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.)
Proportional prizes for prescient philanthropists
Effective Altruism, Economic Growth, Empowering Excetional People
A low-tech alternative to my proposal for impact markets is to offer regular, reliable prizes for early supporters of exceptionally impactful charities. These can be founders, advisors, or donors. The prizes would not only go to the top supporters but proportionally to almost anyone who can prove that they’ve contributed (or where the charity has proof of the contribution), capped only at a level where the prize money is close to the cost of the administrative overhead.
Donors may be rewarded in proportion to the aggregate size of their donations, advisors may be rewarded in proportion to their time investment valued at market rates, founders may be rewarded in proportion to the sum of both.
If these prizes are awarded reliably, maybe by several entities, they may have some of the same benefits as impact markets. Smart and altruistic donors, advisors, and charity serial entrepreneurs can accumulate more capital that they can use to support their next equally prescient project.
Owen Cotton-Barrett and I have thought about this for a while and have mostly arrived at the solution that beneficiaries who collaborated on a project need to hash this out with each other. So make a contract, like in a for-profit startup, who owns how much of the impact of the project. I think that capable charity entrepreneurs are a scarce resource as well, so that we should try hard to foster them. So that’s probably where a large chunk of the impact is.
When it comes to the incentive structures: We – mostly Matt Brooks and I but the rest of the team wil... (read more)