The FTX Foundation's Future Fund is a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity's long-term prospects.
We have a longlist of project ideas that we’d be excited to help launch.
We’re now announcing a prize for new project ideas to add to this longlist. If you submit an idea, and we like it enough to add to the website, we’ll pay you a prize of $5,000 (or more in exceptional cases). We’ll also attribute the idea to you on the website (unless you prefer to be anonymous).
All submissions must be received in the next week, i.e. by Monday, March 7, 2022.
We are excited about this prize for two main reasons:
- We would love to add great ideas to our list of projects.
- We are excited about experimenting with prizes to jumpstart creative ideas.
To participate, you can either
- Add your proposal as a comment to this post (one proposal per comment, please), or
- Fill in this form
Please write your project idea in the same format as the project ideas on our website. Here’s an example:
Early detection center
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophes
By the time we find out about novel pathogens, they’ve already spread far and wide, as we saw with Covid-19. Earlier detection would increase the amount of time we have to respond to biothreats. Moreover, existing systems are almost exclusively focused on known pathogens—we could do a lot better by creating pathogen-agnostic systems that can detect unknown pathogens. We’d like to see a system that collects samples from wastewater or travelers, for example, and then performs a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous
You can also provide further explanation, if you think the case for including your project idea will not be obvious to us on its face.
Some rules and fine print:
- You may submit refinements of ideas already on our website, but these might receive only a portion of the full prize.
- At our discretion, we will award partial prizes for submissions that are proposed by multiple people, or require additional work for us to make viable.
- At our discretion, we will award larger prizes for submissions that we really like.
- Prizes will be awarded at the sole discretion of the Future Fund.
We’re happy to answer questions, though it might take us a few days to respond due to other programs and content we're launching right now.
We’re excited to see what you come up with!
(Thanks to Owen Cotton-Barratt for helpful discussion and feedback.)
EA ops: "Immigration Tech"
I have an idea for a cloud based, AI-powered SaaS platform to help governments handle immigration. Think KYC meets immigration
Today the immigration process is disjointed and fragmented amongst different countries and in most cases it's cumbersome, overly bureaucratic. That means that difficulties for immigrants, particularly in clear Human Rights cases, as well as for countries, who may be losing out on highly skilled migrants.
The idea is a platform that connects between potential immigrants and potential host countries. Instead of an immigrant applying individually to a number of countries, he would upload his relevant documentation to the platform that will then be shared with his countries of choice. Another model could be for interested countries to directly reach out to the potential immigrant of their own accord.
Part of the work of the platform would be to perform the relevant KYC work to authenticate the request as legitimate - thereby saving time and resources for national immigration departments, particularly when a request is lodged to multiple countries.
Obviously the idea is still in it's early stages and there are a number of details that would need to be fleshed out. For example:
But there are already solutions for these issues that are employed in other areas (for example KYC in Crypto, Authentication in HR tech platforms), so I'm sure that an appropriate path can be found.
There are a tonne of useful platforms in the KYC space - from banking, to HR and talent sourcing. I don't think there is a single "Immigration Tech" platform that connects international partners to smooth out the immigration process
We've all seen the sheer scale of the human catastrophe in Ukraine in the last week.
Immigration is a pressing issue.
Having a platform that smoothes out and streamlines the process can be a huge win-win for both immigrants and countries alike.
Avi Lewis
Basically, the aim here is twofold:
- Skilled migrants. Enable host countries to perform a reverse-lookup to attract skilled migrants with a background in say Tech, STEM or IT. And vice verca. Support skilled migrants in their search for a new home environment that can foster their growth and development. An influx of academic and entrepreneurial immigrants can be a boost to the economies of their newly adoptive countries, and can lead to a increase scientific advancement
- Human Right Cases. All too often these fall through the cracks. Long wait tim
... (read more)