Fight the Algorithm Monopoly
Algorithms underpin the modern world. Those who control algorithmic development control the future economy. Today, there is an unprecedented risk that AI giants will consolidate this power - scaling innovation behind closed walls and dictating who has access.
This is a failure of incentives.
The Innovation Game is an economic protocol that removes barriers to monetizing algorithms - forging an open, decentralized future for all.
Previous experiences include:
POWERING THE MODERN ECONOMY
From training large language models to optimizing delivery routes and enabling advanced medical imaging, algorithms drive nearly every corner of the modern economy.
Though deceptively simple in concept - structured instructions for solving problems - an algorithm's true power lies in leverage: a single insight can unlock orders-of-magnitude gains in performance and value, often giving rise to entire industries.
THE THREAT OF PRIVATIZATION
Historically, the most important algorithms were developed openly through publicly funded research. This created a shared intellectual substrate on which entire industries were built - innovation compounded because algorithms were accessible and collectively improved.
That foundation is now under threat.
As AI enables industrial-scale algorithm development, innovation is shifting from rare academic breakthroughs to a capital-intensive process, presenting an unprecedented risk that what was once a commons will become proprietary.
THE MISSING ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK
Open source alone is not sufficient.
History has shown that decentralized, open development can outperform monopolies, but increasingly algorithm development requires continuous access to expensive compute and infrastructure. Large corporations absorb these costs by capturing downstream value across products and platforms. Decentralized contributors have no native mechanism to monetize algorithmic improvements at scale.
Without an economic framework that rewards open innovation, decentralization cannot compete - not due to failures of talent, but failures of incentive. To preserve an open algorithmic future, new incentives are necessary.
Our answer is
The Innovation Game.
TIG creates a new economic framework for algorithmic development - one that aligns incentives, rewards contribution, and keeps innovation open.
At its core, TIG uses a novel proof-of-work variant built around computational challenges grounded in scientifically important problems. Contributors submit algorithms that solve these challenges, and miners are incentivized to adopt the most efficient ones for proof-of-work, creating a manipulation-resistant signal for rewarding the top-performing algorithms.
In this way, TIG democratizes algorithmic innovation, turning contribution into a sustainable economic opportunity, coordinating global intelligence to compete with centralized monopolies.
Our Challenges
World experts have contributed the following problem domains to TIG: