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It's a Wrap: ECH Institute 2025

It's a Wrap: ECH Institute 2025

Written by Vaelyn Luo on 1/1/2026

ECH 2025: Pectra upgrade, Fusaka upgrade, 10 Years of Ethereum celebration, Devconnect, EIP Summit, WiEP, PEEPanEIP and much more!

With 2025 winding down, we at ECH Institute are looking back on a transformative year. It has been a journey marked with growth and is made even more special as we celebrated Ethereum’s 10th anniversary together with the community.

We have dedicated this milestone year to our mission - education, community and homesteading Ethereum, through producing PEEPanEIP videos and Ecosystem Project Demo videos, re-streaming core protocol calls, and maintaining key presence at Ethereum ecosystem events.

In this post, we’re sharing our favorite highlights from 2025. Thank you for being part of the ECH family and the first ten years of Ethereum history!

Let’s dive into the year that was! ✨

  • Pectra and Fusaka Mainnet mainnet upgrades: ECH Institute was one of the featured hosts for the Pectra upgrade livestream with EthStaker, the Daily Gwei, Ethereum Foundation and Bankless and the Fusaka upgrade with EthStaker and Ethereum Foundation.

  • Celebrating International Women's Day with Ethereum builders and ecosystem leaders: We hosted our first ever Twitter Spaces featuring women who are building start-ups, leading communities and shaping the ecosystem from protocol to applications.

  • Celebrating Ethereum's 10 years anniversary: We commemorated Ethereum's 10th anniversary through a short video and community quiz, raffling away EDCON tickets!

  • ECH Institute presentation and WiEP networking dinner @ EDCON: ECH Insitute President Pooja Ranjan was one of the featured speakers at EDCON, presenting on the topic of diversity in Ethereum Protocol development. ECH Institute also help organised the WiEP networking dinner at Osaka (with special guest Hsiao-Wei Wang).

  • EIP Summit at Devconnect: Hosted the EIP Summit at Devconnect, connecting with application builders, researchers and core developers.

  • Rebranding to ECH Institute: Incorporated as a 501(c)(3) last year, Ethereum Cat Herders transitioned our branding to ECH Institute this year, with emphasis on Education, Community and Homesteading.

Mainnet upgrades: Pectra and Fusaka 🔥

PectraAndFusaka

As part of the Pectra and Fusaka mainnet upgrades, we have recorded a whooping 22 podcast episodes for our PEEPanEIP series, featuring Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPS) scheduled for inclusion. We invited EIP authors to explain why the EIPs were needed, how they impact Ethereum's ability to scale and what it meant for dApp builders. In addition, we also recorded an additional five-part series known as the Fusaka Files targeting network readiness for large institutions.

Some of the highlights of the PEEPanEIP series include:

and a special episode highlight, What’s Next for Ethereum After Fusaka? with Tomasz Stańczak.

The full Pectra mainnet upgrade playlist, the Fusaka mainnet upgrade playlist and the Fusaka Files can be viewed on Youtube.

One significant feature of Pectra upgrade was EIP-7702 which improved user onchain experience by enabling wallets to delegate control to smart contract accounts for batching transactions, gas sponsorships and much more. On the other hand, the Fusaka upgrade saw a dramatic decrease in gas fees as a result of PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) increases data capacity for Layer 2 networks.

We also partnered up with Octant for a fun-filled community call led by Vaelyn to quiz community members on the ins and outs of the Pectra Upgrade.

DragonDen

Education initatives: Women in Ethereum Protocol Study Groups, Ecosystem Project Demos and more 📚

Women in Ethereum Protocol (WiEP) Study Groups

2025 is the second year that ECH Institute is supporting WiEP. Each year, there are two study group cohorts that run over a ten-week period, led by our community contributors. Each cohort attracts a large number of women developers who are interested in core protocol development. Our study groups in 2025 are organized and coordinated by Katya (Cohort 3), Mercy and Arunima (Cohort 4). We are heartened to see so many participants eager to contribute to Ethereum's open-source ecosystem.

Some of the Cohort 3 key highlights are:

  • 🎉 23 active participants
  • 🎉 5 office hours, 5 stand ups, 10 assignments
  • 🎉 15 issues tackled, 11 PRs opened, 4 PRs merged

Cohort 4 highlights are:

  • 🎉 25 active participants
  • 🎉 40 GitHub issues worked on
  • 🎉 40 PRs created and 20 PRs merged

Watch the full Study Group Cohort 3 and Study Group Cohort 4 videos on Youtube!

Ecosystem Project Demo series

EPD

Ecosystem Project Demo is a podcast series to showcase & learn about various public goods projects, open-source infrastructure or toolings in the Ethereum ecosystem. Recording and publishing 12 videos, we featured some of the most popular protocols and tools, and covered topics on deep funding, privacy, and governance.

Some of our most viewed videos include:

EIP Office Hours and Governance Meetings

To support EIP and ERC authors move along their proposals from draft to review and to last call, ECH has been organising weekly EIP Office Hours with EIP/ERC editors. Community members can also participate in the governance calls that take place every month, known as the EIP Improvement Process (EIPIP) meetings.

We hosted 34 EIP (and ERC) Office Hours and 10 EIPIP meetings this year! 🔥 We are grateful for our EIP Editors who provided invaluable support, lightclient, Sam, Victor, Gajinder and our newest edition to the team, Jochem.

Protocol calls streaming

Each week, there are multiple core protocol calls happening on Ethereum where core developers and protocol builders discuss important impact and consequences of Ethereum Improvement Proposals. We help publicise these calls by re-streaming them on Twitter (X) and also uploading them on Spotify.

Community building through events and X spaces 🫂

First-ever Twitter spaces celebrating International Women's Day!

X

We spotlighted women builders, entrepreneurs and key ecosystem players to celebrate International Women's Day! Joining us for the big day were Nixo (Protocol Coordinator at Ethereum Foundation), Katya (Core protocol developer), Sejal(ex Ecosystem Growth, Allo Capital), Yoyo (Co-initiator, ETHPanda), Laura(Co-founder, Jobstash), Alisha (Co-founder, FireflyPocket) and Ornella (Community, Ethereum Foundation).

Each of them shared incredible insights into the challenges and opportunities growing Ethereum communities, from onboarding new builders into the ecosystem, to producing open-source hardware and software (upholding trustless, decentralized ethos of Ethereum) and encouraging more builders to contribute to Ethereum's core protocol infrastructures.

Our speakers also highlighted the realities of working in a remote-first environment, the trade-offs experienced as women and mothers in this space.

ETHCluj #RoadtoEthCluj campaign

X

ECH Institute expanded our community partnershi outreach this year, starting out with EthCluj partnership at the start of the year. It was amazing to suppot the ETHCluj Romanian community, co-organising and co-hosting their #RoadtoEthCluj campaign.

As ETHCluj has a strong tight-knitted community of engineers and cryptography researchers, it was exciting to see lively participation of their community in our PEEPanEIP episodes and community calls.

Ethereum 10 year anniversary quiz and community call

We also hosted our own Ethereum 10-year anniversary quiz and community call, raffling away tickets for EDCON.

In addition, we also produced a video celebrating Ethereum's birthday!

10years

Watch it here.

Community partnerships with EDCON

EDCONSpeaker

We were also proud to be a community partner of EDCON, with Pooja speaking on diversity in Ethereum core protocol development.

Devconnect: EIP Summit, WiEP networking brunch

We hosted ECH Institute's first EIP summit and WiEP networking brunch at Devconnect, with participation from core developers, core protocol researchers, dApp builders and EIP/ERC authors. Read more about our events at Devconnect here.

Heartfelt Gratitude for Community Support 💕

As the year wraps up, we deeply appreciate the generous funding & support provided by the Octant & Gitcoin grant organization to ECHInstitute. This invaluable support is instrumental in advancing our mission to nurture and strengthen public goods within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Last but not least, we are grateful for the support of our core team and volunteers. A big thank you to Pooja, George, Akash, Vaelyn, Gajinder, Lightclient, Sam, Victor, Jochem, and Mercy and Jude.

Learn more about ECH Institute