Science DAO supports transparent funding for science and open-source software. AIIM payment transactions are recorded on-chain; the current beta initiates payments off-chain through Node.js.
Science DAO supports transparent funding for science and open-source software. AIIM payment transactions are recorded on-chain; the current beta initiates payments off-chain through Node.js.
Support Science and Free Software Development with Cryptocurrency Donations
Grants Science (save science by cryptocurrency)
Remark: This project Grants Science became not a priority, because we switched to another, possibly better, project AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM).
This is the page of Grants team in our DAO.
Please, support us. (“Think big, start small” – even a little donation on this beginning stage of the project will have a great effect.) Also, please link to this site, to increase its rating on Google. Also we welcome volunteer software developers to join.
This project is about gathering and spreading scientific funds more effectively than in traditional scientific grants, with emphasis on fundamental science, by leveraging cutting edge blockchain/cryptocurrency technologies. Currently scientific publishing is in a miserable state: some projects receive funding and exposure and some don’t. If a very important project receives no exposure, the science get stuck. We are to make scientific financing fair, to unstuck science.
How the science gets stuck
This is how science works in modern world (image credited from Permanent link to this comic: https://xkcd.com/2347/):
At the other hand, some of the researchers are not properly advertising their research due to which only those who are searching through the right keywords know about it. As a result, the other researchers studying the same topic won’t publish their research because it has been already published but not marketed properly making the research unpublishable and the science stuck.
(For example, Victor Porton mispublished his research on funcoids, and therefore he can’t publish funcoids and ordered semigroup actions again in peer review. He also discovered discontinuous analysis and faced trouble publishing it too. What a dystopian world where discontinuous analysis is discovered but cannot be published!
So, as a result, it blocked the development of science:
no funcoids
no ordered semigroup actions
no discontinuous analysis
Making the science stuck. Publishing ordered semigroup actions is now a world war fought just by one man. Join. It will be the best investment of your money into welfare of mankind.)
Our strategy to “unstuck” science
So to solve this problem Victor Porton (see GitHub for a list of software he worked on) has created this charity DAO intended to “unstuck” fundamental science and improve financing of both science and free software development, especially of underfinanced software components and of basic science.
Our initial strategy to improve the existing crypto grants ecosystem consists of these items:
- We will offer the donor to use a part of his/her donation for cites/dependencies. The same applies to software components: They are invisible and so often don’t receive enough donations. Now we offer the donor to allocate a part of his/her donation to direct and indirect dependencies of a software package or science article.
- We need an affiliate referral program for donations. Especially, because somebody may (intentionally or not intentionally) block the development of others by publishing an important discovery but not advertising it loudly, so that only persons who repeat the same discovery will find suitable keywords to find it and therefore will not publish, too, so making a topic in science non-publishable, and if it is a key topic the science stuck. If somebody does not advertise his discovery, let affiliates do it.
- To avoid “Start small, remain small.”, we will reward early marketers of a basic science project or software library by a part of later funds donated to this project (directly or as a dependency), this way thanking them for financing a project useful for future projects.
- We will scan existing APIs of software and science (e.g. crates.io and SemanticScholar) for dependencies and offer dependencies’ authors a timeframe to get their part of the donations.
- Users could specify their crypto addresses for donations (simultaneously for all their projects) using their public profiles on GitHub and similar sites.
This project replaces peer review
This project also provides a new model of peer review: peer review by donations. We will considered as peer reviewed works that received above some level (e.g. of $50) donations. This way people have a monetary interest of doing their peer review acts (donations) correctly.
Peer review is also partly shifted to be worked on by manuscript authors: cited by them works receive more donations. This ensures that review is done by already reviewed experts.
Details on Implementation
We are going to implement this using revolutionary DFINITY Internet Computer blockchain technology.
See https://github.com/gitcoinco/web/issues/10556 for some more details on our plans. We as a DAO fund development of such grants ecosystems.
When proper paid SEO will be applied to scientific texts and grants, the problem of mispublication will vanish as the key scientific results will go to the top of SERPs.
The current stage of the project: Writing the scientific article “The High-Level Algorithm of Financing Fundamental Science and Software, for Blockchain Implementation: Why This Way and Peculiarities of Information Exchange and Payments”, that I (Victor Porton) am going to send to a peer-reviewed journal.
See here for the scientific article draft.
See this page for more details on our plans.
Planned usage of funds
The funds will be used for:
- (much below market average) programmers salaries
- Web infrastructure
- advertising the project
- Excess fund will go directly to financing science and free software funds.
Support Independent Science
Our flagship product, AI Internet-Meritocracy, is an app (in the stage of open beta-testing) designed to allocate donated funds to researchers and open-source developers using AI-assisted evaluation of documented contributions. Payments depend on available funds and eligibility requirements.
Help fund the proposed five-month public test of AIIM’s allocation model with distribution of $1000 to real salary recipients. Support the next testing milestone.
Supporting independent science is not only a matter of fairness to researchers whose expertise and work are often underfunded. It is also essential for addressing systemic failures in scientific publishing that delay discoveries and leave important results unnoticed. In science and software, even one missing component can prevent an entire system from working.
Help valuable research and open-source infrastructure move forward. Please make a donation to support independent scientists and free software developers.
Independent review
Researchers and AI-safety reviewers: We invite independent technical criticism of Science DAO, AIIM, and related AI-safety work, including critical conclusions. Please examine assumptions, human-in-the-loop mechanisms, prompt-injection risks, governance, and failure modes. Use the independent-review packet →
Disclaimer
Experimental-system notice: AI Internet-Meritocracy is an experimental funding system. Its AI-generated evaluations are heuristic judgments based on available public or connected-account evidence; they are not validated measurements of a person’s causal economic or scientific impact. Payment transactions are already recorded on-chain and can be verified on the blockchain. The current beta initiates payments off-chain through Node.js and uses custodial and administrative components. Decentralized governance and non-custodial wallets remain under development; on-chain payment records are already available. Evaluations may contain factual errors or biases and should be interpreted together with audit logs, appeals, human oversight, and published test results.