# OtterTank | PoSciDon | September 2023 Edition

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 34:26
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-rbqp1fFYgIA
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbqp1fFYgIA

## Description

PoSciDon: decentralizing funding and commercialization of personalized medicine research through a DAO.

OtterTank is an in-person pitching stage in the center of Amsterdam. Welcoming crypto-curious, developer, investor, marketing, VC folk to mingle and attend presentations of young projects! 

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Our Judges:
Experienced, knowledgeable and fair.e ready for their critical input.

Thijs van Boven - Digital Asset Trader at VanEck.
Justin Bons - CIO & Founder at Cyber Capital.
David Truong - Aave Grant DAO, developer, Truong.VC.
Sterling Schuyler - Copy and content writer for emerging fund managers & crypto enthusiasts, Founder Added Value Agency.

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## Transcript

[Music] but on that note I would like to welcome to the stage our third startup Poseidon the stage is yours all right uh good day everyone my name is Marco huberts uh our first tital slight got butchered by technology but um I'm going to present you posidon and we aim to revolutionize scientific funding process and as a scientist I experienced a lot of issues in science funding and of course we had to check if other scientists experienced uh the same issues so what we did is we surveyed 44 scientists and we asked uh if they also experienced issues and they experienced funding issues they experienced uh bias in the funding process and also a lack of incentive SL rewards and some other issues in science is that when money is raised for charity only 50 to 60% of those of that money raised goes to the Charities and then between the scientists and the charity there so many middlemen that the amount of money that eventually goes to the scientist um is uh significantly lower so as a solution uh we have Poseidon Dao where we aim to become a decentralized biotech company and we do that by streamlining streamlining the funding process and we focus on personaliz medicine more later and we also reward investors and scientists accordingly and we hope to eliminate most of the bias in the funding process so we focus on personalized medicine because current treatments that are being made often Target whole patient groups and that often results in a high failure rate and by targeting subpopulations of patient groups that have a similar genetic background uh we can then have a more personalized approach to treating patients and because of these factors we can expect some growth in the personalized medicine Market in the next 10 years so to incentivize donors investors and other parties and of course scientists in our Dow we have a multi token model and we start with uh the donation token which you receive upon donating it's account bound it's fungible and you can get uh voting power if you stake it through our platform we also have a tradeable token and the tradeable token um as the name says you can trade it it's um and you also receive a dividend from the potential Revenue that we can generate uh through our Dow and also there's a tax rate which we can talk about more later on uh then we have the third token is a participation token when you participate in a governance system um you get this token and if you stake it together with a tradeable token we can ex uh you can expect more of the tradeable token and that should incentivize people to participate in the governance system but as we have a limited amount of tokens for that staking program it's mainly in the beginning to incentivize people and also to lower the token velocity of our tradable token so our business model is quite simple we fund uh research projects the scientists do everything they can to generate IP and data assets and those data and IP assets we license them to third parties and then we hope to expect uh to generate some revenue and that Revenue will be distributed as follows 30% goes to scientists 30% to investors and the rest to our treasury to further fund other projects so also our logo got butchered here but um we have V da and aena da as our biggest competitors and we as Poseidon on the left right in front of it um we focus on the Venture and biod aspect we also focus on personized medicine as I said before uh we're on The Zing Network we have a dividend for scientists dividend for tradeable token holders we have onchain donations and we have a multi-token model to incentivize donors investors and scientists also that got wichard um so we had nice arrows there but um so here what we have achieved so far we have surveyed researchers we have an app launch on tet we have of course we are have some ongoing um development with that I'm working on that we the most important part is that together with ernston young we're setting up the right legal entity for uh for this Dow and then we are uh then we can start building a community hopefully the when our community is big enough we can then uh offer our tradeable token to the community to investors and hopefully with the funds raised we can uh fund some scientific research projects so with Poseidon we hope to create uh scientific funding process that's non-discriminatory that's decentralized and democratized that will help further scientific discoveries in the personalized medicine field um so please uh thank you for uh listening and um please join our [Applause] community 2 seconds toare uh so my first question is about bias because you mentioned that that's an issue and I am aware that that is an issue um when it comes to reviewing scientific journals but how are you eliminating bias by doing this uh I mean I can talk a bit about my personal experiences but uh without saying too much we get funding from one specific organization and because of the disagreement on uh on well so they gave already some funding but not enough for the whole project and at some point they um because they disagreed with some of the progress we made they decided to just stop the funding uh so that's my personal experience we had our work we worked around that to because I'm I'm a fourthe PhD candidate so um we have four or five projects we need to finish uh so we had some you know improvising to do because of funding stopped but that is I would say um bias in the form um and also centralization actually that if they disagree with uh with my supervisor in this case on the personal or professional level that's some form of bias that we can eradicate by having a lot of people vote on the F on who receives what uh funding or which resource project received what funding so that in that way we attempt to we cannot eliminate all the bias of course but at least most of the bias um that's involved in the process what I experience myself oh sorry can everyone hear me um oh I see I see um so yeah I I think does that answer your question yes so you're saying that you're eliminating bias by having lots of people vote on what gets funded yes and and yeah so we what what we also want to do when and we're still in doubt about that but when a project is up for proposal if we actually share any details regarding um their impact factor well who the person is that's leading the research um and the details of the Institute because there institutional bias people think some institutes are better than others so if we remove that people can then see look at the project itself and and then say okay I like this project regardless of who is actually doing that project so also there we try to uh remove some of that bias okay and you you mentioned so are you a dow or are you a company and who the decision makers well the company in that sense relates to that we are well more like a business I would say and a DA can also be a business uh right so we generate revenue and the only thing is we redistribute that Revenue to our uh token holders um um yes I want to make it a little bit more tangible Al for the audience um so if they if someone in the audience wants to invest uh with a research project that's on your platform what token does he has to buy first how does he get in to start donating something does he have to buy the op token the seci token or there's not a token so get a bit confused that's fine so um well it depends if you want to donate you you donate you get the donation token there's no there's no Financial value in that because it's it's a donation right so it should you should not expect any dividend or uh potential price appreciation so that would be the first step if you want to donate if you want to invest you would go for the side token so if I'm going to donate that's a donation I'm not getting anything back yes okay right so why not just usdc why not e why does it have to be a new token oh no so no no so you can donate with E and with uh usdc we Implement that but as a return to vote there's something that like a token that gives you voting power that you can use in our in our ecosystem that's what the the don't take token has as has a purpose so it's not yeah so you can use e and okay so so I I I get this still feedback would be for investors to make it easier maybe make less tokens maybe only one token but then but then still if I want to invest in it how do you how do you how do you say what do what do you tell investors that they are going to make return on their investment how does it work for them uh so it we try to simplify that um so when regarding the the the side token we we offer that to liquidity bootstrap option so people should uh you know we offer the token and then with the price discovery that the market um you know decides um with the minimum taken into account uh they they can buy that token and then when they stake that through our platform they get the the governance power and then they can vote and then they just have two and uh anyone who does not get it or am I am I still one for an investor right so so there's another yeah which if I'm I'm an investor which token am I buying because the first one the side token what's the name oh the side Tok the tradeable one so the old ones that they don't have any trade they cannot be traded so the first one and third one that I show cannot be traded so there's nothing to invest yeah it's a donation uh that you make so you don't as an investor you don't donate right you invest so you get the tradeable token um to then eventually sell your if you make a profit or whatever or if you want for the wait for the and how do you make a profit so that's where you're selling the the the scientific research to yeah so with the money raised we go fund scientific research projects with the aim to generate data and IP assets and those assets should then uh you know with our team we hope to commercialize that and then generate some revenue and then according to what we show we can redistribute that to the holders 30% yeah got it okay that's only go to the seci Token oh yeah yeah got it okay okay still still feedback I would still use l tokens okay fair my feedb fair okay I'll give the word to Justin okay so first of all uh credit for not claiming full decentralization you're the first one to do that so I won't give you a hard time about that so I actually think that's very good of you to uh not try to I know uh coat yourself with the uh theater of decentralization so I think I think that's great now the biggest problem I actually have with with this and uh my uh peer at fek also uh touched on this actually is with the donation token so I actually think that um sorry me get my notes um I actually think specifically I your project should not be seen as a charity in in any way shape or form and that's why I don't think you should have that donation token CU I think that's very misleading because it's clearly not a charitable organization especially considering that you have a 90 to 70% premine in your token allocation now that depends how you count it uh but at least in terms of how I tend to count pre-m mines it's about 90 to 70% so um I don't understand why You' even entertain the idea of donations when this is a for profitable Enterprise um yeah so I I I see your point um there is we're not necessarily marketing ourselves as a charitable um organization but if if people still want to you know they don't don't care about the investment aspect they they just want to you know contribute financially to a scientific research project then that is still like we won't have thebi status or we won't have like a shifting uh but there's still the opportunity for people to like okay I don't care about investment I still want to give money and I want to have a say in what that money is going to do uh that's that's the intention of why we introduce CU cuz usually when you donate you don't have have other parties directly profiting from that donation in such an explicit way as is the case here so I think that's very problematic um I will say I I like the idea of the participation token that was actually an interesting aspect of governance design so I actually thought that was actually pretty interesting actually so um yeah I think I think that was my main uh point for now was really that yeah I would really stay away from I would even drop the donation token completely just because it's I think it's it's you're you're running into problematic ethical grounds there especially considering the premine especially considering oh yeah I do have one more criticism I'm glad I thought this this is also a big one actually so I've I've always been very critical of crowdsourcing investment decisions MH and in this case what you're doing is you're crowdsourcing through token holders medical research decisions and I'm going to be honest with you here I think that's a terrible idea like really a terrible idea I don't think that's the type of decisions that you should be crowdsourcing what I would recommend is some form of Delegation where maybe you have experts that people can vote for and then they would be making these kind of expert decisions I just don't think that your average token holder in crypto is going to be making informed and good decisions when it comes to medical research so I I would seriously considering rethinking your uh governance um your decision making process in terms of how you make decisions I would start thinking about setting up committees subd Dows delegation this sort of thing because otherwise I I I would not have a lot of confidence in the decisions that are being made yeah no that I think that's a fair yeah we we so we are still uh in in the process of setting up our governance system and and delegation definitely is is one of the the points we are considering for sure yeah nothing is said in stone yet so uh regard regarding the governance Point yeah so definitely recomend thinking about that but yeah I think it's very interesting project you have here so I'll I'll pass it on to David thank you um good on you for for for coming up here uh you know about molecule XYZ I do yeah um I think they're doing a good job and it seems like you you going to go head on with them in a way yeah which we doesn't doesn't have to be direct competition yeah yeah I I think I think it's it's a clear clear problem so I think it's a a good way to attack um I agree with with t there's too many tokens way too complex cuz then you just increase the attack surface and you talk about like governance like the whole realm of governance attacks is like sort of just been starting to get discovered now mhm so so one one thing is like so you donate you get this soul token essentially and then you can vote so potentially you could like sway the vote by donating a lot of money right yeah so there's still like some value there right but you're saying like it's a donation there no value but there's value right and then if I lose my wallet lose access to it will it ever pass the threshold of votes needed right so there's all these like things like that or I could like I could I could donate from my wallet and I take majority voting power then I sell access of that wallet to someone else and I've sold my tokens right so so that that's the thing with like when the more tokens you add the just it's way too much too much complexity and especially for something like this like like just said like governance matters um but you have to be really careful of how you Design Systems um and then on the other uh one of the slides I saw you said a 1% sales tax mhm like that's another Pro like problematic as well how do you enforce that on the contract level uh it's only so when with the focus on the centralized exchanges so when we uh we register the router address in the smart contract and when the money goes towards the router address then the tax is being uh charged okay but you know people are just going to go around there that's someone's going to create a rap yeah there are I mean there we cannot 100% enforce that for sure but I mean it's uh to to some yes so so essentially in then in that sense you punish the you punish the um non-sophisticated Traders and the sophisticated Traders will just use the rappers and they won't get penalized it so that's the the thing where it's like you try and like maybe over engineer the tokenomics of this um and it just creates more problems I see I think I think some other people experim I think the F Fay token experimented with sales tax they failed horribly um cuz it's sort of these um compounding uh effects that happen in like the worst case scenario and it gets worse and worse so so yeah I think I think the problem you're trying to solve is very good but the around the tokens it's very problematic at the moment too many tokens um but yeah you didn't mention anything about bonding curves is there bonding curves here no you do any if we have any liquidity P or no bonding curv so so so the way molecule works is they they deal with bonding curves and that's how they do process Discovery and and there's a lot lot more simpler mechanism right so I'd say like the biggest for for those that aren't aware molecule di essentially they started this many years ago um something similar so I look at them and like not copy their model but like they did things for a very good reason right and and I think their token uh economics or tokenomics is is probably a good starting place for you to improve on thanks I'll take I do actually have another question um after listening to Justin talk about uh the the issue with donations which then made me think about uh again back to this question about eliminating bias if you are primarily delivering to investors it seems that your bias then will be selecting projects that are profitable how would you approach that then because because I would imagine that donations would potentially eliminate that issue of profitability but if you have to balance this concept of profitable and not profitable how are you actually eliminating bias in the projects that you choose I see yeah that's fair so we would focus that so you're saying that our bias is that we focus on the profit profitability um yeah so I mean well first of all therapies need to be generated right therapies need to be um create like we're not focusing on fundamental research so we're focusing on Research that can actually create value to science to uh patients so that and then the token holders and of course the token but like initially for the research itself it's core is to benefit science and patients so uh that it's a byproduct right the byproduct is to to generate a profit or generate Revenue um so but the idea of helping the proc field is still there we just focus on projects that can be commercialized or attempt to be commercialized right and a lot of things in science go wrong or don't work so um yeah I would say pretty much everything that's non-fundamental research is there to be commercialized and that's a lot of research so fundamental research is also quite um it's quite group of people that do that so they look at certain Pathways and certain you know basic fundamental biology stuff but if you look at translational part that's where people create new therapies U so that's on its own already highest um and we contribute to that too yeah I have a um a question actually like when you look at how difficult it is to do governance increment crypto just in general and when you look at all the proposals that go through and voter apathy and the difficulty to for the community to be interested and and keep track of the things that are being voted on um I feel like this is you have to also take this in consideration like the requirement of this Dow what you're expecting of your community of hold of token holders how how knowledgeable do they have to be and also to foresee what will be the profitable ones I think it's it's a lot to require so I'm thinking there's going to be a lot of educ to be done on your community of to I agree for sure uh one one thing that we want to I mean their suggestion was phenomenal to with or like your suggestion with the with those subgroups of of experts but like large amount of people right um often scientific advisory boards consist of two to three people um so we at least try our best to expand that as as much as possible and who's going to decide who are in those committees and how well that is yeah so much figure outs I mean if you what that would do right that would select the experts exactly yeah then then they could uh we could provide all the information that's necessary to people that could vote on that but to come back to what you said I would um what we were thinking of is to at least separate so we have da operations and we would have Dow like funding for some science so at least we could um make it a bit more give a bit more overview for people to separate those two things and maybe and and with the delegation it could be made very easy for people to just still participate in governance but then only on the operation side or both science funding and oper so because I see when I um I have to admit when I go to the V da Discord I get a bit overwhelmed with uh V Improvement proposal 700 something know but I'm exaggerating but like it's very like there's so many proposals and it's up to us to make it as easy as possible um but yeah I mean any suggestions for governance like keep them coming you know we for it to be hon sterlin also made a really good point when it came to the conflict that that creates cuz someone that's do ating is going to have a different motivation from someone that just wants to invest and make money and so and and I think this also reinforces the point that I don't think that donation token should be there at all because if you remove that now you're just purely profit focused and that that's not necessarily a bad thing I think that's something that's healthy to just Embrace and say okay this is the motivation and we're going to design it in such a way that it brings about good outcomes um i' would also just like to comment on my uh critique of your token economics I will say it's a little bit unfair because you've had the best documentation out of everyone here so so it's like I'm I'm only not criticizing some of these other uh projects in as much dep because they don't have the documentation so I just want to for all fairness I just wanted to put that up for you as well so all right thank you thank you so much judges um I'm going to just take a few questions that we got througho can you tell a bit more on the investor base and would the typical investor in scientific projects be digital native enough I think it's a yeah so did you get the question like the investors that you're expecting here like how knowledgeable do they have to be about scientific research well there is uh something also problematic in science just prepare your your grades yeah sorry and another some other issues in science is scientific communication which means breaking it down in in layman's terms and well luckily my my partner is is doing that um so she is she's very confident with the scien of communication like press releases um other types of communication um and and yeah she's she's focusing on on that aspect to like for people to not have to go to five years of U studying to understand what we're trying to fund all right so I think that is very important regardless of the Dow an issue in science still which we could also contribute to education side very important and then someone is asking why CQ syn it's quick and cheap fees cheap gas fees yeah go ahead I have a question uh do you know what the average cost is for for a research project like how many research projects can you actually put in your platform reason well it depends on uh on the size of of the research project and and how uh a lot of factors actually but it could be ranging from 50,000 to multiple Millions um depending on the size of the project depending on how many people need to be hired depending on how um outside expertise or needs to be like but that that is what's the expected return of an investment like that like if you put 50,000 like can you expect millions or is it just like no it look if if we have someone uh if we have a group of people that can create a very um valuable database that can put a lot of manh hours in generating uh extensive database where we can license out the use of that database um to other parties to then you know maybe with 50,000 you could already generate somewhere I I cannot give any estimates cuz it doesn't make sense to give any estimates but um yeah it depends on a lot of fact depends on on on the project itself and we all try to disclose that as much as possible in you know what we communicate towards Dow members and um so yeah I can't give a straight answer on that who wants what um so yeah that's something we're definitely have thought about and it limits our group and maybe we find some early adopter of the medical centers are like well for the first couple projects maybe you can get that data or get some ownership over the IP or to talk about that later yeah for sure no that sounds good yeah I'm all for it for sure please yeah just briefly tou U my question is about the ownership of the IP itself and the and the patents like how are you implementing that in the stuff well so what the like well the goal is that we we have uh the majority the stake in that IP from our funded research projects but that comes to what I just said like it depending on you know with what kind of party is it like we are going to fund the research project for if it's a private someone to started with an idea um then we have less restrictions regarding that and then we can come to agreement on who's going to get what amount and stuff like that any last questions no yeah yes I see one one raised hand in the back and it's the last question and then we have agre yeah so you might have people that want to invest in your product and or into your project and um if they invest in the side token they get 30% of the revenue but outside of that how are you going to protect the token price or the what uh how are you going to prent prevent the coin from going down essentially May repeat the question the video uh so so how are we going to prevent the for the token to go to zero so yeah how me there are many projects that are trying to prevent their token um well well the F first of all I think that the the aspect that you can receive a dividend uh of course the the the amount that we raise would be based on what the market thinks are Dow is valued uh after that we don't have any decision into that we try to reduce a token velocity uh by having M staken uh there we have a dividend that could you know also be seen as some kind of value like like a share of company right can also get some dividend or Price appreciation and the rest like there's not much we can control but not many projects can really unless you want manipulate yeah so I mean you mentioned U molecule oh sorry so if we uh have like an overview of the IP assets maybe onchain or offchain or and I think there is an onchain molecule has the IP nfts um which you know it's an nft representing the intellectual property that an entity holds and um that is something we could utilize to um have a nice overview of which assets we have and um through the molecule platform can I just say grabbing that microphone last one because you mentioned token velocity um that's so like 2017 so there there's much more like around token price so don't don't look into like Tok velocity that's a bad thing there's other ways to sustain price Revenue generation obvious one right so so yeah we can talk about it later please I said seven seven eight I'm going to I'm a five but I'm going to Cave at this and say it is part of a global score so to speak so I'm comparing you with the rest of the market and you're clearly at a very early stage of development so if you figure out some of these things around governance I actually think this is a very um respectable idea and project especially because you have clearly built in dividend mechanisms and that's something I always love to see because you want to see real value real utility and cryptocurrency and I can see that that this defitely has the potential to achieve that so yeah it's five is a good score for me is what I'm saying well [Applause] done congratulations and