Selected RFP:

Software-Defined Operations for Small Businesses

An RFP to research how the core operations of small and medium enterprises can be improved with Ethereum-based solutions. Applicants should focus on a specific SME context and study how firms in that domain organize, coordinate, and execute everyday business processes today, as well as where existing operational stacks break down in practice. Research should explore how Ethereum’s properties as a programmable, credibly neutral settlement and coordination layer could enable new operational primitives that reduce administrative overhead, improve reliability, and enable automation that is currently inaccessible to SMEs. Areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to, commercial agreements with smart contract defined conditions, escrow and dispute resolution mechanisms, tokenized role-based access controls and permissions, inventory tokenization, automated or streaming payments, payment splits, and triple entry accounting. The emphasis is on understanding where these primitives could meaningfully reshape operational workflows in practice, how they would interact with existing legal and financial systems, and which combinations offer the highest leverage for the chosen vertical. Projects should deliver deployable primitives, standards, and/or scoped pilots that enable cities to coordinate shared multi-actor processes while preserving institutional and citizen privacy., These deliverables could include the use of stablecoins, smart contract automation, zero-knowledge credentials, and other forms of lower-level cryptographic verifiability, such as merkle proofs, to real urban workflows (e.g. permitting, mobility networks, reporting, public finance, elections, etc). The focus is on pragmatic, incremental implementations that run alongside current tools and institutional processes rather than replace them.