Quinn DuPont, PhD

Biography

Quinn DuPont is an information scientist, public speaker, and author, with subject matter expertise in AI/ML/NLP, security, cryptocurrencies, and social and human behaviour. He has a PhD in Information Science from the University of Toronto and has worked in risk management, fintech, and information security.

He is the author of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity 2019) and Defining Web3 (Springer, 2024), Associate Editor, Frontiers in Blockchains; Research Fellow at University College London, Center for Blockchain Technologies; and Affiliate at The Future of Money Research Collaborative.

He has held research and teaching positions at York University (Schulich School of Business), University of British Columbia (Information Science), University College Dublin (School of Business), University of Washington (Information Science) Rutgers University (Digital Media), Leuphana University (Digital Cultures Research Lab), University of Victoria (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab), and Dalhousie University (Faculty of Management). His multidisciplinary writing has been published in journals such as First Monday, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Global Policy, Metaphilosophy, amodern, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice, and other venues.


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Books

Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies In progress
I carefully deflate the tarball tar zxvf bitcoin-0.1.0.tgz and Satoshi Nakamoto's bits spill across my terminal. BitCoin v0.01 ALPHA... Bitcoin is an electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority. Decades later the relic is reborn and I can feel the faintest trace of Nakamoto's Windows XP compiler. I look closer and see a half-built market.cpp filled with long forgotten products, users and adverts. I cat irc.cpp and Nakamoto's primitive system beacons me Send(hSocket, "JOIN #bitcoin\r"). It takes wild ambition to make new money. But more importantly, how did a few thousand lines of C++ code usurp such a colossal power?
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Recent Research

Github
New Online Communities: Graph Deep Learning on Anonymous Voting Networks to Identify Sybils in Polycentric Governance (preprint on ArXiv) (Github)
This research examines the polycentric governance of digital assets in blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). It offers a theoretical framework and addresses a critical challenge facing decentralized governance by developing a method to identify Sybils, or spurious identities. Sybils pose significant organizational sustainability threats to DAOs and other, commons-based online communities, and threat models are identified. The experimental method uses an autoencoder architecture and graph deep learning techniques to identify Sybil activity in a DAO governance dataset (snapshot.org). Specifically, a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) learned voting behaviours and a fast vector clustering algorithm used high-dimensional embeddings to identify similar nodes in a graph. The results reveal that deep learning can effectively identify Sybils, reducing the voting graph by 2-5%. This research underscores the importance of Sybil resistance in DAOs, identifies challenges and opportunities for forensics and analysis of anonymous networks, and offers a novel perspective on decentralized governance, informing future policy, regulation, and governance practices.
Navigating the Research Landscape of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: A Research Note and Agenda (preprint on ArXiv)(with Christian Ziegler)
This note and agenda serve as a cause for thought for scholars interested in researching Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), addressing both the opportunities and challenges posed by this phenomenon. It covers key aspects of data retrieval, data selection criteria, issues in data reliability and validity such as governance token pricing complexities, discrepancy in treasuries, Mainnet and Testnet data, understanding the variety of DAO types and proposal categories, airdrops affecting governance, and the Sybil problem. The agenda aims to equip scholars with the essential knowledge required to conduct nuanced and rigorous academic studies on DAOs by illuminating these various aspects and proposing directions for future research.
"WLFI" in Shitcoins (MIT Press, 2026) (in progress)
"No Speaker Required" (in progress)
"Writing Without a Speaker: Notation, Practice, and the Autonomy of Artificial Intelligence" (under review)
"A Progressive Web3: From Social Coproduction to Digital Polycentric Governance" in Defining Web3 (Research on the Sociology of Organizations)
"On the Limits of the Imaginary: A Reply to Jacobetty and Orton-Johnson's "Blockchain Imaginaries and Their Metaphors"," Social Epistemology Review and Reply (2023)
"Shaping Ethical Computing Cultures," (64)11, Communications of the ACM (with Katie Shilton and Megan Finn) (2021)
"Prolegomenon to contemporary ethics of Machine Translation." In H. Moniz and C. Escartin. (Eds.), Towards Responsible Machine Translation. New York: Springer Nature, Machine Translation: Technologies and Applications Series (2021) (with Wessel Reijers).
"Cryptographic Media." In J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, & Matthew M. (Eds.), Second International Handbook of Internet Research. New York: Springer (2020).
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (Polity Press, 2019)
"Experiments in Algorithmic Governance: An ethnography of "The DAO," a failed Decentralized Autonomous Organization" in M. Campbell-Verduyn (Ed.), Bitcoin and Beyond: The Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchains for Global Governance (pp. 157–177). New York: Routledge (2017).
More...

Humanistic AI

Good Poetry Models (GPMs): teaching language models to revise through synthetic education (GitHub)
Good Poetry Models (GPMs) implements synthetic education: training models not on poems alone, but on poetry instruction, critique, revision dialogue, and craft lessons generated in a consistent pedagogical persona. The system fine-tunes separate Educator (mentor/critic) and Poet (generator) models that work in a multi-agent revision loop, and evaluates process with RevFlux, a benchmark focused on revision dynamics rather than only final output quality. Current development includes QLoRA-based training, optional SRPO self-refinement, and local GGUF inference workflows; these models power Bad Metaphor, including Volta visualizations of poem structure and revision trajectories.

Art, Culture, & Digital Media

My Poetry

Speaking & Teaching

Please contact me (quinn AT iqdupont.com) to discuss: AI/NLP, algorithmic trading, financial modeling, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), social and human vulnerabilities, cryptoeconomics, digital polycentric governance, and digital political economy.

Contact me

I maintain a virtual open door policy. I am always interested in speaking with students, researchers, innovators, and technologists with similar interests. If you would like to speak with me please email me at quinn AT iqdupont.com. Please note: I only perform journal and book reviews for pay.

Recruiters: If you'd like to speak with me about a role, please start on the recruiter intake page rather than cold-emailing. I receive a lot of fraudulent and low-quality recruiting outreach; that short step helps serious inquiries stand out and protects my time so I can respond to real opportunities. Legitimate recruiters are welcome—it usually takes only a few minutes.

© 2026 Quinn DuPont