A new narrative about to break out? Looking for DeSci’s “stepping stone” to explore the possibilities brought by Arweave and super-parallel computers AO

Summary

The concept of DeSci (decentralized science) was first proposed in 2018. Although it has not yet received widespread public attention, it is considered by Messari to be a new narrative that is about to explode. DeSci aims to reshape the traditional scientific landscape by building public infrastructure using the Web3 stack. The results of the Arweave ecosystem over the years are not only very consistent with the development needs of DeSci, but also sufficient to carry the entire DeSci ecosystem. After the release of the super-parallel computer AO, the boundaries of DeSci have been broadened again.

Author: Kyle

Reviewer: Sandy

The crypto world is unpredictable. After the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, the market ushered in an upward trend before the Bitcoin halving. Various sectors rotated, and joy and noise rose and fell, but soon returned to silence. After the market returned to rationality, the "no takeover" theory was born. Crypto players still tend to pursue novelty. In the dull market, DeSci, which had not been widely concerned before, began to be mentioned frequently.

The concept of DeSci first appeared in Martin Etzrodt's blog in 2018, when he tried to propose a new paradigm to solve problems such as peer review in traditional science. After years of development, although DeSci has been favored by capital such as Coinbase and Pfizer, and the attention of crypto leaders such as Vitalik and CZ, it has relatively not entered the public eye. However, the potential of DeSci should not be underestimated. This is a technological innovation that directly benefits mankind. This article aims to introduce DeSci and its importance, and focus on how Arweave can promote the development of DeSci in the context of the launch of the super-parallel computer AO.

DeSci: Liberating Traditional Science

Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decentralized-science-desci-singularis-holding/

DeSci, the full name of which is Decentralized Science, means "decentralized science". It is seen as a movement that aims to build a public infrastructure using the Web3 stack to fairly and impartially fund, create, review, certify, store and disseminate scientific knowledge. Nobel Prize winner Randy Schekman once said: "Science has no borders and should be open." As an open movement aimed at liberating traditional science, DeSci, like SocialFi and GameFi, removes the shackles of tradition by utilizing decentralized technology and introducing token incentive mechanisms. In short, the success of DeSci means more to mankind and creates a space for "dreaming with peace of mind" in the field of scientific research.

How DeSci is unshackled from traditional science

The rise of DeSci stems from the challenge and reflection on the traditional scientific system. The difficult problems in the traditional scientific field are nothing more than the old-fashioned drawbacks of the centralized world - there are problems such as capital monopoly, information asymmetry, peer review issues, etc., which restrict the free flow and sharing of scientific knowledge. In addition, the rights and interests of scientific researchers are not fully protected and they cannot fully own intellectual property rights.

Reshaping the way we raise funds and allocate capital

In traditional science, obtaining funding is crucial to scientific research, but it is often a thorny issue. First, the population in the field of scientific research is growing, which has led to tight funding. Secondly, researchers need to spend a certain amount of time and energy to write funding applications, and they also need to meet various quantitative application conditions. At the same time, the funds are in the hands of the government or funding agencies, who may decide which research projects to fund based on their own biases, economic interests or political purposes, which may lead to some important research areas being neglected. In this way, it is difficult for researchers to concentrate on their own research.

DeSci uses DAOs and NFT technology to break the shackles of traditional financing models. Through DAOs, researchers can obtain financial support more transparently, realizing the decentralization of funds in the field of scientific research. For example, VitaDAO is a DAO organization focusing on longevity science research, which provides financial support for scientific research projects through crowdfunding and secondary financing. In addition, the NFTization of scientific achievements also provides researchers with new financing channels, such as the IP-NFTs launched by Molecule.

Revolutionizing research collaboration, publishing and peer review

For researchers in traditional scientific fields, whether it is external cooperation or access to shared resources, they are usually restricted by their organizations or institutions, which gradually forms information islands. When publishing scientific research results, they often encounter human bias and power exploitation, resulting in a very inefficient publishing process. Furthermore, peer review in traditional scientific fields is unpaid, and problems such as inefficiency or low quality are inevitable.

DeSci solves the problems of collaboration, publishing and peer review in the traditional scientific field by creating a decentralized open platform, introducing incentive mechanisms and eliminating intermediaries. For example, ResearchHub, known as the Github in the scientific field, introduced ERC20 tokens and provided a decentralized open platform, allowing researchers to freely publish and discuss academic issues, while encouraging researchers to conduct peer review of published research results.

Protecting intellectual property rights

Whether it is copyright, patents or trademarks, they are actually still in the hands of scientific research institutions. This monopoly is not conducive to the development of the entire scientific field. For scientific research, transparent and open information is very important, not to mention these forward-looking knowledge. Researchers should have unrestricted access to relevant scientific research results as much as possible to promote innovation and scientific research progress.

DeSci uses a decentralized storage solution to ensure the security and accessibility of scientific research data, allowing researchers to openly access and share scientific research data. At the same time, the intellectual property NFT (IP-NFT) launched by the Molecule project provides a new intellectual property management mechanism. Researchers not only have ownership of their research results, but can also share their future benefits.

How does Arweave advance DeSci?

As a powerful infrastructure, Arweave can provide comprehensive support for DeSci. In addition to supporting permanent storage of data of any type and size, Arweave also has computing power. Its native smart contract SmartWeave and the improved storage consensus paradigm SCP both adopt the core concept of "on-chain storage, off-chain computing". Arweave is not only the storage infrastructure of DeSci, but developers can also develop DeSci applications based on Arweave. However, after the release of the hyperparallel computer AO, the potential contained in Arweave has been greatly released, creating a good growth soil for DeSci.

Arweave one-stop platform: covering data storage, encryption, and publishing

Scientific research data are all high-quality and important data. The biggest concern is data loss, and Arweave is the most ideal decentralized storage solution for DeSci. The permanent storage technology provided by Arweave is naturally adapted to scientific data, and all stored data cannot be tampered with, is traceable, and is censorship-resistant.

However, Arweave itself does not have data encryption capabilities. For security and privacy reasons, the DeSci application built on Arweave can encrypt data before uploading it to the chain by using Mind Network's fully homomorphic encryption technology (FHE), and in the future, it can also flexibly decrypt the data to the demander through authorization. At the same time, the AO ecosystem is building the PADO project, the world's first zkFHE decentralized computing network, which combines fully homomorphic encryption with zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology to provide comprehensive privacy protection for DeSci applications.

In addition, Arweave can also serve as a decentralized publishing platform for DeSci. There are already precedents for Permaweb applications such as PermawebNews (news portal). Data is permanently stored on Arweave, and data is dynamically loaded into Permaweb applications through the indexing function. Users can read published content just like browsing Web2 front-end pages.

Full-chain DAO governance: solving financing problems

The transition from traditional authoritative institutions to DAO organizations frees the constraints of centralization and eliminates lengthy intermediate links. Compared with traditional science, DeSci makes financing more democratic and intelligent. However, most DAO organizations are still in the exploratory stage. There are many factors that affect whether DAO organizations can operate stably in the long term, and perfect infrastructure is one of the key factors.

When exploring DAO to solve DeSci's financing problem, we can learn from PermaDAO's governance model. Similar to Bitcoin's POW mechanism, for DAO community members, proof of work directly represents the value created, and PermaDAO uses Arweave as the workload ledger of the DAO organization, and all data is traceable and cannot be tampered with. Contributors will also receive corresponding $HALO Token incentives based on their workload, and then obtain voting rights for governance proposals by staking $HALO Tokens. Therefore, it is feasible to run a dedicated financing DAO based on Arweave.

Atomic Assets combined with UDL protocol: intellectual property rights confirmation and royalty transfer mechanism

Atomic Assets, in Chinese, is a brand-new NFT paradigm based on Arweave. This may also be an NFT standard that is more suitable for the DeSci field than IP-NFT. Unlike most "incomplete" NFTs, Atomic Assets has fully uploaded data to the chain, which can achieve true intellectual property rights confirmation. Specifically, Atomic Assets permanently stores all asset data, metadata, and contracts on the Arweave network and bundles them in a single Arweave ID. At the same time, Atomic Assets has no restrictions on storage capacity and data types, and it can even be large files such as applications.

Atomic assets not only allow researchers to fully own their research results, but also, when combined with the UDL protocol, can establish a complete and usable royalty transfer mechanism. The full name of the UDL protocol is Universal Data License, which means "Universal Data License". It allows researchers to personalize the terms of use of atomic assets through predefined tags. For example, researchers can decide whether atomic assets are allowed to be used for commercial purposes, secondary creations, the period of use and payment methods, etc. These terms will be treated as a separate label and attached to the atomic assets as a license. In addition, atomic assets can also be seamlessly listed on the BazAR exchange for sale. Researchers can not only immediately realize them to obtain financial support, but also enjoy the potential royalty income from scientific research results in the future.

Stamp Protocol and Vouch Protocol: Building a Reputation System

Stamp is the native content curation protocol of the Arweave ecosystem. Anyone can "STAMP" any content on the Permaweb through the Stamp protocol, which is similar to the "Like" behavior on social media. By "STAMPing" a certain content, both users and content authors can get rewards of $STAMP tokens, which not only provides a driving force for the peer review process in DeSci, but also helps to screen out high-quality scientific research results. At the same time, the Stamp protocol also integrates the Vouch protocol, which verifies whether the wallet address belongs to a real human by providing the Vouch Twitter service. Only after the verification is passed, this wallet address can use the "STAMP" function of the Stamp protocol. As a result, for scientific researchers, all their creations and reviews can be recorded. Therefore, the combination of the Stamp protocol and the Vouch protocol can create a credible and traceable reputation system for DeSci.

The ultra-parallel computer AO expands the boundaries of DeSci

The launch of the super-parallel computer AO has given DeSci more possibilities. Arweave, as the solid foundation of DeSci, provides available middleware and can also host any DeSci application. With the support of the super-parallel computer AO, Arweave's potential has been greatly enhanced, and this power can cover all scientific categories of DeSci. AO allows any number of processes to run in parallel, and has the ability to process large amounts of data and unlimited computing resources, which is enough to help DeSci promote the development of the most disruptive AI technologies. At the same time, DeSci applications built on AO can communicate through processes, eliminating message islands to a greater extent.

Recently, the AO ecosystem launched the financial infrastructure Autonomous Finance, which enables new AI-driven DeFi applications by introducing AI models on the chain. In the near future, not only will there be a number of AI-powered AgentFi financial applications, but also ContentFi applications. ContentFi applications can attribute and monetize data stored on Arweave, allowing high-value data resources in DeSci applications to fully realize their potential in the Autonomous Finance ecosystem, while all participants can profit from the data market spawned by ContentFi.

Conclusion

In the era of Industry 4.0, which is characterized by progressive intelligence and automation, the rise of DeSci has redefined the landscape of traditional science and brought new vitality and opportunities to the field of scientific research. At the same time, Arweave has also played a key role in this. Arweave is no longer just a permanent database for DeSci. After the release of the hyperparallel computer AO, it is already capable of carrying the huge DeSci ecosystem in all aspects.

If "greatness" cannot be planned, then we see the art of "accidental success" in the fit between DeSci and Arweave. Arweave has been seeking self-cultivation elsewhere, but it has accidentally become a stepping stone, providing DeSci with broad possibilities.

References

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