Decentralized science (DeSci) — a new field that updates scientific research with blockchain and crypto — may hold the key to revolutionizing the future of science by bootstrapping new blockchain-based funding models and making research more accessible.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Joshua Bate, the founder of DeSci World, said DeSci is a much-needed “update” to the broken software of trad science, which he says has become crippled by pointless incentives, including gatekept data, regulatory capture and corporate greed.
Bate said DeSci can be thought of as an extension of the “open science movement” — an initiative of researchers sharing data and publishing open research that began as far back as the 1600s.
The problem with open science is that it was never economically viable, but DeSci changes this by allowing researchers to bootstrap new types of funding, create more accessible research and publishing opportunities, decrease costs, and drum up interest in new or dormant fields of science.
Bate said one of the biggest innovations to come out of DeSci was the intellectual property non-fungible token (IP NFT), which has been largely pioneered by a firm called Molecule.
“The IP NFT is a way to take a research task and monetize it by crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, the research grant. Then the researcher agrees to have their IP split among all the people that provided the money,” said Bate.
“If the research becomes something productive, then there’s an IP which is split amongst all of the initial funding providers.”
This new funding model could be a way of seeing a major uptick in both scientific “replication”— re-doing research into areas deemed unprofitable by regular science — and pioneering new studies into topics that aren’t receiving funding.
Molecule — one of the largest DeSci incubators — has gone in heavy on the new field, pummeling $30 million across 29 new projects aimed at solving problems on the “fringe” of traditional science — including longevity research all the way to finding a cure for baldness.
DeSci: A cure for baldness?
HairDAO is one example of a DeSci organization breaking into “fringe” science by going after the ever-elusive cure for hair loss.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, HairDAO co-founder Andrew Bakst said because hair loss is deemed a “cosmetic condition” by government agencies, it receives next to no funding.
As a result, the labs that already conduct hair loss research can’t scale and the field has difficulty attracting high-quality researchers.
Both Bate and Bakst say the next major advantage DeSci offers over traditional science is the ability to make research more accessible and attract researchers of all different stripes.
“The best hair loss researchers are anons in our Discord server,” said Bakst.
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“Our organizational structure and community allow us to generate valuable IP at a rate much faster than the old system, which is both siloed and stagnant. We already have two patents, and expect that number to rise exponentially.”
This kind of structure, which allows anyone to participate in serious research, echoes what Bate described as the most critical part of the DeSci movement, i.e. access.
“The thing that I’m most excited about is access, which is how can we use decentralized systems, permissionless systems to allow people to contribute to science that typically was left on the outside.”
Bakst added that HairDAO had just launched its laboratory in Soho, New York, and plans to launch its first patented treatment by early December.
HairDAO — which is funded by Molecule — already boasts $3.3 million in its treasury. It recently launched its native HAIR token to add further layers of financialization for investors and governance.
Blockchains make science better
But DeSci isn’t just about using crypto to bootstrap potentially profitable funding.
Bate says blockchain technology can overhaul other areas of science that fall short of what’s required for real innovation, including new ways to publish research and fix “broken” peer-review models.
“Another core pillar of DeSci is decentralized, permissionless publishing. You can create an academic paper and publish it in a journal that doesn’t require you to pay $15,000 like Nature does. Essentially, you can publish your research in journals that let people read for free.”
This feeds into a new, incentivized peer-review model, which Bate says is already being spearheaded by a project called ResearchCoin.
“So ResearchCoin already does this does the incentivizing of peer review and publishing by attaching novel reputation mechanisms to publishing and funding data.”
“This would look like a series of questions such as: ‘Have you funded a project? Have you published a paper? Have you contributed to this field? Did you provide some data?’ A record of all these queries can provide a new version of a reputation system.”
Memecoins for science?
Another strange facet of the DeSci movement is bootstrapping the viral trend of memecoins to provide funding for new projects.
The DeSci memecoin hybrid platform Pump.science, allows DeSci projects to launch “longevity experiments” associated with specific drugs and chemical compounds.
“To fund the experiment for a particular intervention, drug devs launch a token, which represents fractional rights to the cocktail, and is sold to pay for the experiments,” the Pump.science white paper said.
DeSci is just getting started
But Bate says there are still some significant roadblocks to the growth of DeSci, namely the industry’s reputation and the fringe nature of blockchain tech in the wider scientific community.
“Most scientists don’t know what Web3 is and they don’t really have much desire to make a wallet or trade an asset.”
“They will if we make it exciting for them to do, but right now, the accessibility and UX of Web3 is a barrier to entry but that’s the same for all of crypto, too.”
He also noted that having speculative assets tied to scientific research acts like a double-edged sword.
“We have the speculative environment, which is on the one hand, very good for some science, and on the other hand, not really what a lot of other scientists want to be involved with. A speculative environment can be pretty damaging for reputation.”
Bate hammered home the point that DeSci is still very much in its early stages. He said that while speculative initiatives like Pump.science are all good fun for now, it’s not a true reflection of what is rapidly becoming a truly legitimate industry of high-level research and inquiry.
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“I see all science being conducted with some kind of attestation to the blockchain, your data being timestamped, your contributions to the scientific ledger being attached to some kind of identity with a lot of crypto assets being used in the process for trading the IP, funding or accessing data.”
Overall, Bate says the goal is to move far beyond speculation and create a new era of public infrastructure that makes science more accessible and better incentivized to create real breakthroughs.
“I don’t see a world where DeSci is not the dominant scientific interface in five years' time.”