# EPF Day Introduction | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 09:20
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-_2fNWYoBrT8
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2fNWYoBrT8

## Description

Josh and Mario introduce the fifth cohort's EPF Day.

Speaker(s): Mario Havel, Josh Davis
Skill level: Beginner
Track: [CLS] EPF Day
Keywords: EPF, Ethereum Roadmap, Layer 1

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

All right. Welcome to EPF day. Thanks for being here. Uh my name's Josh. This is Mario. We uh coordinate the uh Ethereum Protocol Fellowship uh with the Ethereum Foundation. Uh and this is EPF day where the fellows from the fifth cohort will be giving you lots and lots of demonstrations about what they have been working on over the past 5 months. Uh though quickly want to talk a little bit about what the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship is. Um this is a program that's been running for about uh 3 years. 3 years now. Uh it's been going through five different cohorts uh starting with uh what was called the core developer apprentice program started by Piper Merriam. Uh and then Mario and I have been running this iteration of the program for the past three cohorts. Uh the Protocol Fellowship is a program that is meant to steward the protocol through the uh bringing in of more and more developers. So um according to the latest protocol guild statistics, there are about 180 uh developers that are working on the core protocol. Uh all the things from specification to working on EL clients, CL clients, doing testing, and also doing lots of the research that is necessary for uh future upgrades and forks. Uh so it's a lot of stuff that needs to get done and not that many people to do it. Uh as Tim Beiko likes to say and I think others uh I'm sure you've seen this road map before uh that each one of these tiny little boxes could use an entire team to focus on just that box. So, we are here to try to fill in all of those boxes. Uh the EPF, the protocol fellowship, has sort of grown a lot over the past couple of years and we've been adding new and new features to it to enhance the experience and to make it easier for people who are interested in doing this work to do so. So, it started with the EPF. Again, this is the fifth cohort. At the beginning of this year, we started the Ethereum protocol study group and that was a three-month two-month-long program that offers some more basic introduction and overview to the different pieces of the protocol. So, those people that are interested and maybe have some developer experience but don't really have much knowledge of Ethereum itself can get introduced to it and learn about the different pieces and parts and understand what it is that they might want to focus on. In addition to that, we've created a resource epf.wiki which is the intention is for it to be the a go-to place for people who are interested in learning about the protocol to to do so answering questions and helping them to understand more about it. It is a growing and and collaborative resource. So, it is in its still its sort of fledgling form and we welcome any further contributions to it if you are learning about the protocol or already are very knowledgeable about it to to add your two cents to it. And finally, like Piper likes to say, the door to core development is hilariously wide open. You just have to step through. The EPF is a way for uh, you to step through with somebody holding your hand a little bit. Uh, I'll go ahead and pass it to Mario. Yeah, thank you so much. And let me tell you a bit about the current cohort. So, as Josh mentioned, we started this cohort like I feel like this cohort started even before it started because we did a study group first. And it was a very special experience we started with that. Uh, this is for the first time and there have been a bunch of people who came to learn about the protocol basically from zero and then uh, joined uh, the cohort. And in last uh, 6 months or during this year we started the the the the the study group like February, March. So, like during this year people who didn't have any idea about the core development became like uh, almost full-time contributors in some cases. So, yeah. Uh, it's been it's been a wild wild ride. We had a Uh, we had around 45 fellows. Uh, just some context to this number because we started when when we when we started the cohort it's permissionless. Anybody can join. And in these first calls we had like over 50 people and maybe like 60 uh, people who were interested in the fellowship but then uh, at least 45 of them um, uh, submitted multiple updates throughout multiple weeks uh, during like 2 months or something. So, so 45 of them at least made it to the second month. But to the very end till today uh, we have 30 fellows who made it to the EPF day. Uh, there are a few of them who couldn't make it of course because of the travel restrictions and so on but uh, uh, we had Uh, anyway, um, Okay, put it further. Okay. For 5 months of the uh, echo. Five months of the of the actual fellowship which was first some learning part first month to figure out what projects these people want to even work on and for many it was easier thanks to the thanks to the study group they than ever before. We we had two weeks two two two calls every week. So all together we had over 40 calls together over past five months. We've met each other every week for the office hours for the stand up. So ton of calls but also we met in person. First time we met in person in Brussels. We had a chance to meet with maybe half of the fellows but almost everyone is here today at Devcon. So it's really honor to actually meet you finally all after seeing each other at these calls. Yeah, so 30 people made it till the end with 30 projects. It's not one project per person. There were teams of people working on a bigger scope project together which is also amazing to see that people learn to collaborate together. And uh Uh we will have presentation for 20 projects today. 30 were proposed. Yeah. And all together we had like over 500 comments over 500 updates in the in the repository. So when you open the development updates in the core five repository with all of the tracking for every follow it's over 500 of them. So I guess not I read all of them but it's not really possible to to to do it by yourself but there's been there's been a lot of lot of uh lot of work done. And and hard to summarize like what individual fellow did. All I I I know that Rahul summarized it, so I kind of borrowed his his data here uh just to give you idea what is like the output of one fellow who dedicated like 1,000 hours to uh to um uh the fellowship uh and uh how many coffees? 228 cups of coffee, yeah. Uh that's uh that's uh that's that's interesting uh metrics that I would like to also use for measuring DPF, but yeah, thank you so much for the numbers, Rahul. Like, so this is and 26 updates just from just from one person. So, you see like this is what the single person is able to dedicate to the fellowship over 5 months. And um so, with this today, again, it's an honor to host the project presentations to see uh your recap of what you've been working on in past months. And there is 20 of them. There is a lot of them. So, we have ton of topics to go over. I'm not going to even mention each each of them because you will see them. Uh this is the order and we are starting with EVM uh memory repricing, so maybe let's get slowly ready to that. And um yeah, we will have uh uh we will have uh first half of the presentations in the in the morning with a pause at 1:00 1:00 p.m. 1:15 50 because we have yeah uh quarter past 1:00. Uh we will have uh 45 minutes for lunch, and then we meet here again at 2:00 p.m. for the rest of the presentations and uh for the panel and two, we'll have a panel discussion as well. So, that is the schedule for today. Uh please uh enjoy the EPF day. Uh and uh yeah, uh I hope you get inspired by the fellows, by their work. I hope you are able to meet some interesting people here.