QNFO Funding Strategy — Verified Funder Landscape & Shortlist

In the paper's words

This paper presents a verified funder landscape and fit-score shortlist for sustaining QNFO, a two-year-old, solo-run, AI-assisted research platform that has produced an open corpus of approximately 1,000 method papers across seven program areas. Every funder fact was verified by live HTTP retrieval on 2026-08-13 across twenty-six pages spanning Web3 and IPFS ecosystem grantors, open-science philanthropy, and decentralized-science programs; anything not verified live is explicitly flagged.

The abstract, verbatim, and its opening sentence is the claim. Every line below is quoted from the text.

Numbers it reports

1. Actual spend is $ 400–600/month for the DeepChat AI stack alone (a Claude evaluation PoC cost $ 400 in under a week), with an optimized Cloudflare AI-infrastructure target of $ 100–200/month — an optimistic cost-cutting projection, not the current total.

   from 1. The Ask (One Paragraph)

2. Budget floor — RESOLVED (2026-08-13) — actual spend is $ 400–600/month for the DeepChat AI stack alone , with a $ 400-in-under-a-week Claude evaluation PoC spike; the $ 100–200/month figure is an optimistic cost-cutting projection for optimized Cloudflare AI infrastructure only , not the current total.

   from 3. Application-Readiness Gaps (Phase-0 Ignorance Audit — what we do NOT know)

3. Funder Status (verified 2026-08-13) Eligibility Amount Deadline URL Emergent Ventures (Mercatus) ACTIVE — low-overhead, rolling Individuals worldwide, age 13+ Grants, [VERIFY] typical $ 1k– $ 100k+ Rolling mercatus.org/emergent-ventures NLnet / NGI Zero ACTIVE — "calls open September 3, 2026 , deadline November 3, 2026 12:00 CEST " (verified on nlnet.nl/propose) "Individuals and organisations of any type" Micro-grants €5k–50k Nov 3, 2026 (then every 2 months, odd months) nlnet.nl/propose/ Foresight Institute ACTIVE — "Application deadlines at the end of each month" Individuals/teams Grants + prizes Month-end, monthly foresight.org/engage/grants/

   from Tier 1 — Apply Now (rolling or near-term deadlines)

4. Window Action Aug 2026 Draft EV application + gather readiness-gap answers (entity, residency, budget floor) Sep 3, 2026 NLnet calls open → submit proposal early (deadlines are hard) Sep–Oct 2026 Foresight month-end application (if epistemics-aligned topic); Gitcoin GG24 listing Nov 3, 2026 NLnet deadline (12:00 CEST) Q4 2026 Filecoin Builder Next Step (after IPFS corpus milestone) Q1–Q2 2027 STA Fellowship window (watch sovereign.tech/programs/fellowship); Templeton/Sloan only if entity formed

   from 7. Sequencing Calendar

How it is done

1. This paper presents a verified funder landscape and fit-score shortlist for sustaining QNFO, a two-year-old, solo-run, AI-assisted research platform that has produced an open corpus of approximately 1,000 method papers across seven program areas.

   from Abstract

2. funding strategy; decentralized science; AI-assisted research; open knowledge infrastructure; grant landscape; Web3 Date: 2026-08-13 Source note: QNFO research note (2026-08-12), included in this deposit as source-note-2026-08-12.md (funding manifesto) Method: All funder facts below were verified by live HTTP fetch on 2026-08-13 (26 pages, status + title + keyword extraction).

   from Keywords

3. QNFO is a two-year-old, solo-run, AI-assisted research platform that has produced an open corpus of ~1,000 method papers, organized across seven program areas (ultrametric physics, laws of form, information physics, paradigm engineering, consilience, platform, demos), with a documented audit discipline (citation audits, post-publication adversarial review, ignorance auditing) and an existing decentralized deployment history (IPFS).

   from 1. The Ask (One Paragraph)

4. Deliverable: (1) open-source the QNFO research pipeline (audit tools, ignorance-audit method, generation-detection), (2) IPFS-mirror the full corpus with content-addressed citations, (3) publish the protocol as libre-licensed content.

   from 6. Per-Funder Pitch Skeletons

What would falsify it

The paper's text states no explicit falsification criterion; the limits below are what it says about where the claim stops.

Where the claim stops

1. This paper presents a verified funder landscape and fit-score shortlist for sustaining QNFO, a two-year-old, solo-run, AI-assisted research platform that has produced an open corpus of approximately 1,000 method papers across seven program areas.

   from Abstract

2. Evidence records (verified live, HTTP 200): the QNFO archive https://papers.qnfo.org/papers/universal-ignorance-audit/ — "The Universal Ignorance Audit: A Fifteen-Question Method for Systematic Inquiry into the Structure of Not-Knowing" the QNFO archive https://papers.qnfo.org/papers — "Knowing What We Do Not Know: Ignorance Auditing, AI-Generation Detection, and the Epistemic Lessons of an AI-Assisted Research Pipeline"

   from Keywords

3. They do not block Tier-1 applications but must be resolved before Tier-3: Legal entity — no registered entity known.

   from 3. Application-Readiness Gaps (Phase-0 Ignorance Audit — what we do NOT know)

Where to read

1. Abstract177 words · 1 min
2. Keywords107 words · 1 min
3. 1. The Ask (One Paragraph)170 words · 1 min
4. 2. Applicant Assets (citable evidence)153 words · 1 min
5. 3. Application-Readiness Gaps (Phase-0 Ignorance Audit — what we do NOT know)197 words · 1 min
6. 4. Verified Funder Landscape524 words · 2 min
7. 5. Fit-Score Matrix192 words · 1 min
8. 6. Per-Funder Pitch Skeletons296 words · 1 min
9. 7. Sequencing Calendar68 words · 1 min
10. 8. Risks & Framing Cautions153 words · 1 min
11. 9. Next Actions (agent-executed, per user standing preference for autonomous outreach)57 words · 1 min