Ethereum is growing and the diversity of human participation is creating resilience across the ecosystem. The Devconnect Scholarship Program is a small effort that aims to create resilience through community diversity. Better representation of human geography and demographics leads to diverse experiences and new perspectives that help the Ethereum protocol meet the coordination needs of all humans, not just a lucky few. Not only does better representation—leading to better geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes for example—help the network stay secure, we believe it is essential to enriching our community and making Ethereum’s stories tangible to more people.
The Scholars program allowed Devconnect Istanbul to bring together 22 builders from communities currently underrepresented in Ethereum. This article highlights some of the Scholars and their stories.
Meet the researchers
Meet Ovia, a blockchain researcher who studied Proof-of-Work blockchains as part of her PhD research. She is an active contributor to the Indian Web3 community, including giving technical workshops and helping empower women and non-binary people at the Phoenix Guild. Ovia said she left Devconnect with ideas and potential collaborations that can feed into her ongoing work, in addition to experiencing “fan-girl” moments meeting some of her tech heroes in real life. You can read her findings here: “Introduction to ZKVM and ZKVM Types” and here: “Simplified Lunar Math Behind ZKSNARKs”
Meet Elnaz, a Java backend developer from Iran turned smart contract developer. After her centralized exchange banned her and others from some countries, Elnaz read Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers and found the innovation of decentralization “mind-blowing.” Speaking about her community, where access to banking is limited and inflation is high, she said there is still a need to educate people about the downsides of centralized networks and integrate them with decentralized networks. You can find her thoughts here: “Enabling low-cost decentralized micropayments on Ethereum using Layer 2 rollups.”
Meet Alphonce, a software engineer from Kenya. He was initially drawn to cryptocurrency because of speculation, but his perspective changed when he started participating in open-source projects on Ethereum and realized it could be a “powerful platform to drive financial inclusion and innovation.” He said he wanted to contribute to the blockchain ecosystem in Africa by reviving Devconnect’s spirit of collaboration and knowledge exchange. Continue reading his findings here: “DevConnect Thoughts: Uncovering Financial Inclusion Opportunities with Ethereum.”
You can find stories, ideas and teachings from more researchers here.
What’s next?
In addition to the efforts already being made in our community for better representation, we hope that the Devcon and Devconnect Scholarships help expand and enrich Ethereum’s infinite garden. For future scholarship programs and more stories, follow @EFNextBillion.
