Program Information

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For the past two years, the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, an initiative of the Ethereum Foundation, has funded a wide range of research and fieldwork in what is now a robust young multi-disciplinary field we call Protocol Studies, encompassing three sub-fields: Protocol Science, Protocol Arts, and Protocol Entrepreneurship. For the 2025 program, we would like to establish direct, summertime contracts with talented educators interested in teaching this emerging discipline. If you are interested, please apply to our Curriculum Development Program (CDP). The application deadline for this program is April 5, 2025, and the application form can be found here. 

SoP alumni have produced a rich body of knowledge that we believe has immense potential for creating positive impact in the world, and the mission of the 2025 program is to enable this impact. You can read more about the overall program in the 2025 program prospectus essay, Accelerating Order.

Education is the critical bottleneck for this mission, and one that we’d like your help to tackle. The SoP research archive mostly comprises roughly graduate-level research that we’d like to make more accessible through well-designed Protocol Studies courses, short courses and modules. The Summer of Protocols 2025 (SoP25) program aims to systematically introduce this emerging field to educators and their students, and support efforts to incorporate protocol studies into curricula at multiple levels, both as modules of existing courses, and as entirely new courses.

What you need to apply

Applying to the program doesn’t take long. The form should take about 30 minutes to complete. Here are some key pieces of info you should have handy:

• Whether you’d like to create a full course or just a module.
• To what extent your home institution will help fund you (optional, but will help your odds).
• The three pieces of SoP research that you’re most interested in.
• A rough idea of the curricula or material you’d develop.
• A brief personal statement including teaching experience (include years spent as a TA).

Unfortunately, due to the limited size and scope of our program, we are unable to route grants through your home institution – all grants will be awarded via direct contracts. If you have any questions, or if your adminstrative team requires specific information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to research@summerofprotocols.com

Grant Information

The SoP25 program is aimed at educators, and will both provide direct funding, and accept participants sponsored by their home institutions or other aligned programs. For the former, two types of grants, module grants, and course grants, corresponding to the two program tracks, are available. We have made $500,000 in funding available for this summer’s program, and grants will be made across these two tracks, on an individualized basis.

• Module grants (MGs) to support the development of course modules or short courses in the form of a 3-4 lecture series with supporting lesson plans and testing material (such as homework problems and assignments) conceived as part of an existing traditional course or as a mini-course. Module grants are open to both high-school and college-level educators, as well as online independent course creators with a track record. The deliverables of an MG will take about the equivalent of a month of full-time effort to complete. 12 MGs are available.
• Course grants (CGs) to support the development of a complete semester length course, comprising 12-16 weeks of classroom sessions with supporting lesson plans, testing materials, grading schemes, a reading list, etc. Course grants are primarily for college-level educators, but we will also consider exceptional online educators. Please only apply for a CG if you can make full-time commitment for the duration of the program (3 months). 6 CGs are available.

A few additional grants of both types will be available for applicants interested in developing materials in Chinese, or from a Chinese perspective. These will be sponsored by our partner, GCC (Global Chinese Community). We also welcome applicants sponsored by their home institutions and/or alternative sources of funding. The program will be capped at 30, including both SoP-funded and externally funded participants.

This summer’s curriculum development program will run from May 15th to August 15th, fully remotely with the exception of an in-person event in late May. Participants will need to be available for regularly weekly collaborative activities of 1-2 hours and sufficient additional time to meet the deliverables of their track.

Participants in both tracks will be expected to thoroughly prepare for and join an in-person curriculum development workshop from May 25 – 31, 2025 as part of the Edge Esmeralda pop-up city in Healdsburg, California. Participants will receive travel support in addition to their grant. Several SoP research alumni will participate. 

Objectives, Activities, and Opportunities to Learn More

Throughout the summer, there will be regular, online participant-led meetings to enable collaboration on the development of educational material. In addition, there will be a series of online guest talks – recordings of which are publicly available here – as part of our recurring Protocol Town Hall track.

Another avenue for discovering and spreading ideas is SoP’s magazine, Protocolized. The magazine publishes short stories, case studies, and research essays. We hope for SoP25 participants to use this platform to share ideas, teaching materials, opinions, and stories about the future of pedagogy.

All participants will be expected to make the course material they develop over the summer (syllabi, lesson plans, handouts, homework problem sets) available to others, under an open-source license. In developing course materials, you can use as much SoP content as you’d like, since it’s also open-source.

Participants will be expected to make best-faith efforts to actually teach the courses or modules in the soonest feasible semester/term at their respective institutions, making use of both materials developed by themselves, and by their peers. Independent course creators will be expected to launch an online course in Fall. 

A portion of our budget will be set aside for follow-on Fall Classroom-Testing Grants (CTGs), and winners of these grants will be expected to report their live teaching experiences back at the annual online Protocol Symposium in late Fall (~November). CTG grants will be on a per-live-contact-hour basis (i.e. the number and length of classes, tutorials, lectures).

Applications are due April 5th, 2025 at 12:00 UTC (noon). Winners will be informed the week of April 7th.

Please browse the Protocol Reader and our archive of additional materials before applying.

And come say hello in our Discord server anytime!