Blockchain Development Company
Decentralized science infrastructure for the open-research era
Blockchain Quest is an Amsterdam-based blockchain development company that designs and ships on-chain funding mechanisms, IP-NFT platforms and reproducibility infrastructure for universities, research institutes and science DAOs. Our smart contract engineering practice covers the full cycle from architecture and secure development through third-party audit to production deployment and sustain.
At a glance
How it works
Three on-chain phases replace nine months of grant paperwork with programmable, transparent capital flows that pay researchers for impact already delivered.
01 / PROPOSE
Researchers submit proposals with on-chain identity verification. Prior publications and datasets are anchored as reproducibility records on Filecoin, establishing a verifiable research provenance before any capital moves.
02 / FUND
Quadratic or conviction voting determines capital allocation from the community funding pool. Approved grants are locked in escrow smart contracts with milestone-gated release logic, removing the need for slow institutional wire-transfer cycles.
03 / REPRODUCE
Milestone oracle or community attestation triggers automatic fund release when reproducible results are on-chain. Retroactive grants pay for impact already delivered. Researcher IP is minted as an IP-NFT with royalty-split logic encoded at mint time.
What we build
Every engagement is built on production-ready smart contracts covering the full scope of on-chain development: from Ethereum and EVM architecture through Layer 2 deployment to multi-chain integration and on-chain monitoring.
Retroactive and quadratic funding pools, conviction voting, milestone escrows and automated fund-release contracts for research DAOs and open-science foundations. Every funding contract is audit-ready before it touches mainnet.
ERC-721 and ERC-1155 IP-NFT contracts with on-chain licensing terms, automated royalty splits and contributor-registry modules that give researchers full ownership of their discoveries. This is domain-specific tokenization platform development built for research IP rather than generic digital collectibles.
Content-addressed anchoring of datasets and methodology snapshots to Filecoin, with on-chain verification proofs enabling independent replication and dispute resolution without legal intervention.
Full governance infrastructure for science DAOs: membership registries, proposal submission flows, on-chain peer-review modules, treasury management and multi-sig coordination contracts. Includes role-based smart contracts and permission design so DAO members hold only the access they need.
Cross-chain bridges, oracle integrations (Chainlink, UMA, API3) and off-chain API connectors that pipe institutional identity systems, ORCID, DOI registries and data repositories into on-chain contracts. Our oracle risk management practices ensure off-chain data feeds cannot corrupt on-chain fund flows.
Pre-audit code hardening, formal third-party audit management, remediation and post-audit monitoring. We apply smart contract threat modeling and upgradeability planning to every system before a single line of production Solidity is written. Zero critical findings to date.
Why research teams choose us
Domain expertise that no general blockchain studio can offer, paired with a security track record that institutional research partners require.
01
Blockchain Quest was founded to serve research communities, not pivoted from FinTech or DeFi consulting. Our blockchain engineering team comes from research-software and open-science backgrounds. We understand grant cycles, GDPR research data rules and the difference between a funder and an investor.
02
Across 44 production contracts shipped and EUR 86 million in research capital flowing through our code, no critical vulnerability has ever been exploited. We maintain blockchain security engineering standards throughout every engagement: threat modeling, formal audit and continuous post-launch anomaly monitoring.
03
We deploy on eight chains including Filecoin for data storage, Gnosis Chain for community DAOs and Ethereum for high-value IP custody. Our cross-chain development practice spans both EVM and non-EVM environments so you are never locked into a single network as your research community grows.
04
ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, SOC 2 Type II report, completed GDPR DPIA and 140 university and lab onboardings give procurement officers and ethics committees the documentation they need. For organisations requiring enterprise blockchain development with institutional-grade compliance, we handle the paperwork that blocks DeSci projects from adoption.
Impact
Blockchain Quest is a blockchain development company based in Amsterdam, Netherlands that builds decentralized science infrastructure: on-chain research funding, researcher-owned IP-NFTs and reproducible research records for universities, research institutes and funders. Founded in 2023, it has funded 1,240 research projects and deployed EUR 86 million in research funding as a dedicated blockchain technology partner to the global open-science community.
Industry context: the Science and Technology Studies community has documented a growing reproducibility gap in funded research. The Nature editorial series on the reproducibility crisis and the Center for Open Science report that fewer than 40% of published results in key disciplines successfully replicate under independent conditions. The funding and provenance infrastructure Blockchain Quest builds addresses this gap at the protocol layer.
Fields of science
Our DeSci infrastructure is field-agnostic at the protocol layer, but our engineers understand the regulatory, data-sharing and IP-licensing norms that vary by discipline.
Drug-discovery IP-NFTs, biobank data-sharing agreements, clinical-trial milestone escrows and genomics dataset reproducibility anchoring. Coordinated with EU clinical-trial regulation requirements.
Model-weight and training-data provenance anchoring, benchmark reproducibility records and compute-credit allocation via quadratic funding for open-source AI research collectives.
Climate-dataset integrity verification, retroactive funding for open measurement networks and on-chain carbon-credit provenance trails that link funding to verifiable emission reductions.
Survey-data provenance, pre-registration anchoring to prevent p-hacking and quadratic funding mechanisms for policy-research institutes seeking diversified small-donor support.
Preprint IP-NFTs for priority-establishment, retroactive funding for open computation libraries and on-chain citation attribution registries that ensure maintainers are credited and compensated.
GDPR-compliant patient-data provenance, IRB-approval anchoring, phase-milestone escrows for clinical trial funding and IP-NFT licensing structures for investigator-initiated studies.
Engineering tools
The full tool set our engineers deploy on every DeSci engagement, from protocol layer to indexing and monitoring.
Engagement models
Three ways to work with Blockchain Quest, each structured around the realities of research timelines and grant cycles. All prices in EUR.
Fixed scope
from EUR 42,000
A defined deliverable with a fixed price: a funding mechanism, an IP-NFT contract suite or a reproducibility-anchoring module. Ideal for institutions with a specific gap to fill and a grant that covers it.
Dedicated team
EUR 1,420 per engineer day
A dedicated smart contract development team of two to five engineers embedded in your research group. Best for science DAOs and university labs building novel infrastructure where scope evolves as research findings change.
Sustain
from EUR 11,000 / month
Ongoing protocol maintenance, dependency upgrades, security monitoring, incident response SLAs and on-chain anomaly alerts for production systems that cannot afford downtime.
All engagements include a free 60-minute Discovery call and a written Architecture Brief at no charge. IP-NFT and licensing platform: EUR 80,000 to EUR 220,000. Full Science-DAO and funding infrastructure: from EUR 240,000.
What drives your price
Six factors account for more than 90% of the variance in project budgets. Understanding them before a Discovery call lets you arrive with a realistic range.
01
A single funding-mechanism contract differs from a full Science-DAO with governance, treasury, IP-NFT minting and reproducibility anchoring. Each additional module adds design, development and audit surface area.
02
Deploying to one EVM chain is straightforward. Multi-chain deployments with cross-chain bridges, shared state and consistent oracle feeds across Ethereum, Arbitrum and Polygon multiply integration testing effort significantly.
03
All contracts receive a formal third-party security audit. Larger or more novel contract surfaces require longer audit engagements. IP-NFT licensing contracts with complex royalty-split logic typically require a deeper audit than simple escrow contracts.
04
Connecting on-chain contracts to ORCID, DOI registries, institutional identity systems or existing grant-management platforms via verifiable credentials development adds a distinct integration layer with its own specification and testing cycle.
05
Projects processing personal data require GDPR DPIA coordination. Medical research involving patient data adds IRB-compliance documentation. MiCA-regulated token structures require legal analysis that runs alongside technical development.
06
Aligning with a grant cycle or a conference deadline is common in DeSci. A compressed timeline requires a larger dedicated team and reduces the iteration budget available for design changes mid-build. Standard timelines for fixed-scope builds range from 6 to 16 weeks.
Comparison
A direct comparison across the eight dimensions that determine whether research capital reaches scientists efficiently.
| Dimension | On-chain funding (Blockchain Quest) | Traditional grants |
|---|---|---|
| Funding cycle | 3 to 6 weeks from proposal to first disbursement | 6 to 18 months including review panels and admin approvals |
| Transparency | Full on-chain auditability of votes, fund flows and milestone releases | Committee decisions are largely opaque to applicants |
| Researcher IP control | Researcher-owned IP-NFT with encoded licensing at mint time | IP typically assigned to institution or funder by default |
| Retroactive eligibility | Yes - retroactive funding pays for impact already delivered | No - prospective grants only, future impact must be predicted |
| Geographic reach | Borderless - any wallet address can receive funding regardless of country | Jurisdiction-constrained - eligibility tied to nationality or institutional affiliation |
| Overhead | 2 to 5% gas and protocol fees | 20 to 50% institutional overhead deducted before researcher receives funds |
| Audit trail | Immutable on-chain record of every transaction and vote | Paper and email trails that are fragmented and deletable |
| Fund release | Automatic on milestone verification via oracle or attestation | Manual approval by programme officer, often delayed weeks or months |
Chain selection
Chain selection for research infrastructure is driven by cost, finality, data-persistence requirements and the regulatory posture of your institution. This table maps the eight chains Blockchain Quest deploys to common DeSci use cases.
| Chain | Primary DeSci use case | Finality | Tx cost | Compliance fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | High-value IP-NFT custody, governance votes that control large treasuries | ~12 min (finalized) | High (USD 5-50 per tx) | Strong · Maximum auditor familiarity · MiCA-compatible |
| Base / Arbitrum One | Frequent low-cost funding disbursements, milestone releases, quadratic funding rounds | ~2 s (soft) / 7 days challenge | Very low (USD 0.01-0.10) | Good · Ethereum security guarantees · EVM-identical |
| Optimism | Public goods retroactive funding pools, OP-native governance integrations | ~2 s (soft) / 7 days challenge | Very low | Good · Active public goods ecosystem |
| Polygon PoS | University onboarding with near-zero friction, ORCID credential anchoring at scale | ~2 s (probabilistic) | Minimal (USD 0.001-0.01) | Good · Widely accepted by institutional procurement |
| Gnosis Chain | Science DAO governance, community funding pools for smaller research collectives | ~5 s (finalized) | Minimal | Good · DAI-native stablecoin avoids volatility risk |
| Filecoin | Permanent dataset and methodology snapshot storage, reproducibility records | Content-addressed (permanent) | Storage-model (not per-tx) | Strong · GDPR-compatible off-chain storage patterns |
| Solana | High-throughput citation and attribution registries, real-time research activity feeds | ~400 ms | Minimal (USD 0.00025) | Moderate · Less auditor familiarity; strong for speed |
Most DeSci projects deploy to two or three chains. A typical configuration is Ethereum for IP-NFT custody plus one Layer 2 for frequent transactions plus Filecoin for data storage. Chain selection is confirmed at the Architecture phase, not during Discovery.
Security and compliance
Every Blockchain Quest engagement is engineered for zero critical findings. Institutional research partners require the full compliance surface below before procurement approval.
Buyer guide
Six criteria that separate a capable DeSci engineering partner from a generic smart contract studio. Use these as your evaluation checklist.
IP-NFT licensing logic, quadratic funding math and reproducibility anchoring are domain-specific problems that require prior experience. Ask for a list of mainnet contracts in your use case, not a portfolio of generic ERC-20 tokens or NFT marketplaces. Blockchain Quest has 44 production contracts exclusively in DeSci infrastructure.
Request the security audit reports for the contracts listed in their portfolio. Look at the critical and high-severity finding counts, not just the final report. Blockchain Quest has zero critical findings across all 44 production contracts. Ask if the firm does pre-audit hardening or just ships code to an auditor and hopes.
Universities processing personal data need GDPR DPIA coordination. Biotech firms may need MiCA token classification review. Medical research requires IRB-alignment in the contract design. A firm without compliance experience will discover these requirements mid-build, adding cost and delay. Ask specifically about GDPR DPIA and MiCA posture before signing.
A professional blockchain development company delivers a written Architecture Brief before coding starts, maintains above 90% contract test coverage throughout the build and hands over a deployment runbook at launch. If a firm cannot show you a sample Architecture Brief or a recent test-coverage report, their process is informal. Blockchain Quest delivers all three as standard deliverables on every engagement.
Research protocols that go live need dependency upgrades, security monitoring and an incident response path. A firm that has no post-launch offering will leave you managing production contracts without support. Ask specifically: what is the SLA for a critical incident, and what does the sustain retainer include? Blockchain Quest offers a 4-hour incident response SLA on its sustain retainer.
Your institution should own all source code, deployment keys and documentation from day one. Confirm the engagement contract specifies IP assignment, not a license. Blockchain Quest assigns all IP and source code to the client at contract execution. There is no vendor lock-in, no proprietary runtime and no dependency on Blockchain Quest infrastructure to keep your contracts running.
Emerging capabilities
The intersection of AI and on-chain research infrastructure is producing a new class of capabilities that Blockchain Quest actively builds for forward-looking science DAOs and research institutes.
AI agents with on-chain signing authority that evaluate incoming reproducibility records, score projects against funding criteria and trigger milestone releases without a human reviewer in the loop. The smart contract layer enforces the governance rules the DAO set; the AI layer handles the evaluation throughput no human committee can match. Blockchain Quest is building the first production deployments of this pattern for science DAO clients in 2026.
ML models trained on methodology metadata can flag reproducibility anchors that are statistically inconsistent with claimed results before an independent researcher wastes effort on a full replication attempt. The AI signal becomes an input to the on-chain attestation layer, weighted by the oracle's reputation score. This hybrid human-AI verification path is the direction the OpenRepro Collective infrastructure is moving toward in 2026.
As AI training datasets become research outputs in their own right, the same IP-NFT and reproducibility infrastructure we build for traditional research applies directly to model weights, training data lineage and benchmark results. Computer science and AI research groups can register training checkpoints as reproducibility records, giving the broader community an immutable audit trail for how a model reached its capabilities.
Science DAOs managing multi-million-euro research treasuries on-chain benefit from AI-driven analytics that surface concentration risk, track milestone-release velocity and flag abnormal outflow patterns before a governance vote is needed. Blockchain Quest integrates on-chain analytics layers built on blockchain data indexing into every sustain retainer, giving DAO token holders a real-time view of treasury health without manual reporting overhead.
Ecosystem
Named protocols and services Blockchain Quest integrates on production DeSci engagements. Every link points to the provider's public homepage.
Who builds your project
Blockchain Quest has 26 engineers. Every engagement draws from the same pool, assembled to the right size for your scope.
Designs the overall contract architecture, token economics, oracle patterns and data model. Owns the Architecture Brief and reviews each milestone before testnet promotion.
Writes production Solidity for funding mechanisms, IP-NFT logic, royalty splits and governance modules. Maintains 90%+ test coverage using Foundry and Hardhat throughout the build cycle.
Runs pre-audit code hardening, coordinates third-party security audit engagement and owns all remediation work. Zero critical findings to date are a direct result of this role's involvement from sprint one.
Coordinates GDPR DPIA documentation, MiCA token classification review and IRB-alignment for medical research contracts. Interfaces with institutional procurement and legal teams directly.
Builds the off-chain connectors: ORCID and DOI registry bridges, oracle integrations via Chainlink and UMA, The Graph subgraphs for on-chain analytics and the TypeScript SDK consumed by your front-end.
Maintains the Foundry fuzz test suite, runs static analysis with Slither and Mythril, reviews edge-case scenarios for funding math and produces the test-coverage report that accompanies every audit package.
Runs weekly architecture reviews, daily standups and async updates, coordinates milestone sign-offs with your team and manages the audit engagement timeline to avoid grant-cycle clashes.
What you receive
Every Blockchain Quest engagement produces the same documented, transferable artifact set. Nothing stays on our servers. You own and operate everything from day one.
Contract diagram, data model, oracle design, risk flags and milestone map delivered before a single line of production code is written. Signed off by your team before build begins.
Production-ready Solidity with 90%+ line coverage, Foundry fuzz tests and a formal third-party security audit report. All critical and high findings remediated before mainnet deployment.
Step-by-step deployment guide, constructor parameter documentation, multisig setup instructions and upgrade path definition. Any engineer can redeploy or upgrade the contracts from the runbook without relying on Blockchain Quest.
The formal threat model produced during pre-audit hardening plus the complete third-party audit report with all findings, severity ratings, remediation evidence and final confirmation of closure.
Typed SDK covering all contract entry points, event subscriptions and query methods. Hosted documentation generated from the ABI with annotated examples for every function your front-end or integration layer will call.
A recorded onboarding session for your engineering team covering the architecture decisions, known edge cases, monitoring setup and upgrade process. Designed so your team can maintain the system independently from launch day.
Risk reversal
Starting a blockchain infrastructure project carries real financial and operational risk. These commitments reduce yours from the first contact to the final handover.
No charge for the 60-minute Discovery call or the written Architecture Brief delivered after it. You receive a technical approach, risk flags, chain recommendations and a budget range before committing anything.
Fixed-scope engagements begin with a two-week discovery and specification sprint at a fixed price of EUR 6,000. If you decide not to proceed after the sprint, you keep all specification documents and owe nothing further.
All intellectual property, source code, deployment keys and documentation are assigned to you at contract execution. There is no licensing fee, no proprietary runtime and no dependency on Blockchain Quest continuing to operate for your contracts to function.
All production contracts receive a formal third-party security audit before mainnet deployment. We commit to full remediation of all critical and high findings before the audit is closed. No Blockchain Quest contract has ever gone to mainnet with an open critical finding.
Your contracts are deployed to public blockchains. You are not dependent on Blockchain Quest infrastructure, proprietary nodes or managed services to keep them running. The deployment runbook we hand over lets any competent engineer operate the system independently.
Every engagement concludes with a formal handover: recorded knowledge-transfer session, complete documentation, ownership of all repositories and a 30-day free support window for questions from your engineering team after go-live. The exit process is defined in the Master Services Agreement, not left to goodwill.
Case studies
Production deployments across biotech, academic consortia and reproducibility nonprofits, with metrics from each engagement.
EU biotech · Life sciences
Blockchain Quest designed and deployed a retroactive funding mechanism for Helmont BioLabs, replacing a nine-month committee-driven grant cycle with a three-week on-chain proposal-to-disbursement flow. The custom smart contracts allocate capital from a curated funding pool to pre-registered projects based on community attestation of reproducible results, with DeFi risk controls governing the escrow layer.
Spanish university consortium · Academic publishing
For this Catalan university consortium, Blockchain Quest built an IP-NFT minting and licensing platform that registers academic papers as researcher-owned tokens on Polygon PoS and Ethereum. The Web3 integration with the consortium's existing institutional identity system uses verifiable credentials development so each co-author is linked to a verified ORCID. Licensing agreements with open-access publishers trigger automatic royalty splits to all registered co-authors without any manual intervention.
EU reproducibility nonprofit · Cross-discipline
OpenRepro Collective commissioned Blockchain Quest to build a reproducibility-anchoring system using Filecoin for permanent dataset storage and Ethereum for on-chain verification proofs. The scalable blockchain infrastructure handles ingestion from dozens of contributing institutions simultaneously. Independent researchers can submit replication attempts which are anchored and compared against the original methodology record, with disputes resolved by on-chain attestation rather than legal proceedings.
Methodology
A full-cycle blockchain development process refined across 44 production contracts, designed to move from research-domain understanding to audited production deployment without losing scientific context at the handoff points.
01
60-minute call. Domain understanding, funding model, regulatory constraints, chain selection and budget range.
02
Written Architecture Brief with contract diagram, data model, oracle design, risk flags and milestone map.
03
Iterative development with weekly releases to testnet, 90%+ contract test coverage and smart contract CI/CD pipelines. Domain expert reviews each milestone before promotion to the next phase.
04
Pre-audit code hardening using Foundry testing and static analysis. Coordinated third-party security audit. Full remediation before any mainnet deployment.
05
Staged mainnet deployment, on-chain monitoring setup, documentation handover and team onboarding session.
06
Ongoing monitoring with blockchain data indexing for anomaly detection, dependency upgrades, quarterly architecture reviews and on-call incident response via retainer.
Founder
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Sergio Vidal founded Blockchain Quest in 2023 after spending a decade inside research institutions watching capable science fail to get funded because of slow grant cycles, opaque committee decisions and institutional IP lock-in. His career began with a research-software lead role at a European research institute, where he built and maintained the computational infrastructure that hundreds of researchers depended on daily.
He then joined an open-science nonprofit as a funding-platform engineer, designing the grant-management systems that he later recognised were fundamentally limited by their centralised architecture. That experience gave him a precise understanding of where the bottlenecks lived and what a blockchain-native alternative would need to do differently.
Sergio specialises in retroactive and quadratic funding mechanism design, IP-NFT architecture and reproducibility infrastructure. He contributes to the DeSci Foundation working group on funding standards and speaks regularly at European Open Science conferences.
In 2021, a widely-used open-source research tool Sergio relied on for his own analysis was abandoned. The maintainer had spent three years building something thousands of researchers depended on, but no grant would fund maintenance because it was not "new research." Sergio built a retroactive-funding pilot that paid maintainers for impact already delivered. Within six months, four abandoned tools were actively maintained again. That pilot became the blueprint for Blockchain Quest's funding-mechanism practice.
Research
Research Note BQST-2026-03 · January 2026
This research note examines how retroactive and quadratic funding mechanisms can allocate capital more equitably than traditional grant panels, drawing on deployment data from 1,240 on-chain funded research projects and EUR 86 million in distributed research capital. We present a formal model of quadratic matching efficiency in science funding, compare retroactive and prospective allocation outcomes across six scientific disciplines and propose a reproducibility-weighted scoring mechanism that adjusts funding levels based on verified replication rates. The underlying Web3 infrastructure for each deployment is analysed for scalability and security properties. Key findings: retroactive allocation reduces funded-but-unreproducible research by 47% compared to panel-reviewed grants; quadratic mechanisms double the number of unique research teams receiving any funding from the same capital pool; and milestone-gated escrow reduces funding cycle duration by 83% versus standard institutional grant timelines.
Reviews
41 verified reviews across Clutch and G2. Five representative voices from production engagements.
The funding cycle reduction was the result that convinced our board. We went from nine months of committee review to a three-week on-chain proposal-to-disbursement process. The Blockchain Quest team understood our regulatory constraints from day one and never asked us to compromise on compliance to hit a technical milestone.
We now have 1,100 papers with on-chain IP ownership and automated royalty splits to every co-author. The platform has removed what used to be a months-long contract process every time a publisher wanted a license. Researchers across our consortium get paid automatically the moment a license is signed on-chain.
Our 180,000 reproducibility records are now anchored on Filecoin with on-chain verification proofs. Replication disputes across our network dropped by 64% in the first year because independent researchers can verify methodology against the immutable anchor, not against a PDF that might have been revised.
On-chain funding transparency changed how our grantees interact with us. Every allocation decision is visible on-chain and every disbursement is traceable. We have had zero internal disputes about fund flows since going live with Blockchain Quest's infrastructure, which alone justified the entire engagement cost.
The smart contract quality is exceptional. We put every contract through a second independent audit of our own before going live and found nothing that Blockchain Quest had not already flagged, remediated and documented. Zero critical findings in production is not luck. Their pre-audit hardening process is genuinely rigorous.
Trust and compliance
Independent verification of our security practices, quality systems and client satisfaction, required by institutional procurement teams.
Certificate BQST-IS-2026-0327
Issued by Kiwa
Valid through 2029-06-15
Report BQST-SOC-2026-H1
By Johanson Group
Annual reporting cycle
Data Protection Impact Assessment completed for all data-processing systems
Legal basis documented
4.9/5 from 23 verified reviews
Top Global Firm category
4.8/5 from 18 verified reviews
Blockchain Development category
Outstanding contribution to decentralized science infrastructure in the Amsterdam tech ecosystem
Finalist recognition for reproducibility infrastructure deployment in European Open Science Cloud context
Zero critical security findings across all 44 production contracts shipped. EUR 0 user funds lost.
Press and publications
Blockchain Quest engineers contribute to the DeSci research conversation through peer publications, conference presentations and editorial contributions to sector publications.
FAQ
Common questions from research teams, science DAOs and institutional funders evaluating on-chain infrastructure.
A blockchain development company designs, builds and audits distributed systems that run on one or more public or private blockchains. Core deliverables span blockchain application development, smart contract engineering, token standards, decentralized protocols, on-chain governance modules and Web3 integration layers that connect on-chain logic to existing databases and front-ends.
Specialist firms like Blockchain Quest extend this to domain-specific infrastructure such as decentralized science funding mechanisms, IP-NFT platforms and reproducibility record systems tailored to the needs of research institutions.
Costs vary by scope and engagement model. At Blockchain Quest, a focused funding-mechanism build starts from EUR 42,000. An IP-NFT and licensing platform ranges from EUR 80,000 to EUR 220,000. A full Science-DAO and funding infrastructure starts from EUR 240,000.
Time-and-materials work is billed at EUR 1,420 per engineer day, and ongoing sustain and on-call retainers start from EUR 11,000 per month. Pricing reflects the security-critical nature of the work and includes formal third-party audit coordination.
Evaluate a firm on five dimensions: (1) domain fit - do they have production experience in your specific use case, not just generic smart contract work; (2) audit track record - how many critical findings did their contracts accumulate post-deployment; (3) chain coverage - do they work natively on the chains your users are on; (4) process transparency - will you receive architecture review documents, test-coverage reports and audit-ready smart contracts; (5) post-launch support - is there a sustain and on-call offering.
Request a list of mainnet contracts they shipped, the security audit reports for those contracts and evidence of smart contract security expertise beyond simple unit tests.
Decentralized science (DeSci) is a movement that uses blockchain and cryptographic infrastructure to remove intermediaries from scientific funding, publishing, peer review and intellectual-property ownership. Instead of grant committees deciding who gets funded, retroactive and quadratic funding mechanisms distribute capital based on demonstrated impact and community support.
Instead of publishers holding copyright, researchers own their IP as on-chain IP-NFTs with programmable licensing and royalty splits. DeSci enables global, borderless participation in science regardless of institutional affiliation or geography.
On-chain research funding works in three phases. First, researchers submit proposals to a smart-contract funding pool with on-chain identity verification. Second, a community or DAO votes to fund projects using quadratic or conviction voting, and capital is locked in escrow smart contracts with milestone-gated release logic.
Third, milestones trigger automatic fund release when reproducible results are anchored on-chain or verified by oracles. The entire cycle from proposal through vote, escrow, milestone and release is transparent and auditable on the blockchain, reducing the funding cycle from months to weeks. Transaction safety at every step is enforced by the smart contract logic itself, not by manual process controls.
An IP-NFT (intellectual property non-fungible token) encodes the ownership rights, licensing terms and royalty-split logic for a research output directly on-chain. When a university or research team mints an IP-NFT for their discovery, all contributors are registered as co-owners in the token metadata.
Any commercial license granted to a DAO, biotech company or open-access publisher triggers an automatic on-chain royalty payment distributed to all contributors in predefined proportions. The token is also transferable and can serve as collateral for research financing.
Blockchain Quest deploys production contracts and integrations on eight chains: Ethereum mainnet for high-value IP-NFT custody and governance; Base and Arbitrum One as Layer 2 development environments for low-cost funding mechanisms and frequent transactions; Optimism for public goods funding protocols; Polygon PoS for university onboarding at near-zero transaction cost; Gnosis Chain for research community DAOs; Filecoin for reproducibility record and dataset storage; and Solana for high-throughput citation and attribution registries.
Chain selection is driven by your users, your budget and your data-persistence requirements. Our Ethereum development expertise covers both mainnet and the full EVM-compatible Layer 2 ecosystem.
We protect researcher IP through a layered approach. First, IP-NFT contracts encode ownership at the token level so no third party can modify or revoke rights without the researcher's private key. Key management guidance and wallet security implementation are part of every onboarding. Second, licensing terms are embedded in on-chain metadata and enforced automatically by royalty-split contracts, removing reliance on legal jurisdiction.
Third, all code undergoes a formal third-party security audit before mainnet deployment, and we coordinate GDPR Data Protection Impact Assessments for systems processing personal data. Our track record is zero critical findings and zero funds lost across all production deployments.
Across 44 production contracts and integrations shipped since founding, Blockchain Quest has received zero critical security findings and lost zero user funds. All production contracts undergo a formal third-party security audit before deployment and are monitored for on-chain anomalies post-launch.
We hold ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification (Certificate BQST-IS-2026-0327, issued by Kiwa) and a SOC 2 Type II report (BQST-SOC-2026-H1, by Johanson Group). We have completed GDPR DPIA documentation for all data-processing systems. Security documentation is available under NDA for institutional procurement processes.
Six questions to ask any blockchain development company before signing: (1) Can you show me the security audit reports for your last three production contracts, including the finding counts by severity? (2) What is your pre-audit hardening process and what tools do you use? (3) Do you have production experience in my specific use case, not just generic smart contract work? (4) Who owns the IP and source code, and is that assignment in the MSA from day one? (5) What does the post-launch sustain offering cover, and what is the SLA for a critical incident? (6) Have you worked with institutions in my regulatory environment, specifically GDPR and MiCA?
At Blockchain Quest, all six answers are documented in our engagement materials before a project scope is agreed.
Yes. Decentralized science infrastructure is domain-specific in ways that affect contract design, not just product requirements. The difference between retroactive and prospective funding is not just a feature preference; it changes the escrow logic, the milestone oracle design and the capital-flow sequence entirely. IP-NFT licensing contracts require an understanding of how academic IP assignment actually works before the on-chain representation can be correct.
Blockchain Quest was founded specifically to serve research communities. Our engineers come from research-software and open-science backgrounds, not from FinTech or gaming NFT studios. That domain depth is why the Architecture Briefs we produce reflect how researchers actually work, not how a generic blockchain development company imagines they do.
A fixed-scope build is appropriate when you know exactly what you need: a specific funding mechanism, an IP-NFT contract suite or a reproducibility-anchoring module with a defined feature set. Blockchain Quest delivers a fixed price for a fixed deliverable. Budget certainty is the primary advantage; flexibility during the build is limited by scope control.
A dedicated research-engineering team is appropriate when scope evolves alongside your research findings, or when you are building novel infrastructure where the correct design cannot be fully specified before development begins. A team of two to five engineers works embedded in your project, with weekly architecture reviews allowing the design to adapt as you learn. This model is billed at EUR 1,420 per engineer day with a minimum three-month commitment. Most full Science-DAO builds and novel funding mechanism designs use the dedicated team model.
Send an outline of your project to hello@blockchain-development-company.quest. We schedule a 60-minute Discovery call within three business days (Mon-Fri 09:00-17:30 CET) to understand your scientific domain, funding model, chain preferences and timeline.
After the call we deliver a written Architecture Brief covering technical approach, risk flags, recommended chain set and a budget range. There is no charge for the Discovery call or the Architecture Brief.
Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the core concepts in decentralized science and on-chain research funding.
Contact
Start with a Discovery call. No charge, no commitment. We respond to project enquiries within one business day.
Blockchain Quest B.V.
Keizersgracht 241
1016 EA Amsterdam
Netherlands
+31 20 261 7400
Mon-Fri 09:00-17:30 CET
KvK: 89412677
VAT: NL863920471B01
Satellite office
Vienna, Austria
Research partnerships and
European Open Science collaborations
Blockchain Quest B.V. processes personal data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation (EU) 2016/679. We collect contact information solely to respond to project enquiries and do not sell or share personal data with third parties for marketing purposes.
Data subjects based in the EEA have the right to access, rectify, erase and port their personal data. To exercise these rights, contact privacy@blockchain-development-company.quest. Data Protection Impact Assessments are completed for all data-processing systems we operate.
Research notes and technical articles published by Blockchain Quest represent the views of the named authors. Client case study data is published with the written consent of the named organisation. Metrics are drawn from production deployment records accurate as of the stated review date.
Press and media enquiries: editorial@blockchain-development-company.quest
Blockchain Quest operates a responsible disclosure policy for vulnerability reports affecting our production infrastructure or client contracts. Please report vulnerabilities to security@blockchain-development-company.quest with full technical details. We acknowledge reports within 24 hours and aim to remediate critical issues within 72 hours.
A security.txt file is available at /.well-known/security.txt
All client engagements are governed by a Master Services Agreement (MSA) under Dutch law (Burgerlijk Wetboek). Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the District Court of Amsterdam (Rechtbank Amsterdam). Time-and-materials and sustain engagements are governed by separate Statements of Work referencing the MSA.
Blockchain Quest B.V. is registered with the Kamer van Koophandel (KvK) under number 89412677 and with the Dutch Tax Authority under VAT number NL863920471B01.