Funding the Future of Science
Can we decentralise, crowdfund and crowdsource science?
What if the next major breakthrough in conservation, cancer research, or alternative energy wasn’t decided in a corporate boardroom or government agency, but by a global network of individuals?
A few years ago, a new trend emerged in Web3 with a novel approach to science funding: tokenized models that are governed by smart contracts. Built on blockchain technology, this model allows contributors to fund high-risk, high-reward research projects, like developing new drugs or sustainable materials while sharing in the potential future rewards.
With a number of companies operating in the space, the movement to decentralize and expand science funding is gathering momentum. It’s more than a financial mechanism; it connects science to broader networks of shared interest and participation.
Early Movers
Molecule and VitaDAO were relatively early developing platforms centered around pharmaceutical research and human longevity. They have strong narratives around making life better for all with built-in potential investor upsides through fractional intellectual property ownership. Ultimately, BigPharma could buy (or ask for access) the research funded by these teams and give value to the underlying token. But what about other areas of science beyond medical applications?
The DeSci Movement
With imagination, tokenized mechanisms can fund everything from materials science research to alternative fuel source development. The result is that the Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement has quickly gathered momentum.
In a similar vein to the Pump.Fun site for meme coins, a Pump.Science initiative was launched with an initial focus on longevity research and development. Another key area is information sourcing: OriginTrail tracks information sources, thus creating a verifiable web for decentralized AI. The goal is to source quality real-world data that can be used by current and future AI systems: Poor data is the easiest way to weaken and diminish the predictive capacity of AI-driven systems.
At the moment, DeSci is a handful of exceptional projects led by strong teams and a long tail of experimental projects that may or may not go somewhere, just like with the startup scene. The DeSci area has a market cap of just over $1BN (at the time of writing) and seems to be gaining public traction. More people are talking, there are some breakout projects, and investment will probably rush in as alt-coins1 have their season. And, take note, this is absolutely not investment advice.
What does it mean for environmentalism, biodiversity restoration, and other related, relevant, and interesting things that are perhaps not as trendy as drug development, longevity, and AI?
We may need to think laterally and creatively, but it is not a stretch.
Environmental Science
Environmental monitoring and restoration is an interdisciplinary complex science. Measuring biodiversity is often a combination of acoustics and imaging, with deep-learning models and AI used as tools for plant and animal species identification. Custom software is being developed for impact modeling, land restoration strategies, and watershed restoration. The use of e-DNA is another tech-heavy tool for animal species identification — because if you are engaged in rewilding, you want to know who is visiting and whether your rewilding efforts are bringing back keystone species and genetic diversity. Analysing a DNA soup with multi-million dollar machinery is a good way to do this.
Environmental data is used at various levels to build predictive models: If you want solid insurance underwriting models for climate-related risks, then a detailed view of the relationship between insured assets and the ambient environment is necessary. Biomimicry, the practice of imitating Nature's designs and strategies, holds the potential to revolutionize disaster resilience sustainably. Insurance companies of the future (and present) are likely to weigh in on risk mitigation and prevention strategies as much as after the event payouts.
The contrast with current DeSci projects is about zooming out from the small and molecular: Environmental science is about global datasets and aggregated reporting systems that tell us about macro-level complex systems like the Earth. As physicist Paul Davies describes it in his book, this is: The Demon in the Machine. And, collectively, the world is spending a great deal of effort (arguably, too little, too late!) to understand and mitigate the demons in the machine when it comes to climate and biodiversity. Yet, we do what we can.
Using tokenization to increase environmental data collection and, specifically, improve biodiversity data collection is a complex task. Tokens act as data collection incentives to help broaden the base areas in which environmental data is collected, and this has been used to good effect in, for example, weather data collection systems: WeatherXM is scaling infrastructure2 to monitor weather data at a granular scale. In Web3 jargon this is known as a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure or DePIN project, but it’s really data collection and science that drives the economy. In a similar vein, bioacoustics and imaging data sets can be collected through tokenization reward systems, where the data quality and frequency are rewarded through a data market. Environmental data is then aggregated from many small data suppliers, so that end data buyers, for example, insurers or certification programs can put them to work.
What does this have to do with Earthstream?
Our vision is to listen to the Earth through acoustic data collection and aggregation and to use this data to generate actionable insights and reports. The first step was building a bioacoustics sensor that can be trusted and placed in difficult-to-access locations where there is no place for WiFi signals and cellphone towers. Next, we are looking at how to finance broad-scale biodiversity monitoring and data collection. To this end, DeSci and DePIN are trending narratives, and token-based incentive systems are an intelligent way to scale micro-level environmental data collection and citizen science. Makes sense? We think so.
Thank you for reading.
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For those that are unfamiliar with crypto and Web3 terminology see this Investopedia article for a useful definition of alt-coins. Loosely speaking, these are tokens that are “minor” in the sense that they are not BTC and ETH, and are less likely to drive broader crypto-market behaviour due to their relatively small market cap size. Initially, BTC was considered the only “coin” and everything else was an alt-coin, but this status has gradually been eroded. For example, it would be difficult to consider SOL in the Solana ecosystem as an alt-coin, so it’s really a matter of perspective.
WeatherXM is a weather monitoring equipment supplier that has built a tokenised rewards system for weather datasets. The goal is to collect hyperlocal weather data — the kind that satellites are unable to collect because it’s too granular. Data providers have their own WeatherXM station which sends real-time local weather data securely to WeatherXM. Data rewards are paid via the WeatherXM token $WXM which was launched on the Ethereum Blockchain. In terms of token allocaiton, 55% of the supply of $WXM is allocated toward data collection over a period of 10 years (see: https://weatherxm.com/ for details).