AI Internet-Meritocracy vs Horizon Europe: Why Europe Needs a Faster, Fairer Science Funding System

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AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) is not merely another grant platform. It is a proposed replacement layer for the broken parts of institutional science funding: slow calls, committee bottlenecks, administrative overhead, and discrimination against outsiders. Compared with Horizon Europe, AIIM can be more continuous, more transparent, more inclusive, and more directly aligned with actual scientific value.

Horizon Europe is the European Union’s flagship research and innovation programme for 2021–2027, with a budget commonly stated around €95.5 billion in official EU materials. It funds major research missions, partnerships, innovation projects, and cross-border consortia.

That scale is impressive. But scale is not the same as precision.

AIIM aims to solve the deeper problem: how to allocate scientific money by merit, dependency, and usefulness rather than by institutional position, grant-writing skill, political access, or committee preference.

Learn more about the model here: AI Internet-Meritocracy.

What Horizon Europe Does Well

Horizon Europe has real strengths. It creates large European research networks, supports strategic priorities, and finances projects that individual donors or small institutions could not handle alone. It also gives Europe a common mechanism for funding research and innovation across borders.

Applicants use the EU Funding & Tenders Portal to find calls, form consortia, submit proposals, and compete through a formal evaluation process.

For many large institutional projects, this is useful.

But for frontier science, independent researchers, small teams, and high-risk theoretical work, the system has structural weaknesses.

The Core Problem: Horizon Europe Is Still a Grant System

Horizon Europe remains based on calls, proposals, deadlines, panels, eligibility rules, administrative procedures, and project packages.

Official EU guidance says proposals are evaluated using criteria such as excellence, impact, and quality and efficiency of implementation. These are reasonable categories, but they still require human committees to judge future value before the research has actually proved its importance.

That creates several distortions:

1. Grant-writing ability becomes a proxy for scientific merit.
   A researcher may be brilliant but poor at bureaucratic proposal writing.
2. Institutional insiders are favored.
   Universities, large labs, and experienced grant offices understand the process better than independent scientists.
3. High-risk ideas are filtered early.
   Work that looks strange, interdisciplinary, or too abstract may be rejected before its importance becomes visible.
4. Funding is episodic, not continuous.
   Money comes through calls and projects, not through real-time scientific dependency and usage.
5. Review happens before discovery.
   Traditional grants attempt to predict scientific value. AIIM aims to measure it dynamically.

AIIM: Funding Science by Merit, Dependencies, and Real Use

AI Internet-Meritocracy proposes a different model: continuous algorithmic funding of science based on contribution, usage, citations, dependencies, and verified impact.

Instead of asking committees to decide in advance who deserves money, AIIM can track how scientific outputs are used by other outputs. If a theorem, dataset, article, software library, or method becomes foundational, the system can route value toward its creator.

This makes AIIM closer to a scientific dependency economy than to a grant programme.

In software, dependency graphs already show which packages rely on which other packages. AIIM extends this logic to science: if later research depends on earlier research, then funding should flow backward through the dependency graph.

This is especially important for neglected foundational topics, such as mathematical infrastructure, theoretical frameworks, and interdisciplinary tools that may not fit a standard Horizon Europe call.

See also: Science Funding Innovation.

AIIM Is Better for Independent Scientists

Horizon Europe often requires teams, institutional participation, and formal project structures. For many calls, applicants must apply as a team of at least three partner organisations from different countries.

That requirement can be useful for large European collaboration. But it also excludes or disadvantages:

• independent researchers;
• researchers outside universities;
• people without degrees but with real discoveries;
• small open-source teams;
• scientists discriminated against by academic institutions;
• contributors whose work is too early, abstract, or unusual for a call topic.

AIIM can be built to support non-discriminatory scientific funding. The system does not need to ask whether a researcher belongs to a prestigious university. It can ask whether their work is used, cited, depended upon, reviewed, replicated, or built upon.

That is a better standard.

AIIM Can Pay Continuously Instead of Waiting for Grant Cycles

Horizon Europe grants are tied to calls, deadlines, work packages, and grant agreements. Even simplified lump-sum funding still pays according to predefined work packages and completed activities.

AIIM can work differently.

It can support continuous micro-funding and retroactive rewards. Instead of one large decision at the beginning of a project, AIIM can adjust funding as evidence accumulates.

That means:

• a useful paper can receive funding after its usefulness becomes visible;
• a mathematical theory can receive rewards when later researchers depend on it;
• a software tool can receive support when other projects use it;
• a neglected discovery can become fundable without needing a committee to understand it in advance.

This is critical because many important discoveries are not obvious when they first appear.

AIIM Is More Transparent and Auditable

A major advantage of AIIM is auditability.

A grant committee decision may be documented, but the reasoning is often opaque to outsiders. AIIM can make funding logic more inspectable: citations, dependencies, usage, reviews, and payout rules can be recorded and audited.

If implemented on blockchain infrastructure, AIIM can make payments, governance, and allocation rules more transparent than conventional grant bureaucracy.

The Internet Computer ecosystem supports canister-based applications and chain-key token infrastructure; official documentation describes chain-key assets and ledger operations for token transfers.

For AIIM, this matters because scientific funding should not be a black box. It should be accountable.

EU Targeting: AIIM Can Be Built Directly for European Users

AIIM can be especially strong in Europe because it can target EU researchers, EU donors, EU institutions, and euro-denominated scientific funding.

Unlike a generic global donation platform, AIIM can create EU-specific funding flows:

• European donors funding European science;
• EU researchers receiving merit-based payouts;
• European universities and independent scientists competing on measurable contribution;
• EU-focused science campaigns;
• euro-denominated public reporting;
• funding interfaces optimized for European users.

This makes AIIM not anti-European, but more European than traditional bureaucracy: it can give EU citizens a direct way to support science while preserving transparency, accountability, and cross-border collaboration.

ckEUR Payments: A Practical Advantage for Europe

AIIM can support ckEURC payments, allowing European users to donate, receive, and route value in a euro-denominated digital format.

This is important because Horizon Europe is naturally euro-based, but its funding process is institutional and slow. AIIM can combine euro-denominated payments with continuous scientific merit allocation.

For EU users, ckEURC support can mean:

• easier donations in a familiar currency;
• clearer accounting for European contributors;
• lower friction for euro-area participants;
• better targeting of European campaigns;
• smoother integration with EU-focused scientific communities.

In short: Horizon Europe distributes euros through bureaucracy. AIIM can distribute euro-denominated value through merit.

Support the project here: Donate to ScienceDAO.

AIIM Is Better for High-Risk and Foundational Science

Many of the most important scientific contributions are not immediately practical. Foundational mathematics, new formal languages, theoretical computer science, and early-stage conceptual frameworks may look useless until later work depends on them.

Traditional grant systems often ask: “What is the expected impact?”

AIIM can ask a better question: “What impact did this actually create?”

That difference matters.

A committee may reject work because it does not fit current fashion. But if later research depends on it, AIIM can recognize that dependency and route funding backward.

This is how science actually works: the visible breakthrough often depends on invisible foundations.

Comparison Table: AIIM vs Horizon Europe

Feature	Horizon Europe	AI Internet-Meritocracy
Funding model	Grants, calls, proposals	Continuous merit-based allocation
Main evaluator	Committees and experts	AI, usage data, citations, dependencies, governance
Best suited for	Large institutional projects	Independent scientists, open science, foundational research, software, high-risk ideas
Timing	Periodic calls and grant cycles	Continuous and retroactive
Access	Often institution-heavy	Can be open to individuals and small teams
Currency/payment	Conventional euro grant administration	Can support ckEUR and crypto-native payouts
Transparency	Formal but bureaucratic	Potentially auditable and on-chain
Bias risk	Institutional and committee bias	Must manage algorithmic bias, but can be made auditable
Scientific dependency tracking	Not central	Core mechanism
EU targeting	Native EU programme	Can target EU users, donors, and euro-denominated campaigns

AIIM Does Not Need to Replace Everything Horizon Europe Does

AIIM does not need to duplicate every function of Horizon Europe.

Horizon Europe may remain useful for large infrastructure, mission-oriented research, industrial consortia, and strategic EU policy priorities.

But AIIM can outperform Horizon Europe in the areas where grant systems are weakest:

• independent science;
• foundational research;
• post-publication merit;
• open-source scientific software;
• neglected discoveries;
• continuous funding;
• transparent dependency-based rewards.

The best future may be hybrid: Horizon Europe funds large European missions, while AIIM funds the merit layer underneath science itself.

Why Europe Should Care

Europe wants scientific excellence, technological sovereignty, open science, and fair access to opportunity. But those goals are limited if funding remains locked behind institutional status and proposal bureaucracy.

AIIM gives Europe a new option:

fund science the way science actually grows — through dependencies, reuse, verification, and accumulated merit.

If a discovery matters, it should not matter whether it came from a professor, an independent mathematician, a small open-source team, or a researcher excluded from the university system.

That is the moral and technical advantage of AI Internet-Meritocracy.

Horizon Europe funds projects.

AIIM funds scientific value.

To support the creation of a fairer science funding system, visit ScienceDAO Donation or read more about AI Internet-Meritocracy.