Values

Central to the decision-making of the DAO stand its core values:

1. Transparency. Funding decisions, logistics, and accounting data are published openly. Anyone can review the capital allocation and the endowment of the DAO. All funded papers, conferences, and projects are public information.

2. Openness. We mandate that the research funded by the DAO is free of software patents and published under a Creative Commons licence. Any software developed in collaboration with the DAO is licensed under an open licence (GPL, MIT, BSD, or Apache). We also mandate that any papers funded by the DAO are published in open archives such as ePrint and arXiv. In this manner, the broader ecosystem can make use of our research results.

3. Rigour. We value research that abides to academic rigour. We prioritize papers that are peer-reviewed and conferences that adhere to high academic standards of peer reviewing integrity, following the double-blind process of peer review. The two primary peer-reviewed conferences in the blockchain field are currently Financial Cryptography (FC) and the ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT). We are also recruiting works in the top security, cryptography, and privacy conferences in the field.

4. Impact. We care about publishing high-quality, impactful papers that solve foundational and difficult problems in the field. We want our research to help the field move forward. If a problem is central to the field, has been identified by the wider research community, and remains unsolved, we want to tackle it. We are especially interested in problems that impact multiple different blockchain systems and the field at large.

5. Equality. We fund research that follows the principles of the cypherpunk community. Research that increases the power and well-being of everyday people, supports the less well-off among us, respects their privacy, enables the sharing and freedom of information and content, and increases the accountability of organizations and governments.