There is no shortage of opportunities in a bull market. Participating in early-stage emerging projects always seems to double your capital in a short period of time. Reports of coins increasing by 100x or 10,000x are emerging one after another, and the crypto community is greedily looking for the next password.
In the face of the emergence of 10,000-fold memes and AI concepts, the increase seems to be just a number, and doubling is not enough to make waves in the crypto community. But among the tokens that have generally increased, ResearchCoin (RSC) has attracted the attention of the market, and its price has broken through previous highs many times in the past month.
In addition to the increase, it is also worth noting that the track to which RSC belongs - DeSci (Decentralized Science), is an action to use Web3 (including NFT, smart contracts, DAO) to fairly and justly fund, create, review, store and disseminate scientific knowledge by building a public infrastructure. DeSci encourages scientists to share their research results publicly and receive honors, while allowing anyone to easily access and contribute to research results.
In the New Year's Outlook at the end of last year, many VCs publicly expressed their optimism about the DeSci track. For example, Messari stated in an investment forecast article that it would turn its attention to several key non-financial sectors in the crypto field. Among them, DeSci revolves around key solutions for our industry that go far beyond the financial field and is therefore less driven by rampant hype.
Matti, co-founder of Zee Prime Capital, once said in an interview with BlockBeats that DeSci is solving some real-world problems. They have practicality that most cryptocurrencies do not have directly, and are more like cryptocurrencies of cryptocurrencies.
However, for current cryptocurrencies, DeSci is not very popular and is still a very new concept.
Compared with the Chinese community, DeSci is more discussed in the English community. At the end of last year, a DeSci conference was held in Berlin, where many industry OGs including Zee Prime Capital co-founder Matti, Molecule CEO Tyler Golato and co-founder Paul Kohlhaas participated and expressed their research and understanding of Desci.
In the Chinese community, perhaps it was the speech of Binance’s former CEO CZ on the social platform that caused a small wave of enthusiasm for DeSci. CZ said that he has been reading about biotechnology and thinking about how to use crypto technology to accelerate research funding there. As we all know, the crypto community has a long history of research on "longevity", and DeSci perfectly fits the research needs in this field.
According to WIKI data , there are currently hundreds of projects in the DeSci track. However, according to Messari report data, 50% of DeSci projects were established in the past year. As can be seen from the figure, DAO is the most prosperous in the current DeSci ecosystem, while other concepts such as NFT-related combinations are still in a relatively wild and early stage.
DAO solves DeSci’s financing problem
DAO can be said to be the basic form of existence of the DeSci concept. In the current DeSci ecosystem, DAO is the most prosperous. At present, the biggest and most pressing problem for DeSci is the difficulty in financing. In addition to DAO, it can be seen that the sector focusing on decentralized financing also occupies a large part of the entire track, and the most important purpose of DAO's existence is to solve the financing problem.
Traditional scientific research seeks research funding and resources through centralized methods such as the National Natural Science Foundation, but this will lead to a large number of problems in the funding application process, and the entire funding application process will also be lengthy and inefficient. In addition, due to the deterioration of the overall environment, such as economic deterioration and environmental protection reasons, the overall research funding has gradually decreased, and the problem of research funding has become increasingly serious.
The interconnected Desci ecosystem
In the Desci ecosystem, close connection between projects may be a good start. Raising funds in the form of DAO seems to be a good choice, and different DAOs will also invest in each other.
For example, after receiving investment from Seed Club Ventures, Molecule participated in the open source drug development organization LabDAO. Subsequently, Molecule also received another $1 million investment from Sora Ventures. To promote innovation in the field of biomedical research, Molecule will provide funding specifically for Asian researchers, and plans to provide $50,000 to scientific teams or individuals who deserve funding.
As a biotechnology research fundraising platform built on Ethereum, Molecule has two main systems: Molecule Discovery and Molecule Finance. Molecule uses a combination of smart contracts and legal contracts to form intellectual property NFT (IP-NFT), a new mechanism that allows anyone to share ownership of research projects and their future results, such as intellectual property, royalties, data, etc.
Molecule CEO and co-founder Tyler Golato and co-founder Paul Kohlhaas co-founded Bio.xyz and VitaDAO.
Bio.xyz serves as a biotech DAO accelerator and DeSci meta-governance layer, with the goal of enabling DeSci DAOs to leverage IP-NFTs to fund, manage and develop the intellectual property of universities, companies and researchers around the world. Not only that, Bio.xyz also provides DeSci DAOs with a launchpad, resources, mentorship, a shared network, and a set of legal and smart contracts.
Molecule and bio.xyz are fundraising for decentralized science organizations similar to VitaDAO. Grouping multiple projects together can make it easier to apply for scientific research grants and link intellectual property to cryptocurrency.
DAOs focus on real-world problems
According to OP Research , the current DeSci projects tend to focus most on the biological track. This may be due to the large number of scientific research biological directions itself and the fact that the epidemic has led to an increase in the general public's attention to biological sciences.
VitaDAO is a leader in research and development in the field of longevity. As the world's first biotechnology DAO, VitaDAO's main goal is to promote the advancement of longevity research and extend human lifespan and healthspan. Its native token VITA has risen by 48% in 30 days, with a market value of US$83.29 million. VITA holders participate in VitaDAO's decision-making process, including the selection of project funding, fund management, and governance activities.
AxonDAO Governance Token (AXGT) also focuses on biotechnology. It redefines the interaction between individuals and their health data through the power of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. The project is based on the use of pre-cognitive algorithms, drawing on biometric technology, genomic data and other key health indicators to not only monitor but also predict health outcomes.
Desci offers a solution using AxonDAO to streamline the collection, storage and verification of clinical data through blockchain technology. This approach ensures secure and transparent data processing while also establishing universal standards for the decentralization of personal health and wellness information, thereby facilitating easier access and greater control of individuals’ own data.
In the field of biotechnology, there is another popular topic: hair loss. HairDAO is a decentralized organization dedicated to treating hair loss, using an open source investment and operation model. Through HairDAO, patients and researchers work together to develop revolutionary new treatments for hair loss. Users' treatment experiences are recorded in the HairDAO application and earn HAIR tokens as rewards.
HairDAO has rich reward mechanisms, cultural characteristics, and meme qualities. According to the article " Hair is Money " by Matti, co-founder of Zee Prime Capital, the ultimate state of HairDAO is a fully vertically integrated pharmaceutical business, including drug manufacturing and distribution. HairDAO must transform from a chaotic Discord group of only a thousand people to a reliable enterprise that can accommodate tens or hundreds of thousands of people (for data collection) and outsource physical world operations (for approval, patents, manufacturing, distribution, etc.).
Desci solves peer review and audit challenges
On the basis of having funds, the second biggest challenge Desci faces is the pain point of peer review in publishing and reviewing papers. Generally speaking, for a scientific research project, its funding cycle often starts from writing the application at the beginning of the year to completing the project and reviewing it at the end of the year, and a lot of time is spent on application procedures and assessment processes.
However, in the process of assessment and approval, scientific research projects lack a comprehensive and efficient approval mechanism. Often, when a project applies for scientific research funding, the progress is more than halfway through, and it is difficult for scientific research funds to be implemented where scientific research is most needed. In addition, in the current scientific research funding review, journal articles and patent publications are important reference points for reviewing 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.
ResearchCoin (RSC) mentioned at the beginning delegates the right to review and speak in a decentralized manner, aiming to change the traditional scientific research journal publishing model.
By creating a "Hub" system that replaces traditional journals, ResearchCoin allows scientists or scholars to publicly publish and discuss scientific or academic content directly in these hubs, thereby bypassing the review process of traditional publishing, accelerating the dissemination of information, and conducting peer review after publication. As an encrypted scientific research platform, users earn ResearchCoin (RSC) by publishing content to ResearchHub, and the number of RSCs received is proportional to the value of the content as considered by other members of the community.
In addition, users can set up RSC bounties for peer reviews, paper abstracts, or new methods in the lab. It is also possible to raise cryptocurrency in forum posts to fund research before the work begins by "pre-registering" projects. According to ResearchHub, activity on the platform has been growing over time, with peer review activity being the most active and promising.
ResearchCoin was co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and others, and completed a $5 million Series A financing on June 15 last year. According to coingecko data, as of the time of writing, the price of RSC rose to $0.8328, a 24-hour increase of 10.3%.
Although most of the tokens in the DeSci field have seen good growth, perhaps because the concept is not widely used, in the DeSci market value ranking compiled by coingecko, some of the top projects have official social media introductions marked with other labels such as DePIN and RWA.
For example, OriginTrail, which ranks 201st in total market value in the crypto market, is also the No. 1 project in this track, but the official Twitter tags of OriginTrail only show AI, DePIN, and RWA. According to its official website, life sciences and healthcare are the key research directions of this project. Dynex, the No. 6 project in this track, cannot directly see DeSci-related content through its official website and Twitter. As a neuromorphic quantum computing cloud, Dynex only mentions DeSci-related use cases in its document introduction, including pharmacy, automobiles, aerospace, etc.
As an emerging concept, DeSci Track may become more popular in the same way that some other very small projects are gaining more attention.
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