What is DeSci that breaks the dilemma of scientific research?
As industries such as finance, entertainment, and social networking begin to enter the Web3 era, blockchain is changing the status quo of current industry development and driving businesses in various fields to pursue an open, transparent, and decentralized future. Just when concepts such as NFT, DeFi, and Metaverse began to rise,DeSci (Decentralized Science) has also become a rising star force in the Web3 world.
The emergence of DeSci starts with long-standing scientific research problems and dilemmas. For scientists, the key to the initial reserve of scientific research is funds. If a lot of time and money are spent on writing grant applications but fail to obtain stable funding, most projects can only be suspended. Due to financial difficulties, more and more scientists have begun to choose research projects in a biased manner, and even a lot of "replication crisis" problems have arisen.
In August 2022, Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes published an article titled "Science Needs to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint" in Scientific American. The article points out that the energy consumption of current scientific research activities is huge. For example, the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the world's major observatories during their operation is estimated to be nearly 20 million tons. In addition, the carbon dioxide emitted by the entire cloud storage and computing field exceeds that of the aviation industry, which has been criticized for its large oil consumption.
In addition to funding, access to information is also key. A large amount of scientific knowledge is only published on the paid pages of well-known journals such as "Science" and "Nature". Scientists not only need to pay to read other people's research results, but also need to pay to publish their own research. This power is further concentrated in large The bold reality in the hands of publishers has made researchers complain.first level title
What is DeSci?
DeSci is an initiative to fund, create, review, store and disseminate scientific knowledge fairly and equitably using Web3 (including NFTs, smart contracts, DAOs) by building a public infrastructure. DeSci encourages scientists to openly share and be credited for their research, while allowing anyone to easily access and contribute to it.DeSci's philosophy is that scientific knowledge should be open to everyone, and its research process should be transparent and fair. By creating a more decentralized scientific research model, decentralizing access to funds, scientific tools and channels, and creating new scientific research Development Environment.
Since last year, DeSci has gradually been recognized around the world, and related new projects have also rapidly emerged and spread. For example, the first open science NFT project was sold for 13 ETH, and some Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) established to support DeSci are also rising. At the LisCon blockchain event at the end of 2021, DeSci was also discussed as a new hot topic.
With DeSci's model, more researchers gain scientific knowledge as they share their work openly. The reason why DeSci is recognized by the scientific research community is that it can provide practical application value, including solving the challenges of research funding, eliminating the intermediary relationship between researchers and reviewers, and realizing the goal of truly opening science to the world.
DeSci encourages scientific research enthusiasts from all over the world to join the scientific research world on the chain, such as online collaborative laboratories, cloud laboratories and other forms. It is this borderless sharing of knowledge that continues to drive scientific progress, allowing scientists to find solutions to fundamental problems faster and share the fruits of collaboration.first level title
DeSci Application Benefits
The DeSci model mentioned above has shown benefits to scientists and researchers. In fact, the superiority of DeSci comes from its use of blockchain and Web3 tools.
Starting from peer review, DeSci can use smart contracts to eliminate the intermediary role of peer review and directly carry out the peer review process. The decentralized nature of blockchain technology can also open data storage and open platforms to the outside world, making researchers all over the world. Free access to needed data reduces censorship and blocking of scientific data exchange by governments.
On the other hand, DeSci enables scientific research results in different fields to be held responsible by different shared communities, which not only reduces the influence of a single institution on scientific research activities, but also protects the scientific community from various external threats such as emerging technologies. Under the premise of the existence of DeSci, scientific knowledge will be shared by everyone, rather than owned by a company or a national government, and knowledge rights will be shared by the public.
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Emerging DeSci projects
According to the statistics of the DAO aggregator ThePASS platform, a total of nearly 102 DeSci-related organizations constitute the DeSci ecological map, including DAOs, BIOTECH Research, Communities, Decentralized Funding Of Science, Institutes, NFTs, Publishing, Protocols & Data and other outstanding projects. Among them, the proportion of DAO reached 29% (the highest-ranked asset type is ResearchHub, the total value of the treasury exceeds 6 million US dollars, and the proportion of native encrypted assets exceeds 99.96%),image description
DeSci Ecological Segmentation Track Distribution Map
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VitaDAO
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LabDAO
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Research Hub
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Genomes.io
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The Future of DeSci: Challenges and Opportunities
Although the development wave of DeSci has risen, there are still many problems and challenges that need to be faced and solved urgently. For example, the quality of scientific research projects is uneven, the final identification standard for establishing the DeSci protocol, and the construction of the DeSci community with pre-allocated funds... All of these require scientific researchers and community developers to jointly think about optimal solutions. And how developers who are committed to the construction of the DAO organization can improve the governance system and enable more scientific research peers to handle cooperation matters on the cloud.
At the same time, DeSci is using various new tools to improve scientific research. If you really want to succeed, you should make these technical tools seamlessly connected with scientists' daily work, focus on empowering scientists, and get rid of inherent instrumental thinking .At present, judging from the scale of users in the Twitter and Discord communities of various projects, the overall ecological attention of DeSci is still relatively small. We look forward to the further integration of DeSci and Web3, and embrace the future of decentralized scientific research and co-creation.
