Last week we launched a special session on Desci. Currently, decentralized science has also attracted a wave of attention, and large institutions have begun to invest in Desci projects, such as Binance Labs’ investment in BIO, and Pump.science has also received investment. In the BIO special session, we learned that BIO is an incubator in the Desci field, and has currently incubated 7+3 projects (The next round of hot spots? Desci special session (2) Analysis of the potential of the BIO-Desci DAO incubator). We will introduce these projects one after another in the future. Today, let’s take a look at the VitaDao and HairDao projects.
2. LIFE
VitaDAO is a decentralized scientific research community focused on supporting research in the fields of anti-aging and life sciences. Its goal is to democratize scientific research funding and innovation through blockchain technology, thereby promoting the development of drug development and anti-aging technology.
Success Stories
Project VC-001: A research project focused on the development of anti-aging drugs that has been approved by relevant drug regulatory agencies, demonstrating VitaDAO’s potential in promoting new drug development.
Core Concept
Research Funding: VitaDAO uses a decentralized governance model to attract scientists, investors, and enthusiasts around the world to provide financial support for anti-aging and life extension research.
Intellectual Property (IP) Tokenization: Projects tokenize research results (such as patents and drugs) so that they can be shared and circulated within the community.
Community-driven: Research directions, funding allocations, and strategic decisions are jointly determined by community members to achieve transparent and efficient governance.
VitaLabs Roadmap
1. Creative stage
This phase provides a platform for applicants to present themselves and their innovative ideas to the VitaDAO community for the first time, aiming to foster collaboration, open discussion, and team building to advance breakthrough projects in the field of longevity science.
2. Team Building
Vitadao encourages team building by integrating diverse skills and backgrounds.
3. Project Proposal
The team needs to clearly explain its vision, action plan and resource requirements to the VitaDAO community. This needs to include: budget, team composition, experimental roadmap, problems and solutions, and commercialization potential.
4. Funding rounds and selection of scholarship recipients
VitaDAO commits to providing $200,000 (in the form of ETH or USDC) every quarter as a supporting funding pool for the QF round. At this time, Vitadao’s community members can use VITA tokens to vote for their favorite projects. Only a maximum of 4 projects will be funded each quarter.
5. Preliminary Experiments
Projects that pass the funding round will enter the preliminary experimentation phase, which focuses on conducting low-cost, high-impact experiments to provide minimum viable proof-of-concept data. The goal is to generate preliminary data that will minimally validate project hypotheses and guide further research and development.
6. Further research: continuous experimentation
7. IPT and Crowdfunding Stage
As projects generate promising data and validate hypotheses, they will become eligible to enter the IPT (Intellectual Property Token) and Crowdfunding phase. This phase provides teams with the opportunity to secure additional funding and community support to further develop their projects.
8. Creation of independent spin-off companies
As projects mature and demonstrate strong potential for practical application, they will enter the stage of creating independent spin-off companies.
IPNFT Intellectual Property Project
Matrix Bio, Discovery of novel autophagy activators - Korolchuk Lab, Longevity molecules - Scheibye.Knudsen Lab, ApoptoSENS - Anti-aging CAR-NK cells, Novel mitochondrial autophagy activators for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease - Fang Lab, Reversing periodontal disease using gerontology - Lab, ARTAN Bio - Inhibition of mutation-specific codons to delay aging and extend lifespan.
Equity Transactions
GERO-physical and artificial intelligence technology platform for age-related diseases, HDAXTherapeutics-histone deacetylase targeted drug development, Remedium Bio-regenerative medicine gene therapy, Oisin Biotechnologies-pioneer gene drug for the treatment of sarcopenia, etc.
VITA Token Locking and Processing
Token Locking Rules:
Community contributed VITA tokens will be locked until the end of the season or the launch of the project’s IPT (whichever is later).
Token return rules:
If the project is terminated after the season ends, all VITA tokens will be returned to community participants.
If the project is successfully advanced and IPT is listed, community members will receive an NFT representing the liquidity provider (LP) position in the Uni v3 pool.
IPT Token Distribution
-Team assignment (30%)
-Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) (4%)
-Community Contributors (6-26%)
-IPT Public Sales (20%)
-VitaDAO Allocation (20-45%)
-Uniswap v3 liquidity pool (5-30%)
Token Economy
The project was launched in 2021. The current coin price is 4.8 US dollars. Especially after November 5, it has skyrocketed 5 times (from 1 to 4.8). The current market value is 40 million US dollars. The total number of tokens is 19 million. Currently, 9 million are in circulation, with a circulation rate of 47%.
The distribution of tokens is as follows: 10% for service provision, 12.5% for working group, 10% for community auction, 7%+0.9% for strategic fund, 1.9% for foundation, and 57.7% should be reserved for subsequent development, which has not yet been planned.
3.HairDAO
HairDAO is an open source R&D network where patients and researchers collaborate to develop revolutionary new hair loss treatments. Record patients' treatment experiences, participate in cutting-edge research, and receive HAlR as a reward. This project should have just successfully completed financing on the BIO platform.
In the Hairdao community, the power to decide which research projects are funded lies in the hands of community members. By holding HAIR tokens, you can vote on which projects should be supported. This democratic approach ensures that a wide range of perspectives are taken into account in the decision-making process, thereby promoting a diverse and innovative research environment.
Currently there are the following research directions: TRH, T3, T4, Twist-1 and 2i and hundreds of other research directions.
In each project, there will be some project evaluations, which is a bit similar to Taobao Mall. This format is a bit rough at present, and the overall process is not as professional as Vitadao.
Token Economy
Currently, the Hair project has also completed its launch in BIO, with a total token supply of 1.5 million, of which 20% belongs to Hari's core personnel (locked for 26 years), 10% is auctioned, 24.7% is purchased OTC, 4.6% is open market, and 35.3% is unallocated.
Although the problem of hair loss is indeed that 8 out of 10 people have hair loss as he said, studying hair loss is a scientific research after all, and scientific research is generally better in top universities and institutions. I also asked on chatgpt that there are currently many top institutions in the field of hair loss research (including androgenic alopecia, alopecia areata, etc.):
1. The field of stem cell research at Harvard University is particularly active, and the research team has made significant progress in hair follicle regeneration and stem cell treatment.
2. University of Pennsylvania. Research at the university found that the WNT signaling pathway plays a key role in hair follicle regeneration.
3. University of Tokyo, whose research team focuses on genomics and the genetic factors of hair loss.
4. The University of Manchester has conducted in-depth research on hair follicle biology and hair growth cycle regulation, and is committed to finding drugs that promote hair growth.
5. Tsinghua University and Fudan University, conducting basic research in the fields of stem cell applications, gene editing technology and hair regeneration.
6. Private enterprise
-Stemson Therapeutics (USA), which focuses on using stem cells to generate new hair follicles and plans to commercialize them, is currently backed by Johnson & Johnson's venture capital company.
- FOLLICA (USA), studying how to stimulate hair regeneration through minimally invasive skin technology, has now entered the clinical trial stage.
- Shiseido (Japan), in collaboration with RIKEN, is working on developing hair regeneration therapies using stem cell technology.
- REPLIcel Life Sciences (Canada), develops autologous cell-based hair follicle regeneration therapy and has advanced clinical trials in Japan, China and Europe.
So at present, just from the perspective of hair loss research and its sub-fields, I think the advantages of decentralized scientific research may not be as good as traditional university institutions, because these top universities have sufficient scientific research funds and atmosphere, and at present, it may be difficult for the grass-roots team of Desci to shake the professional team in the short term.
Finally, let's summarize these two projects. The first one, VITADAO, is pretty good at the moment. It is similar to BIO and is also the predecessor of BIO. The current price of the coin is also very high. However, for the field of scientific research, 40 million US dollars is not high. In fact, it can be seen to be higher, such as YC, 500GLOBAL, Techstars, etc., which are all valued at tens of billions. Hairdao is currently a niche field, which may be more difficult, but it is very likely that the grass-roots team can overthrow the official team if they have the dream. There is a saying that "the world is a huge grass-roots team".
But no matter what, we have seen the thriving development of blockchain in the real world. Blockchain empowering the technology field is also a huge benefit. The world is quietly being changed by blockchain.