Why We Started CiteChain
Three professors, one frustration we couldn’t ignore, and the decision to build something better
For years, the three of us lived inside the system we’re now trying to fix.
We wrote the papers, through long nights and real sacrifice. We reviewed our colleagues’ work for free, as everyone does. We watched brilliant young researchers judged by citation numbers we knew could be gamed. And we watched the value of all that work flow away from the people who created it, toward publishers and databases who simply sat in the middle.
At some point, being frustrated stopped being enough.
This is the story of why we started CiteChain, and why we believe science deserves better infrastructure than it has today.
The quiet injustice at the heart of science
If you’ve never worked in research, here’s something that might surprise you.
Academic publishing is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But the people who produce nearly all of its value , the researchers , see almost none of it.
Think about how it actually works. A scientist spends months, sometimes years, on a piece of research. They write it up and submit it to a journal. Other scientists review that work carefully , for free. If it’s accepted, the journal publishes it, and then charges libraries, institutions, and often the public a substantial fee to read it. The research was frequently funded by taxpayers. The writing was done by the researcher. The reviewing was done, unpaid, by their peers. And yet the profit flows to the publisher.
It’s one of the few industries in the world where the people who create the product, check the product, and consume the product are all the same community , and that community captures almost none of the value.
We lived this. We felt it. And the more we talked about it, the more we realized how strange it was that we’d all simply accepted it as “the way things are.”
It gets worse: the numbers can’t always be trusted
The unfairness was one thing. But there was something that troubled us even more, because it strikes at the integrity of science itself.
The metric that increasingly decides scientific careers , the citation count, can be manipulated.
Citations are supposed to be a signal of influence: this work mattered, so others built on it. But that signal can be gamed. Through self-citation loops. Through “citation cartels,” where groups agree to cite each other. Through predatory journals that will publish almost anything for a fee. The number that helps decide who gets hired, funded, and promoted is, in too many cases, simply not verified by anyone.
We had built an entire economy of scientific reputation on a metric that nobody independently checks.
And then there’s replication, the practice of repeating an experiment to confirm it’s actually true. It is, arguably, the single most important activity in science. It’s what separates real knowledge from lucky accidents and honest mistakes. And it is almost completely unrewarded. There’s no prestige in confirming someone else’s result. Journals rarely publish it. So it mostly doesn’t happen , and the result is what’s now widely called the replication crisis.
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A system that rewards novelty but not verification isn’t really built for truth. And we couldn’t stop thinking about that.
The question that wouldn’t leave us alone
Between the three of us, two computer scientists and a mathematician , we kept circling the same question:
What if science actually rewarded the people who make it?
What if a citation was something you could verify, not just count? What if reproducing a result was celebrated instead of ignored? What if a young researcher, anywhere in the world, could compete on the merit of their work alone, not the prestige of their institution, or who they happened to know?
For a long time, these were just questions we asked each other. The kind of thing academics complain about over coffee and then go back to their work.
But the pieces started to fit. A mathematician who could think rigorously about incentives, how to design a system where honesty is the rational choice. Two computer scientists who could actually build it. And between us, enough years inside academia to know exactly what was broken, and for whom.
At some point, we stopped waiting for someone else to fix it. And we started building.
What we’re building
CiteChain is a citation network designed around a single principle: science should reward the people who make it.
It’s built on three ideas.
First, verifiable citations. Using blockchain, a citation becomes a permanent, tamper-proof record , verified by real, identified researchers, not an unchecked number that can be quietly manipulated. We call this provenance: a citation record whose entire history you can trust.
Second, rewards for honest contribution. Researchers earn recognition, through a utility token called $CITE , for the work that actually holds science together: publishing, reviewing, replicating, and validating. Including the replication that today goes almost entirely uncredited.
Third, community ownership. CiteChain is designed to be owned by the researchers who use it, governed by them over time, rather than controlled by any company or, eventually, even by us. A citation network that three professors could sell isn’t infrastructure , it’s just another gatekeeper waiting to happen.
We want to be honest about where we are: we’re early. We’ve published our whitepaper, released our code openly, built a growing community, and we’ve now begun building the first version of the platform. We’re doing it in the open, deliberately, product before token, an independent audit before any launch, community before everything. We’d rather build this slowly and honestly than quickly and loudly.
Why we’re telling you this
We started CiteChain not to launch a token, and not to chase a trend. We started it because we were tired of watching researchers give everything to science and receive so little back, and because we came to believe we could actually build something better.
We’re three professors from Morocco, building infrastructure for science worldwide. Because good infrastructure has no borders. Linux came from Finland. The World Wide Web came from a lab in Switzerland. Open science shouldn’t be gatekept by geography, and neither should the people trying to improve it.
If any of this resonates with you, if you’ve felt this frustration too, or if you simply believe science deserves better , then you’re exactly who we’re building this for.
We’d love to have you with us.
— Ilias, Souhaib & Youssef, founders of CiteChain
Learn more at citechain.org, read our whitepaper, or come build with us on Discord.
