Research

We are actively recruiting researchers who are passionate about distributed protocol adoption. Reach out to us here with your ideas.


Last year we spent over $100k on research. This is why our signal-to-noise ratio was so good. We want the biggest information advantage possible. To do this, we will be increasing our research budget by over 10x - our goal is to fund over $1,000,000 in Black Swan research.

We offer 1-day Research Sprints and Active Research Projects (1-2 week projects), payouts are variable depending on the scope of the project. All projects & researcher(s) must be pre-approved and on-boarded by the 1000x team to be considered for payment.

1-day Research Sprints...

What are we looking for? Examples:

  • How do we track Russian & Asian darknets?

  • Identifying major darknets we haven't covered & making darknet accounts for markets we haven't covered

  • Bug-finding on the 1000x Dashboard & verifying the document titled 'How We Made The 1000x Dashboard'

  • Finding issues in our 1000x Dashboard developer tracker - specifically, are some developers making core commits away from Github? How do we track them?

  • How do we identify large institutional crypto purchases, specifically ones that are not recorded in public reports like Grayscale's reports?

  • Identifying all tiers of crypto security - example: Tier 1 - hardware wallet, Tier 2 - multisig hardware wallet, Tier 3, Tier 4 etc. + tutorials for each Tier + warnings about crypto use - not disclosing crypto ownership or personal security practices to anyone

  • We’d love to know what you are most interested in learning about, so we want to hear from you! Recommend a 1 day sprint here and we’ll add the best suggestions to our bounty board: [email protected]

Want to dig in a little deeper? You might consider proposing an Active Research Project, these will be short term 1 - 2 week projects for professional researchers in the crypto space.

Example Pro-Research Projects

  • Do spammers drive crypto rallies?  If so, can we find early indicators of spam driven rallies? We’re working with a researcher to measure the acceleration of noise (spam) in crypto from 2009 through the present.  The end goal is to understand the meta-trends correlating spammer activity and market rallies.

  • Analysis of the Dark Markets - Take a deep look into the activity on the dark web, focusing on top markets and vendors, their preference for crypto acceptance, and how their transaction volume might provide insight into protocol adoption. The goal is to have a constant pulse on the activity of the dark web to better understand this extremely influential marketplace.

There are a lot of subjects to dive into on this, and so if you have ideas about what you’d find most valuable to add to your treasure map in 2019, we want to hear from you.

Need more inspiration?

Here are some great examples of high-quality research (made outside of 1000x), we're looking for work of this caliber:


1000x is also hiring! If you’re passionate about what we do and want to continue adding value to the group (while getting paid for your efforts) we have some unique opportunities to join us in this experiment: