An Overview of the Current Status and Future Development of the DeSci Ecosystem

Written by: Sihan, CloudY, Op Research

In our previous article introducing DeSci, we provided a detailed overview of the development history of DeSci and the entire natural sciences from a macro perspective. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and now to the current Web3.0 revolution, it can be said that while the narrow definition of DeSci began with the recent Web3.0 revolution, the broader DeSci movement and spirit have been deeply rooted in the heart of human civilization since the birth of natural sciences. We believe that the DeSci movement is a great social experiment based on blockchain technology and the Web3.0 industry, which has the potential to change the underlying architecture of natural sciences. This article will start from several of the most representative DeSci projects currently and will elaborate on what we believe to be the origins and future of the DeSci movement from a more concrete and concise perspective.

## 1. Problems Addressed by DeSci

Funding Issues

Traditional scientific research seeks funding and resources in a centralized manner, such as through national natural science foundations. This centralized approach leads to numerous problems during the funding application process, such as a small number of academic gatekeepers controlling and monopolizing the entire funding application; furthermore, the entire process of applying for funding is lengthy and inefficient. Taking China as an example, the domestic funding cycle often starts with writing applications at the beginning of the year and concludes with project completion and review at the end of the year, with a significant amount of time spent on application procedures and assessment processes. Additionally, there are considerable issues during the assessment and approval process: for instance, a lack of comprehensive and efficient approval mechanisms for research projects often results in funding applications being submitted when the project is already more than halfway completed, making it difficult for research funds to be allocated to where they are truly needed. Moreover, the review mechanism is singular; for example, in the current centralized funding review, the publication of journal articles and patents is an important reference point for evaluating centralized research funding. Consequently, the publication of journal articles and patents has become a necessity, and some research journals have even formed an industrial chain with clear pricing, leading to a single and unreasonable review mechanism that causes journal articles to gradually become utilitarian and deviate from the original intent of scientific research. Furthermore, due to the worsening overall environment, such as economic downturns and environmental protection reasons, the overall funding for scientific research has gradually decreased, making the funding issue increasingly severe.

Establishing a More Open and Fair Environment for Research Results Attribution

In the research community, there often exists a situation of unreasonable allocation of resources and elements, with redundancy, waste, and even severe internal friction regarding research resources and personnel. The DeSci movement, based on blockchain technology, can optimize this allocation of resources and elements to some extent due to its characteristics of open and transparent data that cannot be altered, and it can also help researchers establish rights, which will help optimize the entire research environment and promote the emergence of results.

Eliminating the Monopoly of Centralized Institutions

As mentioned earlier, since ancient times, the discourse power in the scientific research industry has often been held by centralized funds or authoritative journals, leading to phenomena such as academic monopolies and "academic gangs." For a long time, there has been a situation where academic achievements are measured by opaque and unjust standards, even controlling the academic circle. The DeSci movement, based on blockchain technology, decentralizes the review and discourse power, which not only helps eliminate the monopoly of centralized institutions and reduce the occurrence of centralized malpractices but also facilitates the optimization of resource allocation and promotes cooperation and development between the scientific research industry and various sectors.

Promoting Citizen Science Movement

Citizen Science describes the collaborative relationship between the public and professional scientists. Typically, citizen science refers to projects where members of the public participate in collecting, classifying, recording, or analyzing scientific data. The "public" includes non-professional scientists, science enthusiasts, and volunteers. Citizen science projects are generally initiated by scientists who invite the public to participate and collaborate. Some projects are planned and initiated by the public, inviting scientists as technical advisors. This movement aims to call on society as a whole to participate in research and allocate social resources reasonably. This movement aligns with the spirit of Web3.0, and blockchain-based DeSci technology may provide the necessary technical support for this movement. In any case, DeSci will broadly promote the democratization and universality of scientific research, which will facilitate the development of the entire scientific research industry.

## 2. Currently Representative DeSci Concept Projects

In this section, several representative DeSci projects, as selected by the author, will be discussed. The evaluation dimensions include: project ecology (market value, funding history, functionality, importance, number of partners and incubated projects, and overall industry status), project influence (daily active users, social media popularity, etc.), project update frequency, project launch time, team situation, etc. Currently, WIKI has a relatively complete record of the DeSci ecosystem (as shown in the figure below). The entire DeSci track is still in its early stages, and in the current DeSci ecological landscape, DAOs are the most prosperous. This is likely because DAOs are designed to address the most significant and pressing funding challenges facing DeSci. The second focus is on decentralized funding, followed by concepts for publishing and peer review platforms aimed at addressing the second major challenge of DeSci: the pain points of peer review. Other concepts related to NFTs are still in a relatively primitive early stage. Currently, the majority of DeSci projects lean towards the biological track, possibly due to the larger number of research directions in the biological field and the recent increase in public attention to biological sciences due to the pandemic.

This section will analyze and discuss some representative projects selected from literature publishing and peer review, DAO concepts, and the underlying infrastructure of this track. Among them, the Molecule ecosystem is the most complete and influential in terms of DAO concepts and ecological infrastructure. The author suggests that interested readers can start by learning about this project.

DeSci Ecosystem Overview:

1. Ants-Review: A Bounty-like Open and Anonymous Peer Review System for the Scientific Industry

Ants-Review originated from the ETHTurin 2020 hackathon, submitted by the MetaBounty team. The Ants-Review project won the first prize at that hackathon and received investments from the University of Turin, Gitcoin, and the Ethereum Foundation. (ETHTurin is the first Italian hackathon of the Ethereum community, where hackers can develop Ethereum-based blockchain applications to address local impacts and sustainable development goals.)

Peer review is an essential quality control step for scientific publications. To address the issues of expensive, inefficient, and centralized peer review of scientific publications, Ants-Review proposed a blockchain-based incentive protocol that rewards scientists for their contributions to the work of other scientists and establishes a reputation system. The AntsReview protocol allows any author to issue a request for peer review of their scientific publication while maintaining the anonymity of the reviewers during the review process. It is worth mentioning that the naming of Ants-Review comes from the founders' belief that the work behind a scientific paper is akin to a complex organism like an anthill, which is the sum of many small individuals: within this sum, all contributions (even if as small as an ant) are essential to the whole and deserve recognition.

Ants-Review even creatively proposed the concept of Proof of Concept (PoC): during the review process, reviews that meet the requirements of the Ants-Review smart contract are reviewed by external editors, who verify the content. If the review is accepted by the author, the reviewers can receive ANT tokens issued by Ants-Review, which are in ERC20 format, and the smart contract is written in Solidity.

Currently, the Ants-Review project is still in its early stages and has some key issues (such as how to determine the qualifications for peer review; how to avoid malicious actions; how to prevent cheating, etc.) that need to be resolved. However, the Ants-Review protocol still demonstrates how DeSci can establish an initial economic incentive model within Web3.0. In the future, Ants-Review will issue ANT Tokens and incorporate zero-knowledge proof protocols to achieve anonymous peer review, as well as add personal DID functions to form personal reputations and integrate DEFI, with modular protocols allowing for expansion and improvement of logic.

2. Molecule: Decentralized Biotechnology Underlying Protocol

The Molecule Project is a fundraising platform for biotechnology research. Currently, about 40 scientists are seeking funding for their projects on the site. Anyone can donate and support important future discoveries. At its inception, Molecule was inspired by the citizen science movement and the democratization of drug development, with the original idea coming from patient communities, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical and clinical research. The initial idea was to use blockchain tools to help advance and fund early drug development. To this end, Molecule has made several decisions that have propelled the development of the DeSci field, including conceptualizing intellectual property NFTs, NFTs related to intellectual property (drugs or research-based intellectual property), and launching the VitaDAO community to fund longevity research.

Molecule is built on Ethereum and consists of two layers: Molecule Discovery and Molecule Finance. These layers create a vibrant ecosystem for decentralized modular drug development.

Molecule Discovery: On Molecule Discovery, information about biopharmaceutical assets is allowed to be public. This means that researchers can allow users worldwide to see their biopharmaceutical assets (generally including data and pre-applied patents) and interact with potential funders. The platform allows them to list project details, and interested investors can discover and follow projects in their areas of interest and negotiate collaboration with research teams for further interaction.

Molecule Finance: This layer facilitates modular drug development by creating virtual funding and collaborative environments. NFT assets can be transferred to automated market makers for fundraising or inserted into DAOs that manage portfolios for specific disease treatment verticals. These structures can be almost equivalent to biopharmaceutical startups or holding companies composed of various global stakeholders, funders, and researchers, but unlike them, actual governance rights will be fully allocated to the community.

IP-NFT:

Molecule employs an innovative approach to intellectual property NFTs (IP-NFT) that allows anyone to share ownership of research projects and future outcomes, such as intellectual property, royalties, data, etc. The IP-NFT developed by Molecule mainly consists of two contracts: legal contracts and smart contracts. They intersect and interact with each other. The legal contract is an IP license, referencing blockchain transactions, addresses, and signatures. The smart contract is an NFT, whose code references the IP licensing agreement and stores it mixed with certain data components on a decentralized file storage network. Together, they form the IP-NFT. IP-NFT is a new mechanism for managing intellectual property using distributed ledger technology. The goal of IP-NFT is to enable financing, ownership, and trading of IP in an open and distributed market while preserving the privacy and development potential associated with unregistered IP.

IP-NFT represents complete legal intellectual property and data access control rights for biopharmaceutical research. More importantly, they also represent a pioneering new asset class—virtualized IP-like NFTs. It can be said that in this regard, Molecule is a pioneer in tokenizing property rights and related information data.

With IP-NFT, fundraisers, biomedical researchers, and biotechnology companies can:

• Raise funds commercially without having to apply for patents or create startups early.

• Interact directly with stakeholder groups such as patients, collaborate with other researchers to promote open science, and gain attention through public markets.

• Utilize data access control to collaborate on research tasks.

• Create and implement market financing/monetization strategies.

Molecule Website Architecture

About the Molecule Ecosystem:

Molecule is built on a modular open stack, leveraging various DeFi (Balancer, Gnosis) and governance components (The LAO, Moloch) as well as legal frameworks (OpenLaw) to establish its ecosystem. Beyond these functions, Molecule Discovery also facilitates asset procurement, asset evaluation, and includes infrastructure for clinical data hosting. Molecule is not limited to the basic functions of its website but has established a comprehensive and extensive ecosystem, enabling patient collectives and drug development DAOs to hold and govern real-world IP through NFTs and interact with it. Coupled with innovations in IP-NFT (such as integrating NFTs into decentralized auction systems and funding frameworks in AMMs like Balancer, Uniswap, or Sushi), some believe that Molecule is more like the OpenSea of the DeSci track. However, in the author's view, on a macro level, Molecule insists on seeding new DAOs and their DeSci projects, including VITA DAO (the first biotechnology DAO), ValleyDAO, AthenaDAO, HairDAO, etc., which not only help advance funding for early drug development but also assist in the development of DeSci from the front to the mid-end, such as building the infrastructure for the DeSci track like bio.xyz (a launchpad for DAOs). The Molecule ecosystem is gradually improving and has a grand layout, and we have reason to believe that Molecule will become a leading project in the DeSci concept in the future.

On June 13 of this year, Molecule completed a $13 million seed round of financing, led by Northpond Ventures, with participation from Backed VC, Shine Capital, Speedinvest, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. On September 1 of this year, Pfizer announced a strategic partnership with the decentralized longevity research organization VitaDAO, investing $500,000 in new drug development projects aimed at extending lifespan.

3. VitaDAO

VitaDAO is the most well-known community-managed and decentralized drug development DAO under Molecule. It is also the world's first biotechnology DAO. The core mission of VitaDAO is to accelerate research and development in the longevity space, extending human lifespan and healthspan. To achieve this goal and coordinate incentives to activate early funding for longevity biopharmaceuticals, VitaDAO combines novel governance frameworks with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), NFTs, and algorithmic automated market makers (AMMs) to operate on the Ethereum blockchain, co-funding and digitizing research in the form of IP NFTs.

VitaDAO issues a token equivalent to the number of seconds lived by the longest-lived person in human history. It promises that if the human lifespan limit can be surpassed, they will issue additional tokens based on the new record. The VITA token can be earned by contributing work, funds, or other resources (such as data and IP) to VitaDAO. Ownership of VITA allows holders to participate in the democratic governance of VitaDAO, guide its research, access its data repository, profit from it, and manage its IP portfolio.

VITA does not grant ownership of intellectual property but rather grants complete governance rights. The design of VITA follows the principle of sustainable cycles, meaning that as R&D projects receive funding and begin to generate data, the IP value of VitaDAO grows with positive research outcomes. Successful commercialization requires the development of the VitaDAO ecosystem and greater availability of funding. This, in turn, attracts higher quality IP, providing funding for more projects and further developing the VitaDAO ecosystem.

Public members can join VitaDAO by contributing funds, work, or valuable research data or IP assets, and manage their IP through VITA tokens. The VITA token enables its holders to participate in decision-making and governance of VitaDAO's research, express support for specific programs, and manage its data repository and IP portfolio.

VitaDAO will acquire and commission research, as well as own, develop, and monetize the resulting intellectual property assets. The VITA DAO portfolio includes:

• NFTs representing intellectual property, patents, and licenses for therapeutic research projects.

• Data assets generated from R&D funded around its research projects and NFTs.

To fund more research and provide long-term funding for DAO operations, there are various options to monetize the owned data and IP. The ultimate ownership of intellectual property can be negotiated, with most currently belonging to VitaDAO and a small portion to the authors and initiators.

So far, more than 200 DeSci projects have raised funds through VitaDAO, with a total funding amount exceeding $3 million.

On August 30, Pfizer announced a strategic partnership with the decentralized longevity research organization VitaDAO, investing $500,000 in new drug development projects aimed at extending lifespan.

4. LabDAO: A DAO Organization Dedicated to DeSci Basic Tools and Facilities

LabDAO is a community of scientists and engineers dedicated to sharing open tools for life sciences research. The mission of this community is to accelerate advancements in life sciences by making computational and scientific tools accessible to all its members.

LabDAO envisions a world where individuals can unleash their technological potential without being constrained by funding, software, hardware, and infrastructure limitations. The tools co-built by LabDAO aim to lower the barriers for inventors to raise funds, develop technologies, and share technologies in an unrestricted manner.

In the past 20 years, open-source code has accelerated advancements in information technology. The ability to share code at low cost and reproduce results with high reliability has made this success possible. Additionally, the dynamics of the technology market have accelerated code sharing, where the relevance of intellectual property to time-to-market and implementation-related trade secrets is lower. In contrast, open-source in biomedicine has not been as transformative. The high costs of replicating life science processes and the low reliability of generating expected results have been barriers to open-source market dynamics. Furthermore, sharing instructions is hindered by intellectual property and trade secrets, which are the primary means of resisting competitors during lengthy regulatory approval processes.

To accelerate this process, LabDAO has developed tools such as Openlab, enabling scientists to share their specialized tools and services with one another.

About Openlab:

Openlab allows scientists to exchange tools and services freely in the global market, rather than spending a long time searching for collaborators or contract research organizations. As an important underlying infrastructure for DeSci, Openlab enables every biotechnology scientist, graduate student, postdoc, and professor to become independent inventors or entrepreneurs.

Just as Amazon Web Services has reduced the costs of starting a new tech company, LabDAO believes that the emergence of Openlab infrastructure can stimulate the growth of new biotechnology companies in DeSci. Currently, many laboratory services within biotechnology companies require high capital expenditures, as well as specialized services for the use and control of these devices and effective pricing mechanisms for their use. The emergence of Openlab allows researchers and institutions to trade various laboratory functions and services without licensing agreements to overcome these limitations. Meanwhile, the addition of the DAO concept and token incentive mechanisms will ensure that the market's profits can be reinvested back into the community and market.

The Openlab protocol and its community LabDAO address the aforementioned issues in biomedicine:

• By creating an open market for executing biomedical experiments between experimental designers and executors.

• By improving reproducibility and transparency through defining standards around biomedical tools and establishing effective pricing mechanisms.

• By incentivizing contributors to develop applications or provide instruments/functions.

Payments on Openlab can take the form of shared IP (where ownership is new co-authors) or other tokens. Openlab has transformed the centralized market with opaque researchers and isolated research institutions into an open peer-to-peer market for laboratory services. Most of the fees generated from transactions flow back into the ecosystem for the open-source development of life science tools.

At the same time, LabDAO will use three mechanisms to ensure the quality of services traded within its community:

• Funds paid for transactions will be held in escrow until users review the results of the purchased services. In case of disputes, independent arbitration services can be requested for resolution.

• Participants in the Openlab exchange need to stake $LAB tokens proportional to the value of the transactions they provide and consume. In cases of fraud, the staked $LAB tokens can be destroyed by the community.

• The community maintains a list of trusted service providers participating in exchanges. On-chain transaction records serve as the basis for user experience ratings.

The long-term benefits of LabDAO can be summarized in three points:

• Introducing the Openlab market to reduce barriers to using biomedical tools and services.

• The growth of transactions and the increase in potential conflicts around service specifications will lead to the emergence of community-driven service and tool standardization.

• On-chain records of transactions, including metadata and data assets, will serve as a dynamically evolving knowledge graph—a global laboratory notebook.

LabDAO plans to issue its own governance token $LAB in the future, and all users holding this token will be members of LabDAO. Tokens can be earned by contributing to open-source tools, maintaining the LabDAO community, or by using services on the Openlab exchange.

5. Bio.xyz: A Launch Platform to Accelerate Next-Generation Science by Utilizing Capital, Talent, and Resources to Build DAOs for Biotechnology and DeSci Projects.

Bio.xyz is a launch platform for DAO organizations incubated by Molecule, providing one-stop supporting services including operations, technology, infrastructure, and professional advice. Since 2018, Bio.xyz has incubated and accelerated the first biotechnology DAO: VitaDAO, which has funded longevity research worth $2.5 million and created core DeSci infrastructure such as the IP-NFT framework, laying the foundation for the emergence of the next generation of builders in the DeSci field. Bio.xyz can provide direct support services and funding for various DeSci DAO organizations and work together with DAO organizations to build the future of DeSci.

Bio.xyz is also a biotechnology DAO accelerator and a meta-governance layer for DeSci. Through its work in a range of therapeutic areas and infrastructure projects, Bio.xyz funds and supports future builders of decentralized science. Bio.xyz provides a launch platform, resources, guidance, shared networks, and a set of legal and smart contracts for DeSci DAOs. Our goal is to enable DeSci DAOs to utilize IP NFTs to fund, manage, and develop intellectual property from universities, companies, and researchers worldwide, thus driving explosive growth in biological sciences.

Bio.xyz provides a $100,000 on-chain convertible grant to biotechnology and DeSci DAOs, held in a multi-signature wallet on Ethereum. The multi-signature Gnosis Safe is controlled by members of the DAO founding team and bio.xyz members. Every 45 days, as long as the DAO meets the preset conditions established at the time of granting, 1/3 of the grant will be automatically released. A portion of the DAO's grant is converted into token warrants, which are part of the DAO governance tokens issued by bio.xyz. Members of Bio.xyz vote in the DAO and help ensure that the ownership of the DAO is decentralized from the start. Bio.xyz will provide funding, regulatory support, technical support, and more for new DAO organizations.

6. Research Hub: An Open Community Dedicated to Advancing the Process of Scientific Research Outcomes

Research Hub is a community of people who recognize the need for a completely new way to create and disseminate scientific knowledge. Research Hub envisions establishing a modern infrastructure for academia: eliminating inefficiencies; minimizing barriers to participation in scientific research; implementing incentives to encourage collaboration; and emphasizing the dissemination of science to all audiences. To fulfill the mission of Research Hub and realize this vision, the ResearchHub team will adhere to these values: always starting from the best interests of the scientific community; continuously seeking truth; pursuing self-awareness; upholding openness, freedom, and responsibility; and boldly exploring and learning from mistakes.

The goal of Research Hub is to create a modern portable web3 application that allows people to collaborate on scientific research more effectively, aiming to become the GitHub of the scientific community. Researchers can upload articles in PDF format (preprints or postprints), summarize their findings in an attached wiki, and discuss these findings and share results in a completely open and accessible forum.

To help Research Hub gather and incentivize contributions to the platform, Research Hub has created a unique incentive mechanism: Research Hub has created a new ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC). RSC will be used to reward users who upload new content to the platform, as well as to incentivize summarizing and discussing research. The token rewards are proportional to the community's value judgment of these actions—measured through voting. ResearchCoin is also associated with reputation on the platform—reputation will affect users' ResearchCoin earnings. Reputation will also be linked to certain privileges within the application and the review mechanism within the community. Currently, RSC is the core token and underlying reward material for Research Hub, but the platform's reputation can directly influence the acquisition of RSC and support the stable operation and development of the platform in the long run, making on-chain reputation a core feature that Research Hub aims to build.

7. The Science Dao

A decentralized idea laboratory, incubator, and accelerator platform aimed at facilitating collaboration and financing among inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientific institutions across a wide range of technologies and life sciences.

The Science DAO is a decentralized scientific community incubated by YASHA DAO, aiming to bring cutting-edge technology to the public and promote scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of society and humanity. The ultimate goal is to establish a complete DAO for science. The Science DAO will create a platform for the world's geniuses to realize their dreams. The Science DAO will be open to interested participants in the market. However, the primary target participants will be scientific funds, institutions, and universities. The DAO aims to bring these institutions together to promote growth and deliver emerging technologies to the public. To this end, the team will focus on business development, striving to build the world's largest decentralized scientific think tank.

Each project will create a series of NFTs to conduct fundraising activities. This behavior is collectively referred to as INO (Initial NFT Offering), and the public offering of NFTs will provide funding for the proposed projects. The funds raised from NFT sales will be distributed as follows: 90% will go to the fundraising project, while the remaining 10% will return to The Science DAO as a reserve fund. Additionally, a 6% royalty is set for NFT transactions, with 4% going to the project party and 2% to the community.

Raising funds through INO is a rather innovative approach. Compared to FT, the characteristics of NFTs are more suitable for ensuring investors while also distinguishing different projects on the platform, and royalties can provide continuous funding for projects. However, on the other hand, this also increases the threshold for investors and reduces asset liquidity, adding to the burden on investors.

As of March 2022, the total market value of DeSci projects funded by The Science Dao has exceeded $300 million, with over 30,000 users.

THRY TOKEN (total supply of 1 billion) will serve as the governance TOKEN within the entire The Science DAO ecosystem. TOKEN holders will have voting rights over project decisions and the right to know, participate in, and supervise the entire project process.

## 3. Outlook on Possible Future Development Paths for DeSci

Based on the analysis of the current state of the DeSci movement and the current applications of blockchain, we have derived several potential directions and specific application plans for the future development of DeSci: intellectual property attribution: academic reputation systems; resource redistribution: behavioral incentive mechanisms; data storage, encryption, and sharing: data circulation centers.

1. Intellectual Property Attribution: Academic Reputation Systems

The current attribution of academic articles and patents, as well as the subsequent flow of copyright fees, aligns well with the transparent and immutable characteristics of blockchain. Moreover, there are already relatively mature NFT-based copyright attribution and royalty flow solutions. At the same time, on-chain social graphs and reputation systems established based on user interaction behaviors, such as CyberConnect and ProjectGalaxy, are also developing rapidly. Therefore, we propose an application plan for this:

First, all addresses can authenticate their identity by uploading off-chain identity proof and obtain an updatable Soulbound Token (SBT) as proof, thereby binding the address to personal identity to achieve synchronization of on-chain and off-chain reputation. Based on this identity SBT, we can establish an academic reputation system: in this system, all academic interactions will receive corresponding academic SBT certificates, which are also updatable. An address's identity SBT will be updated based on the updates of the academic SBT certificates it holds, so other projects in the ecosystem only need to read this SBT to understand the corresponding author's academic achievements, rather than obtaining all academic certificates of that account. In fact, not only academic articles but any knowledge output can follow this logic.

Taking the publication of academic articles as an example, users can obtain a corresponding NFT for attribution and an SBT for record-keeping when publishing academic articles on-chain. Meanwhile, editors responsible for the article's publication, reviewers, recommenders, funders, and even data collectors will also receive corresponding SBTs to record their relevance. The article's author can also set the NFT royalty distribution or any other profit-sharing, such as award bonuses, etc. Each article will be reflected on the identity SBT, which will be recognized by the reputation platform and assigned a corresponding score to give value to that action. Furthermore, every citation of that article will be reflected on the article's SBT and the relevant contribution SBT, proving the holder's influence change, thereby establishing each individual's academic relationship map. Due to the personalized nature of Web3 data and the transparency of blockchain, this will change the cumbersome and inequitable situation of traditional academic article creation to publication, decentralizing each link while clarifying the role of each participant.

Once an address's academic reputation is established, users can perform financial operations based on the SBT or a certain academic NFT certificate. For example, users can obtain unsecured loans based on their SBT as a credit foundation, or they can pledge their academic NFTs, using the NFT's intrinsic value and future royalties or profit-sharing as backing to lend circulating assets. More conservatively, users can also enhance their collateral rate based on their reputation or academic NFTs. Additionally, users can fragment NFTs to proportionally split NFT rights, using this as a proof of rights for fundraising. Commercial actions such as renting or buying out intellectual property can also be decentralized through smart contracts and NFTs, avoiding the severe infringement of authors by monopolistic clauses like those of CNKI.

2. Resource Redistribution: Behavioral Incentive Mechanisms

This plan aims to address the issue of unequal resource allocation in academic research. This resource may not necessarily be funding, equipment, or interpersonal relationships; it can also include environmental resources, climate conditions, cultural heritage, etc. Drawing on current long-tail asset market solutions, we can establish a resource redistribution platform, which serves as a fundraising platform like PartyBid for academic research while exchanging fragmented NFTs as proof of rights; it can also serve as a task publishing platform like Keep3r, seeking help with tokens or other resources as rewards, and conducting distributed research on a topic in the form of SubDAOs; additionally, it can function as a peer incentive evaluation scoring platform like Abacus, ensuring fairness and incentives through a reputation system using multi-point evaluation methods. Therefore, we have designed a prototype of this plan:

The platform's functions are divided into three parts: fundraising, collaboration, and evaluation. The key to this platform is to combine these three parts with incentive and reputation systems to realize the monetization of public goods and short-term benefits of long-term projects.

Specifically, anyone can initiate fundraising on the platform, with the raised funds locked on the platform. The fundraiser applies to use the funds through a proposal, and investors vote on whether to approve it. If the number of investors voting against exceeds 10% of the total, a formal vote will be conducted; otherwise, it will be approved directly. The fundraiser will distribute NFTs of the produced work as rewards, in fragmented or ERC-1155 standard NFT forms, granting partial ownership and profit-sharing rights, while additional rights such as usage rights and commercialization can also be attached. Notably, a certain proportion of the profits generated from commercialization by investors will also flow back to the work's NFT, rather than allowing broad exploitation of others' outputs for profit. In this way, both contributors and funders can benefit.

The collaboration model is akin to the current Wikipedia, where everyone collaborates to complete a topic, but all contributors can receive rewards commensurate with their contributions, defining each contributor and pricing the output of public goods. For instance, a team in Singapore researching the correlation between the growth rate of a certain mangrove species and water quality and ocean currents may need to study mangroves in other regions, such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, due to geographical constraints. If the team chooses to conduct field investigations themselves, they must address compliance issues and consider time and manpower constraints. Therefore, the team can publish collaboration requests on this platform and offer corresponding rewards (tokens, fiat currency, fragments of the article's NFT, etc.), providing some funding support for local mangrove protection, thus generating positive effects. As a large project, it will inevitably be broken down into several smaller projects, which can then be completed collaboratively by different PhD students, researchers, and even undergraduates. When such decomposition is no longer limited by geography and national regions, the feasibility and completion efficiency of the entire project will increase significantly, while also sharing high-quality academic research resources with relatively underdeveloped research teams in other regions, promoting their academic development.

Peer review draws on current NFTFi solutions, utilizing multi-node staked tokens for joint evaluation, achieving efficient and fair assessments through incentives and penalties. Similar to Abacus, multiple evaluation nodes need to stake a corresponding number of tokens as a cost of malfeasance to score the same work. Scores will be weighted based on each person's reputation, and evaluation nodes whose scores align closely with the final score will receive incentives provided by the evaluation applicant. The entire process is supervised by challengers; once malicious scoring or witch-hunting is detected, the evaluation can be restarted, and the malefactor's staked tokens can be confiscated as incentives. Additionally, to facilitate the entire matching process, there will be a role similar to traditional editors who match evaluation nodes with applicants, which we can call curators. When a work's scoring is successfully completed, they will receive a portion of the applicant's incentives. Since the perception of a work is subject to real-time changes, and the value of the work can continuously generate, the entire scoring process can be ongoing. After each round of scoring is settled, the applicant can apply for additional evaluations with extra incentives, and evaluation nodes can change their scores by staking additional tokens, at which point other nodes can also be invited for additional scoring.

3. Data Storage, Encryption, and Sharing: Data Circulation Centers

The storage of academic data has always been a problem. The loss of key data can lead to the failure of an entire project, so reliable storage devices with backups are needed. However, once confidential data leaks, it can lead to the project being plagiarized or stolen, halting its progress. Yet, most data need to be shared promptly and verified for authenticity, creating an impossible triangle. Current blockchain technology offers mature solutions to borrow from, namely IPFS, ZK, and query/API. These three technologies can break data silos, ensure data security, and synchronize data in real-time to verify authenticity.

A data circulation center based on IPFS, ZK, and API serves as a resource integration platform, not actually building services, so it does not host user data but seeks suitable decentralized data storage services for users and collects storage fees based on user needs. All data will be encrypted to ensure privacy and verified using zk technology. Since all detected data will be uploaded in real-time, non-confidential data can be shared promptly with users in need. Moreover, the access threshold for data APIs/queries can be set by data owners to achieve data-based monetization. More importantly, the authenticity and uniqueness of the data itself can be guaranteed through blockchain characteristics, while the complete original data also makes data review and experimental reproduction simpler and more credible.

DeSci Ecosystem:

When these three plans are integrated, a comprehensive DeSci ecosystem network can be established. The data circulation center provides an essential infrastructure for this ecosystem, addressing the fundamental data issues, ensuring data security, and breaking information asymmetry. When all information is transparent, a free market can be established. The reputation system provides motivation for participants, recording each participant's contributions and assigning them value. This not only makes everyone's contributions transparent but also protects intellectual property. When all efforts can be witnessed, the entire ecosystem can develop positively. Most importantly, the behavioral incentive mechanism allows for the redistribution of resources within the entire ecosystem, enabling everyone to take what they need and maximizing the utilization rate of each resource. This is the key to the sustainable operation of the DeSci ecosystem and the essence of Web3, where everyone can control their personal resources and earn based on them.

For example, a researcher who follows their mentor's PhD student in completing a graduation project, belonging to a subproject of a future Nobel Prize-winning research, or simply providing some data for it. Years after graduation, the researcher can still receive a small reward from the Nobel Prize, and the record of their participation in the Nobel Prize research will always exist. The researcher may even receive an additional low-interest loan from the bank because of this. Another example could be someone who casually wrote a portion of a Wikipedia entry based on their expertise in their field. If that entry later experiences a surge in traffic, with many users paying for it, a significant portion of that revenue will automatically flow into the NFT they own. This is all thanks to the long-term preservation of data, the existence of the reputation system, and the incentive mechanisms.

Such an environment is the soil for the survival of DeSci, where flowers named "masters" can bloom and bear fruit that can change the development of the world.

Source:

https://antsreview.substack.com/

https://www.molecule.to/

https://medium.com/molecule-blog/an-open-bazaar-for-drug-development-molecule-protocol-a47978dd914

https://docs.molecule.to/documentation/introduction/what-is-molecule

http://news.sohu.com/a/581723085_121124375

https://www.vitadao.com/

https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1742820648865536500\&wfr=spider\&for=pc