![\"How](\"/images/blog/pl-rd-accelerates-hero.png\")
The most important breakthroughs often begin before there is a market to fund them, a field to organize them, or an institution to back them.
\nThey may start as a primitive that only a few researchers understand, a protocol that lacks a deployment path, a scientific result with no obvious business model, a regulatory gap that prevents adoption, or a community of builders who can see the future before capital knows how to underwrite it.
\nThis stage is difficult for traditional institutions to support. Academic labs can produce deep insight, but often lack the infrastructure, capital, and deployment channels to turn that insight into widely used systems. Venture capital can scale companies, but usually enters after a market becomes legible. Governments can set standards, create demand, and fund ambitious work, but often move after a frontier has already taken shape. PL Research & Development (PL R&D) exists for the stage in between fundamental research and venture creation.
\nPL R&D is the field-building arm of the Protocol Labs (PL) innovation network. We map frontier computing fields, identify the bottlenecks blocking progress, and coordinate the research, funding, infrastructure, talent, and deployment pathways that help breakthroughs reach the world.
\nOur mission is to accelerate computing breakthroughs that expand human freedom, coordination, intelligence, and cognition. We do that through our focus areas:
\nOpen, verifiable, censorship-resistant infrastructure for human freedom and agency in the digital age.
Programmable infrastructure for more effective coordination among individuals, institutions, markets, and states.
Open compute, data, coordination, and economic rails for autonomous agents and embodied AI.
Brain-computer interfaces, whole-brain emulation, and NeuroAI systems that can expand human cognition safely and responsibly.
PL R&D exists to help these fields accelerate faster.
\n![\"PL](\"/images/blog/pl-rd-pipeline.png\")
To shape strategy and interventions within opportunity spaces and inflection points, each focus area is stewarded by a Focus Area Lead and advised by its own Scientific Advisory Board of field experts. Together, they identify the field bottlenecks that can have the greatest impact, and the tools to use to unblock progress. We begin with a field-level question: What would need to be true for this field to progress much faster?
\nTo answer this question, we organize each focus area into a small number of opportunity spaces – ARIA's term for \"critically important but underexplored areas of research that we believe are ripe for breakthroughs\". Within each opportunity space, we identify inflection points: specific, observable milestones that indicate a field has crossed an important threshold that lifts progress and momentum onto a new trajectory.
\nInflection points can be technical demonstrations that shift the Overton window, adoption thresholds for new technologies, or another specific milestone that shapes field policy, legitimacy, access, or resources. The point is to be explicit about what we think will matter, what evidence would prove it, and what bottlenecks stand in the way. Once we identify the bottleneck, we can choose the intervention.
\nMuch of today's most promising frontier work struggles to find a home: it is often too early, too interdisciplinary, or too radical for traditional capital. Even when funding exists, the primary bottleneck is frequently a lack of coordination.
\nPL R&D bridges this gap. Rather than making discoveries ourselves, we create the conditions for discovery to thrive. We bring researchers, builders, funders, and institutions together to align on technical primitives, open infrastructure, and deployment pathways. Because every field faces unique obstacles, we deploy a versatile toolkit to unlock progress:
\nEffective field-building is itself an open research domain, so part of our work will be refining new types of interventions. Over time, PL R&D aims to innovate not only within our focus areas - but in how R&D itself accelerates field progress faster.
\nUltimately, the success of PL R&D is the success of our focus areas and the breakthroughs they create over time. As we reflect on our impact in accelerating progress, we use three questions to measure our own success in each focus area:
\nThe first two questions are about the world. The third is about attribution. We will not always have clean answers, but we can be explicit about our hypotheses, our evidence, and where we were wrong.
\nOver time, we intend to publish progress against each field: the opportunity spaces we chose, the inflection points we tracked, the interventions we ran, the evidence for and against our contribution, and what we learned.
\nProtocol Labs was founded in 2014 by Juan Benet as a research, development, and deployment lab for network protocols. The premise was simple: many breakthroughs fail to matter because the gap between research and deployment is too large.
\nPL's first decade focused on the decentralized web. That work helped produce IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, IPLD, and Multiformats: open infrastructure for addressing, storing, verifying, moving, and organizing information across distributed networks. Our R&D work helped establish content addressing as a standard with papers, protocols, implementations, developer adoption, storage markets, and a community that could carry the work forward; peer-to-peer networking with reusable libraries rather than every team rebuilding the same stack; and cryptographic infrastructure via production systems that forced theoretical primitives to become efficient enough for real-world use.
\nPL R&D is now applying that operating philosophy to the next set of fields where computing will shape civilization most directly: digital rights, economic coordination, machine intelligence, and human cognition.
\nIn Digital Human Rights, 381 teams are active in the network, supported by more than $30M in grants in 2025, with convenings from the Cypherpunk Retreat to a d/acc Residency in Patagonia seeding the next generation of censorship-resistant infrastructure and agentic builders.
\nIn Economies & Governance, more than 22,000 researchers, builders, and residents from over 80 nations are working on coordination problems nation-states cannot solve alone. Crecimiento brought DevCon 2025 to Buenos Aires (14,000 attendees, over 1,000 startups, more than $20M raised) alongside Regulation Day, which convened 1,500 regulators and lawmakers around crypto-native governance.
\nIn AI & Robotics, open and distributed compute reached frontier scale: Prime Intellect trained a 100B+ parameter model via decentralized compute that rivals centrally-trained alternatives, EQTY Lab shipped a verifiable-compute layer on Nvidia's Blackwell platform, and BitRobot released HIW-500 - the largest open-source humanoid teleoperation dataset collected in real homes. Together, these form components of the agent-coordination infrastructure the next generation of AI deployment depends on.
\nIn Neurotechnology, $2M in grants funded 9 teams in 2025. The BCI (brain-computer interface) Founders Retreat convened 9 leading teams whose companies have collectively raised billions in venture capital; the Connectomics Workshop advanced the mapping of brains for compute, emulation, and consciousness research; and PL Neuro launched as the field's organizing infrastructure, with whitepapers, roadmaps, and a public brand at plneuro.xyz, making a nascent field legible and recruitable for the first time.
\nWe are pointing this approach at emerging fields because it has already worked in the ones PL knows best. The two case studies below show what this looked like in practice:
\nPL R&D is designed to create leverage for many different stakeholders within the wider Protocol Labs innovation network. A good field map can help researchers orient their work, help founders find company ideas, help funders deploy grants and other capital more intelligently, and help institutions understand where policy or procurement can accelerate progress. A well-timed grant can create the proof point that makes a company fundable, while a gathering of the right minds can create the trust needed to scale a pilot. Shared infrastructure and primitives can help many teams build faster than they could alone.
\nThe primary measure of success for PL R&D is whether a field accelerates. But durable institutions also need durable funding models, and one advantage of the Protocol Labs innovation network is the ability to connect multiple stages of the pipeline. PL connects early invention, expert talent, venture formation, and long-term capital into a compounding loop that can create sustainable funding sources for the next generation of R&D breakthroughs. Within the network, aligned cofounders like PLVS help turn validated breakthroughs into companies, while venture funds like PL Capital back extraordinary founders scaling breakthrough R&D. Founders we have supported have proceeded to raise more than $1B from angels & VCs across our investor network. From early invention to large-scale growth, the PL Platform helps ambitious projects reach the users, contributors, and markets they need to cross the chasm.
\n![\"The](\"/images/blog/pl-innovation-network.png\")
Our model is ambitious, and it should be evaluated seriously.
\nWe see several risks: We could spread ourselves too thin across too many fields. We could choose familiar interventions instead of the ones a bottleneck actually requires. We could publish maps and host convenings without moving the underlying bottlenecks. We could fail to measure attribution well enough to learn and iterate. We could produce useful work that does not reach the researchers, founders, funders, and institutions who need it.
\nInstead of shrinking from risk - we face it head on by being precise about our hypotheses, public about progress, open to criticism, and willing to update our thinking. Frontier R&D is itself an evolving field. We expect to learn as much about how to run this kind of organization as we do about digital human rights, governance, AI, robotics, and neurotechnology.
\nPL R&D is built for collaboration.
\nResearchers - we want to hear where your field is blocked, what primitives are missing, what research directions deserve more attention, and what would help your work reach deployment. We can connect your expertise to field maps, grant programs, and talent gaps, and shape the path from research to deployment.
\nFounders & builders - our field-mapping can help inform which opportunity spaces are ripe for innovation, how new businesses can unlock field bottlenecks, which expert talent can help accelerate breakthroughs, and how open infrastructure can support new products and markets.
\nFunders, LPs, & philanthropists - PL R&D can help make frontier fields more legible, identify high-impact funding opportunities, and coordinate capital around shared bottlenecks.
\nInstitutions, policymakers, & standards bodies - our field experts can help inform the rules, pilots, procurement pathways, and standards that help responsible technologies reach the world.
\nProtocol Labs network members - PL R&D is a way to connect your work to deeper field strategy: the opportunity spaces, inflection points, and infrastructure that can make your efforts compound.
\nPlease get in touch with us at research@protocol.ai or follow us on X or Bluesky to continue the conversation.
\nThis post kicks off the PL R&D blog because it explains the operating model behind our work.
\nThe next posts will go deeper into each focus area: Digital Human Rights, Economies & Governance, AI & Robotics, and Neurotechnology. Each will describe the opportunity spaces we see, the inflection points we think are within reach, the bottlenecks blocking progress, and the teams already pushing the frontier forward.
\nOur aim is to make frontier computing fields easier to understand, easier to fund, easier to build in, and easier to steer toward human flourishing. That is the work of PL R&D - and we hope you'll join us.
\nThis post is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer, solicitation, or recommendation of any security or investment product, and nothing here is a commitment or guarantee of any future performance or any outcome.
\n" }, + { + "slug": "securing-fundamental-rights-in-the-digital-realm", + "title": "Securing Fundamental Rights in the Digital Realm: The Infrastructure Freedom Now Runs On", + "date": "2026-06-30T00:00:00.000Z", + "summary": "The digital foundations our fundamental rights now depend on.", + "description": "", + "authors": [ + "will-scott" + ], + "areas": [], + "external_url": "", + "coverImage": "/images/blog/securing-fundamental-rights-in-the-digital-realm/hero.png", + "html": "![\"Securing](\"/images/blog/securing-fundamental-rights-in-the-digital-realm/hero.png\")
Part of a series introducing the focus areas of PL R&D.
\nOur information environment is being reshaped in real time by algorithms, networks, protocols, platforms, and adversaries that move faster than the institutions meant to govern them. Digital infrastructure like core internet protocols, already shapes how we speak, gather, and keep our lives private. We now need to ensure we build the infrastructure to protect those freedoms faster, and more wisely, than that same infrastructure can be turned against them.
\nThe types of freedoms we mean are specific: freedom of speech (to seek, receive, and impart information regardless of frontiers); freedom of peaceful assembly and association; the right to privacy; recognition everywhere as a person before the law; and the freedom of thought and self-determination that underwrites them all. Far from new, each was hard-won through long debate.
\n![\"Juan](\"/images/blog/securing-fundamental-rights-in-the-digital-realm/web3-summit-2019.png\")
At PL R&D, we know that the infrastructure we build today will determine which of these freedoms can be exercised tomorrow. To preserve and extend them, we continue to invest in research, funding, and product development across four interconnected opportunity spaces. These are the frontiers where a technical breakthrough can become a durable protection for a specific right, rather than one more tool for eroding it.
\nWe organize our work into four layers, each sustaining specific rights:
\nKeeping communication and connectivity alive even in low-connectivity, partitioned, or adversarial environments. The frontier has moved past simple encryption toward metadata-resistance (hiding not just what you say but whom you say it to) and partition-tolerance (staying connected when the network is deliberately fragmented).
\nSpeech and assembly are the first freedoms to go in any adversarial environment, and both assume you can reach other people, an assumption that residential and cellular networks, controlled by a few incumbents and the states that license them, can revoke at will.
\nNation-state-independent connectivity is appearing, low-earth-orbit satellite networks such as Starlink decouple a person's ability to get online from the institutions that govern local access. Metadata-resistant tooling such as Kohaku (Ethereum Foundation) is productionizing Private Information Retrieval and mix networks inside a wallet, so that messages, and the patterns of who contacts whom, leak as little as possible. And modular networking stacks such as libp2p let applications find one another and stay connected even when traditional rails fail.
\nThe step-change comes when nation-state-independent connectivity and metadata-resistant messaging reach consumer scale, so that during a deliberate shutdown a measurable share of a population stays connected and able to organize. Observable, and not yet true: a global connectivity provider offers consumer-scale service without state licensing or identity gating, and a metadata-resistant messenger crosses tens of millions of users under real adversarial conditions. At that point censoring who may speak or gather online becomes impractical rather than merely illegal.
\nVerifiable credentials and portable reputation owned by the individual rather than the platform, for humans and, increasingly, for the agents acting on their behalf, without depending on a centralized government ID or on expert-level key management.
\nIdentity is how a person is recognized, and today that recognition is mostly rented from platforms and states: lose the account or the document and you lose the standing. Without portability, people are trapped in whatever platform first issued their identity; without privacy, identity becomes a surveillance dossier. This sustains recognition as a person before the law, and privacy.
\nOpen social protocols such as the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol behind Bluesky give people a credible exit: identity and data bind to a portable identifier the user controls, so a whole social graph can move between providers without loss. Sybil-resistant systems such as World establish that someone is a unique human without tying that proof to a state document. And zero-knowledge credential systems, spanning age verification, passkeys, and verifiable credentials, let a person prove one specific claim while disclosing as little as possible.
\nThe step-change comes when a service at real scale, more than 100 million people, verifies unique humans for everyday services without anchoring them to a nation-state identity or KYC. Observable, and not yet true: today's proof-of-personhood systems operate well below that scale and outside mainstream services. When one crosses it, recognition as a person need no longer be rented from a state or a platform, and privacy-preserving personhood becomes safe to build on.
\nDurable, tamper-evident records and standards for non-intermediated trust: systems that can prove a knowledge artifact has not been altered, and keep proving it over time.
\nThe rights to seek, receive, and share information depend on a shared public record people can trust. The ability to prove a piece of information is authentic has always underpinned that record, and as AI-generated content floods the internet that ability gets far more fragile and far more urgent. As global truth gets harder to verify, trust retreats into small private circles, a dark forest in which a common, checkable account of what happened ceases to exist.
\nContent addressing, as in IPFS, gives every file a verifiable identifier derived from its contents, so a reader can confirm data is exactly what was published. Provenance frameworks such as Starling Lab establish verifiable chains of custody for journalism and historical records. Large-scale archives such as the Internet Archive preserve digital history at scale. And formal-verification systems such as Lean, with zero-knowledge proofs of execution, extend provenance from documents to the computations that produced them.
\nThe step-change comes when content authenticity stops being optional. Observable, and not yet true: two consecutive generations of frontier AI models ship attested provenance tooling by default, and at least one major platform or archive adopts content-addressed provenance as the default for its public record. As synthetic content becomes indistinguishable from the real thing, a public record that can prove its own integrity becomes the precondition for accurate information meaning anything at all.
\nThe open environment, compute, storage, and identity, that lets AI agents coordinate and transact on our behalf: open enough to be permissionless, accountable enough to keep humans in charge.
\nAI is becoming a powerful extension of each of us and of the institutions around us, and the open question is whether that capability stays under individual human control or concentrates in a few hands. An agent that acts on your behalf only extends your agency if you, and not a single platform, govern the compute, storage, and identity it runs on. This is where self-determination and freedom of thought are won or lost.
\nOpen storage markets such as Filecoin run on independent providers rather than one centralized host, so no single party can deny, alter, or lose your data. Fully homomorphic encryption environments such as Zama let computation run directly on encrypted data, so agents can coordinate in public without exposing what they hold. And open compute protocols such as Gensyn and Prime Intellect train models across independent, globally distributed hardware rather than inside a single lab.
\nThe step-change comes when serious AI capability no longer requires a single provider's stack. Observable, and not yet true: a frontier-scale model is trained across independent, decentralized hardware rather than one company's cluster, or a meaningful share of agent-to-agent economic activity settles on open, permissionless compute, storage, and identity rather than inside one platform. At that point the rights architecture of the agent economy is set in the open rather than by whoever owns the cluster.
\nThe next few years will decide whether these freedoms are quietly curtailed or deliberately extended. Human freedom can be hollowed out when infrastructure is centralized, surveilled, or switched off, and PL R&D focuses on the root system a free digital society stands on. We do not build every piece; we connect them, and aim our toolkit, field-building communications, convenings, grants, venture support, and policy and standards work, at the blockers specific to this field. (That toolkit is described in the PL R&D Overview.) PL's foundational primitives here, IPFS, libp2p, and content-addressed data, are among the strongest in the portfolio.
\nIf you are working on any of these four layers, we want to hear from you:
\nThe rights we refuse to lose will be defended in the infrastructure, or not at all. Join us.
\n" + }, { "slug": "juan-benet-podcast-max-hodak", "title": "Announcing the Juan Benet Podcast: Launching With First Guest Max Hodak, CEO of Science Corp",