Why DeSci? The purpose and impact of decentralized science

Transcript

[Music] Hello everyone. Um, so I'm going to speak about decentralized science. Maybe just for show of hands who who has heard of decentralized science or knows what it is. Okay. So maybe half. Um, yeah. So decentralized science, DI for short, kind of means um kind of the intersection of crypto and science. and um I'll going to speak about kind of the purpose and impact of decentralized science kind of the high level ideas but also where it stands today. Um yeah and for context I'm I've helped create um vita which maybe some know and um

running the ecosystem at molecule. So I'll start in the first uh part on uh why DAI and what does DAI look like in practice, how does it work and kind of hopes for the future what the ultimate goal is for DAI because it's quite a young movement that I think really only took shape in the last two years. Perfect. So maybe as a starting point kind of um it's a presumption that uh kind of science is the ultimate engine of human progress like I think we wouldn't have crypto we wouldn't have modern cities or anything for that matter I think without science. So I think um this chart is illustrating this well kind of like uh the scientific revolution and scientific progress kind of kicked us off into the modern age and

I think um we can reach the uh flying cars and and everything as well with science. So I think it's quite important and something that also Ethereum should uh enable and and plug in with. So um kind of there there's of course like the scientific method which um is at the core of how we do science and I think also relates even to things like protocol development and other things um starting with observation and question and really resolving this um with a scientific method like testing hypothesis with experiments and an analyzing those and drawing conclusions.

The problem is of course that science as like we know it today is pretty broken and has like a lot of problems that I think uh Ethereum can um help with and and crypto more broadly. So one of the main problems um goes in the direction of funding which is ex insanely centralized and mainly around government bodies like uh the US and EU with like bodies like the NIH which predominantly um for example the NIH uh funds mainly uh old people like the amount of funding going to under 35 year olds is less than 2%. So it's quite um uh like bureaucratic and slowmoving uh institution and um a lot of those centralized funding bodies take months

sometimes many years to uh get back to you to your application and they usually don't fund you especially not for moonshot uh really impactful ideas. So um there's a lot of problem around funding and I think that's something we're actually uh also our focus is and I think that is one of the most obvious ones with crypto which of course with programmable money and all the primitives I think can really um power science funding and I think there's been already a lot of progress in this direction. Then another one is the replication of science. So a lot actually the majority of papers doesn't replicate and there's many um what it means is you can't reproduce the same results and there's multiple reasons for this. One is that often actually the

data goes missing and uh people just don't have the context to do it again. So potentially permanent storage for example could help with this. Um but also um a bunch of other problems like it's not well documented. Sometimes it's even completely faked. So there's no really uh ways to check that some of the science that our found um society is building on is pretty flawed and wouldn't replicate. Then there's um the problem of hyper competition which um results in very incremental um hyperco competitive environments that I think are not really conducive to more longer term ambitious science. So it like results in a lot of short- optimism and people publishing a lot um just to get to um like professor positions or to

get the necessary funding and then ultimately I think one of the biggest problems is around the communications so it's largely inaccessible and it's crazy if you think about it that all of you fund science uh through your tax dollars but none of you can access any of that science like you can't read it without paying 50 bucks to read a PDF and like you can it quickly adds up if you want to actually understand what's going on. You pretty quickly spend a lot of money just to uh pay for the science that you actually paid for as a taxpayer. Um and I think that's also a large problem and um ultimately even the scientists actually uh like also have to pay to publish um in journals that then are payw wall. So um there's a huge problem there and I think also something where

decentralization and uh can really help. So let's jump in on kind of some of those problems stem from uh centralizing authorities like as I also mentioned before like especially around the funding. It's quite a like small amount of funding bodies that does the majority of the scientific funding and they kind of favor also specific kind of funding like you can imagine that like the NIH is not funding more wild research which some of the people in crypto actually are some of the biggest funders and one fun example for example is cryopreservation which actually the like one of the core inventors of Bitcoin Halini funded a lot of people like Ralph Merkel and others are um deep in it and

actually already like that field is predominantly funded by crypto wealth and like zero government funding. Um it even helps for stuff like organ preservation um but then there's also on replication there's a new experiments um in DI that kind of help to resolve this mainly by making the data permanently available having clear protocols so people can actually just run the experiment virtually again. So there's a bunch of projects in this direction um like lab dow for example and I think on the competition part for example um we have create va and there's now a bunch of other scientific dows that really enable more collaborative positive sum um environment for scientists to

collaborate um and have an incentive to collaborate. So what if science is decentralized? So, I'll just quickly go into the why, what, and how. And kind of like on the why, the the reason and kind of like how the I think is shaping up is that it's really building on the open science movement um to make science much more collaborative and actually accessible to everyone. It's kind of crazy if you think about it that such an important process, but um only like 0.1% or something like this of the world are involved in science. like most people are neither funding it directly nor able to actually um engage in science or advance science. So the goal is really

to democratize science similar like uh how NFTs maybe have democratized the create economy that everyone can get involved in science or even get funding to run their own scientific experiments without having Harvard PhD or something um because I think there's a lot of untapped um talent and opportunity for people to contribute to science with their software skills with their communication skills and other aspects um and then on the what kind of the idea is to create a global open alternative to the current scientific system uh where like everyone can participate in and of course through kind of the different web 3 technologies um to raise funding to actually run experiments natively um through web 3 and to share data distribute insights um in a much

more open way so why is it important why is decentralization important I think the interesting thing is there's a lot of values that Ethereum and crypto share that I think are quite important for science mainly around of was open source culture, transparency and um broadly decentralization. So I think those uh are also quite important for science and of course also by design crypto is internet native and enables global access for everyone to participate. It's trustless and permissionless. Um so I think that's also quite an important value uh for science and then censorship resistance like ultimately it's less common of course maybe in Europe but like a lot of science for example around co got

censored uh in in different places of the world so I think that's also something where permanent storage can help to uh make it censorship resistant and then um enabling permanent storage because it's crazy that like a big chunk of the science that we're building on is literally like forgotten it's like lost on hard drives it's lost because people died or like because it was stored on their server and then that server got taken down or something. So I think it's quite important to just for humanity to preserve its whole um scientific corpus. Um that's kind of like a more like a comparison between Trezai and DI on the different uh dimensions um which is also on the Ethereum website. Um if you go on ethereum.org/dai org/dai. Um it just

basically compares what I also already mentioned on how um funding is broken in Treza on being uh focused on a small closed very intransparent centralized group that is uh allocating the funding um while in dets literally happening in the open literally for example in vita it's in discourse governance form like other governance proposals being discussed by different scientists waiting um the different pros and cons of specific research projects and discussing it in the open which I think is also quite important for uh people to communicate and to understand science almost more like an apprenticeship model where people can just like learn by reading the evaluation from other scientists and then of course on

collaboration which I also already touched on. Um also these I think can be by nature much more collaborative especially through Dows. um on labs and infrastructure for example labs um project we supported that is building kind of like a Airbnb for labs and for also uh wet lab compute so basically that you can run experiments from your laptop in the browser um and access from compute to kind of like cloud labs so the goal is really to at some point make science as easy as uh building an Ethereum app or like an app in general that you can just run it from your laptop and don't have to access to um expensive laboratories that are usually not around in most countries or cities.

Um and then on publishing there's also now a lot of experiments. Um one is for example from the Coinbase founder called Research Hub and there's also DA Labs which is building a new decentralized publishing platform and actually Vita just launched its own decentralized journal uh called Longivist um which um goes also in peer review. So basically the idea is instead of having peer review happen behind closed doors where like your competing peers uh review you uh with like no incentive no compensation and no incentive really to review you in a honest way because uh then they don't get funding at the end.

Um so the goal is to move peer review completely to the open and uh basically compensate also people for peer reviewing. So for example, Vita DAO is doing an open um longevity journal and every scientist uh is openly reviewing it and gets compensated for it. And then for example on um intellectual property which is the main asset class of science. In traditional science scientists get zero ownership in the science. It's usually the universities who get it and then they have to negotiate with the universities to outlic their own intellectual property and have often to pay a lot of money if the research was successful. And in DAI what we actually do is we go to the universities and um give funding to a researcher before kind of um they take

on the research and get an exclusive license. So ultimately the DAO and the researcher actually has ownership in the IP while in the old model it was mainly the university which then is also incredibly slow to move uh for licensing and other things. So it's often these science gets stuck in universities and then just dies down doesn't get translated. Um and then of course also on the incentive layer um on like these I can re-engineer the incentive around also sharing all kinds of data including negative data by just um doing all of these steps in the open.

So um I've already touched a bit on it but like on kind of what does DA look like in practice there's different verticals. One I touched on is the funding and IP layer. Um which I think is one of the most thriving layers where we are most active. Um so there now has been uh dozens of research projects funded in the in the first u one or two years of of DA's existence and it really enables just much faster funding and also more democratic and like the scientists can really see like how people evaluated his project how many people voted in favor of funding it so it's much more transparent and I think a much better experience overall for the scientists who then also are valued and like um is appreciated by the community

and they the and also engage with the community and then also um there's like a huge vertical around publishing of science with a lot of projects and about reproducibility and identity and reputation but I'll touch more on funding and IP um so science funding is in the size making um strong progress with a lot of the biodals we've helped create u vauo as the main example but there's also other experiments going on um that we supported for example, on retroactive public goods funding and um quadratic funding more broadly. So together with Gitcoin and Vitalik, we did a quadratic donation round for longevity that raised over a million uh

dollars and um one for decentralized science more broadly which also got over a million uh together. So there's already um the first kind of thriving of um public goods funding as well of open science that is funded uh through donations. Um then of course there's these Dows that I touched on with tokenized incentive structures. So a lot of uh biods um kind of after vita came now like a lot of bio and science dows for different therapeutic areas for example like athena for women's health and a bunch of other dows that we also fund and support through a program called bioxyz. And then there's this whole new asset class of IP NFTs and the

IP tokens that we created where I'll go into some of the detail how it works. So um our focus with Molecule is on uh making IP transactable in crypto and enabling sustainable funding loops for scientific dials. And the the biggest challenges in intellectual property uh in patents are that they're monopolistic and uh create perverse incentives. uh they they're very analog in a and don't have a basically a digital footprint and they're not programmatic and very uh intransparent. It's very hard to get an overview of like the IP out there and it's very hard to buy it to license it.

It's usually done in the physical world. You go to a university, try to understand what IP they have and try to license it from them in email chains basically and it's very illquid. So it's hard to transact and transfer and impossible to use as an incentive. Um and it's not standardized or global. So our idea is a bit like why cominated a safe agreement for startups who want to create standardized IP agreements. Um yes, so I'll touch on this that with molecule we basically built like a science uh marketplace and protocol for like kind of like the openc for science funding and um the IPNFT protocol to bridge basically science into the

digital world. Um and kind of the ecosystem now raised like over 35 million from um like including the science st to start funding a bunch of signs. Um yes. So the goals with IPF is to improve and upgrade the um intellectual property system which I think needs a lot of improvements and is pretty broken um as it stands today. But ultimately we're trying to um build a solution on top of making um digital IP transactions possible creating liquid markets around IP and enabling fractionalization of IP.

So people can there's price discovery around IP but people can also um as a scientist get incentivized in the native asset class. Um yes so it's basically composed of different components like a legal component which is stored on chain. Um but then also it's natively transactable and programmable. So it can be used um in governance, can be used to be fractionized, can have programmatic royalties and even uh more public goods funding like models like pay for success uh models. Um so basically the legal contact contract um is uh referenced on chain through like an Ethereum smart contract um which contains like a metadata JSON with like the different um

information about the research project and then also an encrypted data room with kind of all the scientific data and IP attached to it. So it kind of also serves as an access token to all the data surrounding the research project. Um and recently we also fractionalized the first uh IP NFT into a IP token. So basically that people can now buy uh fractions of an IPF um through IP tokens. Um so you can see it on on vada.com kind of like how it works but also the research project u and I'm quite excited for this so people can directly crowdfund a research project together.

So that's kind of like the uh ecosystem right uh now. also it kind of really exploded into um many different dows many different uh publishing efforts and it's even more than that so it's uh like hard to keep up with like it's similar moment that I realized in uh that Ethereum happened in 2017 or 18 when there were so many uh things being built that at some point it became impossible to keep track I think that's now also happening with DI where there's like many more projects than one can keep up with um in all kinds of different therapeutic and scientific specific areas and also around publishing, funding, data storage and other aspects of science.

Um and for Vita uh we now funded over 17 projects with over 5 million some of which uh are now quite um progressing rapidly and looked at uh over 400 projects um with like 9,000 members and like have an additional six million in cash to fund science. And what was for me one of the craziest moments was uh last year um FISA got on board and is now actively voting in Dows and uh writing a governance proposals which was unexpected one year in um and that's kind of like I'll quickly skip because my time is running out but that's kind of like the flow of how sun the funding works. So basically scientist applies the community evaluates the proposal

like scientists MDS and experienced people in the field then they write up a governance proposal with their evaluation then the community actually asks questions and the scientist answers them and then at the end it's put up for an onchain vote and then um if it's funded then um it's advanced and uh kind of like further managed towards um hitting its milestones and then making further decisions if it's been out into biotech. sold or licensed or um if the DAO uses additional funding to advance the project further. So those are some of the projects and on the website we have all 17 uh projects we funded. Um a bunch of them also uh things around more public goods funding like we funded uh

60 students entering the field like from Kazakhstan, Turkey to like all other places around the world in different parts of the world to support them in their entry into the field. but also things like um a decentralized science prize and other things that um got funded through the Gitcoin round. So I'll end on some of the goals for DI and the hopes for the future. One is like to enable every um human to be a scientist and participate in science. And I think of course one of the prerequisites is that one has something to participate. I think uh that's where like I think the crypto community can on the one side um educate themselves of course has a lot of skills from software engineering to others that uh can be

quite useful and also as capital to fund science and I think the true power is really that it's now like through IPFS and other things like biod tokens more like an asset class instead of a donation so people um don't just need altruistic reasons to fund science um and then goes also for patient and researcher communities to govern the cures and access to medications. So for example, imagine uh like a community of diabetics managing and collecting funding to advance diabetic medicines like insulin. I think the it would be like more fairly governed uh if patients themselves would have a voice in in how it's developed and priced and governed. And then one of the goals which right now is insanely

broken is that most of the leading scientists spend over 50% of their time applying for funding and our goals to reduce this ideally to less than 20% so that they can actually start focusing on science again and also on doing bigger more moonshot projects where I think also crypto and a lot of the crypto bigger crypto funders have now funded a lot of uh inspiring uh moonshots. So I'm not sure if everyone is aware of like all all of those projects but everyone from Vital League to the Coinbase founder to Juan Benini have kind of basically stepped up to become some of the biggest science funders in the world like with like between 10 to like a billion dollars which puts them literally at nation states like I think Vidik funded more science um than the 20th biggest nation states. So he's like

literally funding more science than New Zealand like last year um or than Saudi Arabia which is pretty crazy to think about. Um and then the goal is also to share knowledge, data and resources much more openly to um have negative data be uh openly published and communicated um and making science as easy as uh logging into a website or participating in crypto. Um enabling scientists to be fairly compensated and paid where I think also cryptonative incentives can really help uh similar as NFTs helped creators.

um then to really decouple science to an extent from the um Traza institutions that people can become independent researchers and um do the most ambitious science. So like to summarize the goals to use crypto mechanisms such as Dows to help distribute funding more equally to increased transparency, enable um collaborative peer review and make research much more openly accessible and improving science communication broadly ultimately improving the objectivity rigor and reproducibility of scientific research. So call to action uh join a community, apply to get funding, fund a DA or research project or um get compensated for just sharing a link to a

friend that is looking for funding. Thank you everyone and you can check the link for kind of like a link tree of all the uh articles and projects if you want to get involved. Um like I would recommend as a starting point athereum.orgdexplainer org/dexplainer which I think has the best overview and also a lot of links. Thank you. I think we can have a small Q&A session while we set up the next speaker. Does anyone have a question? Uh thanks Vincent, really appreciate it.

Um from Australia and big fan of yours and the work you're doing. So uh good fun here. Uh this is just a bit of a fun question. Um you you mentioned FISA coming on board for VA DAO. Uh I think like actually it's awesome to see like you know traditional farmer come on board but also it's kind of like the equivalent of a big bank coming onto DeFi. Um, so what are there any like problems you foresee perhaps in uh like research being funneled in a particular way for their interest maybe or or what's I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, great question. Um and like like I had similar concerns a while ago but then realized that ultimately a lot of um the farmer and biotech players are still the ones that bring all the drugs to market like uh if we look at the landscape today uh they are more like private equity like they use half a billion to carry like a cancer drug to market and I think the one decision was was a government sold to the community where uh they actually got a quite a small stake. So I think VA is like worth 80 million or something and they have maybe 1 million um of that. So like almost like 1% of the votes. So I think that was quite important that they are not too big of a voice. Um and I think the others they actually um mainly interested to like enter the field of

longevity which I think is also quite um like it was literally their first involvement in the field of longevity through this. Um and I think ultimately um kind of design needs uh big biotech and farmers to carry those things to market because the amount of capital required is pretty staggering. So the average drug takes like roughly half a billion to bring to market. Uh which of course I think for now Disa is not well equipped to do this like hundreds of times. Um but I think at some point it might and I think there's of course different incentives that play out at this large scale and I think they're fairly broken but ultimately I think farmer and biotech is operating under broken um scientific incentives that I

think we can fix. Um so I think at the end of the day there's more complex incentives that are broken at the end of the day around even health insuranceers and others which was an area I um worked on like many years ago. So uh I think it's it's a bigger problem in general that like incentives are broken for um translational science especially in late stages but it's still an effective translation engine but it's yeah um ultimately cures are not as profitable as thing um as things you can sell for a long time. So if you cure a disease then your market is have to interrupt. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you Vincent. Sorry for interrupting because we need to to proceed with the next speaker. Thank you. [Music]