We get approached. Not constantly, not overwhelmingly, but regularly — and the volume is growing. Since securing six permanent onchain TLDs for Queensland, there’s been a steady stream of organisations, builders, brands, and enthusiasts who want to do something with us, alongside us, or adjacent to what we’re doing. That’s a genuinely good sign. It means the work is visible and the mission is resonating. But it also means we have to be deliberate about what we say yes to.

We’ve said no more than we’ve said yes. We don’t think that makes us difficult to work with. We think it makes us worth working with. And because we’ve now had enough of these conversations to see patterns — patterns in what works, patterns in what doesn’t, patterns in where deals fall apart and why — we decided to write all of this down, not just for ourselves, but for anyone who wants to understand how we think about this before they reach out.

This is our criteria for partnerships. Not a pitch deck. Not a checklist. A genuine attempt to explain how we reason through these decisions, what questions we ask ourselves, and what the difference looks like between a partnership that serves this project and one that doesn’t.

Why we have criteria at all

When you’re building something with a clear mission and a clearly defined constituency — Queenslanders, their identity, their right to own a permanent digital address — you don’t have the luxury of treating partnerships as neutral. A partnership is never just a business arrangement. It’s a statement. It says: we think this other entity shares enough of our values, our direction, and our understanding of who we’re building for, that we’re willing to stand next to them in public.

That matters because of what we’ve built and what we’ve promised. Every address on .queensland, .qld, .brisbane, .surfersparadise, .gold-coast, and .brisbane2032 is a permanent onchain commitment. The person who pays five dollars and claims their address is trusting us — not with their data, not with a recurring subscription, but with their digital identity, potentially for the rest of their life. That’s a different kind of trust than most technology products attract. It has to be treated differently.

So when a potential partner shows up, our first instinct is never “what can we get from this?” It’s “does this compromise anything we’ve promised?” That inversion is important. We start from the position that we have something worth protecting, and work outward from there.

The three questions we actually ask

Every partnership conversation, no matter how casually it begins, eventually gets filtered through three questions. They’re not the only things we think about, but they’re the ones we always come back to. If the answer to any one of them is wrong, the conversation usually ends.

Does this advance the mission?

Does this serve Queenslanders?

Does this compromise permanence, accessibility, or trust?

These three questions aren’t independent of each other. They overlap. A partnership that doesn’t advance the mission probably doesn’t serve Queenslanders. A partnership that compromises permanence almost certainly breaks trust. But keeping them as distinct questions forces us to think about each dimension separately, and that discipline matters. It stops us from letting enthusiasm in one area — say, a technically impressive organisation we like personally — override a legitimate concern in another.

Let’s go through each of them properly.

Does this advance the mission?

The mission of Queensland Foundation is not complicated. We want every Queenslander to own a permanent digital address — not rent one, not depend on one, not hope that their account doesn’t get suspended or their renewal doesn’t lapse. Own one. Permanently. The infrastructure is onchain, which means the address is recorded at a level that no registrar can erase, no company shutdown can extinguish, and no renewal failure can expire. That’s the thing we built and the thing we’re committed to spreading.

So when we ask whether a potential partnership advances that mission, we’re asking a very specific question: does this relationship, in any material way, increase the number of Queenslanders who own a permanent address, improve the infrastructure those addresses run on, or deepen the understanding of why this kind of ownership matters?

That question rules out a lot. It rules out partnerships with organisations that are broadly well-aligned but are fundamentally operating in a different space and just want to borrow our credibility or our Queensland-specific positioning. It rules out arrangements that would benefit a partner’s audience without meaningfully touching ours. It rules out deals that are technically adjacent but directionally wrong — that would, for instance, pull us toward building infrastructure for a narrow audience at the expense of our commitment to the broadest possible one.

Advancing the mission doesn’t mean every partnership has to directly drive address registrations. That’s too narrow a reading. A partnership could advance the mission by helping more people understand what onchain ownership means. It could advance the mission by expanding the technical capability of what someone can do with their address. It could advance the mission by building a bridge between a community we haven’t reached yet and the infrastructure we’ve built for them. All of those count.

But the direction has to be right. The question isn’t just “is this useful?” It’s “is this useful in this direction?” We’ve had conversations with organisations doing genuinely interesting work that just happened to be pointed somewhere else. Those are easy to wish well and walk away from. The harder ones are the arrangements that look like they’re pointed the right way but aren’t quite — where the surface alignment is real but the deeper direction is off. Those require more scrutiny, and that scrutiny is where the next two questions become essential.

Does this serve Queenslanders?

This question is harder to answer than it sounds, because “serves Queenslanders” has to mean more than “is available to Queenslanders” or “is technically connected to Queensland.” Almost anything could meet that bar. We have to ask it more rigorously.

What we mean is: does this partnership make the permanent address infrastructure more valuable, more accessible, or more meaningful for the actual people it was built for? Does it make it easier for a family in Cairns to claim their name? Does it make it more useful for a small business in Townsville to build something durable on their .queensland address? Does it deepen the relationship between a Queenslander’s digital identity and the place they actually live?

These are not rhetorical questions. They’re the ones we sit with.

We have a very particular constituency. Queensland is a vast, diverse state. The people we’re building for range from technology-fluent early adopters to people who have never thought about blockchain infrastructure in their lives and shouldn’t have to — because the whole point is that permanence and ownership should be simple enough for anyone. That breadth is part of what defines the project. We didn’t build .queensland for Web3 natives. We built it for every Queenslander. That’s five and a half million people with different backgrounds, different levels of technical familiarity, different reasons for wanting a permanent digital address.

So when a partner comes to us with an offer that serves a very narrow slice of that constituency — say, the technically sophisticated, or the already wealthy, or the already digitally engaged — we have to weigh that honestly. It might genuinely serve those people well. But does it serve Queenslanders in the full sense of what that word means here? Does it pull the infrastructure toward exclusivity, toward complication, toward the kind of thing that only a subset can participate in? If it does, that’s a problem.

Conversely, a partnership that genuinely broadens access — that makes it easier for someone unfamiliar with blockchain to claim their address, that embeds our infrastructure in places where ordinary Queenslanders already are, that reduces friction rather than adding it — that’s the kind of thing that clears this bar easily.

The “serves Queenslanders” question is also where we think about conflicts of interest. A partner might genuinely serve some Queenslanders while working against the interests of others. An organisation with existing commercial interests in digital identity or domain infrastructure, for instance, might benefit from our growth in ways that don’t align with the outcome we want for our community. We’re not naive about the fact that some of the most eager potential partners are eager precisely because they see something valuable here. That’s fine — but we have to make sure the value they extract doesn’t come at the cost of the people we’re accountable to.

Does this compromise permanence, accessibility, or trust?

This is the hardest question, and the most important one. It’s also the one that requires the most honest self-interrogation, because the compromises it’s designed to catch aren’t always obvious. Sometimes they’re structural. Sometimes they’re subtle. Sometimes they only become apparent when you think through what happens not at the beginning of a partnership but at the end.

Permanence is the core promise of everything we’ve built. An address on our TLDs is not a rental. It’s not a subscription. It’s not contingent on a company continuing to exist, a server continuing to run, or a renewal fee continuing to be paid. It’s recorded onchain. It’s permanent in a way that is enforced by the infrastructure itself, not by our goodwill. That’s the whole point.

A partnership that introduces any dependency that would compromise that permanence is a partnership we won’t take. What does that look like in practice? It looks like an arrangement where a partner’s involvement in the infrastructure creates a new point of failure — where the useful operation of someone’s permanent address now depends on a third party that didn’t exist before and might not exist forever. It looks like integration agreements that technically work today but introduce conditions under which the address functionality could degrade. It looks like commercial arrangements where a partner’s continued participation is necessary for addresses to resolve correctly. Any of those patterns puts us in a position where we’ve effectively made a promise to one party and handed a degree of control over that promise to another. We won’t do it.

Accessibility is the second element of this question, and it maps directly back to the $5 price point. One of the things we’re most deliberate about is that the entry point for a permanent Queensland address is not a premium. Five dollars is a number we chose because we believe that everyone — not most people, not people above a certain income threshold, but everyone — should be able to afford their permanent digital identity. That’s not a marketing position. It’s a values position. And it has practical implications for the kinds of partnerships we’ll accept.

A partner that would effectively raise the cost of participation — through bundling, through lock-in, through dependencies that require additional purchases to unlock the utility of an address — is a partner that erodes the accessibility promise. We won’t do that either. The moment we build an ecosystem where the five-dollar address works best only if you also buy something else, we’ve started charging more than five dollars. We know that. We think about it carefully.

Trust is the third element, and it might be the most expansive. Trust is built slowly and broken quickly. We’ve built a particular kind of trust with the people who’ve claimed addresses through us — a trust that’s grounded in transparency, in a simple and permanent promise, and in a demonstrated willingness to protect the mission even when that means saying no to things that look attractive on the surface. A partnership that damages that trust, even indirectly, is not worth its upside.

What damages trust? Association with organisations whose values are misaligned with ours in ways that people would reasonably find troubling. Arrangements that create the appearance of endorsement when we’re actually just in a commercial relationship. Partners who would use the Queensland Foundation name or TLD infrastructure to lend credibility to something we wouldn’t endorse if asked directly. Any of those things corrode the relationship we have with our community, and that relationship is the foundation of everything else we’re trying to build.

What a good partnership actually looks like

We don’t just want to describe what we reject. Let’s describe what we’re actually looking for, because good partnerships do exist, and we want them.

A good partnership, for us, is one where the mission alignment is genuine and specific, not just broadly sympathetic. We’ve had conversations with organisations that genuinely believe in what we’re doing and want to help it grow — not because it benefits them instrumentally, but because they share the underlying conviction that Queenslanders deserve permanent digital infrastructure that belongs to them. Those conversations have a different texture. They move differently. There’s less negotiation about surface terms and more honest discussion about what both parties actually want for the community.

A good partnership is one where the partner understands permanence — not just as a technical property of blockchain, but as a commitment to people. Organisations that get this are relatively rare. Most entities in the technology space are accustomed to building on infrastructure that can be updated, pivoted, deprecated, or shut down. We’re not. Our infrastructure has to be assumed to still be working when someone’s grandchild inherits their .queensland address. A partner who doesn’t genuinely understand that distinction, who thinks of permanence as a marketing feature rather than a binding constraint, will eventually make decisions that conflict with it. We’d rather find that out before we’ve formalised anything.

A good partnership expands reach without diluting the message. We’re interested in working with organisations that have genuine relationships with Queenslanders who don’t yet know that permanent onchain addresses exist, or don’t yet understand why they might want one. That expansion of reach is valuable. But it’s only valuable if the message that travels through the partner’s channels is accurate, unexaggerated, and consistent with what we’d say ourselves. Partners who would simplify or sensationalise the offering — who would sell the address as something it isn’t, either by overpromising utility or underplaying the infrastructure’s maturity — create more problems than they solve.

A good partnership has a clear and honest structure. We don’t do vague arrangements. We don’t do implicit understandings about what each party will do or not do. When we work with an organisation, we want to know exactly what the relationship entails, exactly what each party is committing to, and exactly what the resolution looks like if something goes wrong. Ambiguity in these arrangements almost always resolves in a direction that benefits the larger party. We’re not going to be the party it resolves against.

And a good partnership is reversible. We know this sounds like it contradicts the permanence point, and we want to address that directly. The permanence we’ve promised is to address holders — to the people who own a .brisbane or .qld or .surfersparadise address. Their ownership doesn’t depend on our partnership arrangements. So the reversibility we’re talking about is at the partnership level, not the infrastructure level. We want any partnership we enter to be structured in a way that, if it ends, nothing about the permanence of existing addresses is affected. If a partnership can’t be unwound without putting addresses at risk, it was never structured correctly in the first place.

What a failed partnership looks like

It’s worth being equally direct about the patterns we’ve seen in conversations that didn’t work.

The most common failure mode is mission drift presented as collaboration. Someone comes to us with an arrangement that, on the surface, looks aligned — it touches Queensland, it involves digital identity, it has some connection to the blockchain space — but when you look at what it actually requires us to do, it pulls us away from our core work. It asks us to build something for a niche. It asks us to endorse an ecosystem that doesn’t serve our constituency. It asks us to co-brand with something that only vaguely connects to permanent onchain addresses for Queenslanders. We’ve learned to recognise this pattern early, because it never gets better as the negotiation progresses. The gap between the headline and the substance widens, not narrows.

The second failure mode is the arrangement that introduces hidden dependencies. This is the one that requires the most technical scrutiny. Sometimes a proposed integration looks clean and additive — it would make our infrastructure more capable, more visible, more useful — but buried in the architecture is a dependency that would compromise the permanence promise. The address holder’s experience would now rely on a third-party service. The resolution of an address would now route through infrastructure we don’t control. The functionality that was promised as a feature would become a liability if the partner’s situation changed. We try to trace these dependencies carefully, because they’re not always obvious in the initial conversations and the people proposing them don’t always understand the full implications of what they’re suggesting.

The third failure mode is the accessibility trap. This is when a partnership would make the overall product more valuable for people who are already engaged while making it less accessible for people who aren’t. It can look like a feature addition — and sometimes it genuinely is, for a subset of people. But if the feature comes with an entry cost, a complexity premium, or a lock-in that disadvantages people who can’t or don’t want to pay more, it runs directly against our core commitment. We’ve had to walk away from some objectively interesting arrangements because this was the honest assessment.

The fourth failure mode is the credibility extraction. Some organisations want to associate with us because of what we’ve built, not because they want to contribute to it. They want our TLD infrastructure’s legitimacy to rub off on something else they’re doing. They want the Queensland connection, the permanence narrative, the “backed by a permanent onchain TLD” framing — and they’re willing to offer something in return, but what they’re offering doesn’t actually serve our mission or our community. This can be subtle. The offer can be genuinely generous in financial terms. But we’ve learned that if the primary thing a partner wants from us is credibility, and the primary thing we’d get from them is money, we’re looking at the wrong deal.

The conversation we want to have

None of this means we’re closed. The opposite, actually. Writing all of this down is an act of openness, not defensiveness. We want people to know how we think so that the right conversations can happen faster and the wrong ones can be avoided entirely.

The conversation we want to have is the one where both parties already share the foundational view — that Queenslanders deserve permanent digital infrastructure, that ownership is different from rental, that accessibility can’t be an afterthought, and that the people who’ve already claimed their addresses are trusting us with something that matters to them. When that shared foundation exists, the rest of the partnership conversation becomes much simpler. The specific terms, the specific activities, the specific timeline — those are logistics. The hard part is the alignment, and if that’s genuine, the logistics work themselves out.

We’ve also found that the best potential partners are the ones who ask hard questions early. Who probe the permanence model and want to understand exactly how it works. Who ask what we won’t do, not just what we will. Who want to know how we think about failure and conflict before they know how we think about success. Those questions suggest someone who is serious, who understands that a partnership is a commitment and not just an opportunity, and who is coming to the table with the kind of rigour that this infrastructure deserves.

On saying no

We want to say something directly about the act of declining partnerships, because we think there’s a cultural tendency in building organisations to treat every “no” as a missed opportunity or a failure of ambition. We don’t see it that way.

Saying no to a partnership that doesn’t serve Queenslanders is not a missed opportunity. It’s a decision to keep the trust of the people who do. Saying no to a partnership that would compromise the permanence promise is not a failure of ambition. It’s a recognition that ambition without integrity eventually undermines itself. Saying no to a partnership that extracts credibility without contributing value is not being difficult. It’s basic stewardship of something we’ve spent a long time building.

Every time we say no to the wrong thing, we’re implicitly saying yes to the right thing — to the version of Queensland Foundation that actually delivers on what we’ve promised, that looks after the community of address holders who’ve put their trust in us, and that builds the infrastructure of permanent digital identity for this state in a way that can be sustained and respected for as long as those addresses remain valid.

Which, to be clear, is forever.

Where this leaves us

The criteria we’ve described here are not fixed forever. We update our thinking when we encounter situations we haven’t seen before, when we learn something from a conversation that changes how we frame a question, when the technology or the landscape evolves in ways that make an old consideration obsolete or introduce a new one. We hold these criteria with conviction but not with rigidity.

What doesn’t change is the underlying structure: mission first, community second, infrastructure integrity always. Those three anchors haven’t shifted since we began, and we don’t expect them to. They’re not the result of a single decision or a single conversation. They’re the accumulated expression of what we actually believe about why this project exists.

We believe that digital identity should be owned, not rented. We believe that ownership should be affordable for everyone, not just those with the means to keep paying. We believe that the infrastructure of identity should be permanent, not contingent on commercial arrangements that can change at any moment. And we believe that the people of Queensland — all of them, from the first-generation immigrant finding their footing in a new place to the third-generation farmer whose family has called this state home for a century — deserve to have their place in Queensland’s digital future secured in a way that reflects all of that.

Every partnership decision we make either reinforces those beliefs or doesn’t. We’ve become quite good at telling the difference.