The use of ethanol as a fuel in direct alcohol fuel cells depends not only on its ease of production from renewable sources, but also on overcoming the challenges of storage and transportation. In an ethanol‐based fuel cell, highly active electrocatalysts are required to break the C−C bond in ethanol for its complete oxidation at lower overpotentials, with the aim of increasing the cell performance, ethanol conversion rates, and fuel efficiency. In recent decades, the development of wet‐chemistry methods has stimulated research into catalyst design, reactivity tailoring, and mechanistic investigations, and thus, created great opportunities to achieve efficient oxidation of ethanol. In this Minireview, the nanomaterials tested as electrocatalysts for the ethanol oxidation reaction in acid or alkaline environments are summarized. The focus is mainly on nanomaterials synthesized by using wet‐chemistry methods, with particular attention on the relationship between the chemical and physical characteristics of the catalysts, for example, catalyst composition, morphology, structure, degree of alloying, presence of oxides or supports, and their activity for ethanol electro‐oxidation. As potential alternatives to noble metals, non‐noble‐metal catalysts for ethanol oxidation are also briefly reviewed. Insights into further enhancing the catalytic performance through the design of efficient electrocatalysts are also provided.

Tailoring the size, controlling the morphology, and designing the metal–organic interface are three promising strategies to improve the catalytic performance of monometallic noble-metal nanocrystals. In the “hydrogen economy” society, water electrolysis is viewed as one of the most promising technologies for hydrogen production. The design and synthesis of highly active and durable electrocatalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is vitally important for the development of the hydrogen economy. In this work, we successfully synthesized polyallylamine (PAA)-functionalized Pt tripods (Pttripods@PAA) with ultrathin and ultralong branches through a facile chemical reduction method in an aqueous solution of PAA. The morphology, structure, and composition of Pttripods@PAA were fully investigated by various physical techniques. The characterization results reveal that ultrathin and ultralong branches of Pttripods@PAA have a concave structure with high-index facets and that PAA strongly binds on the Pt surface as a proton carrier. Impressively, Pttripods@PAA display unexpected activity for the HER in acidic solution with an onset reduction potential of +19.6 mV vs RHE, which significantly outperforms currently reported monometallic Pt electrocatalysts. This activity is due to the increase in the local proton concentration on the Pt surface.

The proton enrichment at an electrode/solution interface remarkably increases the onset reduction potential of the hydrogen evolution reaction.