About
The Protocol Institute is an independent research, education, and scene-making organization dedicated to the study of protocols — the rules, procedures, technologies, and coordination infrastructures that shape how individuals, organizations, and systems interact and co-evolve. In particular, we are interested in the contemporary evolution of planet-scale intelligence through the interplay of AI, modern cryptographic technologies like blockchains, and their physical embodiments, as well as the human ecologies that emerge on top of them.
The Institute evolved from the Summer of Protocols, a research program funded by the Ethereum Foundation that ran from 2023 to 2024. The program brought together over eighty researchers across multiple disciplines — from philosophy and organizational theory to cryptography and urban infrastructure — to investigate the deep structure of protocols as a category. It operated across multiple research tracks, supported independent scholars, and produced over 270 published works spanning essays, papers, tools, datasets, and works of fiction. Materials inherited from this program, as well as new materials, are published on our media hub companion site, Protocolized, and disseminated through our Substack newsletter. The protocol fiction first developed there has since been spun out as an independent magazine, Monstrous Times.
What we do
Today, the Protocol Institute carries that work forward through research, publishing, events, and education:
- Research Groups — focused, renewably chartered groups that meet regularly, develop expertise on specific protocol themes, and take on time-bound research projects. The projects they propose for the coming year are collected in the Research Roadmap 2027.
- Projects — research projects led by our members, alongside the open challenges they respond to.
- Events — symposia, workshops, and gatherings, including PiBoWriMo, our book-writing month. Recordings from the Protocol Symposium 2026 are online.
- Publishing — Protocolized, with its newsletter, books, and resource archive.
- AI research systems — PIBot, a research assistant built on the Institute's corpus, and Humboldt, an autonomous research agent.
The Programs page maps all of our activities, and partner organizations are listed in the Protocol Institute Network.
People
PI is run by a small Core Team, working with an Extended Team of editors, collaborators, and AI systems. Our Research Leads host the research groups, Researchers take part in them, and an active Discord community connects everyone. The full member directory has more.
Supporting our work
We are in the process of spinning out of the Ethereum Foundation as an independent entity, and are now seeking support, including funding for the projects in the Research Roadmap 2027. The Support Us page has details on the various ways you can support our work.
Research outputs from the Summer of Protocols 2023 are published under a CC+ license that transitions from CC BY-NC 4.0 to CC BY 4.0 on December 13, 2026.