If you’ve found yourself around the scientific research world, you know of the immense strain money puts on scientists. Even before the professional careers of researchers begin, they get seminars, lectures, and hands on experience about how to secure grant money. Principal Investigators (PI) often have to spend a large chunk of their time writing grants in order to keep their labs funded.
If you’ve found yourself awake and aware to the world the last 6 months, you know of the craze surrounding cryptocurrencies. Whether the crypto intends to be a major disruptor of the current financial system (BTC/ETH) or just pure comedy, the sheer quantity of capital and participants makes crypto hard to ignore.
In proving its disruption of the status quo, founders are attempting to use new cryptocurrencies to shake the current scientific notions surrounding funding. Richard Heart, creator of the HEX cryptocurrency, has now created a new crypto called PULSE. However, the way PULSE is being issued is extremely unique.
Heart decided to use what is termed an airdrop in the cryptocurrency world. An airdrop is a way for a coin to gain publicity and a wide variety of users at its earliest stage, accomplished by depositing said crypto in the wallets of users for free or small US fees. PULSE has one of the most unique issuing plays I’ve seen within the crypto world.
Users are able to particiapte in PULSE’s airdop if they make donations, and all of the donations are being funneled to SENS Research Foundation, a non-profit tackling regenerative medicine and Anti-Aging Research. Thus, PULSE is branding itself as the “Anti-Aging Crypto”, as holders (potentially HODLers) of the coin directly fund research.
The most astounding part of this airdrop is that in just TWO days, the airdrop has raised $22 million dollars. That alone is 4x the annual operating budget of SENS, which has been around since 2009.
SENS and PULSE aren’t the first time we’ve seen crypto and blockchain technology begin to dip it’s foot into the scientific realm. VitaDAO is a “cooperative vehicle for community-governed and decentralized drug development”. For the first time we’re watching as smaller players are able to work together to deploy large amounts of capital in the scientific field. This provides a fascinating alternative to funding agencies like the National Institute of Health (NIH) and large pharmaceutical corporations. This point alone highlights how transformative this new technology can be to research. We’ve all heard of Big Pharma funding studies to validate their products, nullifying the scientific nature of the research. Decentralizing the funding of scientific research encourages the return to foundational scientific principles, and a potential gold age of capital entering Anti-Aging research in general.
In 2019 Vitalik Buterin made a $350,000 US Dollar donation in the form of Ethereum to the SENS Research Foundation. Funding via cryptocurrency is unique given its contrasting nature to the inflationay US Dollar. At the time of Buterin’s donation, 1 ETH was valued at $107.57 US Dollars. Given the rapid rise in the assets value, had SENS held all the donated ETH on its balance sheet, that donation would now be worth $6.1 million dollars. Scientific organizations, much like Microstrategy and Tesla, have an interesting opporunity to hold cryptocurrency on their balance sheets in order to leverage these assets against the untold future of financial markets.
The thought process and intracies of VitaDAO are enough for its own post, but it would be a disservice to its potential if I did not expand upon it more here.
With VitaDAO, regular people like you and I have the ability to provide capital or if you are a scientist, data and research to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), governed through smart contracts and blockchain technology. The DAO’s parameters encourage collective participation by Investors, Researchers, and Pharamceutical Companies. Below is a great graphic to highlight the reach that DAO’s have.
Two things catch my interest from this model:
1. The way decentralization of funding will change the intentions and interests of scientists
AND
2. How technology such as NFT’s will disrupt stereotypical IP and licensing dynamics within the scientific community
Seeing this crossover between Crypto and Science has been one of those moments I probably won’t forget. Crypto, Blockchains, and DAO’s have been that side interest for 6 months that I seem to share passionately with a few close friends and see as the future of the world. My work in the PNI Lab at Baylor has been the easy part of my life to market and speak about, as it represents a safe and well-beaten path.
I’m pumped to see where I take this unbeaten path of “CryptoScience”.
It was very interesting to read in The Daily Bud about how funding and finance affect modern day research and how Crypto Currency could change the face of funding to research by using there own programs to help research and out-compete large pharmaceutical companies and corporations.
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Great article Colin! Question for you... at the top of the schematic you shared, DAO members give funds, and in return they get Vita Tokens. Presumably, the value of the Vita Tokens will depend on the success of VitaDAO in having marketable stuff to sell to collect other funds. Based on the schematic, this is what it seems like. So, how is owning Vita Tokens any different than owning stock in a corporation that raises money, invests that money, then sells products or services, the success of which determines how much the stock is worth... how is this different? And if the answer is that it's not really that different, is this really just "crowdsourcing" for what effectively a Venture Capital fund named VitaDAO? And if that's the case, wouldn't it start to be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as such?
Good stuff Colin! Thanks for sharing such a thought-provoking subject!