Reform is the greatest productivity, from Musk "switching" to Trump in the general election to proposing a team structure with an IQ of 200 working 80 hours a week with no pay.
In the end, the knife of cost reduction and efficiency improvement will be slashed at those institutions that have united to fleece the American people. Last week, when the Starship was launched, Trump went to the scene to support it, which also had a connotation. Since Musk supported Trump's election, Musk has frequently received investigations from various California governments and environmental organizations.
For example, will the recovery of the Starship have any impact on sharks in the sea? If not, then check the whales. If the launch is OK, then check whether the recovery will affect the hearing of seals. Musk's response is also extremely straight. He asked SpaceX employees to tie a seal with headphones when the Starship was launched, and finally used data to prove that the launch would not have a fatal impact on the seal.
Therefore, whether it is aimed at his own starship or the scientific research system, the weird research damages the taxpayers' trust in the government, and the one aimed at him is purely the ineffective idleness of capital. From this perspective, Musk naturally needs a new scientific research system, and DeSci is also aimed at this.
Decentralized Science (DeSci) is a new movement that uses blockchain technology to address core challenges in science, such as lack of funding, transparency, and collaboration. By leveraging decentralized technologies such as tokens, NFTs, and decentralized autonomous organizations, DeSci aims to create a more open, community-driven, and incentivized approach to scientific research. The DeSci project embodies how decentralized platforms can reshape the way scientific research is funded, conducted, and disseminated, ultimately bridging the gap between basic research and applications while ensuring ownership and transparency in data management.
Today’s scientific funding system is so inefficient that many researchers spend nearly 80% of their time applying for grants and only 20% on actual research. Imagine if software developers had to spend most of their energy on obtaining funding rather than coding—the end result would be a significant delay in development time, just as the outdated processes currently hinder scientific innovation. Early career researchers face the greatest barriers, while established scientists receive the majority of funding and resources. This preferential treatment stifles fresh, unconventional ideas and limits opportunities for development. In addition, centralized, competitive, and conservative funding prioritizes clichés and mediocre innovations over research that could have an impact.
Then there is the profit-driven academic publishing industry. The academic publishing industry is dominated by five major publishers, which control nearly 50% of the market, generate $9 billion in revenue each year, and have profit margins of up to 40%. This control allows publishers to act as gatekeepers, prioritizing profits over scientific merit. Expensive publishing fees create significant barriers for underfunded researchers.
Sci-Hub became popular in this context. In 2011, Ms. Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakh who was born in the Soviet Union, felt deeply hurt by the shamelessness of academic journals and decided to publish them online for free. This story happened almost simultaneously with the birth of Bitcoin, a story about the love of wisdom and freedom.
In Alexandra Elbakyan's view, the property rights of scientific research knowledge belong to all mankind, and academic publishers should not close the channels for knowledge dissemination under the pretext of operations. The use of sci-hub is extremely simple. As long as you obtain the DOI number of the corresponding paper, you can get the text with one click, eliminating all steps and allowing knowledge to return to its most authentic function.
Then there is medicine. The traditional drug development process is time-consuming and expensive, typically taking 10 to 13 years and costing more than $2 billion to bring a new drug to market, so companies work in isolation rather than collaborating in a globally connected market, resulting in duplication of efforts and missed opportunities for joint progress, such as a unified approach to treating diseases like cancer.
A key obstacle in this process is the “valley of death,” the stage between basic research and commercialization. During this period, many promising projects require significant funding to scale up but face a sharp decline in financial support. With 95% of drugs failing in human trials, this funding gap remains a significant barrier that prevents transformative innovations from reaching the market and impacting lives.
Decentralized science uses blockchain technology, decentralized networks, and new incentive structures to solve major challenges in the traditional scientific research ecosystem. These solutions aim to improve scientific accessibility, transparency, funding mechanisms, and collaboration.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations provide a decentralized, community-driven framework for scientific research funding and decision-making. By democratizing resource allocation, DAOs enable scientists, investors, and other stakeholders to propose and vote on project proposals, thereby creating a collaborative and transparent research environment.
DeSci platforms offer researchers a secure and decentralized way to store their data, manuscripts, and research materials. By leveraging blockchain technology, these platforms ensure that research outputs remain accessible over the long term, preventing issues such as “link rot,” where links to data can become inaccessible over time. For example, platforms such as DeSci Nodes offer decentralized storage that guarantees permanent and unalterable access to research outputs.
In addition, the DeSci platform is built around the FAIR data principles, which stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. This means that each dataset contains metadata detailing how the data was generated and allowing other researchers to easily find and reuse the data. Incorporating the FAIR principles not only makes scientific data more accessible, but also encourages collaboration and helps avoid duplication of research efforts.
The DeSci platform eliminates the barriers of traditional publishing paywalls by providing scientists with open access options that allow them to freely share their research results. For example, DeSci Publish allows researchers to upload and disseminate their research results without paying high publishing fees, thereby ensuring that scientific discoveries are disseminated more widely and have a greater impact. In addition, programmatic publishing speeds up the research-to-publication process and reduces the burden of manual submission by automating tasks such as manuscript submission, formatting, peer review coordination, metadata creation, revision tracking, and dissemination, so that researchers can focus on their research instead of administrative tasks such as leadership approval.
Decentralized science offers a transformative solution by placing patients and donors at the center of the process. Using blockchain technology, DeSci ensures that donors retain control of their biospecimens, enabling them to understand how their donation is used, while the decentralized system provides enhanced security for sensitive data, ensuring that data is securely stored and accessed only with appropriate permissions. By replacing centralized repositories with the transparency and immutability of blockchain, DeSci can protect privacy and accelerate progress in biomedical research.
DeSci is expanding beyond Ethereum, and Pump.Science on Solana has taken over Pump.Fun’s position in the industry. Pushing the boundaries of decentralized science. Backed by the Solana Foundation, Pump.Science allows users to watch live research experiments and tokenize longevity compounds. This innovative approach has driven its rapid success, with its tokens exploding after DevCon, with $RIF’s market cap reaching $106 million and $URO soaring to $39 million.
The decentralized science market is experiencing significant growth, with transaction volume exceeding $25 million and a market capitalization reaching $1.2 billion. DeSci token is experiencing amazing growth. The numbers reflect a surge in investor interest and confidence in DeSci's potential to reshape the scientific landscape. Decentralized science is leading to groundbreaking changes in the way science is funded, conducted and shared. Backed by industry giants like Binance and the likes of Vitalik Buterin, DeSci is more than just a technological innovation, it’s a movement to democratize science and solve humanity’s most critical challenges.
DeSci is a step towards an open, collaborative and inclusive future for science. This is not a temporary trend, but the beginning of a major change in the way we treat progress. He Jiankui's madness has earned him a private custom-made charge of gene editing, and the subversion of the scientific research system by cryptocurrency is indeed a good thing if it allows us to read papers for free. If it is crazy enough to reach the radical human era, then let's end with Liu Cixin's words: give civilization to the years, not years to civilization.
I hope we can safely get through this great low point in human scientific research.