Blog by Timber Stinson-Schroff: “…The mission of this institute is to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy, appreciation and cultural salience globally. In other words, our mission is to build the field and community capable of stewarding the ongoing planetary processes of protocolization – the slow, largely invisible means by which human behaviors become standardized into the coordinating infrastructure of civilization.
The Protocol Institute inherits the work of its predecessor, the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, which ran from 2023 to 2025. The Ethereum Foundation initiated SoP with a bold thesis: deepened understanding of protocols generally would enable better governance of the core Ethereum protocol specifically. As a seasonal grants program, SoP was designed to:
- Bootstrap a new field of study around protocols
- Establish protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about and acting in the world
- Seed a scene and improve literacy around protocols
The program not only succeeded in these objectives, it went beyond them, sparking a rich discourse spanning many domains, such as robotics, climate, government, natural resources, insurance, programmable cryptography, economics, urban planning, health, gaming, encryption, wildfire management and more. Through its successes, both planned and unplanned, SoP has created the need for a suitable vehicle to sustain long-term activities building on what has already been accomplished…(More)”.
