Seven for seven: officially research
We submitted the seven research projects behind YGOOW to the Bescheinigungsstelle Forschungszulage (BSFZ), the body that decides whether a project in Germany counts as research and development under the Research Allowance Act (FZulG). On 1 October 2026 it confirmed all seven.
With the decision comes the BSFZ seal. It now sits in the footer of every page on this site, and it links to the BSFZ’s own explanation of what it means.
What was checked
A company can call itself innovative for free. The BSFZ doesn’t take its word for it: it assesses each project against the EU’s legal definitions of research and development, read through the OECD’s Frascati Manual — the international yardstick for what counts as R&D. Reduced to its core, the Frascati test is five words: the work has to be novel, creative, uncertain in outcome, systematic, and reproducible.
Two of the five describe how we already work.
Uncertain means that nobody — including us — knows in advance whether an approach will hold. Wiring well-understood parts together, however well, is engineering, not research, and it wouldn’t have qualified. We know our uncertainty is real because it has bitten us: some of our predictions missed, and some claims this site used to make didn’t survive our own measurements. We published both.
Systematic means a method rather than a hunch. Ours is described in Measured, not assumed: every experiment starts as a card with the question, the adversary and the pass/fail criteria written down before the run, and ends with a ledger of which predictions held.
We’re not listing the seven projects here — their titles say more about how than we’re ready to publish. What they are for is no secret: the whitepaper says what YGOOW guarantees and how far each guarantee has been measured, and progress says what is done and what isn’t.
What the seal is not
Not funding. The seal says the work is research. It is not a grant, and it is not money.
Not a security certificate. The BSFZ checked whether our work is research — not whether our code is correct. A seal doesn’t make a cipher stronger or a relay blinder. Our security claims stand or fall on what we publish: the numbers in the whitepaper, and a changelog of what it used to say.
Not access, and not a say. The BSFZ assessed written descriptions of research projects. It has no access to the app, the relay or any message, and no say in what we build.
What changes
In the app, nothing. On this site, a seal in the footer. In the research, nothing either: “confirmed as research” means the answers aren’t all in yet. The work goes on the way it has — question first, criteria before the run, and the misses published next to the hits.
Your key, your rules — everything else is redacted.