Written by: Gyro Finance
When it comes to the hottest track in the past two weeks, it has to be DeSci.
Since Binance labs announced its investment in BIO Protocol on November 8, this once dormant concept has re-emerged under the joint endorsement of CZ and V God. Hot money has poured in, and RIF and URO have generated a thousand times of wealth, also creating a new potential MEME track.
DeSci, also known as decentralized science, refers to the concept of Messari, which refers to the establishment of public infrastructure through Web3 technology to achieve open and fair funding, storage and dissemination of scientific knowledge. DeSci encourages scientists to share their research results publicly and receive honors, while allowing anyone to easily access and contribute to research results. In short, DeSci is committed to solving scientific research problems based on blockchain technology, covering fund raising, knowledge sharing, review, intellectual property rights, and more.
In terms of track performance, DeSci focuses on fundraising. Most project models rely on tokenization to finance projects to support scientific research and development. At the same time, scientific research results are often advocated to be put on the chain to enhance transparency and protect intellectual property rights. At present, the core role of DeSci is to open up new fundraising channels for scientific research that requires long-term investment. Since it links the two unrelated fields of encryption and scientific research, it gives tokenization more practical significance, and is therefore strongly advocated by the market as one of the practical cases of MEME.
When it comes to the root of this round of DeSci’s popularity, celebrity effect is the key. On November 8, according to official disclosure, Binance completed strategic financing for BIO Protocol, making this “on-chain scientific version of Y Combinator” surface. Later, CZ attended the DeSci Day event held by Binance in Bangkok, and Vitalik was also present. The two discussed DeSci together, which pushed DeSci to the forefront.
The crypto community, which is good at finding hot spots, quickly surged with the DeSci craze. Pump.Science became an instant hit, and the RIF and URO projects made a thousand times the profit, making this track completely popular. Andrew Kang, partner of Mechanism Capital, even wrote that "the DeSci field now feels like the DeFi era in early 2019. Everything is still primitive and experimental, but a basic conclusion can be drawn from it, that is, it has huge potential." Affected by this, even in the current market correction, according to SoSoValue data, the DeSci sector still rose 3.35% against the trend.
Although Desci's vision is promising, and the opening of funding channels for scientific research is undoubtedly valuable, from a current perspective, the hype component clearly outweighs the actual utility. In essence, the long-term nature of scientific research is significantly different from the short-term profit-seeking nature of the MEME field. It is quite a fantasy to hope that the purely speculative MEME track will neutralize the zero-speculative scientific research field.
On the one hand, scientific research is extremely uncertain. Drug development can take more than a decade. If the direction is wrong, it will be a disaster. It has the characteristics of high investment and high risk, and requires sustainable long-term investment. This is why scientific research funds usually adopt a model led by the state and leading enterprises. State capital and social capital are combined to hedge risks and maintain competitiveness. However, in the crypto market, attention is the core, and hot spots are difficult to sustain. At present, the hot money around DeSci is mainly concentrated on Pump.Science, a meme coin issuance platform for scientific research projects, showing the market's attention to the money-making effect.
In fact, from a conceptual point of view, DeSci is a bit like old wine in a new bottle. If we trace back to history, VitaDAO, initiated by Vita in July 2021, is the earliest and most representative DeSci project, but the development of this project is not as magnificent as its concept.
VitaDAO is a community-owned project dedicated to funding early longevity research. Its goal is to promote scientific innovation through the collective power of the community, research and support projects aimed at extending human life and preventing age-related diseases. In other words, VitaDAO is a DAO community for longevity research.
Previously, VitaDAO briefly sparked heated discussions due to the strategic participation of traditional pharmaceutical company Pfizer in the project, but it quickly fell silent as the topic of conversation faded. At present, VitaDAO is also making extensive arrangements, not only deploying $4.2 million in funds to fund 24 projects, but also conducting research cooperation with well-known universities such as Newcastle University. But compared with its actions, the actual results are quite limited. Starting from 2021, until Devcon not long ago this year, V God finally demonstrated VitaDAO's first product VD001.
On the other hand, although the blockchain of scientific research results will enhance transparency and intellectual property protection, and is also conducive to the diffusion of science, this point is almost a structural subversion in the relatively closed scientific research field. In today's scientific research system, most research teams maintain a high degree of confidentiality of research results and experimental data during the scientific research process to prevent the research results from being stolen, used or leaked by unauthorized persons, especially when it comes to deep interests, confidentiality is of paramount importance. With the strong entry of decentralization, the security of data is naturally difficult to guarantee.
With the support of the above two, it can be expected that, in addition to the surface applications in scientific research content, review fairness and data tokenization, only the extremely difficult, time-consuming and highly collaborative topics will cater to the encryption model. From this round of craze, most DeSci projects are targeting a core issue of common concern to all mankind - longevity, which also makes the market jokingly call DeSci the elixir of life on the chain.
Immortality is ultimately just a beautiful vision, and the market's attention to DeSci is only for the liquidity behind it. Although the BIO Genesis community fundraising campaign initiated by BIOProtocol raised $33 million, and the DeSci sector has soared in the past two weeks, the primary market has limited action, and large institutions have not yet participated. From the perspective of leading projects, the secondary market's attention is even more mediocre. The market capitalization of VITA and RIF is between $120 million and $200 million, which is far from the market capitalization of other sector leaders of $1 billion.
DeSci sector development, source: sosovalue
But if we ignore the long-term, DeSci is a relatively good sector in the MEME world. Compared with other MEMEs, DeSci has a stronger narrative. Although the celebrity effect is difficult to sustain, it has a fundamental effect because it is supported by actual scientific research projects. Any scientific research innovation and product development will strengthen the narrative. The biomedical sector is open to all investors, and the emerging nature of this field makes it more likely to be connected with the encryption field. In addition, DeSci has a potential breaking circle effect. The celebrity effect of the current sector is temporarily concentrated in the encryption field, led by V God and CZ. Celebrities in the traditional medical and scientific research fields have not yet entered, and large institutions have not yet emerged, which also provides direction for subsequent narratives.
Returning to the macro market, whether it is a zoo or an artist, AI-driven or scientific research verification, we can see that MEME has become the main carrier of market funds. But the successors to this round of wealth were altcoins. Looking at the altcoin market alone, Bitcoin rose from US$10,000 to the edge of US$100,000, and the follow-up effect of Ethereum was significantly reduced. The performance of altcoins mostly fell. Among the top ten crypto assets, only SOL and XRP increased. The copycat season, which often grows dozens of times, seems difficult to repeat.
From the core point of view, the change of capital flow is the key. In the traditional bull market transmission, the general path is to gradually sink from high-stability assets to low-stability assets, and activate high-yield preferences from low-yield sources, that is, mainstream currencies - altcoins - MEME currencies - other sectors, but this year the path is not as good as before. However, at present, with the entry of institutions and the saturation of the number of projects, large amounts of external new liquidity will only flow into the Bitcoin ecosystem, and there are no strong applications emerging in the public chain ecosystem. The altcoins are even more deeply trapped in the crisis of supply and demand institutions. Bitcoin has become a siphon of ecological funds, and funds from other sectors have also been siphoned in. Only MEME, which is fast in and out and has a concentrated wealth effect, stands out, and the altcoin season has therefore become the MEME season.
A typical example is that Pump.fun has become the biggest winner in the bull market. According to Dune data, as of November 24, pump.fun's cumulative revenue was close to $230 million (US$228,908,720), and the total number of deployed tokens was approximately 3.74 million.
Of course, the two are not substitution effects, and the rise of MEME does not mean the collapse of the copycat. With the relaxation of regulations and the rotation of sectors, the copycat may still turn the tide. However, the improvement of MEME's market position undoubtedly reflects the structural changes in the market. In fact, whether it is Pumpfun live broadcast, TikTok shouting, or AI autonomous drive, etc., with the entry of Generation Z and the rapid evolution of new technologies, the crypto market is experiencing deep changes in narrative logic, communication mode, and operation mode.
The traditional copycat projects are unable to sustain the form of long-term profiteering by releasing tokens to maintain the narrative. The market no longer pays for VC tokens, but moves towards a fairer, more autonomous, and closer to the core of tokens, and attention is increasingly scarce. In this sense, the combination of MEME and projects seems to be more competitive than a single project. The copycat is the banker, while MEME is relatively fair. MEME lacks long-term nature, while the project gives it fundamentals. The two are highly compatible, which may be one of the reasons for the rise of concepts such as AIMEME and Desci.
But in any case, the formation of consensus is highly random, and MEME gold mines are few and far between. Citing Panews data, as of November 21, Pump.fun has issued a total of 3.59 million tokens, which is far more than the total amount of tokens issued in the crypto world in the past 10 years. Among them, the number of graduated (full curve and online Raydium) tokens is 50,389, accounting for about 1.4%. The number of tokens with a market value of over 100 million US dollars is only 32, and only less than one in 100,000 MEMEs have a market value of more than 10 million US dollars.
In the long run, finding a consensus balance between attention and long-term nature will become an important issue in the development of MEME, but for individuals, staying alive and not returning to zero is the prerequisite for everything.