Mechanisms for Human Cooperation

The Decentralized Cooperation Foundation exists to build mechanisms for human cooperation from tools of secure computing, cryptography, and distributed systems.

We want to see more cooperation in the world

People cooperate when the risk of doing so is low enough. Most of the tools that lower it put a trusted party in the middle: a bank, a platform, an administrator. That party then becomes the thing everyone depends on.

Decentralized systems lower the risk without the middleman. That is why we work on them, and it has been our purpose since the foundation started.

From Agoric to AI agents

DCF was founded in February 2022 as an independent non-profit foundation. Our first emphasis was Agoric's proof-of-stake chain and the Cosmos IBC environment. We said at the time that we would carry the technology underneath them to other chains, and to systems that aren't blockchains at all.

AI agents made the second part urgent. An agent acts on delegated authority, and today most agents hold far more authority than they need. Part of our work now is an open specification that fixes this.

The Agoric work continues alongside it.

Four lines of work

  • Open infrastructure.

    Endo and the OCapN protocol, developed in public repositories under the Apache 2.0 license.

  • Ecosystem support.

    Grants and validator delegation for Agoric and the Cosmos IBC ecosystem.

  • Research.

    A specification, a reference implementation and a conformance suite for delegable authority, with revocation that fits how organizations operate.

  • Community.

    We connect people and organizations working on decentralized cooperation, across specializations and across countries.