Hi everyone,
I am working on a decentralized publishing and discussion platform for academics and researchers, and I would appreciate feedback on the idea and its potential challenges.
Core Vision
The goal is to create an open research ecosystem where:
- Articles, discussions, and academic content are published through Nostr, enabling decentralized networking, censorship resistance, and interoperability.
- Funding and treasury management are handled on-chain using the Internet Computer (ICP).
- Moderation, reputation, and social coordination remain off-chain through Nostr clients and relays.
Why Keep Some Components Off-Chain?
While blockchains provide strong guarantees for treasury management and transparent funding, social mechanisms evolve rapidly.
Smart contracts are difficult to modify once deployed. If a flaw is discovered in the moderation or reputation algorithm:
- Off-chain: We can update the software and iterate quickly.
- On-chain: We would need contract migrations, governance approvals, and ecosystem-wide coordination.
Research communities often experiment with different reputation systems, peer review methods, and moderation policies. Keeping these mechanisms off-chain allows faster adaptation while preserving on-chain transparency for funds.
Funding Mechanism: Conviction Voting
We are considering conviction voting to allocate treasury funds to authors and research initiatives.
Conviction voting is a governance mechanism where the longer participants lock their tokens, the greater their voting power becomes.
Potential advantages:
Long-term preferences dominate
Participants who support projects over longer periods accumulate greater influence, reducing short-term speculation.
Manipulation becomes expensive
Influencing outcomes requires acquiring and locking capital for extended periods, increasing attack costs.
Minority protection
Smaller groups with strong long-term conviction can gradually build influence instead of being immediately overwhelmed by majority voting.
Alignment with honest participation
Participants are incentivized to support projects they genuinely believe will create long-term value rather than maximizing short-term gains.
The hypothesis is that conviction voting may create a more stable equilibrium for funding public goods such as research, replication studies, open datasets, and educational content.
Is finishing the project and submitting it to SNS a good idea for fundraising? What do you think—would this idea receive enough support from SNS governance?
What other fundraising mechanisms exist in the ICP ecosystem to help sustain the project? DFINITY developer grants also seem to have stopped.