Welcome to World Science DAO — a project developing infrastructure intended to support more decentralized, transparent ways to fund, coordinate, and share science. Our mission is to explore organisational models in which researchers, developers, philanthropists, and citizens can collaborate using blockchain, open-source platforms, and transparent governance.
Brand architecture: Science DAO is the umbrella project; AIIM is the main science-funding system; Symbiote is a related AI-safety initiative.
Our ecosystem is built around three complementary and interconnected projects: AIIM (AI Internet-Meritocracy), Grants Science, and XML Boiler. Each addresses a distinct challenge in science funding or publishing. AIIM is our flagship project and focuses on using AI-assisted evaluation and transparent records to support scientists and open-source developers.
Our flagship project: AIIM
AIIM is a philanthropic funding system designed primarily for science and open-source software. It is intended to support the lifecycle of innovation, including evaluation, funding, development, deployment, and impact measurement. With AIIM we bring together:
- AI-powered matching between marketers and research/development teams, so resources can be directed toward relevant work.
- Tokenised governance: contributors, reviewers, domain experts, and donors are intended to participate in an on-chain merit-based reputation system.
- Open innovation network: designed to connect mathematicians, blockchain engineers, AI researchers, and community participants.
We believe future-facing science can benefit from flexible funding, cross-disciplinary collaboration, open infrastructure, and reputation-driven incentives. AIIM is our attempt to build infrastructure around those principles.
Grants Science
Grants Science serves as another philanthropic and grant-making arm of the project. It is designed to improve how funding can be allocated across global science by reducing administrative overhead, enabling grants of different sizes, and giving independent or non-traditional researchers access to support.
Through Grants Science we aim to:
- Design open call programmes with transparent criteria and published outcomes.
- Enable dashboard-driven tracking of funded projects so donors can follow outcomes.
- Build feedback between funded work, AIIM, software modules, and reputation data.
XML Boiler
XML Boiler is a software library and toolkit for standardised metadata, interoperability, and open-schema publishing for research outputs and software projects.
Its goals include:
- Promoting machine-readable metadata so research artifacts, reports, and code packages can integrate more easily.
- Supporting auditability of structured project and publication data.
- Providing developers with open-source tools for documentation, metadata, and schema processing.
A longer-term research goal of XML Boiler is to explore whether a new scriptable XML-based format could serve as an alternative to parts of the roles currently filled by HTML and LaTeX.
Why we exist
Science still faces challenges from siloed research, slow publication workflows, and grant systems that can be difficult for independent researchers to access. World Science DAO explores alternatives based on the following principles:
- Researchers should be active contributors in a reputation-driven ecosystem rather than being evaluated only through institutional prestige.
- Funding should be transparent and connected to evidence of contribution and impact.
- Infrastructure should be open, composable, and auditable.
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration should be easier for researchers and developers working across mathematics, software, blockchain, and AI.
Who runs and funds this project
World Science DAO is an online project and is not currently a separate incorporated charity. Donations for World Science DAO are legally received and controlled by Victor Porton’s Foundation. For information about the people behind the project, see Key Contributors. For questions or corrections, use our Contact page. Journalists and media professionals can also use the Press & Media Kit for concise descriptions, current status, media assets, source links, and FAQs.
Editorial transparency
This page is authored by Victor Porton and has received AI-assisted language and SEO editing. Descriptions of planned features are statements of project goals, not claims that every feature is already deployed. See Product Status for the current implementation status.
Join us
We invite researchers, developers, funders, and other participants to become part of the Science DAO project.
- If you have an idea that bridges mathematics, AI, or decentralised systems, explore AIIM and Grants Science.
- If you are building research or publishing tools, explore XML Boiler and our open-schema work.
Our goal is to build infrastructure for scientific discovery around transparency, collaboration, and open innovation.
— The Science DAO Team
Help Turn AIIM’s Beta into Evidence
AIIM remains experimental. The next proposed milestone is a five-month public adversarial test, with $1,000 planned for distribution to eligible funding recipients. Donations support the work required to run and evaluate that test.
Fund the public test → Test proposal → Independent review →
AI-generated evaluations can contain factual errors or biases; decentralized governance and non-custodial components remain under development. Public testing, auditability, and external criticism remain part of the project.