Quo Vadis, DeSci?

Where are you headed, Decentralized Science?

DeSci. Potential and threat 

Decentralized Science (DeSci) is a new way of funding, conducting and publishing research. It uses blockchain and web3 to fund science, share data, and solve problems faster and more openly. The goal? To make research better, more accessible, and focused on real-world needs.

DeSci is exciting and becoming an important web3 trend. It’s brought memes, buzz, and big ideas, like funding cancer research through DAOs or creating open-access data for all. It’s a movement that encapsulates the desire of the web3 community to do something meaningful, amidst trending dogs, frogs and Chill Guys. 

DeSci has the potential of becoming the most important web3 trend, leading the way of fair, useful, verifiable, community-driven research, and adding trillions of dollars of value to the global economy.

But it can also magnify the current problems of science and incubate pathologies that will further erode trust in research and result in destruction of value with long-lasting consequences. 

In this article we lay out our current subjective diagnosis of Decentralized Science as well as concrete suggestions about further direction of the entire space. 

DeSci Challenges

Modern science faces many challenges, so does web3. The most important ones, common to both industries are:

1. Incentivizing short-term gain 
2. Using complexity to obscure the truth 
3. Intellectual fetishism
4. Translational gap

Let’s unpack them one by one. 

 

Short-term gain

Science is being increasingly dominated by the “publish or perish” culture, that promotes quick, publishable research rather than chasing slower, but potentially groundbreaking discoveries. Publications and h-index decide the scientific pecking order – grants, scholarships, prestige and recognition. Few scientists risk the livelihood of their families to go after bold hypotheses that may likely yield negative, unpublishable results. 

DeSci comes with a lot of momentum and a community which is by an order of magnitude more impatient than traditional research stakeholders. 

Volume, retweets, KOLs and price action above everything else drive the perception of a project. Liquid tokens likely comprise the bulk of net worth of the project’s team and founders. There’s a very powerful incentive and a strong and immediate feedback loop to pursue chart-driven decisions rather than valuable ones. 

DeSci may accelerate research, but chances are that the quality of such research will be mediocre at best. 

 

Complexity obscuring the truth

Science and web3 are full of highly educated and intelligent people with a culture of inflated egos. Both industries also have a complicated vernacular, often used to manifest intellectual superiority and create an illusion of value and innovation. Obscurity of ideas, technical terms, philosophies and loosely-connected concepts is a smokescreen, sheltering a flourishing ecosystem of golden-mouthed snake oil sellers such as alternative medicine charlatans or meme-flipping “key opinion leaders” on X.

Crypto is a game of appearances and frequently a game of projecting and monetizing one’s confidence. Philosophy of many projects can be summarized with an elegant quote from Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” (2019):

“If you wish to be The King of the jungle, it’s not enough to act like a king. You must be The King. And there can be no doubt. Because doubt causes chaos and one’s own demise.”

Science is a game of uncertainty. A game of doubt. A great scientist can hardly ever be confident. In fact, overconfidence in research results most likely means that the results were not worth pursuing in the first place. 

Is it possible to play the game of doubt while still being The King of the jungle? 

 

Intellectual fetishism

There’s a lot of money and a lot of highly intelligent individuals in crypto. 

Intellectual fetishism is what you get from combining both of them. 

In short, intellectual fetishism is when intellectual exercises or complexity are valued for their own sake, rather than for what they can achieve or contribute to real-world outcomes. It’s a kind of “show-off” intellectualism that prioritizes appearing smart over being practical or impactful. It’s an excessive fascination with abstract ideas, theories, or complex intellectual pursuits, often at the expense of practicality, usefulness, or relevance to the real world.

Ironically, crypto is the only industry where you can get paid by doing that. 

The effect of this impracticality in science is the gaping hole of a “translational gap”. 

 

The Translational Gap

Right now there’s a buzzing mix of innovation at the two far ends of the research pipeline:

• Funding basic research (e.g. pump.science, Bio Protocol)
• Publishing (Research Hub)

 

There’s still little activity in DeSci focused on the clinical validation and pragmatic side of innovation implementation: 

• Does the new solution help patients?
• Is it effective and cost-efficient? 
• Will hospitals or insurers pay for it?
• Is it easy for doctors and nurses to use?
• Does it make a real difference in care?

 

Why? 

Because it’s messy, complicated, fraught with regulatory hurdles and involves multitude of stakeholders. 

Yet, this is where the work gets done to bring the innovation from bench to bedside. 

 

Rx. Our prescription and eight commandments for DeSci

1. We need to acknowledge the truth when it comes to the motivations and capacities of different actors in science:
   1. Degens want to… well… degen, speculate and invest. They will not run, govern and appraise scientific experiments. 
   2. Patients are looking for attention, hope and cure. They will not degen, govern a DAO or invest in a token. 
   3. Healthy research participants do it for money. They expect to be paid, promptly and without hassle. Crypto may be okay for some of them. 
   4. Doctors and researchers care most about funding of their research. A status and prestige aspect is also important. 
   5. The broader web3 market is all about expectation, a pipeline of bullish news and being in a trend.
2. We need to double down on the unsexy, translational research and make it sexy and interesting, tapping into the excitement and capital available in web3. It’s our job to elicit excitement and make it fun.
3. Controversy is inevitable. We should welcome it, but never cross the boundaries of patient safety and privacy.
4. We need to be clear, communicate simply and beware of intellectual fetishism.
5. We need to calibrate the expectations to accommodate more room for slow science
6. We need to shift our focus to measuring meaningful progress indicators, like users or revenue rather than size of rounds raised or market caps.
7. We need to welcome and embrace uncertainty and beware of overconfidence, which is usually a sign of intellectual unsophistication.
8. We need to take to heart research quality and safety alongside research acceleration. “Move fast break things” doesn’t cut it in biomedical research.

 

The Bottom Line

The future of DeSci isn’t just about making science decentralized—it’s about making it matter again. 

It’s about regaining trust in science. It’s about reimagining public involvement in experiments. It’s about making research fair, transparent and fun. 

The ultimate goal is simple: turn today’s breakthroughs into tomorrow’s treatments.

Let’s focus on delivering solutions that truly help people. Because in the end, it’s not just about the tech. It’s about the lives we can change.