In a bullish market ripe with opportunities, early involvement in nascent projects often leads to exponential growth, with reports of coins multiplying by hundreds or thousands of times circulating regularly. The crypto community avidly hunts for the next big thing amidst the proliferation of meme coins and AI concepts.

In the face of the 10,000x meme and AI concepts that are piling up, the increase seems to be just a number, and doubling is no longer enough to make waves in the crypto community. But among the slew of popular tokens, ResearchCoin (RSC) has caught the market’s attention, with its price having broken through previous highs several times in the past month.

Beyond its remarkable price surge, ResearchCoin (RSC) is part of a promising track known as DeSci (Decentralized Science). DeSci aims to revolutionize how scientific knowledge is funded, created, reviewed, stored, and shared by leveraging Web3 technologies like NFTs, smart contracts, and DAOs to establish a robust public infrastructure. It encourages scientists to openly share their research findings, fostering recognition, and enables effortless access and contribution to research outcomes for everyone.

In their New Year’s outlook at the end of last year, a number of VCs were openly bullish on the DeSci track, with Messari, for example, indicating in its investment forecast article that it was turning its attention to several key non-financial sectors of the crypto space, with DeSci being less driven by rampant hype as it revolves around key solutions for our industry that go well beyond the financial realm.

Matti, co-founder of Zee Prime Capital, emphasized DeSci’s real-world problem-solving capabilities, distinguishing it from most cryptocurrencies by its practical utility, akin to being a cryptocurrency for cryptocurrencies.

However, DeSci is not very popular among cryptocurrencies at the moment and is still a very new concept.

Compared to the Chinese community, DeSci is much more discussed in the English community. At the end of last year, a DeSci conference was held in Berlin, in which many industry OGs, including Matti, co-founder of Zee Prime Capital, Tyler Golato, CEO of Molecule, and Paul Kohlhaas, co-founder of Molecule, etc., participated to express their own research and knowledge on Desci.

In the Chinese community, perhaps it was the remarks made by former Binance CEO CZ on social media platforms that gave DeSci a small buzz, as CZ said he has been reading about biotech and thinking about how to use crypto to accelerate research funding there. As we all know, the crypto community has a long history of “longevity” research, and DeSci is a perfect fit for this area of research.

According to the WIKI collection, there are currently hundreds of projects on the DeSci circuit. However, according to the Messari report, 50% of the DeSci projects have been established in the past year. As you can see from the chart, the current DeSci ecosystem is most prosperous with DAO, while other NFT-related portfolio concepts are still in a relatively barren early state.

DAO Address Funding Challenges in DeSci

DAOs can be considered the fundamental manifestation of the DeSci concept, and currently, they thrive within the DeSci ecosystem. At present, the most pressing issue facing DeSci is funding difficulty, and besides DAOs, it’s evident that a significant portion of the entire track is dedicated to decentralized financing. The primary purpose of DAOs is to address this funding challenge.

Traditional scientific research seeks research funding and resources through centralized methods such as the National Natural Fund, but this can lead to a large number of problems in the process of applying for funding, and the entire process of applying for funding can also be lengthy and inefficient. Furthermore, worsening environmental conditions such as economic downturns and environmental concerns have also led to a gradual decrease in overall research funding, exacerbating the issue of research funding.

The Interconnected Desci Ecosystem

In Desci’s ecosystem, the close interconnectedness of projects is probably a good place to start. Raising capital in the form of DAOs seems to be a good option, with different DAOs investing in each other.

For example, after receiving an investment from Seed Club Ventures, Molecule participated in LabDAO, an open-source drug discovery organization, and then received another $1 million from Sora Ventures. To promote innovation in biomedical research, Molecule will provide grants exclusively to Asian researchers, with plans to award $50,000 to deserving scientific teams or individuals.

As a biotech research fundraising platform built on ethereum, Molecule has two main systems, Molecule Discovery and Molecule Finance. Molecule utilizes a combination of smart and legal contracts to form Intellectual Property NFTs (IP-NFTs), a novel mechanism that allows anyone to share ownership of research projects and their future outcomes, such as the creation of a new research project. Molecule utilizes a combination of smart contracts and legal contracts to form IP-NFT (IP-NFT), a novel mechanism that allows anyone to share ownership of a research project and its future results, such as intellectual property rights, royalties, and data.

Tyler Golato, CEO and co-founder of Molecule, and co-founder Paul Kohlhaas co-founded Bio.xyz and VitaDAO.

Bio.xyz serves as a biotech DAO gas pedal and DeSci meta-governance layer with the goal of enabling the DeSci DAO to utilize IP-NFT to fund, manage, and develop the University’s intellectual property around the world for companies, firms, and researchers. In addition, Bio.xyz provides the DeSci DAO with a launchpad, resources, mentoring, a shared network, and a set of legal and smart contracts.

Molecule’s and bio.xyz’s fundraising grants are aimed at decentralized scientific organizations like VitaDAO. The combination of multiple programs can make it easier to apply for scientific research grants and also link intellectual property to cryptocurrencies.

DAO Focuses on Real-world Problems

According to OP Research, the current DeSci program has the highest number of projects leaning towards the biological track, which may be related to the higher number of scientific biological directions themselves resulting from the epidemic as well as the general public’s heightened interest in biological sciences.

VitaDAO is a leader in research and development in the field of longevity. As the world’s first biotech DAO, VitaDAO’s main goal is to promote advances in longevity research and to extend the human lifespan and healthy lifespan. Its native token, VITA, is up 48% in 30 days and has a market capitalization of $83.29 million. VITA holders participate in VitaDAO’s decision-making process, including the selection of project grants, fund management and governance activities.

AxonDAO Governance Token (AXGT) also focuses on the field of biotechnology. It aims to redefine the interaction between individuals and their health data using blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. The project’s foundation lies in the use of predictive algorithms, drawing from rich biometric recognition technology, genomic data, and other critical health indicators. This approach enables not only the monitoring but also the prediction of health outcomes.

Desci can use AxonDAO to provide a solution that simplifies the collection, storage and validation of clinical data through blockchain technology. This approach ensures secure and transparent data processing, while also enabling the creation of common standards for the decentralization of personal health and wellness information, thus facilitating easier access and better control by individuals over their own data.

Another popular topic in biotechnology: hair loss. And HairDAO is a decentralized organization dedicated to treating hair loss, using an open source investment and operating model. Through HairDAO, patients and researchers collaborate to develop revolutionary new treatments for hair loss. Users’ treatment experiences are recorded in HairDAO’s app and earn HAIR tokens as rewards.

HairDAO is rich in rewards, cultural specificity, and meme-like qualities. According to Zee Prime Capital co-founder Matti’s article, “Hair is Money,” the end state for HairDAO is a fully vertically integrated pharmaceutical business that includes drug manufacturing and distribution.HairDAO had to be transformed from a disorganized Discord group of 1,000 people into a credible business that could both accommodate tens or hundreds of thousands of people ( for data collection) and also outsource physical world operations (for approvals, patents, manufacturing, distribution, etc.).

Desci Address Peer Review and Moderation Challenges

Based on the availability of funding, the second major problem Desci faces is the pain point of peer review of publications and literature review of papers. Generally, for a research project, the funding cycle often starts at the beginning of the year when the application is written, and ends at the end of the year when the project is finalized and reviewed, with a lot of time spent on application procedures and assessment processes.

In the assessment and approval process, scientific research projects lack a comprehensive and efficient approval mechanism, and often when a project applies for scientific research funding, the progress is already more than half, and it is difficult to implement the scientific research funding to the place where scientific research is really most needed. In addition, in the current review of research funding, journal articles and patents are an important reference point for the review of research funding, based on which the publication of journal articles and patents has become a necessity, and even some research magazines have formed an industry chain at a reasonable price. This single and unreasonable review mechanism has led to the gradual utilitarianization of journal articles and a deviation from the original intention of scientific research.

The ResearchCoin (RSC) mentioned in the beginning of this article is a decentralized way to decentralize the right to review and discuss, aiming to change the traditional scientific research journal publishing mode.

By creating an alternative ‘Hub’ system to traditional journals, ResearchCoin allows scientists or scholars to openly 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 a crypto-scientific research platform, users earn ResearchCoin (RSC) by posting content to ResearchHub, receiving an amount of RSC proportional to the value of the content as perceived by the rest of the community.

In addition, users can set RSC bounties for peer reviews, abstracts, or new methods in the lab. It’s also possible to fund research by ‘pre-registering’ for the program and raising cryptocurrency in forum posts before research begins. According to ResearchHub, activity on the platform has grown over time, with peer-review activity in particular being the most active and promising.

ResearchCoin was co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and completed a $5 million Series A financing round on June 15 last year. According to Coingecko data, at the time of writing, RSC’s price has risen to $0.8328, with a 24-hour increase of 10.3%.

Although most of the tokens in the DeSci space have seen good gains, perhaps due to the low popularity of the concept, some of the official social media profiles of the top projects in the DeSci market capitalization rankings according to coingecko are labeled with the rest of the hashtags, such as DePIN, RWA and so on.

For example, OriginTrail, which is ranked 201st in total crypto market capitalization and is also the No. 1 project in this track, has official Twitter hashtags that only show AI, DePIN, and RWA, and according to its official website, life sciences and healthcare are among the project’s key areas of research. Dynex, the No. 6 project in the track, is even less DeSci-related via its website and Twitter feed. As a neuromorphic quantum computing cloud, Dynex only mentions DeSci-related use cases, including pharmacy, automotive, and aerospace, in its documentation.

As an emerging concept, the DeSci track may gradually gain more attention, similar to how some very small projects are gaining increasing visibility and popularity.

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