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ICDevs is a 501(c)3 non-profit. We exist to build and preserve critical public infrastructure for the Internet Computer and decentralized computing generally — through education, scientific research, and open-source development.
Our priorities are:
- Retain the builders who show up — with retroactive public goods funding that rewards proven, lasting impact.
- Ensure Motoko has an independent, long-term future beyond any single commercial organization.
- Maintain and improve core libraries, ICRC implementations, and developer tooling.
- Develop AstroFlora as the permanence, provenance, and trust layer for asynchronous computing.
- Build community-driven security, audit, and verification infrastructure.
- Advance AI-native development methodologies and self-writing internet infrastructure.
- Deliver a push-button EVM experience on the Internet Computer.
- Develop sustainable, market-based node provider incentives that strengthen decentralization.
- Restore long-term staking with an 88-year reward curve that rewards conviction and stewardship.
We believe decentralized systems require decentralized stewardship, durable institutions, and incentives aligned toward decades rather than quarters.
We pursue each of these goals through our core instruments: educational programs, sponsored research, open-source bounties, developer resources, and community organization.
ICDevs was never intended to be another development organization.
It was founded on a simple observation:
Critical infrastructure cannot depend on the success or failure of any single company.
The Internet Computer's future should not be determined by venture cycles, corporate priorities, or temporary market conditions. If decentralized computing is to fulfill its promise, it must be supported by institutions whose mission is preservation, continuity, and public benefit.
As a 501(c)3 educational and scientific organization, our objective is clear:
To research, document, teach, and help maintain the infrastructure, tooling, standards, and institutions necessary for the Internet Computer to thrive for generations.
Every initiative below reflects that mandate. We do not build products for commercial gain. We fund research, develop educational resources, organize the developer community, and sponsor the open-source work that keeps the ecosystem independent.
To be direct about it: ICDevs is independent of the DFINITY Foundation. We are grateful for what the Foundation has built and for the grants it has extended to our work, and we expect to keep collaborating with it. But infrastructure this important cannot rest on the priorities of any single organization — including DFINITY. Several of the positions in this document exist precisely to give the ecosystem a steward whose mandate outlives any one company's roadmap.
Most of the priorities in this document are supply-side: better languages, better tooling, better economics for the people who run and extend the network. That work matters. But it is not enough.
The Internet Computer's hardest problem has never been capability. It is gravity. Builders ship into the ecosystem and too often nothing pulls them back — no audience, no follow-on funding, no signal that the work mattered. A platform that does not retain the builders who show up will not last generations, no matter how good its infrastructure becomes.
So we treat builder retention as priority zero, and retroactive public goods funding as its primary mechanism.
Grants pay for promises. Retroactive funding pays for proven impact — it rewards the library everyone ended up depending on, the tool that quietly became infrastructure, the contributor who was still here in year five. It closes the loop between shipping something valuable and being rewarded for it.
ICDevs supports the development of network-driven and market-driven retroactive funding mechanisms through research, education, and direct sponsorship. Our work focuses on:
- Identifying and measuring durable ecosystem impact.
- Designing funding mechanisms that reward proven value rather than projected promises.
- Establishing repeatable, transparent processes so contributors can count on recognition over time.
- Tying retroactive rewards to the provenance and audit infrastructure that makes impact verifiable.
The goal is simple: the builders who show up should still be here in five years — because the ecosystem gave them a reason to stay.
Motoko represents one of the most important innovations to emerge from the Internet Computer ecosystem.
As Motoko development increasingly shifts toward commercial organizations, the ecosystem requires a permanent and independent steward capable of preserving the language regardless of market conditions or organizational changes.
ICDevs intends to become that steward — through education, research, and open-source sponsorship.
Our research and educational work in this area includes:
- Supporting and documenting system-level canisters written in Motoko.
- Researching Motoko deployments beyond Internet Computer-specific environments.
- Studying and publishing runtime integration patterns for additional platforms.
- Developing educational materials around reproducible build systems and certification standards.
- Researching trusted module registries and verification systems.
Motoko should become more than a language for one network.
It should become a durable, well-documented, openly studied platform for decentralized computing everywhere.
The Internet Computer should not merely connect to Ethereum. It should offer a first-class EVM experience.
Developers should not be forced to navigate fragmented deployment paths or partial compatibility solutions.
The question remains: Why is there no push-button EVM on the Internet Computer?
There will be.
ICDevs will contribute to this goal through research, developer education, and by sponsoring the open-source work required to make a seamless EVM environment a reality — one that combines Ethereum compatibility with the unique capabilities of canister-based infrastructure.
Execution environments should be portable. Developers should choose platforms based on capability, not compatibility limitations.
Strong ecosystems are built on dependable foundations.
ICDevs will continue investing in research and educational resources around:
- Core Motoko libraries.
- ICRC standard implementations.
- Developer tooling.
- Modular frameworks.
- Shared infrastructure.
The goal is to reduce friction, increase interoperability, and give developers the knowledge and resources to focus on building applications rather than rebuilding primitives.
Artificial intelligence is transforming software development.
Soon, a significant percentage of software deployed to the internet will be generated, modified, and maintained by autonomous systems.
ICDevs intends to research and publish methodologies, frameworks, and infrastructure patterns that allow AI systems to safely and efficiently build applications on the Internet Computer.
The Internet Computer's architecture uniquely enables persistent AI services through:
- Persistent computation.
- Native hosting.
- Deterministic execution.
- Decentralized ownership.
The next generation of software will increasingly be written by machines.
Our responsibility — as an educational and research institution — is ensuring that the infrastructure and the developer community around it remains open, transparent, auditable, and sovereign.
Verification will become more important than authorship.
One of Ethereum's greatest innovations was permanence — the ability to verify deployed code, track its history, and independently audit changes.
As software evolves toward asynchronous architectures and autonomous services, those guarantees become more difficult and more important to maintain.
AstroFlora exists to solve this problem.
AstroFlora is a WASM registry, orchestration platform, and software provenance system designed to bring permanence, auditability, and verifiable trust to the Internet Computer.
Concretely: before you call a canister, you should be able to confirm that the code actually running inside it matches the audited source its developers published — byte for byte — and see every upgrade it has ever undergone. Today that is mostly an act of faith. AstroFlora's goal is to turn it into a lookup: point at a canister, get back its verified build, who deployed it, and its full upgrade history. Read the AstroFlora & ETHDAOs writeup →
If the EVM established permanence for smart contracts, AstroFlora aims to establish permanence for canisters.
It provides verifiable guarantees regarding:
- What code is running.
- Who deployed it.
- How it was built.
- Which modules were installed.
- What upgrades occurred.
- Whether deployed code matches certified source artifacts.
- The complete historical chain of custody for software.
This builds on emerging standards work — see ICRC-105 and its seven cousins for the registry and provenance primitives this depends on.
AstroFlora transforms software from something that must be trusted into something that can be verified.
ICDevs supports AstroFlora as a research and educational initiative. We study, document, and help develop the standards and tooling required to make decentralized software provenance a reality — not as a commercial product, but as public goods infrastructure.
As AI-generated software becomes increasingly common, software provenance becomes as important as consensus itself.
The future internet requires more than decentralized execution. It requires decentralized trust.
Trust in a decentralized network cannot come from a single approving authority. It has to be something the community can produce for itself.
As more software is generated by AI and deployed autonomously, the question "is this code safe to run?" stops being occasional and becomes constant. Centralized review does not scale to that — and it reintroduces exactly the single points of control that decentralization is meant to remove.
ICDevs supports the development of decentralized security, audit, and verification infrastructure through research and community education — systems that let communities, independent experts, and institutions collectively evaluate software safety and publish what they find.
Our work in this area focuses on:
- Open, reproducible audit methodologies that anyone can run and check.
- Tooling that binds audit results to verifiable provenance — so a clean audit is tied to the exact code that was reviewed.
- Shared registries of reviewed modules, findings, and attestations.
- Educational resources that grow the pool of people able to evaluate canister security.
This is the safety counterpart to open DAO formation (see Governance Principle 2). As the network retires centralized gatekeeping, the answer to "what stops scam launches?" is not a return to permission — it is verification: provenance, community audit, and transparent track records that let participants judge software for themselves.
Decentralization requires aligned incentives.
Node providers should not merely be compensated for hardware ownership. They should be rewarded for contributing to the health, resilience, and long-term success of the ecosystem.
ICDevs supports the development of market-driven node provider incentive systems through research and community education. Our work focuses on systems that:
- Reward long-term participation.
- Encourage geographic decentralization.
- Align incentives between node providers, developers, and users.
- Support ecosystem infrastructure and public goods.
- Strengthen operational excellence and reliability.
The objective is not maximizing node count.
The objective is building sustainable infrastructure markets capable of lasting for generations — and equipping the community with the knowledge to evaluate and advocate for sound economic design.
Short-term incentives create extraction. Long-term incentives create stewardship.
ICDevs supports restoring staking mechanisms with lock periods extending up to 88 years and reward curves that strongly favor long-term commitment.
Those willing to assume the greatest risk and longest time horizon should receive the greatest rewards.
Governance should reflect commitment. Not convenience.
We advance this position through public education and community research — publishing analysis, educating stakeholders, and providing resources to help the community understand the implications of different staking and incentive designs.
A list of priorities is a statement of direction, not a claim that everything happens at once. So that donors, contributors, and developers know where to plug in, here is roughly how we sequence the work.
Underway now — where our effort already goes:
- Builder retention and retroactive public goods funding — designing and piloting mechanisms that reward proven impact.
- Core libraries, ICRC implementations, and developer tooling — the foundations the ecosystem already depends on.
- AstroFlora provenance and verification research — the trust layer much of the rest of this agenda leans on.
Near-term:
- Motoko's path to an independent, permanent home.
- A push-button EVM on the Internet Computer.
Medium-term:
- Community security and audit infrastructure.
- AI-native development methodologies and self-writing infrastructure.
Long-term — primarily advocacy and research:
- 88-year staking and long-term governance alignment.
- Sustainable, market-based node provider economics.
These last items move mostly through NNS governance and published research rather than direct development on our part.
Our open-source bounty program remains our primary instrument for funding development, and the work already underway above is where new bounties are concentrated.
ICDevs will generally support governance proposals that advance the following principles. Our positions are informed by ongoing research and our commitment to educating the community on governance design.
1. Long-Term Governance Alignment
Restore staking periods extending up to 88 years with exponential reward scaling.
Beyond reward scaling, we believe influence should be matched to time horizon. Today every staked vote counts the same on every kind of question, which lets short-horizon holders steer decisions whose consequences they will not be around to live with. We think that is backwards.
The principle: short-duration positions should carry the most weight on short-horizon decisions; long-duration positions should carry the most weight on the choices that shape protocol direction for decades. Someone locked for a few months has a legitimate, immediate stake in near-term parameters and operations. Someone locked for years or decades has skin in questions of architecture, monetary policy, and constitutional change — and should have proportionally more say over them.
This is a genuinely novel mechanism, not a settled design, and getting the dimensions, weightings, and abuse-resistance right is hard. ICDevs intends to treat it as an open research question — publishing models, simulations, and analysis — rather than asserting a finished answer.
2. Decentralized DAO Formation
Retire official NNS oversight and gatekeeping of SNS launches.
The ecosystem should encourage a diverse marketplace of DAO launch frameworks, governance systems, and organizational structures developed by the community — including lighter-weight models like veto-based ("anti-DAO / pre-DAO / DAOless") governance. Innovation should emerge through competition rather than central planning.
This is not a call to remove safety — it is a call to replace gatekeeping with verification. The honest objection to open launches is "what stops scams and malicious launches?" Our answer is the provenance and community-audit infrastructure described above (AstroFlora and Principle 6): participants protect themselves by verifying who deployed what, whether the code matches its audited source, and what its track record is — rather than trusting a central authority to pre-approve it. Permission does not scale and recentralizes control; transparent verification scales and keeps it distributed.
3. Market-Based Node Provider Incentives
Actively develop and support market-driven node provider reward systems — including incentives that encourage node providers to support open-source infrastructure, public goods, developer tooling, and community-maintained software.
4. Developer-First Economic Alignment
Economic policy should prioritize developer growth and ecosystem expansion until governance market capitalization sustainably exceeds network resource consumption.
Networks grow through applications. Applications grow through developers.
5. Retroactive Public Goods Funding
Establish network-driven and market-driven mechanisms for rewarding contributors who create lasting value.
Public goods should not depend solely on grants. The ecosystem should continuously reward proven impact.
6. Community Security and Audit Infrastructure
Develop decentralized auditing systems that allow communities, experts, and institutions to collectively evaluate software safety and security.
Network trust should emerge from transparent verification processes rather than centralized approval structures.
ICDevs is not attempting to become another protocol company.
We are attempting to help establish permanent institutions for decentralized computing — through the tools available to a 501(c)3 educational and scientific non-profit:
- Researching and publishing critical knowledge.
- Educating developers and the broader community.
- Sponsoring open-source development through bounties and grants.
- Maintaining public infrastructure.
- Supporting independent developers.
- Funding public goods.
- Strengthening decentralized governance through informed community participation.
- Building systems that survive beyond any individual organization.
The future of decentralized computing will belong to those willing to think in generations instead of quarters.
That is the work ahead.
And we intend to do it.
ICDevs is funded by the community it serves. Every bounty, research grant, and piece of public infrastructure described above is paid for by donations.
- Donate to ICDevs — see every way to give: ICP, ckBTC, other tokens, and recurring support.
- Mint an ICDV token — receive a permanent, on-chain proof of your donation to public goods. Learn about ICDV.
Donations are tax-deductible for US citizens and corporations.
This is a living document (v0.1.0). It will change as the ecosystem does, and we want it argued with. The source lives in a public repository at github.com/icdevsorg/guiding-principles — open an issue or pull request to challenge a principle, propose a new one, or suggest a change, and we'll track revisions there in a public changelog. Prefer to discuss in the open? Find us on X and Bluesky, or email admin@icdevs.org.
ICDevs.org is registered as The Internet Computer Developers Education and Discovery Corporation, a 501(c)3 Texas Non-profit. Meet our Board and Advisors · Read our Bylaws