The Smart Contract Research Forum (SCRF) is where academics, researchers, and industry leaders from all over the world come together to discuss research, solicit thoughtful peer review, and find new projects on which to collaborate.
Supporting blockchain research takes global coordination, carefully balanced incentives, a stream of novel research, strong editorial independence, and a critical mass of dedicated and professional forum moderators.
We believe the forum will pay dividends for academia, industry, and emerging blockchain technologies. Concentrating unbiased blockchain research into a single, chain-agnostic, civil, and trustworthy space accelerates existing work in the field. It sparks the kind of collaborations between academia and industry that created the modern Internet.
Our core research team, the Research Fellows, have committed to working at least 10 hours a week and attending regular weekly meetings. Generally, Research Fellows each represent a larger group of individuals such as a university blockchain club, company, or university and tend to have a Ph.D or are pursuing one. They have successfully published numerous research summaries for SCRF.
Researchers who prefer occasional work and fewer meetings are referred to as Research Associates. There are no commitments required for being a Research Associate other than maintaining a light presence in our Chat and forum and occasionally contributing a comment or summary to SCRF. Research Associates who have completed several research summaries may be invited to become Research Fellows.
To make SCRF the most compelling crypto-focused space online, we recognize that we have to compensate you for your time and expertise. All work for SCRF is compensated.
In order to bridge the divide between industry and academia, the problem-havers and the problem-solvers, we require individuals who are capable of sourcing and summarizing new and existing research.
The Research Team is the foundation of the forum, and it is their mission to ensure that a steady stream of new and meritorious research is being surfaced to their peers as well as the industry in general. They do this by selecting the best papers from various crypto-related disciplines and summarize them for greater accessibility.
SCRF content is crafted to surface cutting-edge research and present it in a more succinct format than what is found in a full-fledged research publication. Our goal is to synthesize research, normalize concepts and terminology, and ultimately provide a strong backbone for engaging, objective conversations to take place.
Given the existing body of research around blockchain and supporting technologies, we also want to positively contribute to researchers working on their publications. We are cognizant that Literature Reviews, Related Works, and Theses can take a considerable amount of time and effort for researchers and post-docs exploring this space. SCRF can be the place where that research is monetized and converted into the form of Research Summaries, which can be shared with the ecosystem.
In addition to researchers, we’re also looking for moderators, editors, project managers, social media experts, among other roles.
There’s a wide variety of work to be done at SCRF, from writing Research Summaries to copy editing and graphic design to various administrative roles. We support flexible payment schedules, honoraria, grants, and other arrangements.
As our researchers become more deeply engaged with the project, or take on larger pieces of work, we have longer-term relationships available, including salaried positions.
We pay in cryptocurrency. For longer commitments, alternative arrangements can be made.
If you are unable to accept direct payments because of your university or funding agency, we can discuss alternative options. This could include:
- funding a project
- conference travel
- charitable donations to an endowment in lieu
- credits for compute resources, archive nodes, etc
- supporting a blockchain-related organization or event of your choice
We pay from $200 to $500 USD depending on the complexity of the content generated and the time involved. Researchers that commit to longer-term engagements and have produced a good body of work for the forum are encouraged to seek additional and more lucrative responsibilities.
Chat: We use our #general chat for discussions about content, blockchain-related events, coordination, and project planning.
Project Management: All the work that SCRF produces is created collaboratively in a public document pipeline. Please feel free to look around.
Live meetings: We have several weekly meetings for pitching ideas, status updates, projects and processes, and planning forum engagement.
If you are an academic, a researcher, or an industry participant with deep insight into blockchain technologies and are comfortable with writing literature reviews, research summaries, long-form technical blog posts, or have even published original research; we would like to talk.
Interested applicants should send us an email that outlines:
- Why you are interested in the space.
- Which projects you are most interested in, and why.
- Any project or research affiliations you may have.
- And includes links to three of your best blog posts, articles, or other writing that is related to blockchain research.
Please feel free to come and introduce yourself in our Chat as well.
Another great way to introduce yourself to us is to find a thread on the SCRF website and add a well-reseasoned or insightful comment to one of the discussions.
If you would like to get some deeper insight into how we do work and what we have on the go, you can also have a look at our public board.