#61 - DeSci: Opportunities, Problems, and Perspectives

A tribulation on using crypto to accelerate the scientific frontier

Jan 13, 2025

Happy New Year! To our fantastic audience, thank you for your readership of Stanford Blockchain Review. And as we kick of 2025 with a deep dive into DeSci, we remain committed to bringing you relevant analysis of the crypto space all year long. I will be Editor of the Review this year and look forward to covering exciting projects and revelations this year. If you're interested in collaborating with Stanford Blockchain Club or Review, please reach out to me via Twitter — Tesvara @tesvarajiang

Stanford Blockchain Review
Volume 7, Article No. 1

📚 Author: Jay Yu - Stanford Blockchain Club & Pantera Capital

🌟 Technical Prerequisite: Low

Many thanks to Andy Hung from Stanford Blockchain Club for reviewing and editing this article!

Science today sits on top of a paradox: on the one hand, scientific innovation thrives on open borders, open communication, and international collaboration. On the other hand, opaque and convoluted funding mechanisms, drawn-out research processes, and the uncertainty of breakthrough success forces scientists to fight for funding and mindshare from a handful of ivory-tower institutions and donors.

But what if, instead of having to seek funding and prestige from gatekeeper organizations, scientists could bootstrap their wildest ideas from a decentralized community? This is the promise of decentralized science: a paradigm shift in the way science is produced, accessed, and monetized. In this article, we will discuss how we might be able to use crypto rails to address three core issues in academic research: the accessibility of science, the funding of science, and the productionization of science.

1 - The Accessibility of Science

The History of Open Science

The concept of “open science” has a long history, and one that has been greatly intertwined with the development of the Internet [1]. The World Wide Web, for example, was originally conceived and developed as a tool for information-sharing between different universities around the world [2], and the idea of “open source software” also has its roots in an academic and research setting.

Open science is fundamentally about accessibility – of papers, data, and methodologies. Today, renting a single research paper for 48 hours from an academic publisher can cost over $30 – something completely unsustainable for scientists with a budget constraint and not affiliated with wealthy universities or research institutions [3]. Journal publishers have built billion-dollar businesses with profit margins that dwarf even those of the most successful tech companies, largely by positioning themselves as intermediaries using prestige. Critics argue that this publishing model diverts valuable resources away from productive research [4].

Within the “open science” movement, perhaps one of the most interesting and controversial projects is Sci-Hub, a “shadow library” that provides direct access to millions of research papers and journals, regardless of copyright. Unsurprisingly, Sci-Hub, like many other open-access “shadow libraries,” have faced a lot of criticism over the ethical considerations, and in 2022, the head librarians of Z-Lib were arrested for copyright infringement and other charges [5]. These arrests sparked some alarm from the research community, with some calling this a modern day “burning of the Library of Alexandria” [6] – a testament to the vital role that open access plays in the process of academic research.

Today, in many fields of academic research, researchers often share their latest work via online “preprint servers” such as ArXiv, before submitting their work to journals for peer review. Unlike shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub, which operate outside of the process of academic publishing, preprint journals are an integral part of the multi-year academic process. However, many of the popular preprint servers today rely on legacy infrastructure from over 30 years ago, and are hosted by centralized university servers. ArXiv, for example, was created by Cornell University researchers in 1991 [7]. Papers are usually directed and shared as PDFs, with no way for others to rate, comment, or otherwise interact with the content.

Creating A Crypto-Based Preprint Server

One of the most interesting ideas within the “decentralized science” movement is the creation of a modern, crypto-based preprint server. ResearchHub, for example, is a DeSci project led by Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of Coinbase [8]. In November 2024, it announced the ResearchHub journal [9], an open-access journal with immediate preprint publication services and a 21-day peer review. In line with crypto ethos, ResearchHub is attempting to challenge the status quo of intermediaries in the realm of scientific publishing.

ResearchHub Preprint Server. Source [10]

In its preprint server, ResearchHub augments the PDF hosting of traditional preprint servers with a modern, Reddit-like discussion forum, allowing researchers to receive instant feedback and discussion. This brings transparency into the traditionally opaque peer review process and opens a research article to the wider community for scientific discourse. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of ResearchHub is its use of the ResearchCoin token to create a novel incentivization system. ResearchHub incentivizes publication, reviewing, and collaboration using RSC, and allows users to create grants, tip other users, and gain voting rights using their tokens [11]. Peer reviewers, for example, are awarded 1000 USD worth of ResearchCoin each month [12].

ResearchHub is a great case study for how token incentives can be used to reimagine the publication process. Accessibility is fundamentally a financial problem – and by offering financial incentives for open-source work, ResearchHub may be able to create a compliant, open-access alternative not only to paywall publications, but also existing open-access services such as shadow libraries and preprint servers.

Open Questions for Open Access

Nonetheless, ResearchHub and other open-access DeSci platforms remain in an experimental stage, and there remain several open questions that still need to be addressed, including but not limited to:

Tokenomics Design: As mentioned previously, RSC tokens act as a core way to incentivize open science work on the platform, and can be used on the platform itself – in governance, research requests, and tips. But to what extent are recipients of RSC actually spending on-platform versus converting to fiat? Are these token incentives sustainable and effective in driving quality research? To what extent is on-platform research quality affected by market fluctuations? This question of tokenomics design is perhaps the core question at stake for ResearchCoin and other token-based preprint servers.

Disciplinary Fragmentation: The scientific process today is highly specialized, and there is no monolithic process of publication. Even within a single discipline, such as biology or computer science, there are numerous subfields, each with their own publications, conventions, and timelines. Today, many DeSci projects tend to focus on a single discipline or research area. ResearchHub’s journal, for example, focuses only on biomedical topics and publications. This fragmentation potentially limits the scale and market for each individual project – after all, there are only so many professional endocrinologists in the world. As DeSci projects develop, one likely scenario is that they will develop a federated structure, similar to professional organizations such as IEEE (Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers), containing numerous subcommittees and different conference conventions for each subtopic.

Quality Control: Another key question for an open-access journal and preprint platform such as ResearchHub is quality control. Compared to a traditional journal, a fully open-source platform may have a lower mean but higher variance in the quality of publication. For every outstanding paper published on these platforms that is blocked on traditional venues, there are perhaps thousands of other papers inferior in quality. Although identity and authorship verification, token rewards, and reputational scores may help, they still don’t fully address the question of quality control. The effectiveness of all these metrics are also limited by the expertise of the community, and could potentially even be compromised by those farming for reputational points and token allocations.

Association of Prestige: In science, as in many places, scarcity creates prestige. Publications such as Nature are coveted precisely because there is a rigorous selection process and low acceptance rate – the opposite of an open-access process. Since prestige requires a continuous process of curation, open-access journals where all articles are accepted run the risk of being seen as inferior in quality and content to traditional venues. This sense of conventional prestige is perhaps the strongest moat for traditional processes for scientific publication, and makes it uniquely difficult for a decentralized platform to disrupt.

Community Accessibility: Finally, there is the question of audience. Are these open-access platforms such as ResearchHub aimed at an audience of professional scientists, or that of a wider, science-curious audience? At the moment, there does not seem to be a clear answer on either side, as some features – such as article publication and peer reviewing – seem to be geared towards professionals, whereas others, such as question posting and commenting seem geared towards a wider audience. This question of audience is important due to the differing incentives and levels of understanding that professionals and hobbyists have. One interesting idea could be for these decentralized science platforms to act as places for scientific communication and “technical translation” – to transform dense, jargon-ridden research papers into easily understandable ideas.

2 - The Funding of Science

Decentralized Incubation of Science

Today, researchers can spend as much as half their time writing grant proposals for their work, and this vicious competition for funding can impact the quality of research work that they produce [13]. The current funding model leaves a gap for non-mainstream ideas, replication efforts, and early-stage applied research. One of the core missions of DeSci is to reform the funding process, and allow scientists to directly bootstrap their work from a decentralized community interested in their work.

One of the early pioneers in this space is Molecule Protocol, which provides biology researchers with a platform to create funding proposals for their research projects. For each project, Molecule will mint an IP NFT that represents the patentable research output. Ownership of this NFT is then fractionalized into “IP tokens” that are given to all of the participants that provided funding to the research project through “crowdsales” [14]. If the funding is successful and reaches its goal, the project then enters a negotiation phase, where the researcher, their research organization, and the funders will reach a licensing and revenue sharing agreement.

Molecule DAO Projects [15]

Molecule’s IP NFT infrastructure underlies many of the popular DeSci protocols today. VitaDAO, for example, is a DeSci project focusing on accelerating research in the longevity space to provide tangible, usable research. Similarly, HairDAO is a DeSci organization aimed at creating hair loss solutions, while CerebrumDAO seeks to tackle Alzheimers and advance brain health.

Recently, Molecule has also introduced pump.science, a DeSci funding platform on Solana inspired by memecoin launch platforms such as pump.fun. On pump.science, anyone can submit experiments with drug regimens for C. elegans worms, trying to create a regimen that will extend the lifespan of the worm [16]. Users can try to predict the success or failure of the various regimens, and the token liquidity can be used to fund the ongoing research. The data from the research will then be streamed back to users, who will have a stake in the success of the project.

The core observation in pump.science is that memecoins can be more than just for capturing the social media zeitgeist – they can be used to bootstrap attention for socially productive ideas such as scientific experiments. In December of 2024, Siqi Chen, the founder of Runway, shared on X (fka. Twitter) his daughter Mira’s battle with a rare brain tumour. This prompted an X user to launch a memecoin named MIRA with half the supply dedicated to Siqi [17]. The token eventually allowed Siqi to donate over a million dollars towards a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer at the Hankinson Lab at the University of Colorado – showcasing the potential for memecoins to direct attention and capital to good causes [17].

Another prominent project working on this funding and bootstrapping aspect of decentralized science is BIO protocol. Building off of the success of Molecule and early DeSci DAOs such as VitaDAO, BIO protocol is a “financial layer” for DeSci, aiming to incubate a new generation of BioDAOs that provide researchers with community-sourced funding and resources to conduct pharmaceutical research and pharma products [16]. Some of the the latest projects in BIO protocol’s cohort include Long Covid Labs, aiming to provide a cure for long COVID patients, Curetopia, creating a space to unite families suffering from rare diseases, and Quantum Biology DAO, aiming to build a quantum biology microscope [18].

Evaluating Science DAOs and Community Ownership of Science

Interestingly, many DeSci projects today take shape in the format of a DAO, emphasizing the communal ownership of science and IPs. Aside from the historical reason that many early experiments in the DeSci space took shape as DAOs or DAO-launching platforms, there may be several reasons behind this. Firstly, launching a DAO token allows for a simple, straightforward way of crowdsourcing funding via a publicly tradable token. Secondly, this token creates a community of engaged stakeholders within a project that a researcher can communicate their findings with.

However, DAOs as an organizational form have faced many unique challenges in their development. One of the most prevalent is the question of community engagement and voter apathy – a problem systemic to the vast majority of DAOs. Even in popular DeSci DAOs, such as VitaDAO, voting quorum for any given proposal is around 10% of the total supply, and there are sometimes less than 10 votes for a proposal [18]. In VitaDAO’s recent VDP-157, for example, which introduces the concept of pump.science, the vote, which has only around 2M votes, is dominated by a single voter with 1.2M VITA tokens [19]. This poses centralization risks to the voting process.

Furthermore, unlike some of the largest protocol DAOs today, such as Uniswap, Arbitrum, or Optimism, the governance of VitaDAO and other BioDAOs occur entirely offchain, relying on Snapshot as a centralized service provider. Moreover, unlike protocol DAOs that use smart contracts to manage a “tangible” on-chain treasury, it is not immediately clear how precisely a decentralized organization would govern an “intangible” asset of an IP NFT. Compared to their centralized counterparts, decentralized governance could add a lot more latency and coordination problems to the research process, not to mention potential regulatory hurdles within the space.

Perhaps one of the core issues that decentralized funding and governance bring to this process of scientific research is the question of audience. Although the token-buying stakeholders may be interested in a project, they may not necessarily be fully aware of the research norms, context, and specialized knowledge of academic research. This would push researchers to have to do much more technical communication and “translate” their research to a generalist audience, a burden that may slow down frontier research efforts.

Moreover, for projects like pump.science that have adopted a memecoin launchpad model, it is unclear if the short attention cycles and reflexive market behaviour of memecoins would be able to uphold a multi-year, or oftentimes multi-decade process of biomedical research. Crypto and academic science simply operate on two different timescales. The average time to market for a new drug is 10-15 years, which is about as long as the entire history of blockchains [20]. If these protocols seek to return tangible products back to their stakeholders, they will likely only be able to tackle products in the late phases research productionization, rather than contribute to the cutting edge discovery process that many DeSci evangelists envision.

Finally, deploying new funding into science does not address the complex issues funders face to meaningfully define success. Researchers and funders have become dependent on publication and citation counts as metrics, but this incentive system has contributed to a reproducibility crisis, undermining public trust and impeding genuine progress [21]. Merely diversifying the sources of funding fails to address the underlying inefficiencies inherent in current research institutions.

3 - The Productionization of Science

From DeSci to DePIN: Productionizing Research IP

As mentioned above, one of the core problems for DeSci is the timescale mismatch between crypto attention span and the time it takes to develop a wholly new scientific project. This means that as opposed to helping scientists do groundbreaking foundational research, perhaps DeSci’s edge and primary use case will be in the productionization of science – turning proven research into a specific consumer product. In this way, DeSci’s future can be seen as a domain-specific extension of DePIN – combining physical consumer products with tokenomics design to incentivize user behavior and aid researchers with data collection.

Many of the major existing DeSci projects seem to recognize this “productionization” angle. Molecule’s Catalyze platform, for example, emphasizes that it is for “translational research” that will directly result in an IP that can be productionized, rather than for fundamental research [22]. Moreover, it has several restrictions on project size, asking scientists to raise each round of funding with <$50k of funding and taking less than 12 months to complete [22]. Compared to traditional science, DeSci’s capacity for permissionless contributions is particularly well-suited to product translation. Motivated patients and users can act as citizen scientists, giving a project instant access to real-world feedback and expertise.

Introduction of Lushair device [23]

So what might these “productionization” projects for DeSci actually look like? Recently, HairDAO has also partnered with Genpulse to create Lushair, the world’s first at-home AI-powered scalp analysis solution that provides data analysis on metrics including hair density, follicle activity, and oil state [23] [24]. Lushair, as a physical product, may provide us with some hints of what “productionized research” may look like in the future via DeSci:

Crowdsourced funding from a widespread, known consumer pain point
Productionization of patents and analysis from existing, well-established scientific literature
Creation of physical products, such as detector devices, designed for everyday consumer use
Using DePIN-like tokenomics structures to crowdsource consumer data and provide real-world data for further medical literature

As DeSci DAOs continue to develop these consumer-grade physical devices for their members, we can see a path for a business model for DeSci that looks similar to existing decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) such as Helium and Hivemapper.

Crypto as a Distribution Channel for Evangelizing Research

Aside from the creation of physical consumer products such as Lushair, one of decentralized science’s most promising aspects is the ability to allow existing but niche areas of research to be popularized into the mainstream. As we’ve mentioned before, the token holders within these DeSci communities are more likely to be generalist users with interest in a specific scientific problem, rather than being academic scientists themselves. This may present an “audience problem” for some of the previously mentioned projects that try to create a platform intended for academic scientists.

Rather than trying to bootstrap an audience of academic researchers or converting a generalist audience into research scientists, perhaps DeSci DAOs should lean into the “technical communication” part of science and actively engage their audience with digestible summaries and takeaways from research that can be applicable to their daily lives. Thus, it is possible that DeSci DAOs will act as “research amplifiers,” with products and educational programs that popularize science for a generalist audience.

Recently, we’ve seen how platforms such as pump.science have been inspired by the rise of memecoins. The attention-grabbing economics of memecoins could be particularly interesting in creating educational channels and awareness campaigns for science projects. However, memecoins only represent a top-of-funnel attention; the core challenge for a DeSci DAO is to optimize for retention, and transform this top-of-funnel attention into long term holders and stakeholders of these research projects.

These education products can take place in many different ways. For example, these DeSci communities could create AI agents that are able to translate academic papers into attention-grabbing short videos, tweets, and other forms of media for a mass audience. We could also potentially see the development of “Masterclass-style” platforms that allow for the decentralized education of science. By developing these education-based products, DeSci projects can use a wider crypto community as a distribution channel and carve out another path to allow these communities to stay relevant, both within a crypto context as well as in the scientific community.

Disciplinary Limitations for DeSci: The Lifestyle Relevance Test

Throughout our discussion of DeSci, we’ve pretty much only focused on a single discipline – biology – that is not necessarily representative of research in other scientific disciplines. As we’ve suggested above, this may be because there are certain disciplinary limitations for DeSci. In other words, DeSci works far better for some scientific disciplines than for others.

But what characterizes these disciplines with DeSci potential? I believe that the most important litmus test for DeSci is the “lifestyle relevance” test – does the science being conducted actually affect my day-to-day lifestyle?

This litmus test, derived from the observation that most DeSci community members are an interested, informed public, explains why many of the DeSci projects we see today – from VitaDAO to HairDAO to CereberumDAO – focus on biology and medicine. The findings from these research projects could actually affect the day-to-day lifestyle of many consumers. Thus, in the productionization of existing research, DeSci organizations will likely prioritize projects that can create tangible products that create lifestyle changes for a mass consumer audience.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we’ve examined three key aspects of science that the DeSci movement aims to tackle – the accessibility of science, the funding of science, and the productionization of science. While projects like ResearchHub and Molecule Protocol demonstrate promising innovations in open access publishing and research funding, many of these existing DeSci models face significant challenges around tokenomics, governance, and audience.

Because of the fundamental timescale mismatch between academic science and crypto, perhaps the future of DeSci will be in the productionization and distribution of research-proven solutions. Moreover, DeSci seems to be much more suitable for certain types of scientific problems – those that can affect behavioral and lifestyle changes – rather than covering all research in all disciplines. Thus, in the long term, DeSci’s future likely lies not in replacing the traditional scientific research process, but in complementing them by creating new funding vehicles, new publication channels, and new productionization venues that allow theoretical results to quickly translate into tangible consumer products. This perhaps is the ultimate goal of DeSci, translating abstract scientific advances into concrete, everyday products that can benefit humanity at large.

About the Author

Jay, or 0xFishylosopher, is a senior at Stanford pursuing a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy. He is President of the Stanford Blockchain Club and founder of the Stanford Blockchain Review. He researches designs for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and blockchain governance with Stanford Law School faculty and as a Research Fellow for IC3. He also works on the investments team at Pantera Capital.