About

The Protocol Institute is an independent research organization dedicated to the study of protocols — the rules, procedures, and coordination structures that shape how individuals, organizations, and systems interact.

Protocols are everywhere: in diplomacy and software, in medical practice and parliamentary procedure, in how cities manage traffic and how communities manage conflict. Despite their ubiquity, protocols remain poorly understood as a category. The Protocol Institute exists to change that.

The Institute evolved from the Summer of Protocols, a research program funded by the Ethereum Foundation that ran from 2023 to 2024. The program brought together over eighty researchers across multiple disciplines — from philosophy and organizational theory to cryptography and urban infrastructure — to investigate the deep structure of protocols as a category. It operated across multiple research tracks, supported independent scholars, and produced over 270 published works spanning essays, papers, tools, datasets, and works of fiction.

The Summer of Protocols established a vocabulary, a community, and a set of open questions that the Protocol Institute now carries forward. Its archive remains accessible and continues to be a reference point for researchers and practitioners working in this space.

Today, the Protocol Institute carries that work forward through ongoing research, publishing, convenings, and mentorship programs. Our work is interdisciplinary by nature, drawing on traditions from organizational theory, infrastructure studies, governance design, software engineering, and the history of institutions.

We are independent, member-informed, and committed to producing work that is both intellectually rigorous and practically useful.