Towards the end of her four-decade academic career, public health researcher Maria Goreti Freitas was invited to author a book chapter. However, she was disappointed to realize that she wouldn't be earning royalties and would have to forfeit her intellectual rights to the work. This is a familiar scene in academic research. While inherently collaborative, science is often exploitative and involves unpaid work.

After retiring from academia, Freitas wanted to solve the challenges that scientists faced, particularly in publishing. A chance encounter introduced her to non-fungible tokens (NFT), digital assets stored on the blockchain, and how they could decentralize academic publishing.

To this end, Freitas co-founded deScier, a journal-as-a-service publishing platform where researchers can publish their papers, monetize them while retaining ownership, and even create their journals. Like deScier, a host of emerging decentralized platforms are changing how scientists fund, conduct, and publish research.

Decentralized Research Funding

Centralized science funding and publishing are in a self-propagating cycle that concentrates funding in a few institutions. Publishing in highly-ranked journals typically requires large funds, both for complicated research protocols and publishing fees. Well-funded groups can publish in these journals and are rewarded with subsequent funding, whereas researchers in not well-funded institutions or developing countries lag behind.

As a result, many research projects with massive potential are underfunded or never funded at all. It excludes particular research themes as well, such as drug development for many rare and neglected tropical diseases. Decentralized funding models upend this paradigm.

With advances in blockchain and smart contracts technology, a new form of funding has come to the forefront of DeSci. Dubbed decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), they allow laypeople and experts with a shared goal to advance research toward particular research projects. Like companies, some DAOs tackle a particular problem, whereas other DAOs act like funding bodies. ValleyDAO, an example of the latter kind, allows researchers to raise funds for projects at the intersection of climate and synthetic biology.

ValleyDAO's structure is typical of a DAO with a core team supplemented by community contributors. Contributors are compensated for their efforts in ValleyDAO’s crypto token, GROW. The token represents a significant way DeSci differs from earlier research crowdfunding efforts. It gives funders part of the intellectual property generated.

“Crypto enables us to tokenize our network and all of our activities into this one token,” said ValleyDAO co-founder Albert Anis. The token provides its holders with governance rights. They can steer how the DAO operates, such as by voting on which projects get funded. “The secondary utility is that the token gives you the ability to trade into different sub-projects of ValleyDAO,” said Anis.

On its platform, researchers have raised funds for a range of interesting projects, like bioengineered yeast that produce commercially important fats, climate-friendly hemp fabric, and software for designing metabolic pathways for bioproduction. Other biotech-focused DAOs are advancing research on longevity treatments, rare disease therapeutics, and genomic data privacy.

Innovating on the Blockchain

Blockchain‘s most important features — immutability, traceability, and cryptographic security — are critical to how DAOs and other DeSci projects operate. It fosters more effective collaboration and offers a way for researchers to be compensated more fairly for their contributions. For DeSci, the benefits of blockchain extend beyond facilitating distributed ownership and monetization.

A lot of genomics research relies on synthetic data due to privacy concerns. However, “it's not the real data that are represented by people, and while learning from that data, AI models sometimes hallucinate or make up characteristics,” said McCoy, director of infrastructure at Sei Foundation. Blockchain, on the contrary, permits privacy-preserving sharing of real data.

DeSci has another component: Web3, a decentralized version of the internet. As the internet evolved from a place where users only consumed data (Web1) to one where users also generated data (Web2), it connected the world at a scale not possible before—but missed a key driver for decentralization.

“We haven't found great ways to monetarily incentivize people across the world for their different contributions to open source,” said McCoy. Now, decentralized platforms are trying to tackle that problem for scientific research.

For building DeSci applications, Sei’s blockchain uses decentralized protocols to capture more value for the creators, people with specific expertise, and customers than a centralized research organization. Decentralized protocols can do this by "using automation and AI to do a lot of the administrative stuff and tasks that centralized providers do for the most part,” McCoy added.

BIO is another DeSci platform building decentralized infrastructure, including a financial layer to set up blockchain transactions for biotech DAOs. Holders of its native token govern which biotech DAOs the platform chooses to support. In January this year, the BIO token was recently listed on Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges globally, signaling mainstream validation of DeSci. Also in January, the Sei Foundation announced a $65 million venture fund for startups building DeSci applications on its blockchain.

Toward an Onchain Bioeconomy

It’s still early days for the DeSci ecosystem, but the technologies enabling it are seeing wider acceptance than ever. NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance are at the core of on-chain economies. Web 2.5, a transitional phase between web2 and web3, is making it easier for more people to participate in these economies.

While there hasn’t been a blockbuster success in decentralized synthetic biology yet, there has been some progress toward realizing an on-chain bioeconomy. For instance, the bioengineered yeast funded by ValleyDAO could soon be commercialized. Anis stated that ValleyDAO is in talks with a chocolate manufacturer that will use the actual lipids in chocolate making.

Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency, has a market cap of nearly 2 trillion dollars, making it extremely hard for traditional banks to ignore it. Likewise, “when a DeSci project manages to build the first billion-dollar unicorn, it is going to put deSci on the radar of the whole tech industry, the biotech industry, and the academic institutions,” said Anis.

Lastly, DeSci is as much about scientists as it is about their research. What would it take for more scientists to embrace decentralization? Freitas believes it will be stories like hers. “When people think that they can get funded and take off some of their projects, it will create a mass that will bring others to the stage,” said Freitas.