The Merge is coming, providing a more secure and sustainable home for Ethereum—as well as more data, lots and lots of data. And the Ethereum community needs your help to make sense of it all.

• What new visualizations help provide insight into proof-of-stake Ethereum?
• How do the consensus layer and execution layer interact? Are there differences across client pairs in communication patterns, efficiency, etc? Are there good places to optimize?
• What, if anything, changed on the network at the point of The Merge—block propagation times, p2p connections, transaction mempool performance, etc?
• Did The Merge affect core Beacon Chain activity—attestation performance, blocks missed, sync committees?
• Did user activity noticeably change after the Merge? What about MEV?
• What new tools can you build to collect and analyze data in the post-Merge network?

Document your best Merge data insights in the most readable blog post possible—for prizes!

The Ethereum Foundation is running this challenge because there’s a lot to learn and discover from the Merge mainnet activity. Your findings will give the Ethereum community – from beginners to researchers and client developers – important insight into the Merge.

About Ecosystem Support Program(ESP)

Ecosystem Support Program(ESP) provideS grants and other support for open source projects that strengthen Ethereum’s foundations, with a particular focus on builder tools, infrastructure, research and public goods. ESP focuses on strengthening Ethereum’s foundations and enabling future builders: improving infrastructure, expanding the range of tools available to those building on Ethereum, deepening our understanding of cryptographic primitives, and growing the builder ecosystem through education and community development. The work we support is open source