Original title: What is DeSci that breaks the dilemma of scientific research?

DeSci is applying new tools to improve scientific research.

As industries such as finance, entertainment, and social networking enter the Web3 era, blockchain is changing the current status of industry development and driving businesses in various fields to pursue an open, transparent, and decentralized future. At the time when concepts such as NFT, DeFi, and Metaverse began to rise, DeSci (decentralized science) also became a rising star in the Web3 world.

The emergence of DeSci starts from long-standing scientific research problems and dilemmas. For scientists, the key to early reserve for scientific research is funds. If a lot of time and money are spent on writing funding applications but fail to obtain stable funding, most projects will have to be suspended. Due to financial constraints, more and more scientists have begun to select research projects in a biased manner, and many “replication crises” have even occurred.

In August 2022, Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes published an article titled “Science Needs to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint” in “Scientific American”. In the article, he points out that current scientific research activities consume lots of energy. For example, the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s major observatories during operation is estimated to be nearly 20 million tons. In addition, the carbon dioxide emitted by the entire cloud storage computing field exceeds that of the aviation industry, which has been criticized for its large oil consumption.

In addition to funding, access to information is also essential. Much scientific knowledge is only published in the paid pages of well-known journals such as “Science” and “Nature”. Scientists not only need to spend money to read other people’s research results but also need to spend money to publish their research. This kind of power is further concentrated in large-scale journals. Researchers are complaining about the bold reality at the hands of publishers. Therefore, scientists and researchers continue to seek a more open and free environment, and the combination of DeSci and DAO comes at the right time.

About DeSci

DeSci is an initiative to fairly and equitably fund, create, review, store and disseminate scientific knowledge using Web3 (including NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs) by building public infrastructure. DeSci encourages scientists to share their research openly and receive credit, while allowing anyone to easily access and contribute to their research. The concept of DeSci is that scientific knowledge should be open to everyone, and the research process should be transparent and fair. A new environment for scientific development should be created by creating a more decentralized scientific research model and decentralizing access to funding, scientific tools, and channels.

Since last year, DeSci has gradually been recognized globally, and related new projects have also rapidly emerged and spread. For example, the first open science NFT project was sold for 13 ETH, and some Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) established to support DeSci are also rising. At the LisCon blockchain event at the end of 2021, DeSci was also specially discussed as a new hot topic.

Through the DeSci model, more researchers gain scientific knowledge when they share their work publicly. DeSci is recognized by the scientific research community because it can provide practical application value, including solving the challenges of raising research funds, eliminating the intermediary relationship between researchers and reviewers, and realizing the goal of truly opening science to the world.

DeSci encourages scientific research enthusiasts from all over the world to join the world of on-chain scientific research, such as online collaborative laboratories, cloud laboratories, etc. It is this kind of borderless sharing of knowledge that continues to promote scientific progress and allows scientists to find solutions to basic problems faster and share the results of cooperation. This group of volunteers who initiated scientific research activities formed a DAO focused on DeSci, achieving data open, process transparent, cost sharing, and benefit sharing.

The Application Advantages of DeSci

The DeSci model mentioned earlier has shown significant benefits for scientists and researchers. In fact, the superiority of DeSci stems from its utilization of blockchain and Web3 tools.

Starting with peer review, DeSci can use smart contracts to eliminate the intermediary role in peer review, enabling a direct peer review process. The decentralized nature of blockchain technology also opens up data storage and external platforms, allowing researchers from around the world to freely access the data they need, reducing the scrutiny and obstruction of scientific data exchange by governments worldwide.

On the other hand, DeSci can ensure that research outcomes from different fields are managed by different shared communities. This not only reduces the influence of single institutions on scientific activities but also protects the scientific community from various external threats such as emerging technologies. With DeSci in place, scientific knowledge becomes common to everyone rather than owned by a specific company or national government, realizing the sharing of knowledge rights among the public.

From the perspective of scientist reputation systems, previously, the reputation of scientists mainly depended on the H-Index, which had high requirements for the quantity of published papers and citation counts. However, with DeSci, scientists can acquire NFTs through community-recognized activities, thereby enhancing their visibility and influence and attracting more attention from younger individuals.

Rising DeSci projects

According to statistics from the DAO aggregator ThePASS platform, a total of nearly 102 DeSci-related organizations constitute the DeSci ecological map, including DAOs, BIOTECH Research, Communities, Decentralized Funding Of Science, Institutes, NFTs, Publishing, Protocols & Data and other outstanding projects. Among them, the proportion of DAO reached 29% (the highest-ranked asset type is ResearchHub, with a total vault value of over 6 million US dollars, and the proportion of native crypto assets exceeds 99.96%). The most active governance is MoonDAO, with a total of 74 proposals and 10,102 votes in support. , followed by VitaDAO and CrunchDAO.

DeSci ecological segmentation track distribution map

We can see that in the DeSci ecological segmentation track, DAO has firmly occupied the upper hand in the ecological landscape. In the actual DeSci world, in addition to DAO, there are some good projects that are growing upwards.

VitaDAO

VitaDAO aims to democratize longevity research projects by attracting them and placing them on a democratization track. Ownership of VITA allows holders to participate in VitaDAO’s democratic governance and direct its research, and users can profit from access to data repositories and manage their IP portfolios. In this sense, VitaDAO is like an autonomous ETF (exchange-traded funds) composed of hundreds of early longevity projects.

LabDAO

LabDAO is an open community operation service network that provides relevant tools and services to promote the progress of life sciences and promotes the free exchange of technologies and products. At the same time, LabDAO has clear community operating rules. The owners of $LAB are all LabDAO members and need to contribute and serve the maintenance of open source tools and the LabDAO community.

Research Hub

Research Hub is a project formed to accelerate the pace of scientific research. To bring the nascent community together and increase incentivized contributions to the platform, ResearchHub created the virtual crypto asset ResearchCoin (RSC). After receiving the RSC, users upload new content to the platform and conduct summary, discussion and research.

Genomes.io

Genomes.io is a private and secure DNA database that puts users in control of their own genome. By solving DNA testing and sharing privacy, security, and ownership issues, Genomes.io aims to build the world’s largest database of user genomes to power the future of personalized medicine. Genomes.io also established Genomes DAO, GENETICATS NFT, and issued encrypted assets - $GENE for its DAO organizations.

The Future of DeSci: Challenges and Opportunities

Although the development momentum of DeSci has risen, there are still many problems and challenges ahead. For example, the uneven quality of scientific research projects, the final certification standards for building the DeSci protocol, and the construction of the DeSci community with pre-funded funds… These all require scientific researchers and community developers to jointly think about optimized solutions. And how developers who are committed to the construction of DAO organizations can improve the governance system and enable more scientific research peers to handle cooperation matters in the cloud.

At the same time, DeSci is using a variety of new tools to improve scientific research. If it really wants to succeed, it should make these technical tools seamlessly integrated with scientists’ daily work, focus on empowering scientists, and get rid of the inherent tool-based thinking. At present, judging from the scale of Twitter and Discord community users of each project, the overall ecological attention of DeSci is still relatively small. We expect that DeSci and Web3 can achieve further mutual integration and embrace the future of decentralized scientific research.

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