👋 Welcome to IFT

The Institute of Free Technology emerged from Status, which Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts founded to enable the free flow of information and protect the right to private, secure conversations in 2017.

Over time, gaps in the infrastructure required to deliver Status in a form that fully reflects its founders’, contributors’, and users’ values became apparent, and the project’s scope widened. IFT and the startups it incubates are the product of this expanded scope.

🔭 Mission

We support the development, adoption, and accessibility of solutions to digital age problems and are guided by our principles: liberty, censorship resistance, security, privacy, and inclusivity. We seek to connect with and support those innovating to defend our digital rights.

IFT Services

Learn more about IFT and its programs here

Vac

Vac is a principle-driven research and development group that provides technical support to each IFT startup. It comprises elite specialists in distributed systems, zero-knowledge proofs, and P2P networking, produces specifications for IFT startups, and undertakes comprehensive protocol testing. Like the IFT and the startups with which it works, a commitment to liberty, censorship resistance, security, privacy, decentralisation, and inclusivity guides Vac’s R&D efforts.

Learn more here

Finance

Our startups benefit from IFT capital to fund their research and development efforts. Meanwhile, the IFT nurtures relationships with investors who share our values and commitment to world-changing tech. Besides funding and investment, the IFT handles payment of fees to contributors, and potential expenses incurred by the contributors working with us via our in-house finance department.

Legal

A specialist and highly experienced legal department led by Dr Agata Ferreira helps our startups navigate the often confusing and ever-changing blockchain legal landscape while providing the legal support to allow them to achieve their project aims. Supporting Agata is a team of two with backgrounds in a wide range of legal areas, including, among others, crypto finance and blockchain. The department assists our startups identify and prevent or mitigate potential (legal) risks.

People Operations

Our PeopleOps department ensures that our startups have the most valuable asset they need — highly engaged and productive contributors — to focus on developing and supporting the innovations we incubate. The team handles talent scouting, recruiting, onboarding, travel, administrative support, and other initiatives to keep those working with us happy, engaged, and productive.

Brand & Awareness

The studio works with our startups to deploy high-impact campaigns, raising brand awareness among their target markets both within the web3 ecosystem and beyond it. IFT startups enjoy full access to the studio, which comprises marketing, digital communications, design, web development, and events management specialists.

Programs

Logos

A movement supporting the development of the decentralised web. Logos technologies lay the foundations for a freer internet upon which communities can evolve into network states. Each protocol in the Logos stack seeks to empower its users while upholding civil liberties and fundamental freedoms.

Waku

A family of generalised P2P communications protocols. The messaging layer of the Logos stack. Waku is private, censorship resistant, modular, and scalable by design. This combination of features makes Waku suitable to run in a wide range of environments, including phones and browsers, while upholding its users’ rights to private communications.

Codex

A decentralised storage engine with strong censorship resistance and durability guarantees. The data archiving layer of the Logos stack. Codex leverages a novel combination of cutting-edge features, including erasure coding, a lazy repair system, ZK-based remote auditing, and incentivisation mechanisms to ensure reliability, data durability, efficiency, and cost effectiveness.

Nomos

A sovereign, modular, zk-encrypted network of blockchains. The trustless agreements layer of the Logos stack. The forthcoming Nomos network will provide a common infrastructure layer upon which communities and aspiring network states can build social, governance, and financial services that uphold their community members’ fundamental rights and values.

Status

A blockchain-based super app that combines private messaging, a wallet, a DApp browser, and tools for web3 community management. Status aims to be a truly decentralised communication tool and, since its founding in 2017, has been progressively removing reliance on centralised infrastructure. The application leverages Waku and other technologies developed under the IFT umbrella.

Keycard

A discreet, convenient, affordable hardware security solution for crypto assets. Taking the form of a credit card, Keycard offers comparable crypto security at a fraction of the cost of others in the hardware wallet niche. Keycard is in production, and the team is working on a full hardware wallet, which will be entirely open-source and compatible with existing Keycards while offering a familiar user experience.

Nimbus

A lightweight Ethereum client implementation designed to reduce hardware requirements for solo stakers and increase efficiency for institutional staking service operators. Nimbus’ mission is to make staking accessible, thus promoting maximum network decentralisation. The Nimbus consensus client is in production, and an execution client is in development. By offering lightweight implementations for both consensus and execution layers, Nimbus simplifies operating an Ethereum node for hobbyists and institutional stakers alike.