Ethereum Security QF Round: Results (April 23 - May 14, 2026)
We are pleased to announce that the results from the Ethereum Security QF Round are in!
This was the largest quadratic funding round matching pool ever, with a 500 ETH matching pool provided by TheDAO Security Fund and an additional $200,000 from Wintermute, $50,000 from Quantstamp, $5000 from Credsheilds and an additional $45,000 through generous donations from the community. The total matching pool is now over 637 ETH!!!
This round is funding projects and individuals strengthening the Ethereum security ecosystem. The Ethereum Foundation set the eligibility criteria and the Giveth review team - along with ecosystem partners - fastidiously applied it, reviewing over 250 applications and accepting just 134 absolutely heroic projects into the round.
But before we get into the numbers, we want to take a moment to recognize some of the people and companies who made this round bigger than the matching pool itself.
A Huge Thank You to Our Donors 
This round was supercharged by contributions from across the security ecosystem in a variety of ways. Some projects contributed directly to augment the matching pool, some sent funds to badgeholders to distribute, and others supported projects through donations sent via their employees or directly.
Wintermute stepped up HUGE after the round ended to contribute $200,000 to the matching pool. And during the round Quantstamp generously offered to donate $50,000 to the matching pool. Quantstamp’s donation actually inspired us to make a project for donating to this matching pool directly and the community donated over $50,000 more to the pool.
A special shout out and thank you to the other big donors below:
Major Boosts for Badge holders: CertiK, Certora, OtterSec
Large Coordinated Team Donations: Sigma Prime, ChainSecurity
Other notable donors: Pashov Audit Group, ETH Strategy / stratjr.eth, Coinspect, CredShields, Yearn, OpenSea, Mattaereal/ The Red Guild, Opsek / Pablo, Dedaub, Hacken, Runtime Verification, Tellor, Rekt, Hexens, Perimeter, ECH Institute & Tenderly.
Final Results
| Matching Pool | 637.4274 ETH |
| Round Duration | April 23 – May 14, 2026 |
| Eligible Projects | 134 |
| Total Donations | 13,805 |
| Unique Donors | 3934 |
| Badge Holder Participation | 172/200 - 86% of all badge holders! |
| Total Donated (USD) | $315,020 |
| Networks | Ethereum, Gnosis, Optimism, Polygon, Celo, Arbitrum, Base |
Full results:
Project owners: Please double-check your Ethereum Mainnet payout address before funds are distributed.
How Matching was Calculated
We used COCM (Cluster-Oriented Cluster Matching) as the matching algorithm for this round. COCM is a QF algorithm designed to make matching more resistant to sybil attacks and coordinated donation patterns. It looks at how donors cluster across projects, then adjusts matching so projects with broad, independent support are rewarded more than projects supported by tightly connected groups. The goal is to preserve the spirit of quadratic funding while making the allocation more fair, credible, and harder to game.
On top of COCM, ETHSecurity Badge holders received a 4Ă— multiplier on their donations in the matching calculation. This was a deliberate design choice to give trusted, verified security experts amplified influence over where matching funds went.
We also applied a maximum matching of 5% of the pool and a minimum matching (floor) of 0.3333 ETH. The maximum represents the upper limit of the total pool that any one project can receive. The minimum is applied after the maximum, projects that would have received less than the “floor” are brought up to 0.3333 ETH. The funding to bring projects up to this floor is taken proportionally from all other projects above the min and below the max matching.
FINN and TIK Donations
FINN and TIK are donation tokens (with no inherent market value), that represent additional funding to projects, that were sent to badge holders to donate.
Any projects that received FINN or TIK donations from Badge holders during the round already have or soon will be receiving funding additionally:
- 0.001 ETH for each FINN received (sponsored by TheDAO) - totaling 7.393 ETH
- 1.2565858 USDC for each TIK received (sponsored by CertiK) - totaling $50,000
FINN and TIK donations were also included in the matching calculations.
You may ask, why does TIK have such a weird exchange rate? Well only about 80% of the 50,000 TIK given to ETHSecurity Badge holders was donated in the round, so CertiK generously decided to increase the value of TIK to ensure all of the $50k they donated was allocated.
Donor Eligibility & Sybil Analysis
In order to be considered qf-eligible and have their donations included in the matching calculation, each donor needed to have:
- an ETHSecurity Voting Badge,
- a Human Passport model score of 50 or more, or
- a Human Passport Stamps score of 15 or more.
We also did additional analysis on the data, identifying on-chain sybil clusters with passing scores, and donors who were found to be recirculating funds with projects (recieving donations, sending them out and redonating). These donations, along with donations from addresses that were not “qf-eligible” by the criteria above, still were received by the projects, but did not count toward QF matching.
Educational Dashboard
We are also excited to share with you a dashboard we developed using the data from this QF round, where you can explore how different QF settings may have changed the outcome on the matching.
Learn how classic QF compares to COCM, check the impact of Badge holders and more! The dashboard comes pre-loaded with abstracted donation data from the round (donor identifying content has been removed), and default settings that were applied in this post.
Check it out here:
Interesting Stats
Top 30 Projects By Matching (ETH) - with a 637.4 ETH matching pool
Number of qf-eligible donors (Y) who donated some (total) amount in USD (X)
Projects whose donor bases were most diverse under COCM (top 10)
| Project Name | Match per unique donor |
|---|---|
| OSs Security - Hardening for macOs, Linux & Windows | 0.1805 |
| Safe OpenSig: Eliminating Blind Signing | 0.1774 |
| The Red Guild: security as a public good | 0.1730 |
| Roundabout: Static Analysis for Solidity | 0.1674 |
| DeFiHackLabs | 0.1576 |
| Zero Cool | 0.1541 |
| SEAL Frameworks | 0.1416 |
| Wallet Security Ranking | 0.1416 |
| Echidna: A Fast Smart Contract Fuzzer | 0.1401 |
| Fuzzing for ZK Systems - privacy is normal but not safe | 0.1356 |
What’s Next
- This forum post will stay open for 3 business days for feedback, questions, and corrections (please leave a comment!)
- Project owners: confirm your payout address on Ethereum Mainnet is correct. This is critical, as funds will be sent there.
- TheDAO Security Fund and Giveth Matching pool will distribute matching funds directly to projects.
- Feedback welcome: We’d love to hear what you thought of the round. Please fill out this feedback form.
To everyone who applied, donated, boosted, and showed up for this round - thank you! Ethereum is safer because of you 