Solana Scholars Opens Funded Three-Month Research Internships for PhD Students

Solana Scholars is a new programme of funded, three-month research internships for PhD students, announced on 30 September 2026 by the Solana Developers account on X. Scholars work directly with Solana engineers on consensus, networking, cryptography and economics, on-site or remotely, and the Solana Scholars programme page says applications are accepted all year with no deadline.

What the Solana Scholars PhD internship offers

The Solana Scholars page says internships run for three months "with a possible extension" and can be on-site, for example in Zurich, Switzerland or New York, USA, or virtual. The page describes the offer as "focused research internships carried out in close collaboration with the people building the system." Neither the announcement nor the page states a stipend amount.

Applicants have a say in the topic. Per the page, a PhD student can "pitch your own topic or express interest in one of our areas; if there's a fit, we scope the internship together." The page states the pitch plainly: "Your work doesn't end at a PDF. It ends up in production."

Anza researchers Quentin Kniep and Roger Wattenhofer lead the programme

The Solana Scholars page is signed like a paper's author line: "Q. Kniep & R. Wattenhofer." Quentin Kniep and Roger Wattenhofer are Anza researchers, and Wattenhofer's ETH Zurich biography lists him as both Head of Research at Anza and a full professor in ETH Zurich's Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Zurich, where Wattenhofer teaches, is one of the two on-site locations the page names.

Kniep and Wattenhofer also write Solana protocol proposals. As we covered, the pair wrote SIMD-0674 and SIMD-0675, a geo-aware leader schedule that cut handover delay between block producers by 53% in their simulations. Solana Scholars gives the same research group a route to bring outside PhD students onto problems of that kind for a quarter at a time.

The programme page does not name an operating organisation beyond the Solana Foundation copyright line in the solana.com footer, and applications go through a form hosted on the Solana Foundation's Typeform account.

PhD eligibility: a paper at PODC, CRYPTO, SIGCOMM or a similar conference

Solana Scholars is open only to currently enrolled PhD students working in distributed systems, networking, cryptography, economics or a neighbouring field. The page adds a hard filter: applicants should already have published at scientific conferences in their area.

The page's venue list covers distributed-systems and networking conferences (PODC, DISC, SOSP, OSDI, EuroSys, SIGCOMM, NSDI, SIGMETRICS), security and cryptography venues (FC, AFT, CCS, S&P, USENIX Security, NDSS, CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT) and the economics and mechanism-design conferences EC and WINE. In computer science, papers at venues like these carry the weight that journal articles do in most other fields, so the requirement screens for students who have already put work through peer review.

What consensus and networking research means for Solana

The four research areas cover the core of how Solana runs: how validators agree on blocks, how data moves between them, the cryptography that secures both, and the fee and reward rules that pay for it. Changes in those areas reach mainnet through written proposals such as SIMDs and public review, a process that rewards the same habits academic publishing trains.

The page leaves several questions open. It does not say how many places are available, whether scholars' results will be published openly, or how intellectual property from the internships is handled.

How to apply: a short form and no deadline

Applications go through the Solana Scholars application form. The page describes them as short: "we care about your ideas and your fit, not paperwork." There is no deadline; the page says applications are accepted throughout the year.