Author: Sihan, CloudY
Editors: Vincero, YL, DoctorStrange
Review: Crystal
Abstract: In our previous article introducing DeSci, we introduced the development history of DeSci and even the entire natural science in detail from a relatively macro perspective, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and then to the current Web3.0 revolution. It can be said that although DeSci in a narrow sense started from the recent Web3.0 revolution, the broad DeSci movement and spirit have been deeply rooted in the heart of human civilization since the birth of natural science. We believe that the DeSci movement is a great social experiment based on blockchain technology and the Web3.0 industry, which has the potential to change the underlying architecture of the entire natural science. This article will start from several of the most representative DeSci projects at present, and explain what we think is the origin and future of the DeSci movement from a more concrete and concise perspective.
1. Problems Solved by DeSci
1. Funding issues
Traditional scientific research seeks research funding and resources in a centralized way, such as the National Natural Science Foundation. This makes the centralized research method have a lot of problems in the funding application process, such as a few academic cliques controlling and monopolizing the entire funding application; secondly, the entire funding application process is lengthy and inefficient. Taking China as an example, the domestic funding cycle often starts from the beginning of the year to write applications, and ends at the end of the year to complete and review. A lot of time is spent on application procedures and assessment processes. In addition, there are also considerable problems in the assessment and approval process: For example, there is a lack of a comprehensive and efficient approval mechanism for scientific research projects. Often, when a project applies for scientific research funding, the progress has exceeded half, and it is difficult for scientific research funds to be implemented in the areas where scientific research is really needed; secondly, the review mechanism is single. For example, in the current centralized scientific research funding review, journal articles and patent publications are important reference points for reviewing centralized scientific research funds. Based on this, the publication of journal articles and patents has become a rigid demand, and even some scientific research magazines have formed an industrial chain with clear prices. This single and unreasonable review mechanism has led to the gradual utilitarianization of journal articles and deviated from the original intention of scientific research. Furthermore, due to the deterioration of the overall environment, such as economic deterioration and environmental protection reasons, the overall scientific research funding has gradually decreased, and the problem of scientific research funding has become increasingly serious.
2. Establish a more open and fair environment to confirm the ownership of scientific research results
In the scientific research circle, there is often an irrational allocation of resources and factors. There is redundancy, waste and even serious internal friction in scientific research resources and personnel. DeSci, which is based on blockchain technology, can optimize the allocation of resources and factors to a certain extent due to the characteristics of open and transparent data that cannot be changed, and help scientific researchers to confirm their rights to a certain extent, which will help optimize the entire scientific research environment and promote the birth of results.
3. Eliminate the monopoly of centralized institutions
As mentioned above, since ancient times, the right to speak in the scientific research industry has often been in the hands of centralized funds or authoritative journals. There have even been academic monopolies such as "academic cliques" and academic "gangsters". For a long time, there has been a situation of measuring academic achievements with opaque and unfair standards, and even controlling the academic circle. DeSci, based on blockchain technology, delegates the right to review and speak in a decentralized manner, which will not only help eliminate the monopoly of centralized institutions and reduce the phenomenon of centralized evil, but will also be conducive to the optimal allocation of resources and promote cooperation and development between the scientific research industry and all walks of life.
4. Promote the citizen science movement
Citizen Science, also known as citizen science, describes the cooperative relationship between the public and professional scientists. Generally, citizen science refers to projects in which members of the public participate in collecting, classifying, recording or analyzing scientific data. The "public" includes non-professional scientists, science enthusiasts and volunteers. Citizen science projects are generally initiated by scientists, who invite the public to participate and carry them out together. There are also projects planned and initiated by the public, and then scientists are invited as technical guides. This movement aims to call on the entire society to participate in research and reasonably allocate social resources. This movement coincides with the spirit of Web3.0. The blockchain-based DeSci technology will have the possibility of providing technology for this movement. In any case, DeSci will promote the popularization and universalization of scientific research movements from a general perspective, which will promote the development of the entire scientific research industry.
2. Representative DeSci Concept Projects
In this section, several DeSci projects that I think are more representative are selected. The dimensions of the selection are: project ecology (market value, financing history, functionality, importance, number of partners and incubation projects, and overall industry status, etc.), project influence (daily activity, social media popularity, etc.), project update frequency, project launch time, team situation, etc. At present, WIKI has included a relatively complete DeSci ecology (as shown below). The entire DeSci track is still in a very early stage. In the current DeSci ecological map, DAO is the most prosperous, which should be because DAO is to solve the biggest and most urgent financing problem that DeSci needs to face. The second is also a sector that focuses on decentralized financing, and then the publishing and paper literature review platform concept to solve the pain point of peer review, which is the second biggest problem of DeSci. Other combination concepts such as NFT are still in a relatively wild and early state. Among the current DeSci projects, the most tend to be in the biological track, which may be due to the large number of scientific research biological directions themselves and the recent epidemic factors. The general public's attention to biological science has increased.
This section selects some representative projects for analysis and discussion from literature publication and peer review, DAO concept and the underlying infrastructure of this track. Among them, Molecule Ecosystem has the most complete DAO concept and ecological underlying infrastructure, and has the greatest influence. The author recommends that interested readers can learn about it from this project.
DeSci Ecosystem Panorama:
1. Ants-Review: Bounty-like open anonymous scientific industry peer review system
Ants-Review comes from the ETHTurin 2020 hackathon and was submitted by the MetaBounty team. The Ants-Review project won the first prize of the hackathon at that time. And received investment from the University of Turin, Gitcoin, and the Ethereum Foundation. (ETHTurin is the first Italian hackathon in the Ethereum community, where hackers can develop Ethereum-based blockchain applications to address local impacts and sustainable development goals).
Peer review is an essential quality control step for scientific publications. In order to solve the problems of expensive, inefficient and centralized peer review of scientific publications, Ants-Review proposes a blockchain-based incentive protocol to reward scientists for their contributions to the work of other scientists and establish a reputation system. The AntsReview protocol allows any author to make a request for peer review of their scientific publications, and the anonymity of the reviewers will be maintained during the review process. It is worth mentioning that the naming of Ant in Ants-Review comes from the founder's belief that the work behind a scientific paper is similar to an organism as complex as an anthill, which is the sum of many tiny individuals: in this sum, all contributions (even if as small as ants) are essential to the whole and deserve recognition.
Ants-Review even creatively proposed the PoC concept (Proof of Concept): During the review process, the reviews that meet the requirements of the Ants-Review smart contract are reviewed by external editors, and the external editors verify the content. If the review is accepted by the author, the reviewer will be able to obtain ANT tokens issued by Ants-Review. The ANT token is in ERC20 format, and the smart contract is written in Solidity language.
The Ants-Review project is still in its early stages, and there are still some key issues to be resolved (such as how to determine the qualifications for peer review; how to avoid deliberate evil; how to avoid cheating, etc.), but the Ants-Review protocol still shows how DeSci in Web3.0 can establish an initial economic incentive model. In the future, Ants-Review will issue ANT Tokens, and add a zero-knowledge proof protocol to Ants-Review to achieve anonymous peer review. It will also add personal DID functions to form personal reputation and integrate DEFI. The modular protocol allows for expansion and improvement of logic, etc.
2. Molecule: Decentralized biotechnology underlying protocol
The Molecule Project is a fundraising platform for biotechnology research. Currently, about 40 scientists are looking for funding for their projects on the site. Anyone can donate and support important discoveries in the future. At the beginning of its creation, Molecule was inspired by the citizen science movement and the openness of drug development. The original idea came from the patient community and aimed to cross the death valley between theoretical and clinical research. The original idea of the project was to use blockchain tools to help advance and fund early drug development. To this end, Molecule made several decisions that have promoted the development of the DeSci field, including the conception of intellectual property NFTs, intellectual property-related NFTs (drugs or research-based intellectual property), and the launch of the VitaDAO community to fund longevity research.
Molecule is built on Ethereum and consists of two layers, Molecule Discovery and Molecule Finance, which can create a vibrant ecosystem for decentralized modular drug development.
Molecule Discovery: On Molecule Discovery, information about biopharmaceutical assets is publicly available. That is, researchers can make their biopharmaceutical assets (generally including data and pre-applied patents) visible to users worldwide and interact with potential funders. The platform allows them to list detailed information about their projects, and interested investors can discover and follow projects in their areas of interest, and negotiate cooperation with the research team for further interaction.
Molecule Finance: Enabling modular drug development by creating virtual funds and collaborative environments. NFT assets can be transferred to automated market makers to raise funds, or inserted into DAOs that manage portfolios for specific disease treatment verticals. These structures are almost equivalent to biopharmaceutical startups or holding companies composed of various global stakeholders, funders, and researchers, but the difference is that the actual governance rights will be fully distributed to the community.
IP-NFT：
Molecule's novel approach of using Intellectual Property NFTs (IP-NFTs) enables anyone to share ownership of research projects and future results, such as intellectual property, royalties, data, and more. IP-NFTs developed by Molecule are mainly composed of two major contracts: legal contracts and smart contracts. They intersect and interact with each other. The legal contract is an IP license, and its language references blockchain transactions, addresses, and signatures. A smart contract is an NFT whose code references the IP license agreement and is stored on a decentralized file storage network after mixing it with certain data components. When the two are combined, IP-NFT is formed. IP-NFT is a completely new mechanism for managing intellectual property using distributed ledger technology. The goal of IP-NFT is to enable the financing, ownership, and trading of IP in an open and distributed market, while retaining the privacy and development potential associated with unregistered IP.
IP-NFTs represent fully legal intellectual property rights and data access control rights for biopharmaceutical research. But more importantly, they also represent the pioneer of a whole new asset class - virtualized IP-based NFTs. It can be said that in this regard, Molecule is a pioneer in NFTing property rights and related information data.
With IP-NFTs, fundraisers, biomedical researchers, and biotech companies can:
(1) No need to apply for patents early or create a startup to raise funds
(2) Directly engage with stakeholder groups such as patients, collaborate with other researchers to promote open science, and gain attention through the public market
(3) Collaborative research tasks using data access control
(4) Create and implement market financing/monetization strategies
Molecule website architecture
About Molecule Ecosystem:
Molecule is built on a modular open stack, using various DeFi (Balancer, Gnosis) and governance components (The LAO, Moloch) and legal frameworks (OpenLaw) to build its own ecosystem. In addition to the above functions, Molecule Discovery can also perform asset procurement, asset evaluation, and includes infrastructure such as clinical data hosting. Molecule is not limited to the basic functions of its own website, but has established a complete and huge ecosystem that enables patient collectives and drug development DAOs to hold, govern and interact with real-world IP through NFTs. Coupled with innovations in IP-NFT (for example, by integrating NFTs into decentralized auction systems and funding frameworks in AMMs such as Balancer, Uniswap or Sushi), some people think that Molecule is more like the OpenSea of the DeSci track, but in my opinion, in the macro sense, Molecule insists on seeding new DAOs and its DeSci projects, including VITA DAO (the first biotech DAO), ValleyDAO, AthenaDAO, HairDAO, etc., which not only helps promote funding for early drug development, but also helps the development of DeSci from the front and middle ends, such as building DeSci track infrastructure such as bio.xyz (DAO's launchpad). Molecule's ecology is gradually improving and has a grand layout. We have reason to believe that Molecule will become a leading project in the DeSci concept in the future.
On June 13 this year, Molecule completed a $13 million seed round of financing, led by Northpond Ventures, with participation from Backed VC, Shine Capital, Speedinvest, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. On September 1 this year, Pfizer announced that it had reached a strategic partnership with the decentralized longevity research organization VitaDAO and invested $500,000 in it for new drug research and development projects to extend lifespan.
3. VitaDAO
VitaDAO is Molecule's most prominent community-managed and decentralized drug development DAO collective. It is also the world's first biotech DAO. VitaDAO's core mission is to accelerate R&D in the longevity space and extend human lifespan and healthspan. To achieve this goal and align incentives and activate early funding for longevity biopharmaceuticals, VitaDAO combines a novel governance framework and financial engineering tools such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), NFTs, and algorithmic automated market makers (AMMs) running on the Ethereum blockchain, and co-funds and digitizes research in the form of IP NFTs.
VitaDAO Ecosystem
VitaDAO issued an equal number of tokens based on the number of seconds of life of the longest-lived person in human history. And promised that if the human lifespan limit can exceed this record, they will issue more tokens based on the new record. The token VITA can be obtained by contributing work, funds or other resources (such as data and IP) to VitaDAO. Ownership of VITA allows holders to participate in the democratic governance of VitaDAO, guide its research, access and profit from its data repository, and manage its IP portfolio.
VITA does not grant ownership of IP but full governance, and is designed to follow the principle of a sustainable cycle, whereby as R&D projects receive funding and begin to generate data, the value of VitaDAO's IP grows with positive research results. Successful commercialization requires the growth of the VitaDAO ecosystem and greater availability of funding. This in turn attracts higher quality IP, which in turn funds more projects and further grows the VitaDAO ecosystem.
Members of the public can join VitaDAO by contributing money, work, or valuable research data or IP assets and manage their IP through VITA tokens. VITA tokens enable their holders to participate in the decision-making and governance of VitaDAO research, express support for specific initiatives, and manage its data repository and IP portfolio.
VitaDAO will acquire and commission research, as well as own, develop and monetize the resulting intellectual property assets. VITADAO’s product portfolio includes:
(1) NFTs representing intellectual property, patents, and licenses for therapeutic research projects.
(2) Data assets generated around its research projects and NFT-funded R&D.
In order to fund more research and provide long-term funding for DAO operations, there are multiple options to monetize the data and IP owned. The final ownership of the property IP is negotiable, and currently most of it belongs to VitaDAO, and a small part belongs to the author and initiator.
So far, more than 200 DeSci projects have raised funds through Vita DAO, with a total amount of more than 3 million US dollars.
On August 30, Pfizer announced that it had reached a strategic partnership with the decentralized longevity research organization VitaDAO and would invest $500,000 in it for new drug research and development projects to extend lifespan.
4. LabDAO is a DAO organization dedicated to DeSci basic tools and facilities
LabDAO is a community of scientists and engineers working together to share open tools for life science research. The community's mission is to accelerate progress in the life sciences by making computational and scientific tools accessible to all of its members.
LabDAO hopes to live in a world that can unleash the potential of individuals to develop technology, so that researchers and organizations can conduct research without being limited by funding, hardware, software, and infrastructure. The tools co-built by LabDAO are designed to lower the barriers for inventors to raise funds, develop technology, and share technology in a barrier-free manner.
Over the past 20 years, open source code has accelerated advances in information technology. This success has been made possible by the ability to share code at low cost and reproduce results with high reliability. Furthermore, the sharing of code has been accelerated by technology market dynamics where intellectual property is less relevant to time to market and trade secrets associated with implementation. In contrast, open source in biomedicine has been less transformative. The high cost of replicating life science processes and the low reliability of generating expected results have been barriers to open source market dynamics. Furthermore, the directive to share is hampered by intellectual property and trade secrets, which are the primary means of fending off competitors during lengthy regulatory approval processes.
To accelerate this process, LabDAO has developed tools such as Openlab, which enables scientists to share their professional tools and services with each other.
About Openlab:
Openlab enables scientists to exchange tools and services without restriction in the global market, instead of looking for collaborators or contract research organizations for a long time. As an important underlying infrastructure of DeSci, Openlab enables every biotechnology scientist, graduate student, postdoctoral fellow and professor to become an independent inventor or entrepreneur.
Just as Amazon Web Services has reduced the cost of starting a new technology company, LabDAO believes that the emergence of Openlab infrastructure can stimulate the growth of new biotech companies like DeSci. Currently, many laboratory services within biotech companies require high capital expenditures, professional services for the use and control of these equipment, and effective pricing mechanisms for these equipment and use. The emergence of Openlab allows researchers and institutions to trade various laboratory functions and services without licensing agreements to address these limitations. At the same time, the addition of the DAO concept and token incentive mechanism will ensure that the benefits of this market can be fed back to the community and the market.
The Openlab protocol and its community LabDAO solve the above problems in biomedicine:
(1) By creating an open market between experiment designers and performers for performing biomedical experiments
(2) Improve reproducibility and transparency by defining standards around biomedical tools and establishing effective pricing mechanisms
(3) By incentivizing contributors to develop applications or provide instruments/functions
Payments on Openlab can be in the form of shared IP (ownership is the new co-author) or other tokens. Openlab enables a shift from a centralized market with opaque researchers and isolated research institutions to an open peer-to-peer market for laboratory services. Most of the fees generated by the exchange flow back into the open source development of life science tools within the ecosystem.
At the same time, LabDAO will use three mechanisms to ensure the quality of service for transactions within its community:
(1) Funds paid for a transaction will be held in escrow until the user has reviewed the results of the purchased service. If a conflict arises, an independent arbitration service can be requested to resolve it.
(2) Participants in the Openlab Exchange are required to stake $LAB tokens proportional to the transaction value they provide and consume. In the event of fraudulent behavior, staked $LAB tokens can be destroyed by the community.
(3) The community is maintaining a list of trusted service providers participating in the exchange. On-chain transaction records serve as the basis for user experience ratings.
The long-term benefits of LabDAO can be divided into three points:
(1) Introducing the Openlab Marketplace to reduce barriers to access biomedical tools and services.
(2) The growth of transactions and the potential for conflict around service specifications will lead to the emergence of community-driven unified standards for services and tools.
(3) The on-chain record of transactions, including metadata and data assets, will serve as a dynamically evolving knowledge graph - a global laboratory notebook.
LabDAO plans to issue its own governance token $LAB in the future, and all users holding this token are LabDAO members. Tokens can be obtained by contributing to open source tools, maintenance of the LabDAO community, or by using services on the Openlab exchange.
Bio.xyz: Accelerates the next generation of science using capital, talent, and resources to build the future biotech DAO and a launchpad for the DeSci project’s DAO.
Bio.xyz is a DAO organization launch platform incubated by Molecule, providing one-stop supporting services including operations, technology, infrastructure, professional advice, etc. Since 2018, Bio.xyz has incubated and accelerated the first biotech DAO: VitaDAO, which funded $2.5 million worth of longevity research and created core DeSci infrastructure such as the IP-NFT framework, laying the foundation for the emergence of the next generation of builders in the DeSci field. Bio.xyz can provide direct support services and funds to various DeSci DAO organizations, and work with DAO organizations to build the future of DeSci.
Bio.xyz is also a biotech DAO accelerator and DeSci meta-governance layer, bio.xyz funds and supports the builders of future decentralized science through DAO work in a range of therapeutic areas and infrastructure projects. Bio.xyz provides a launch platform, resources, guidance, a shared network, and a set of legal and smart contracts for the DeSci DAO. Our goal is to enable the DeSci DAO to use IP NFTs to fund, manage and develop the intellectual property of universities, companies, and researchers around the world, thereby driving the explosive growth of bioscience.
Bio.xyz is offering $100,000 worth of on-chain redeemable grants to a multi-signature wallet on Ethereum for the Biotech and DeSci DAOs. The multi-signature Gnosis Safe is controlled by the DAO founding team members and bio.xyz members. Every 45 days, 1/3 of the grants are automatically released once the DAO meets pre-set conditions set at the time of grant. A portion of the DAO grants are converted into token warrants, which are part of the DAO governance token issued by bio.xyz. Members of Bio.xyz vote in the DAO and help ensure that ownership of the DAO is decentralized from the ground up. Bio.xyz will provide funding, regulatory support, technical support, and more to the new DAO organization.
6. Research Hub is an open community dedicated to advancing scientific research results
Research Hub is a community of people who recognize that the world needs a new way to create and disseminate scientific knowledge. I envision Research Hub building a modern infrastructure for the academic community: eliminating inefficiencies; removing barriers to participation in scientific research as much as possible; creating incentives to encourage collaboration; and emphasizing the dissemination of science to all audiences. To fulfill the mission of Research Hub and realize this vision, the Research Hub team will be guided by these values: always acting in the best interests of the scientific community; constantly seeking truth; seeking self-awareness; adhering to openness, freedom and responsibility; and boldly exploring and learning from mistakes.
The goal of Research Hub is to make a modern, portable web3 application where people can collaborate on scientific research in a more efficient way, becoming the GitHub of the scientific community. Researchers can upload articles (preprints or postprints) in PDF format, summarize the findings of their work in an attached wiki, and discuss these findings and share results in a completely open and accessible forum.
To help Research Hubs come together and incentivize contributions to the platform, Research Hub has created a unique incentive mechanism: Research Hub has created a new ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC). RSC will be used to reward users for uploading new content to the platform, as well as for summarizing and discussing research. Token rewards are proportional to the community's value judgment of these actions - and these will be measured by voting. ResearchCoin is also associated with reputation on the platform - reputation will affect the user's ResearchCoin income. Reputation will also be associated with certain privileges in the application and the audit mechanism within the community. At present, RSC is the core token and underlying reward material of Research Hub, but the platform reputation can directly affect the acquisition of RSC and support the stable operation and development of the platform in the long run, so on-chain reputation is the core function that Research Hub wants to build.
7. The Science Dao: A decentralized idea lab, incubator, and accelerator platform designed to facilitate collaboration and funding among inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientific institutions across a broad range of technology and life sciences.
The Science DAO is a decentralized science community incubated by YASHA DAO, with the goal of bringing cutting-edge technology to the public and promoting scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of society and humanity. The ultimate goal is to build a complete DAO for science. The Science DAO will create a platform for the world's geniuses to realize their dreams. The Science DAO will be open to interested participants in the market. However, the main group of target participants will be scientific foundations, institutions, and universities. The DAO aims to bring these institutions together, promote growth and bring emerging technologies to the public. In response, the team will focus on business development and strive to build the world's largest decentralized scientific think tank.
Each project created will create a series of NFTs to conduct the fundraising activity. We collectively refer to this type of behavior as INO (Initial NFT Offering). NFT public offerings will provide funds for the proposed projects. NFT will provide investors with the opportunity to invest in the product early. Ninety percent of the funds raised from NFT sales will be obtained by the fundraising project, and the remaining ten percent will return to The Science DAO as a reserve fund. There is a six percent royalty set in NFT transactions, of which four percent belongs to the project party and two percent to the community.
Fundraising through INO is quite innovative. Compared with FT, the characteristics of NFT itself will be more suitable for differentiating different projects on the platform while ensuring investors, and royalties can also continue to inject blood into the project. But on the other hand, this also increases the threshold for investors, reduces asset liquidity, and also increases the burden on investors.
As of March 2022, the total market value of the DeSci project raised on The Science Dao has exceeded US$300 million, and the number of users has exceeded 30,000.
THRY TOKEN (total 1 billion) will serve as the governance TOKEN in the entire The Science DAO ecosystem. TOKEN holders will have voting rights on the entire project decision and have the right to know, participate in and supervise the entire project process.
3. Outlook on the possible future development path of DeSci
Based on the analysis of the current status of the DeSci movement and the current applications of blockchain, we have come up with the following future development directions and specific application plans for DeSci: intellectual property rights confirmation: academic reputation system; resource redistribution: behavioral incentive mechanism; data storage, encryption and sharing: data transfer center.
1. Intellectual Property Rights Confirmation: Academic Reputation System
The current confirmation of academic articles and patents and the subsequent transfer of copyright fees are in line with the transparent and tamper-proof characteristics of blockchain, and there are relatively mature NFT-based copyright confirmation and royalty transfer solutions. At the same time, on-chain social graphs and reputation systems based on user interaction behaviors, such as CyberConnect and ProjectGalaxy, are also developing rapidly. Therefore, we provide an application solution for it:
First of all, all addresses can authenticate their identities by uploading off-chain identity certificates and obtain a new standard Soulbound Token (SBT) as a certificate, thereby binding the address to the personal identity to achieve synchronization of on-chain and off-chain reputations. Based on this identity SBT, we can establish an academic reputation system: in this system, all academic interactions will obtain relevant academic SBT credentials, which can also be updated. The identity SBT of an address will be updated based on the update of the academic SBT credentials owned by the address. Therefore, other projects in the ecosystem only need to read the SBT to understand the academic achievements of the corresponding author, rather than obtaining all the academic credentials of the account. In fact, not only academic articles, but any knowledge output can follow this logic.
Taking academic article publication as an example, users who publish academic articles on the chain can obtain a corresponding NFT to confirm the ownership and an SBT to record. At the same time, the editors responsible for the article publication process, the reviewers, recommenders, investors, and even data collectors will obtain a corresponding SBT to record their relevance, and the author of the article can also set the NFT royalty distribution or any other profit distribution, such as the bonus dividend of the award. Each article will be reflected in the identity SBT, so it will be recognized by the reputation platform and given a corresponding score to give value to the behavior. In addition, every act of citing the article will be reflected in the SBT of the article and the related contribution SBT to prove the change of the holder's influence, and then establish the academic relationship map of each person. Due to the personalization of Web3 data and the transparency of blockchain, this will change the current situation of the cumbersome process and uneven distribution of benefits from the creation to the publication of traditional academic articles, decentralize each link, but clarify the role of each participant.
When the academic reputation of an address is established, users can conduct financial operations through SBT or an academic NFT certificate. For example, users can conduct credit lending based on their own SBT, use their academic reputation as a credit basis to obtain unsecured loans, or pledge their academic NFTs, use the NFT's own value and future royalties or profit dividends as endorsements, and lend circulating assets. To be more conservative, the mortgage rate of user funds can also be increased based on user reputation or academic NFTs. In addition, users can also split NFT rights in equal proportions through NFT fragmentation, and use this as a equity certificate for fundraising. Commercial behaviors such as leasing or buying out intellectual property rights can also be decentralized through smart contracts and NFTs, avoiding overbearing terms such as CNKI that seriously infringe on authors.
2. Resource reallocation: behavioral incentive mechanism
This solution aims to solve the problem of uneven resource allocation in academic research. The resource is not necessarily money, equipment or interpersonal relationships, but can also be environmental resources, climate conditions, cultural heritage, etc. Drawing on the current long-tail asset market solution, we can build a resource redistribution platform, which is a project fundraising platform like PartyBid to provide funds for academic research, and in exchange for fragmented NFTs as proof of equity; it is also a task publishing platform like Keep3r that seeks help with tokens or other resources as rewards, and conducts a distributed research on a Topic in the form of SubDAO; in addition, it is a peer incentive evaluation and scoring platform like Abacus, which uses a reputation system to use a multi-node evaluation method to ensure fairness and incentives. Therefore, we designed a prototype for it:
The functions of the platform are divided into three parts: fundraising, cooperation and evaluation. The key to this platform is to combine the three parts with the incentive and reputation system to realize the value of public goods and the short-term benefits of long-term things.
Specifically, anyone can start fundraising on the platform, and the funds raised will be locked in the platform. Fundraisers apply for the use of funds in the form of proposals, and investors vote to decide whether to reject them. When the number of fundraisers who choose not to pass exceeds 10% of the total number of fundraisers, a formal vote will be held, otherwise it will be directly passed. The fundraiser will distribute the NFT of its output to investors in the form of fragmented or ERC-1155 standard NFTs as compensation, granting them partial ownership and dividend rights, and additional rights such as usage rights and commercialization can be attached. In particular, a certain proportion of the income generated by investors' commercialization will also flow back to the NFT of the work, rather than casting a wide net to profit from the output of others once and for all. In this way, both contributors and investors can benefit.
The cooperation model is just like the current Wikipedia, where everyone works together to complete a project, but all contributors can get rewards that match their contributions, which will define each contributor and price the output of public goods. For example, a team in Singapore studies the correlation between the growth rate of a certain mangrove and water quality and ocean currents. Due to the geographical restrictions of Singapore, the study needs to study mangroves in other regions, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. If the team chooses to conduct field investigations on its own, it not only needs to solve problems such as compliance, but also needs to consider time and manpower. Therefore, the team can publish cooperation needs on this platform and provide corresponding rewards (Token, legal currency, NFT fragments of this article, etc.), which will provide certain financial support for local mangrove protection, thereby producing a positive effect. As a large-scale project, it will inevitably be decomposed into several small projects, which will then be completed by different doctoral students, graduate students, and even undergraduates. When such a decomposition is no longer restricted by geography and national regions, the feasibility and completion efficiency of the entire project will rise sharply, and at the same time, the research resources of high-quality colleges can be shared with relatively backward research teams in other regions, driving their academic development.
Peer evaluation draws on the current NFTFi solution, using multiple nodes to pledge tokens for joint evaluation, and achieving efficient and fair evaluation through incentives and penalties. Similar to Abacus, multiple evaluation nodes need to pledge a corresponding number of tokens as the cost of committing evil, and score and evaluate the same work. The score will be weighted according to each person's reputation. The evaluation node with a relatively consistent final score will receive incentives provided by the evaluation applicant. The entire process is supervised by the questioner. Once malicious scoring or witch attack is found, the evaluation can be restarted and the tokens confiscated by the evildoer will be obtained as incentives. In addition, in order to facilitate the entire matching process, there will be a role like a traditional editor to match the evaluation nodes and applicants. Let's call him a curator. When the work is scored successfully, they will receive part of the applicant's incentive. Since the perception of the work changes in real time and the value of the work can be continuously generated, the entire scoring process can be continued. After each round of scoring settlement, the applicant can apply for additional evaluation with additional incentives, and the evaluation node can change its score by staking additional tokens. At this time, other nodes can also be invited to perform additional scoring.
3. Data storage, encryption and sharing: data transfer center
The storage of academic data has always been a problem. The loss of key data will lead to the failure of the entire project, so a reliable storage device with backup is needed. However, once confidential data is leaked, the project will be plagiarized or stolen, which will also stop the project. However, most data needs to be shared in a timely manner and its authenticity can be verified, which forms an impossible triangle. However, the current blockchain technology has ready-made mature solutions that can be borrowed, namely IPFS, ZK and query/API. These three technologies can break data silos, ensure data security and synchronize data in real time to verify authenticity.
The data transfer center based on IPFS, ZK and API is a resource integration platform. It does not actually build services, so it does not host user data. Instead, it finds suitable decentralized data storage services for users and collects storage fees according to user needs. All data will be encrypted to ensure privacy, and data verification is achieved through zk technology. Since all test data will be uploaded in real time, non-confidential data can be shared with users in need in a timely manner. The data API/query access threshold can be set by the data owner to achieve data-based profits. More importantly, the authenticity and uniqueness of the data itself can be guaranteed by the characteristics of the blockchain, and the complete original data also makes data review and experimental reproduction simpler and more reliable.
DeSci Ecosystem:
When the three solutions are integrated, a comprehensive DeSci ecological network will be established. The data transfer center builds an essential infrastructure for the ecosystem to solve the most fundamental data problems, ensure data security, and break the information asymmetry. When all information is transparent, a free market can be established. The reputation system provides motivation for participants, recording the contribution of each participant and giving it value. This not only makes everyone's contribution transparent, but also protects intellectual property rights. When all efforts can be witnessed, the entire ecosystem can develop positively. Most importantly, the behavioral incentive mechanism enables the redistribution of resources throughout the ecosystem, allowing everyone to take what they need and maximize the utilization of each resource. This is the key to the sustainable operation of the DeSci ecosystem and the essence of Web3. Everyone can control their own personal resources and gain benefits based on them.
For example, the graduation project done by the researcher following the tutor's doctoral student is a sub-project of a research that won the Nobel Prize in the future, or it simply provided some data for it. But many years after graduation, the researcher at that time can still get a negligible reward for this, but it comes from the Nobel Prize, and the record of the researcher's participation in the Nobel Prize research will exist forever. The researcher can even get an additional low-interest loan from the bank. Another example may be that someone casually wrote part of a Wikipedia entry based on his or her expertise in his or her field. Later, the number of visits to the entry surged, and a large number of users paid for it, and a large part of it automatically flowed into the NFT owned by TA. This is all due to the long-term preservation of data, the existence of a reputation system and incentive mechanism.
Such an environment is the soil for DeSci to survive, and only in this way can the flower called "Master" bloom and the fruit that can change the development of the world be produced.
Source:
https://antsreview.substack.com/
https://www.molecule.to/
Decentralized science platform Molecule raises $13 million in seed funding
https://medium.com/molecule-blog/an-open-bazaar-for-drug-development-molecule-protocol-a47978dd914
https://docs.molecule.to/documentation/introduction/what-is-molecule
http://news.sohu.com/a/581723085_121124375
https://www.vitadao.com/
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1742820648865536500&wfr=spider&for=pc
https://www.vitadao.com/blog
https://docs.labdao.xyz/
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https://thesciencedao.io/investing
https://www.researchhub.com/
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https://www.partybid.app/
https://keep3r.network/
