India's Institutions Shaping Ethereum | Shyam Sridhar | ETHMumbai 2026

Um, yeah. Good evening, everyone. Um, I'm pretty sure all of you all have had a long and, you know, uh, tiring day at the conference. So, I'm going to try and keep this talk as lively as I possibly can. Um, so today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how Indian India's institutions, specifically the educational institutions, can actually help shape uh, Ethereum.

And some background and context on, you know, how this talk came about. Uh, so we were brainstorming ideas on, okay, like how can we, you know, effectively leverage uh, Devcon coming to India as a way to really spotlight and really, you know, shine some some focus on the extensive research ecosystem that exists already in in India today. Um, and so essentially this talk is going to focus a lot on how we can connect this vast and deep research network to some of the key problems of this arguably the most important open digital infrastructure project that we're building. Uh, so to start off, maybe I I would like to talk a little bit about how Ethereum is right now at what I'd like to call like inflection point. So, the protocols open research problems span across a wide range of disciplines, right?

So, cryptographers are working on things like post-quantum, zero-knowledge proofs, um, uh, data availability sampling and and and these like super important uh, aspects for the scaling roadmap. Uh, people from like the economics fields and and, you know, the business schools and finance folks are working a lot on fee markets, on, uh, you know, defining externalities through, uh, MEV and staking incentive models and so on. And, uh, more importantly, law and governance schools are just now starting to like ask very important questions around, okay, like what is the, you know, liabilities of DAOs or the legal structures that can build around it around the cross, you know, border digital payment transactions and so on. And so, Ethereum is this very unique case where it is, you know, where it it can take the inputs of not just one discipline or like one way of like looking at it, but it's you know, very very cross-disciplinary with multiple scholars looking at it from different angles. Yeah, so a very you know, interesting mental model that I have is this parable of the blind man and the elephant.

So, like you know, it's like each person is looking at it from a different lens. So, you know, computer scientist A is saying that hey, this is a test bed for like the cryptographic functions that I build. You know, it's a like a computer scientist B is saying you know, it's a distributed system. It's a peer-to-peer network. From a for a finance scholar, it's you know, this new financial system that's being built from scratch.

Anthropologists are starting to look at it as like, you know, like subcultures and the people that are coordinating around this digital infrastructure. UX designer sees that you know, they have tons of work ahead of them if they were actually going to like shape the protocol into something that's a little more usable and so on. So, each of these people are right in what they say, but like none of this is a complete picture. And if we like zoom out and we look at it, like we see that the relevance of this is is is is across many, you know, domains and many disciplines. And then each and every lens of looking at it here is is arguably the right lens, but just incomplete.

I think this is where India becomes extremely relevant. So, I was trying to do put some statistics together to really, you know, nail down for this talk what the state of education India is and what the state of like higher education specifically is. And I was quite blown away with some of these numbers, right? So, we see that India has 2.55 million STEM graduates per year.

And this is the second globally, I you know, after China.

[snorts]

And this in fact makes up 31.7% of all global STEM graduates. There are thousand plus research institutions in India which are publishing active academic work in in various you know, sort of venues in in um forums. Sorry. Yeah, and but at the same time there's this very interesting constraint that despite all of this there's only like 260 researchers per million population.

Uh which you know, is a constraint but also a big opportunity if we actually look at it. And uh you may ask like why is academia even important? Like uh you know, we've all studied in university, we've all listened to our professors, but like you know, how much of an influence does that actually have in the real world? Uh so people, you know, often have this question of like how far like academia can be from actual realities in the world. And I would like to challenge that belief and the thought because the truth is when academia actually engages uh the Ethereum core protocol changes.

And this is a fact. So if you look at, you know, the fee market that we have right now on Ethereum EIP-1559, uh most of the formal, you know, economic analysis came from academia and and like notably from like Tim Roughgarden from Columbia. And he's, you know, directly shaped how we think about uh the fee structure and the fee market structure uh Ethereum. If you look at like the foundations of most of the ZK proofs that secures nearly billions of dollars uh in like layer twos and also the core layer one, a lot of these primitives and almost all of these primitives has come out of, you know, academic cryptography work from institutions like ETH Zurich, MIT, and Stanford. And India's still, you know, pretty big on the game because if you look at like smart contract vulnerability research, a lot of the formal analysis, a lot of the uh you know, EVM bytecode analysis, which has directly led to new and new auditing and tooling standards has come from institutions like IITs and NITs.

Um and the list is goes on and on, right? So, if you look at like formal verification and the consensus mechanism that we have today, again, it has its root back to academia. Virtual machine design has, you know, drawn out of years and years of uh bytecode and and and like compiler theory and stack-based architecture research. And the very idea of MEV, which becomes a very important theme in most of the conferences that we go to, like that whole concept of what MEV actually is, and like thinking about, you know, the market microstructure actually came out of a PhD student's work. And and they were the very first ones to even define what MEV is.

And um So, these are just examples of how, you know, various disciplines and various like people in in in academia have changed protocol. And this also shows that a lot of the infrastructure that like that India currently has can directly contribute to like all these, you know, examples that have been mentioned before. So, we have like engineering and computer science school that actively look at like cryptography, algorithms, and formal methods that can directly be applied to the tech stack. We have a lot of like theoretical computer science institutes like TIFR, CMI, IMSC, and so on, who, you know, literally look at like the the the type of like ZK research that we need to refocus and and and and and, you know, redirect towards the the core protocol and also like all the layer twos and all the applications that are built on top of it. We have tons of institutes looking at like financial economics, mechanism design, game theory, and so on.

We have a vast ecosystem of of law schools that can look at the legality aspects of digital assets. We have the IIMs and ISBs who do a lot of work on organizational governance and institutional design, for which there's, you know, tons of problems that exist because if these problems didn't exist, then, you know, Ethereum would probably, you know, not be where it is today. And there's also like a lot of flex social science and civic civil society schools in institutes like TISS here in Mumbai, Azim Premji University and so on that can start looking at, you know, the digital right aspect, the public good accountability research and so on. And so this is just an example of like how India's vast and India has the potential to directly shape many of the ways that we think about Ethereum today as a as an ecosystem as a whole. So that's kind of where, you know, my team at the Ethereum Foundation comes in, the academic secretariat.

So, you know, the academic secretariat is a research program within the Ethereum Foundation that primarily looks at like three things. The first one is like researcher and faculty engagement where we try to like identify some of the best minds around the world, uh present them the concept of Ethereum and some of the open problems that we can get them to weigh in on. We produce artifacts such as papers, course materials, reading lists, and so on. And the the goal is to keep these artifacts last longer than any, you know, market cycles that we have and actually help produce talent that Ethereum needs in the future generations. And we try to, you know, have a much stronger institutional presence and legitimacy in areas, in venues, and in in circles that are outside this, you know, nice little bubble and community that we've created for ourselves here in Ethereum land.

So actually hosting workshops at universities, at research institutions, supporting scholars at, you know, global venue with the singular goal of like making Ethereum a serious research object. So it's important to say here that like has a very significant Ethereum ecosystem and you know, everything that the research layer does is just additive rather than anything else. So, we you know, already have a very high builder density. We are one of the few places that you know, or have as active web three policy engagements where Indian regulators and civil societies have engaged with crypto frameworks compared to most economies that we have. There's a lot of like entrepreneurial output like some of the most ambitious projects in the space have their roots trace back to Indian origin founders.

And we have you know, a very vast diaspora at the frontier which are like embedded across the core protocol teams and the core research teams in the ecosystem working on cutting edge problems. And what this research layer does is basically to move from this model of participating in the ecosystem, building on top of the ecosystem to actually help shaping it and you know, have for example like influence in the protocol. So, like independent Indian researchers publishing on economics and consensus can actually directly inform how the protocol can evolve in the future. It creates legitimacy in global debates. So, having like India's Indian scholars present in governance discussions can really carry weight because of all the legitimacy and institutional prestige that academia brings which cannot normally be easily replicable by [clears throat] most other profiles.

It it creates durable knowledge assets which is by far the most important thing. Things like core cellular back papers, research programs that again like outlast any sort of like market cycle and it also adds a lot of depth and not just speed. I think India has done a pretty good job at you know, being fast and and you know, this creates like a lot of depth in in the work that we do as well. So, um a lot of you must already be from the ecosystem. So, uh here are some ways that you can actually engage with academia in a way that's meaningful for them.

So, the first way is to like actually take your real problems, your real data, and your real stakes, which is exactly what academic researchers need to publish serious work, and and open it up to researchers to weigh in and sort of like work with you on. Uh you can if you're of a DAO or a foundation, fund independent research work that can add that critical inquiry that you need uh and and to give that like perspective that probably uh you know, internally like you might not already have. Uh by funding more work and and and encouraging more uh neutral research and and and and scholarly input, as a as investors and VCs, then you we can really encourage you to like back the next generation of people who will shape Ethereum's governance, uh you know, long-term trajectory, and and regulatory landscape. Um and finally, I'd like to end off by saying that you know, you could talk to us anytime. Feel free to reach out.

Here are like my handles. And [snorts] one specific program that we are currently running that I would encourage all of you to, you know, take note of and also spread awareness around your researcher circles is that we are running a PhD fellowship program with a 24,000 stipend over the 1-year period. Uh we will we expect to onboard somewhere around 9 to 10 fellows, and applications close very soon in 3 weeks uh on April 1st. And so, yeah, we encourage all of you to apply. That's it.

Thank you very much.