Building programmable infrastructure for more efficient, equitable coordination at global scale.
This focus area rectifies the inadequacies of current macro systems, which often struggle to coordinate and solve monumental challenges like climate change. By leveraging decentralized and improved governance tools, we are rethinking how capital is formed and deployed.
This movement harnesses mechanism design to align millions of people worldwide toward shared goals, creating structures that can allocate resources at the scale of nation-states for the benefit of all humanity.
Two initiatives where we put these ideas to work, turning collective input into legitimate decisions and building the research field that stands behind them.
AI-assisted sensemaking at the scale of a community or a nation. Broad Listening turns thousands of voices on contested questions, such as climate, AI, and public-goods funding, into a clear, shared picture, building on a lineage of civic technology like Pol.is and Talk to the City. Simocracy takes the next step: at our Funding the Commons experiment in San Francisco, structured deliberation surfaced weighted preferences and drove real budget allocation, with sims at the table and humans on the wheel.
The academic engine behind the work. AI4PG grows the field of mechanism design for public goods in the age of AI, co-funded with Gitcoin and co-led by PL Research. It funds grants, convenes workshops with leading universities, and produces open research that gives policymakers and communities trustworthy ground to stand on.
Convergence zones where multiple subfields unite to create transformative opportunities. These are the high-leverage areas where we can catalyze systemic change by bridging technologies, communities, and institutions.
Open, verifiable, privacy-preserving rails for nation-states
A new category of infrastructure is emerging. Nation-states, multilateral institutions, and regional blocs are recognizing that their core p...
Sustainable funding mechanisms connecting programmable allocation to institutional capital
Public Goods Funding mechanisms have matured from quadratic funding experiments to sophisticated retroactive funding, hypercerts, and impact...
New coordination mechanisms for collective decision-making
Traditional governance systems struggle with scale, legitimacy, and responsiveness. Programmable governance mechanisms offer new primitives ...
DePIN networks and ReFi mechanisms for climate action at scale
Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) are demonstrating that compute, energy, sensing, mapping, and telecommunications can ...
9 interconnected subfields driving systemic change.
Ecosystem impact across villages and funding.
242+ teams building public goods infrastructure.
Strategic dependency trees across 4 inflection points.
We are actively seeking:
Does this opportunity space resonate? What's missing? What's wrong?
What sovereign DPI deployments, DeSci infrastructure, DePIN projects, or PGF mechanisms should we be learning from?
Who else should be at the table? What institutions, teams, or individuals are essential to this work?
What reference architectures, standards, or specifications would be most valuable?
What have we gotten wrong about the field, the opportunity, or the approach?
