with a goal of creating interactive and engaging visualizations that help developers and users understand the intricacies of the Beacon Chain. The prizes include:

  • An interactive, educational visualization of the Beacon Chain
  • Help document/visualize the architecture of your favorite Eth2 client
  • Visualize the cutting edge of Phase 2 (suggestion: the Phase 2 wiki is very helpful)

These visualizations will not only help developers better understand the underlying mechanics of the Beacon Chain but also provide a valuable resource for users who want to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in Eth2.

Tooling: Building the Infrastructure for Eth2

The second set of prizes is focused on tooling, with a goal of creating essential infrastructure for Eth2 development. The prizes include:

  • Implement the proposed BLS key standards (EIPs 2333, 2334, 2335) in a language of your choice (suggestion: one of the Eth2 client languages)
  • Fast viz: Given just a single BeaconState, visualize the last events and validator registry state (suggestion: use Lodestar code to work in the browser)
  • Attestation surround/double vote checker (suggestion: look at Eth2.0-pm repo issue 63)
  • Attestation pool: make a bare bones tool that listens on the attestation aggregation subnets and global net, and show what's there (suggestion: start with logging received attestations)
  • Beacon node load balancer: implement a validator API that proxies traffic to any healthy up-to-date beacon node (suggestion: take existing HTTP proxy, and focus on the nodes health status)
  • Netstats2: log/visualize the health status of a list of Eth2 testnet nodes (suggestion: Prysm or Lighthouse testnet, start with simple API queries like latest block)

These tools will provide developers with the necessary infrastructure to build and test their applications on the Eth2 network, making it easier to develop and deploy decentralized applications.

Research: Exploring the Frontiers of Eth2

The final set of prizes is focused on research, with a goal of exploring the frontiers of Eth2 and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The prizes include:

  • Take the EE interaction design from Quilt, and extend it with your own experiment. (Curious to know more about this? Ask us in the Discord during the hackathon and we can point you in the right direction)
  • Model state size growth on beaconchain and shards (suggestion: parametrize with constants config, Lodestar has a neat TS package)

These research projects will provide valuable insights into the underlying mechanics of the Eth2 network and help identify areas for improvement, ultimately leading to a more robust and scalable network.

Conclusion

The Ethereum Foundation's hackathon prizes offer a unique opportunity for developers to contribute to the development of Eth2 and shape the future of the Ethereum network. With a focus on education, tooling, and research, these prizes will help foster innovation and collaboration within the Ethereum community, ultimately leading to a more robust and scalable network.

As the Ethereum network continues to evolve, it is essential to have a strong foundation of developers, researchers, and users who are committed to pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The Ethereum Foundation's hackathon prizes are a testament to the foundation's commitment to fostering innovation and collaboration within the Ethereum community, and we look forward to seeing the impact of these prizes on the future of the Ethereum network.

Additional Resources

For those interested in learning more about the Ethereum Foundation's hackathon prizes, the following resources are available:

  • Ethereum.org Gitcoin Bounties: Several open bounties are available on Gitcoin, covering a variety of small updates and improvements to ethereum.org
  • Legendre PRF: The Legendre pseudo-random function is an extremely MPC-friendly one bit PRF, and the Ethereum Foundation has set out a series of bounties to encourage more research about this PRF
  • STARK-Friendly Hash Challenge: The Ethereum Foundation has asked StarkWare to recommend a STARK-Friendly Hash (SFH), and the StarkWare hash challenge is a public competition aimed at evaluating the security of current proposed SFH candidates.

Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2019/11/04/eth2-at-ethwaterloo

Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2019/11/04/eth2-at-ethwaterloo

About the Author

ZadeNor AI Team is a leading expert in WEB3 & BLOCKCHAIN, contributing to cutting-edge research and development in the field.

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