DeSci on Trial: Two Years, 2000 ETH, 11 Projects, 2bn data points on Ethereum - has ... | Devcon SEA

[Music] one welcome to the last day of Devcon um really appreciate you all uh still coming here uh after such a long and incredible week um this is actually my fifth Defcon so I'm really excited to be here uh to have the honor to uh to speak today um uh it's a third time I'm speaking and it's just really incredible to see how the space has advanced uh so I'm here today to talk to you about dii scientists today roughly at least the scientists that we spend to spend 80% of their time applying for funding and 20% doing the science Academia scientific funding and even the biotch VC ecosystem is really broken in the sense of like how we distribute um and access and fund Innovation imagine if software developers had to spend 80% of their time getting funding to write a piece of code and and only we're coding 20% like um uh that would take us back into the 80s and 90s and that's essentially where our scientific innovation ecosystem is stuck so we have the fundamental uh hypothesis that most of the world's potential scientific Talent actually today remains untapped we live in a time of Science Fiction not of Science Fiction those super cool solar Punk like cities we're only going to get there if we actually upgrade the way that we do Innovation uh so this is um a nature report that recently came out a scientist that treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in a lab um and uh she she treated herself with this and the the the response was that this under the radar stigmatized and ethically fraud practice uh essentially scientists shouldn't be doing this and there's a really cool comment scientist of science cures cancer the science no no you can't do that and then you wonder why scientists are fleeing Academia uh so design decentralized science is ultimately really about making science permissionless in the same way that we have permissionless money we should have permissionless signs this is the typical Innovation and Drug development cycle uh that happens within a firm this process today take up takes up to 10 years and costs upward of $2 billion and within here you have this is like one company for instance trinic cure cancer uh instead of all working together globally in a globally connected Marketplace each company does work buy an in of itself so what we developed is uh on ethereum is something called an ipft It's a combination of a legal contract a smart contract and then you encrypt all of the secret sauce the private data on a combination of arweave and and filecoin this mechanism to date has uh funded over 2,000 eth in research across the world this for instance is the research portfolio of uh V da one of the leading um dside Dows that exist today so there's an ecosystem now of dsid dows that are all actively using this framework to fund research on on ethereum um this for instance is with University of Copenhagen University of Oslo we have one project with Newcastle University if any of you are into longevity research the project that we funded at Newcastle is about a phagy activators and these new drugs that are being developed that 100% now owned by a dow are actually proven to be two to three times more effective than rapy rapy being the other leading longevity drawer this is 100% owned on ethereum now um this happens as I said through an ipft there's a further governance framework that we developed which are called IPS which essentially make individual research projects now tradable um I'll go through a little a little case study sorry it's very FAL based uh it's a lot lot of ground to cover for 5 minutes um so this project was funded for $90,000 in in uh in May 2023 uh it is about longevity gene therapy uh it was then tokenized um this is how like this is how the ipft kind of looks on chain um and then here you can kind of see a public tokenization event where now members of V can publicly contribute uh to funding this um then a DEX Unis swap liquidity pool was launched and what happened now is you have a live market that becomes really hungry for data which typically doesn't doesn't happen so all of the market participants at token H and are constantly in touch with the researcher trying to find out how the research is going uh so since then he's released a whole bunch of data um this is a biotech developer who's also new to crypto so we're bringing an entire new user base really into crypto um so since 2023 we've now built over seven of these different bods that have in total soured over 2,000 projects and essentially moved over 20 million of signs on chain uh we have one focused on psychedelic research for instance another one focused on hair loss um cryogenics uh neuroscience and we're building more and more um one of the most exciting ones for me is a DI focus on Quantum biology with one of the world's leading researchers from MIT that is now coming on chain uh to build a Quantum biology focused hour so what data points do we have today we have over 2,000 projects that were evaluated approximately only 0.5 of them got funded 13 projects funded on chain over 3,000 East deployed we're developing five to six new medicines uh we have first Real World products this is one of the first products that vow has brought to Market it's a highd dose spadine supplement approved by the Tha FDA if you want to learn more we'll be here in a bit um but now the question is how might we get to a 100,000 projects how do we actually increase the throughput how do we get to 100 medicines how do we actually get to a world without P patents um one will be through open curation markets so building autonomous marketplaces and exchanges that can massively increase the scalability and curation of projects if any of you have heard about bondes bonding coves I think one of the most exciting Innovations to actually curate not just memes but curate science curate research um however science and biotech really requires large sums of money so the next question should be how might we Inspire millions of patients to come on chain let's be honest most of the world still sees crypto as a giant Casino hasn't solved that many real world problems yet but here we actually have potential to inspire millions of people by solving real problems we could fund a malaria vaccine we could fund a clinical trial nation states typically invest 4 to 5% of their GDP into funding basic research if we consider blockchains to become nation states or network States then we should do the same and a super small example here to kind of just to leave you with if e stakers redirected their rewards so do this voluntarily redirected rewards def funding basic research on chain ethereum would have an R&D budget just from 10% from 10% of e staking rewards ethereum would have an RD R&D budget the size of Singapore so we could fund four five malaria vaccine trials a year uh and actually if you think about that kind of impact I think we've been scaling so much for throughput but we should be starting to think about scaling for impact so we want to build towards a world where scientists spend 80% doing the science 20 applying for funding where anyone in the world can fund and participate in science independent of institution and geography thank you so much thank you thanks a lot you see that this topic matters right you you heard the Applause what you heard the Applause this topic matters to every the topic matter sorry I ran a little bit over um yes uh thanks Paul uh can you explain a little bit to me about about how you go the the protocol goes about um validating projects to make sure that the funding they're seeking is for a worthwhile project and um what's to stop just somebody just posting up a a rubbish project that's first question second question once you have found one it's listed it's got the money it's actually got a product and solve something you still have to go through FDA approval of some sort somewhere like you did for that Thailand uh does that then take you back into the quog M of um that process you're trying to get around 100% so this product was actually approved by the Thai FDA um but leave that aside the biggest bottleneck in funding basic science or funding research is in the early stages it's in kind of The Sweet Spot between 100 to 500k this is typically called the valley of death in Academia there's been hundreds of Articles written around this no one has a solution to this problem I think we might have something here um to answer your question really specifically Capital markets are among the best ways of to to to curate things um right now a lot of the funding is permission in the sense it's semi- permission I presented these numbers 2500 and roughly only 0.5% were funded it's not that most of the other ones were garbage it's just the space has such little funding uh some of these STS have been operating with SH string budget of was like 750k 1 million through one and a half years of a bare market and actually funding research with it it's not just Ops cost but I we're now moving from like a permissioned way where token so token holders vote and then you have scientific um a scientific community and like a scientific Advisory board that actually reviews proposals in a similar way that the NIH would do that grand proposals are reviewed so it's very very professionalized in the future though I think to really scale throughput we're moving into much more permissionless designs one thing I think that we could dig up again if any of you still familiar at token curated um Registries I think that could be a really interesting way to have token holders up vote and down vote which projects should get funded and then the other way is really I think um we can laugh about pump. fund and it's like it's it's a weird little thing but it's actually to this to currently very quickly birth more crypto unicorns than ever any other platform ever before on a short time frame I think a similar thing in a safe way could be applied to sign so if we take out some of the some of the crazy speculative aspects and make it a little bit more tempered that would be a great way to actually boil the ocean to get a lot of ear stage Innovation funding thank you for the answer and a great question H one more there but let's be fast we are like super short on time short question please and a short transfer possible yes um so I guess how do you think about the ethical stuff like that cancer um the doctoring on cancer like that's an ethical issue that like how do you basically think about that when you're funding and vetting and does this solve this in any way or yeah how do you think about this framework 100% so um I mean so actually if you dig deeper into this and you're like fully permissionless science bios safety and all of that actually becomes a much bigger concern so with regards to ethical considerations um it's like we're a neutral platform in the same way that ethereum is a neutral platform I remember in the early days of ethereum people were really worried about this one use case which was like What if we have assassination markets on ethereum and like anyone can create a smart contract that someone gets it never happened I actually think that fully open systems are much better at at at regulation than existing Regulators so like we have really bad stuff that came onto the market through the FDA uh namely oon all of those opioids like the regulator isn't much better at protecting the public from I think what an actual system is so if you ever did have something that was really concerning come onto a market like this I think the market self-regulates on the other hand who are it's always about the funders and so actually think this becomes really powerful if funders of these things are patients imagine if a new diabetes drug was 40% funded by patients like what would they do to access and to pricing they would probably be much more interested to offer it to as many diabetics as possible at as low a price as possible and so I think because the early funders in these communities are in fact patients or people are affected by this one of the most successful communities is hair which is comprised of hair loss patients and I'm