Leverage Weekly #44 - Decentralized science
With a visit to Thailand
Most people understand that science is important. Some people believe that legacy institutions are failing. Put those two things together and you get: decentralized science.
We first encountered the decentralized science movement from a tip from Riva Tez, Silicon Valley and crypto superconnector. Clarice (from the Quantum Biology Institute) and I met Vincent Weisser and soon a bunch of other people from the BIO.xyz team. We then began exploring the possibility of creating a DAO — a decentralized autonomous organization, essentially, a people-led foundation, that would support the Quantum Biology community and help raise funds for the Quantum Biology Institute and other important quantum biological research.
Much later, the QBio Institute team decided to become part of BIO’s second cohort. BIO is basically YCombinator, but for bio DAOs. A “bio DAO,” in turn, is a biologically focused DAO, which again is essentially a foundation, run by the people and powered by crypto. DAOs launch tokens which they use to raise money to fund research. On the usual model, that research then generates intellectual property, which is owned by the DAO. As the DAO produces good research, it generates IP, which then puts money back into the DAO.
For our quantum bio efforts, starting a DAO fit in perfectly. It sits between the institute (a traditional non-profit) and a planned incubator (a traditional incubator of traditional startups) on our quantum biology roadmap. It will help to raise money for the work after some of the initial basic research but before we’re ready for quantum bio startups. We also figured out some great things it can do, from edgier research (dangers from 5G?!) to public engagement (quantum consciousness?!) to letting token holders stake their tokens on the results of experiments, rewarding people with better predictions by giving them more control over how the DAO’s funds are allocated.
The three-tiered structure we’re using is somewhat complex. But, a bit to our surprise, almost no one has complained. In fact, we’ve started hearing that people are doing something similar, or in some cases, that people are thinking of recommending that others copy us. It makes sense: the three-organization structure makes it possible to bring in money of all types and helps to harmonize the interests of the organizations.
Now that the Quantum Biology DAO is part of BIO’s second cohort, Clarice and I have started attending meetings with other members of the cohort, learning about how to build interest in the DAO (and quantum biology!), and most recently, we went to Thailand for Devcon 7, a big crypto conference, and BIO’s 1-day event the Sunday before, Desci Bangkok. And by “recently,” I mean, Clarice is still there and I got back to the States yesterday.
BIO’s event was great. I learned about a bunch of other DAOs, including HairDAO, with the mission of curing baldness. I got a chance to speak about quantum biology; this was received very positively. Clarice and I also had a chance to meet a bunch of the BIO people in person, and attended a BIO/Binance event (Binance just invested in BIO). That was fun. Also, CZ and Vitalik showed up.
All of this time immersed in crypto and bio DAOs and BIO got me thinking, quite naturally, about decentralized science. I remarked in my talk, it’s weird that we talk about “open science.” Science is meant to be open! If it stops being open enough, it stops being possible for scientists to replicate and check each other’s work, and stops being science. The same is true, I realized, for decentralization. (Or “pluralism.”) Science depends on multiple people independently checking and being in the position to correct errors. If they stop being independent, the virtuous cycle stops and science stops with it.
But it wasn’t just the nature of science. There’s a big question of how to fund science at scale outside of legacy institutions (academia, etc.). A bunch of crypto people have money, but how can they figure out what to fund? Who should determine what money goes to which science projects? Talking with a variety of people at the event, including Juan Benet (founder of Protocol Labs, inventor of Filecoin (ranked #41 in tokens at the time of writing)), I realized that crypto and decentralized science offer a potential way to rethink how science works in the world.
So it’s not just about quantum biology, or raising money for one project. It’s about thinking about how science can be funded into the future and what it means in practice for science to be refounded, at scale, in the near term.
I’ll be thinking about that more.
‘Til next time,
Geoff
p.s. If you want to join the quantum bio excitement, join the Quantum Bio DAO’s Discord server here. Or you could retweet something.
p.p.s. I’m in the photo in this tweet. Or at least, part of my head is: https://x.com/cz_binance/status/1856648227572908514