P2P Networking Intern

About the Ethereum Foundation

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to supporting Ethereum and related technologies. Our mission is to do what is best for Ethereum’s long-term success. Our role is to allocate resources to critical projects, to be a valued voice within the Ethereum ecosystem, and to advocate for Ethereum to the outside world.

EF Internship

As part of our mission to advance blockchain systems, interns will contribute to bleeding edge research that spans computer science, distributed systems, crypto-economics, and mechanism design. This program offers a unique opportunity to work closely with Ethereum Foundation researchers, their collaborators, and other contributors across the ecosystem, tackling both foundational and applied research challenges. Interns will also have opportunities to share their findings through ethresear.ch, academic publications, or conference submissions helping shape the future of Ethereum.

Interns can choose to work remotely but are encouraged to work out of an EF office (likely Berlin, Germany). In addition, interns will be invited for an in-person cohort meetup in the summer.

The duration of the internship is 12 weeks during summer 2026.

P2P Networking team description

The P2P Networking team addresses a proven bottleneck in Ethereum today: the networking layer. We work on two fronts: we are improving the current stack to deliver on Ethereum's short and medium-term ambitions while conducting radical, first-principles thinking to redesign the networking layer from scratch for long-term scalability and growth. We collaborate closely with client implementers, researchers, and libp2p maintainers across the ecosystem.

We focus heavily on propagation: making incremental improvements to gossipsub and libp2p for immediate gains while exploring entirely new techniques like erasure coded broadcast for future breakthroughs. Our efforts also cover transport improvements, large-scale simulation and benchmarking, and deep instrumentation, metrics, and telemetry to profile the underlying network dynamics in order to make optimal decisions.

This dual approach helps us enable key endeavours like expanding blob capacity, improving transaction throughput, reducing slot times, and enabling future architectures, while strengthening security, censorship resistance, and privacy to maintain Ethereum's core principles of decentralization and openness.

Internship projects may involve: broadcast techniques, performance engineering, network anonymity, censorship resistance, telemetry and simulation, and/or transport optimizations.

More on the EF Protocol cluster: https://protocol.ethereum.foundation/

• Understanding of network programming, including TCP/IP, UDP, and application-layer protocols
• Experience in systems programming languages such as Go, Rust, C++, or similar
• Understanding of cryptographic protocols, including key exchange, authentication, and secure communication channels.
• Understanding of P2P networking concepts like DHTs, gossip networks, discovery, and NAT traversal.

• Conduct original research in areas relevant to Ethereum and decentralized technologies.
• Collaborate with Ethereum Foundation researchers and contributors to address pressing technical and conceptual challenges.
• Contribute to public-facing materials, such as blog posts, white papers, and technical reports, to share research outcomes.
• Engage with the broader research community through discussions, seminars, and collaborations.

• Current university enrollment studying a relevant field such as computer science, cryptography, mathematics, or economics. Very recent graduates (~1 year) may also be considered.
• Demonstrated interest in Ethereum, blockchains, and decentralized technologies.

Important dates:

This application closes on Dec 1st, 2025. Applicants will receive decisions by January 30th, 2026.