Introduction
Maybe one of the most interesting areas of crypto that I would say probably 99% of people, even in the crypto space, are completely unaware of is the DSi space. In this blog, I’m going to talk about what DSi is, why I’m bullish on the space, and some of the top projects to keep an eye on. DSi stands for decentralized science. We all know that science is a public good and is the foundation for technological advancement.
The Problem with Current Science Systems
The advancement of health and medicine, and overall our understanding of the universe, yet the existing scientific system is completely broken. It’s become a bureaucratic nightmare built around a social hierarchy riddled with inefficiencies, a lack of openness, and according to many in the space, it has become anti-what science is supposed to be about. These days, scientists are spending more time applying for research grants than they are actually doing science. Scientists have to pay rent to research papers instead of open collaboration. The peer review process is incredibly cumbersome.
Publish or Perish Culture
On top of that, scientific culture is built around this publish-or-perish mindset. Academics are simply judged in the way that they get pay increases and advance their career based on how many papers they publish to reputable journals. Journals are oriented towards publishing exciting and positive results. It’s no surprise that this leads to some researchers simply making up results. In fact, since 2003, there have been over 8,000 biomedical research papers that have been pulled because of suspected fraud. The current system that modern science is built on is far from perfect and has a lot of room for improvement.
Enter DSi: Decentralized Science
That’s what DSi aims to do—create a new system that’s free from a lot of these inefficiencies that are currently muddling up today’s scientific process. DSi views itself a lot like open-source software. It aims to make science open and accessible to everyone to contribute to, rather than just an elite few who have all the right checks on the resume.
Current System Issues
To give you an idea, the current system is built like this: first off, research is funded by government grants or corporate entities. Both consist of small groups of decision-makers who get to decide who and what gets funded. This leads to researchers who need to get funded and feed their families, tailoring their proposals to research that they think has a high likelihood of getting funded rather than the ideas or concepts that they’re excited about and passionate about. This means there’s a wide variety of ideas, technologies, and medical breakthroughs that never see funding because they’re just not the type of ideas that these corporate entities and governments are interested in funding. This also means that medical research for cheap drugs and cures for niche illnesses often gets outright ignored.
Unincentivized Peer Review Process
The second big issue is that research review is currently completely unincentivized. All research has to go through an unpaid peer review process. As you can imagine, this drastically slows down the process of publishing sometimes critical research. Since none of these researchers are actually incentivized or paid to review this research, they’ll often skim through it maybe faster than they should and sometimes miss fraud and things that they should have caught. On top of that, astoundingly, the journals that publish these research not only charge the person who is putting the research into the journal but also charge the reader who is reading on the other side. The system taxes both the scientists publishing the research and the person trying to read the research, acting as yet again another centralized entity slowing down the scientific process and, in a lot of ways, gatekeeping what research can and can’t be published.
Publish for Career Advancement
Thirdly, as mentioned earlier, researchers advance their career and increase their pay by publishing research in reputable journals. This incentivizes researchers to publish exciting and positive results, even if that means using shady tactics like what’s known in the industry as p-hacking. There’s also a massive issue with transparency around the data for this research. Currently, it’s estimated that the results of upwards of 50% of research papers cannot be reproduced. It’s also estimated that 85% of biomedical spend is wasted on research that ends up going nowhere.
DSi’s Solutions
DSi hopes to change a lot of that or maybe even all of that. We already know that crypto can be an amazing place to get funding for a wide range of ideas, which definitely means crypto could be a great place to help with the funding issue. But also, crypto is a social layer of people who value decentralization and permissionlessness as well as things like sharing open-source code and building public goods. Outside of the actual technology, the movement of crypto is about approaching old ideas with a fresh perspective. It’s about better social coordination mechanisms and systems and replacing centralized inefficiencies with code. DSi has the potential to do that with the current system’s inefficiencies.
Open Research on Chain
You could share open research on-chain and have different collaborators contribute to that research, and all of that history would be preserved on-chain so that everyone who deserves credit would be given due credit. It would also make it so all that data was documented and preserved and would be a lot easier to reproduce. You could build DAOs to replace research journals and fairly compensate the peer review process by aligning incentives more closely with positive outcomes rather than flashy findings.
On-Chain Funding
You could, as I mentioned earlier, apply for funding on-chain and get access to global funding from a wide range of participants. This could open up research to maybe brilliant scientists in their specific field who have never had access to these prestigious colleges, or maybe they’re located in a third-world country and they’re not able to come to the US or Europe and get a degree at one of these colleges. Or maybe they were rebels who didn’t mesh well with the system and were never able to work their way up the academic hierarchy. I’m sure there’s a wealth of untapped scientific minds out there.
Investment Opportunities
As an investor, you could directly fund scientific endeavors you were passionate about with the potential to profit if a major breakthrough was made. By removing the gatekeepers and the excess and opening up science to simply those who do the best work, who knows what we could achieve?
Current DSi Projects
Currently, there are over 90 different DSi projects in operation today, with most of those launching within the past year and a half. This is a brand new sector in the crypto space with a lot of potential for growth. I’m going to dive into the top projects I’m currently keeping an eye on.
VitaDAO
First up is VitaDAO. VitaDAO is trying to advance longevity science, one of the most popular science sectors for the ultra-wealthy who would rather not die. Vita tackles not only aging but also age-related diseases. Today, it’s deployed around $4 million in funding across 19 different projects and has about $6 million in liquid funds and 9,000 community members. VitaDAO is run via the Vita token. The market cap of this token is about $16 million, but the fully diluted value is around $116 million. It was launched last year during the bear market and has never really seen a proper bull run. DSi is a really early sector. To me, that means some of these projects could have massive upside potential, and Vita seems like a good contender to possibly do well next bull run if this sector gains steam. If this project were to 100x from here, it would be at $1.6 billion in market cap or a little over $10 billion fully diluted, which I think is reasonable considering projects like Bitcoin Cash, Algorand, VeChain, ICP, Axie Infinity, FTX Token, Bitcoin SV, Harmony, Waves, Dash, Decred, and so many more were all well above that last bull cycle. This is when I ended up buying myself and adding to my portfolio.
AntidoteDAO
Next up is AntidoteDAO. This DAO aims to fund cancer research and from what I can tell, they’re only aiming to tackle the funding issue. They use the blockchain to transparently show how funds are spent, ensure funds go toward the causes they were raised for, and reduce overall costs. Currently, it doesn’t have a token, which makes sense as most of these projects are likely waiting for the bull run before launching a token, so for now, this is just one I’m keeping an eye on.
Genomes
After that is Genomes. Genomes aims to create a library of medical research and DNA data. It allows users to submit their DNA data and get paid when it’s used for research. Think of something like 23andMe, but if you owned your data. Currently, the market cap for this one is a tiny $8 million, meaning for it to 100x, it would need to just hit $800 million. I think that’s some interesting risk-to-reward upside potential personally, and I ended up buying the token.
LabDAO
After that is LabDAO. This project’s tagline is updating the standard for open and reproducible computational biology, and here’s how they describe themselves: LabDAO is an online life science research collective. We provide and use open-source tools and infrastructure for computational life science research. Just giving them a brief look over, it looks like they try to solve some of those results reproducibility issues we talked about earlier, and it definitely looks like a really interesting concept. But currently, they have no token. It’s possible that changes when the bull run hits, so this is just one I’m going to be keeping an eye on.
Molecule
After LabDAO is Molecule. This one seems like it’s more focused on trying to solve the funding dilemma. Today, it’s funded around $1.9 million toward research and according to them has around $30 million in funds in their ecosystem, which I’m not entirely sure what that means as it’s kind of vague language
. This one doesn’t have a token either, but it’s one I’m definitely keeping an eye on.
SCINET
Next up is SCINET. It’s a bit different from the previous projects as it’s tackling the data reproducibility issue. It helps create what they’re calling digital labs that help create a reproducible foundation that supports trustable and transparent data. Currently, no token yet, but I’m keeping an eye on it.
DeSci Labs
Another one I’m watching is DeSci Labs. DeSci Labs is described as a DAO-driven framework for organizing a decentralized community to facilitate scientific discovery, including managing community information through a digital ledger, capturing and utilizing research provenance, rewarding participation, and guiding governance of the DAO community itself. Again, it doesn’t look like this one has a token yet, so for now, I’m just going to be watching it.
Conclusion
These are the main projects I’m watching, but as I mentioned, there are around 90 different projects currently being worked on in the DSi space. I’m really excited about the potential that DSi has, and if the industry continues to grow, I think some of these tokens could do really well next bull run. Just keep in mind that with a lot of these projects not even having tokens yet, this is probably going to be a much slower sector than a lot of other sectors of crypto, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see a whole lot of movement from these projects this year. But definitely keep an eye on them when the next bull run hits.
