Skip to content

Inventing New Nature

ArticleVenkatesh Rao

Venkatesh Rao outlines the Protocol Institute's research mission as a newly formed organization funded by the Ethereum Foundation to advance protocol science. The core job is to channel resources from funders to researchers and groups doing work that contributes to the broader process of protocolization.

Related resources

Article

Introducing the Protocol Institute

The Protocol Institute launches as a new organization dedicated to advancing protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, with Protocolized magazine as its flagship publication. The institute inherits work from the Summer of Protocols program (2023-2025) and aims to build a field and global community capable of stewarding planetary-scale protocolization—the process by which human behaviors become standardized into civilization's coordinating infrastructure.

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Article

How the Protocol Institute is Adopting AI

The Protocol Institute is building itself around AI adoption, using bots like C3PO and Humboldt to handle research discovery and organizational tasks rather than traditional human-led infrastructure. The organization's approach treats AI tool proliferation as a generative process, allowing practical patterns to emerge through experimentation rather than top-down design.

Timber Stinson-Schroff

Article

Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead

Venkatesh Rao introduces the Protocol Institute Challenges program, designed to catalyze fresh research efforts around protocol science problems by moving beyond repackaged thinking and cosmetic applications. The program aims to develop practitioners who think natively in protocols rather than superficially applying protocol concepts to existing problems.

Venkatesh Rao