DeSci: Blockchains are Powering Science 3.0

welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet finance and today on this episode of our Zoo zalu series we are exploring some New Frontiers New Frontiers and new technologies all of which are poised to completely revolutionize the world and change everything about the operating system that Society is currently running on Bank list Nation today we are exploring the frontier of DSI or decentralized science what is DSI it's a really good question because I legitimately had no idea going into zuzalu but it became clear that DSi

is a great connector of many of the Technologies presented here at zuzalo DSi is how synthetic biology and Longevity have to do with ethereum DSI is what is putting ethereum at the center of these things the fundamental argument for DSI is that the old ways of doing science is bad and for the same reasons why the old way of doing money and doing Finance is bad DSi looks at the incumbent system of producing science and sees friction and Corruption and antiquation and toxic

tradition Desai wants to use blockchain technology to improve the systems and institutions of science the mechanisms of how science can use a blockchain is a very big conversation and the answers are more than a few but the conversation that you're about to hear with Boris and Mikey will download you on the DSi landscape here but this isn't just about improving the ways that we do science this isn't just about hey we found a new way to do science better and faster DSi presents a zero to one step function change in the form factor of scientific

progress itself you know how uniswap and aveg and erc20 tokens are just open apis to financial tools DSi wants to do very similar things for scientific data what would happen if we made our scientific data as open and as free as a contract call what if scientific data was as modular and open as the internet itself but blockchain Tech doesn't just provide new solutions for scientific data specifically DSi is also marked by an emergence of dows all following a decently similar form factor of capital

allocation financing clinical trials in hopes of investing in a breakout new treatment servicing the long tail of unserviced patients which also sounds a lot like baking the unbanked and a bunch of other similar puzzle pieces that are all coming together in these very variety Dows that are all trying to go after a certain specific use cases in the world of science so this first episode in this two interview series is with Boris dayakov and Mikey Fisher both who are pioneers in the Desai space and helped me have one of the most enjoyable and easy conversations that I had at

zuzalu and after listening to this conversation you'll understand exactly what DSi is getting at and whether or not you want to proceed into the second conversation with al-aktai whose project Vibe bio illustrates a specific example of the overall archetype of Desai Dows that are art there trying to use blockchain Tech to coordinate and accelerate scientific progress so Bank location are you ready to explore the frontier of scientific progress by the way at zuzalu of the traditional scientific researchers that were there all realize that the existence of Desai

implies the existence of tradsai which was a meme that stuck pretty damn fast so all right let's go and learn about DSi with Boris and Mikey followed by D side Dows with alok but first I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade on Kraken Pro you'll have access to Advanced charting tools real-time Market data and lightning fast trade execution all inside their spiffy new modular interface kraken's new customizable

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what's up Mikey how's it going how's it going and then further down to my right we got Boris what's up Boris hello David pleasure to be here so I've heard the name Desai a number of times um it was uh had some exposure at East Denver I've seen it on Twitter but I haven't really figured it out but DSi seems to be the thing that really is pinning a lot of these various conversations at zuzalu together uh that's why the synthetic biology people are talking to the crypto people right that's why the longevity people are talking to the crypto people that's kind of my my basal level understanding but

beyond that I don't know what DSi really is or how to explain this movement to the bankless nation so I'm hoping you guys can help us guide uh all the listeners down that rabbit hole you guys want to do that very excited too yeah happy to but first a little bit more about you guys Mikey tell us a little bit about yourself and your background yeah so uh I just finished my PhD I was at Stanford I was writing uh computer science and uh natural language processing and uh after I finished that I wrote a book on regulating Ai and then

I got very interested in I saw the PHD I thought this could be done in a different way so uh I got into crypto I learned about DSi and I thought one of the key parts around DSi was like data and how we could fix uh some of the problems that exist in traditional Academia around how data is collected so I started a company called DB dial which basically like fractionalizes large data sets and then gives peoples and gives people an incentive to contribute data all right Boris uh tell us about yourself so uh I'm a scientist by training

um I'm actually a current PhD student PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and the ludenfeld Tannenbaum Research Institute um so I'm coming from a different field my PhD is in molecular genetics and basically my research is around figuring out where these uh which proteins are found within these structures in the cell called nuclear bodies in the nucleus so I spent most of the past decade pursuing this academic career uh really just trying to build a career as a scientist and eventually have my own lab and continue to unlock new knowledge

about how cells work and how they're organized and during covet I kind of took a step back and started exploring other Pathways and after the sort of long journey exploring business and finance I eventually ended up getting interested in web3 and thinking about how we could solve some problems in science that essentially drove me away from the career that I'd been pursuing for so long um and we'll talk about this after I'm sure because there's a lot of issues in how science is done both in Academia and industry but basically I was thinking about how we can maybe fix some of these problems and uh realize there were other

people coming from my background who were excited about these same problems and were trying to tackle them using some really interesting Technologies like Dows and crypto so uh that was about a year and a half ago and it's been a wild ride ever since I mean I think Boris and I are both interested in science like we are both scientists and we both love science and we both went through the traditional science means of doing science which is a university we both saw that there's issues or ways that could be done better and that's that's what me that's what excited me about DSi is like oh you can still do

some science but you can do it in maybe a better way and that's actually just resonates a lot with me because of the when I was getting into crypto I was thinking about going down a doctorate of physical therapy route with the intention of also applying that to mental health and nutrition and then I found ethereum and saw one path which was slow and friction filled and costly and the other path which was new and Innovative and fast where you don't ask for permission and I kind of think that's why this DC World exists at large is because the ins the

the old way the Trad side is is old and friction filled and slow and I think maybe we're what uh the people that have got hopped onto the D side movement have been able to identify in crypto is that we move really really fast and there seems to be an appetite in the scientific Community to move faster than the incumbent ways of doing things and that's where this demand for a new form factor of science comes from that's kind of my sentiment is that is that am I over the Mark here yeah one of the big things is just accelerating

science and tradside um it could literally take two to three years to publish a paper for some things um by the time you like get the funding to the time you do the play around with the research question to publish the paper to get reviews it could take quite a bit of time and it doesn't have the quick turnaround Cycles like GitHub or like a pull request does this really does vary field by field I mean

everything is slow in the Life Sciences in biology like I work with I'm a wet lab biologist and when I say wet lab I mean I actually work with pipettes and cells and proteins and liquids and test tubes um and everything's slow but cells need to grow you know all these processes are manual and and really drawn out and that stuff can definitely speed up and be automated that's not really a d side problem I mean I think in some ways the slowness of science can be a feature and not a bug but not in every sense there's a lot of inefficiencies that can be sped up and I think a lot of this appetite and excitement for DSI is one scientist

discovering that there's new technology that enables us to coordinate more effectively make things more efficient um do things in a trustless way of course and uh and just exploring the possibilities around that and then I think on the other hand people who are coming from like crypto are excited to have more use cases for blockchain technology um yeah yeah one thing you were mentioning is like the permissionlessness of um of it of crypto and I think that's one of the things that's become an issue in traditional science is it is a very permissioned

system you have to get grants from a specific agency you have to get accepted into a university by fulfilling some certain things you have to then appease the advisor appease a journal it is very hierarchical and gatekeeping or an approval by the FDA exactly exactly whereas whereas what's really neat about this DSi movement is that it's permissionless anybody can contribute to a research project if you have the right data if you have the right background it's not based on a

degree or any or anything it's based on a meritocracy and it's based on the data that's provided and it's a much different way of thinking about uh how to do science if I can add to that I mean uh something we should maybe start with is that the Desai movement I guess we can call it a movement um it really Builds on on the earlier open science movement which has been around for decades which has tried to solve a lot of these same problems we're talking about I mean um you know the fact that if you want to

read an article like scientific knowledge that should be freely shared among everyone you need to get through a paywall and you know hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about public like the whole publishing problem and reproducibility crisis in science but um there's a lot of barriers and it really just doesn't make sense in a lot of ways so there has been this movement of people pushing for making everything Open Access open source um and I I think there's a lot of inspiration that science can and must take from like the open source software movement and those communities because it's just a better way of doing things

it's how things should be but we as a community are kind of Trapped in these long-standing in you know really like strong institutions of science which have done a lot of good things but have also kind of uh missed the mark in a lot of ways yeah and I mean building off what Boris has like Desai is very much um has its roots in open science like but one of the things that's really interesting is like open science was probably happened like 10 years ago I don't know around 20 30. yeah it's been

around for a while but it's it's it's it's it's caught in some waves but it hasn't really taken over as much as uh people would have liked I guess and maybe the crypto correlate is like the Occupy Wall Street movement which was a good uh flag a banner to Rally around that actually didn't really end up moving the needle until Bitcoin came around right yeah love that analogy yeah it's like oh yeah yeah so one of the things that's interesting about the open science is like what what is what is what does DSi offer that builds on open science and it's um it's like

incentivization mechanisms so now we have the ability to track research from test tube to final product and so if final product is good you can incentivize the people that contributed because you you have this immutable Ledger that anyone can contribute to and you can track who did what part and so this is very cool because now we have a way of tracking if someone does good basic science if someone does good research they can now be partial owner of it the benefit whereas in open science you had your data you'd throw it

over the wall to this journal to a data set and you'd lose sort of ownership of that and so this is like why blockchain is actually very important for this design movement just for like attribution and creditness and being able to see the source of things and being able to map those things and just having a specific destination of who did what opens up the world of of collaboration and other and other mechanisms 100 I mean like the the whole idea of like data Providence is is a big topic I think in crypto and like data science and all that but the same

thing it's like your contributions in science essentially are only recognized through this chain of citations which is like text in a PDF these things aren't hyperlinked you know there are new there are systems now where you can kind of have a a record of your academic work it's called Orchid um it's very much a web 2 kind of you know system it's it's a step in the right direction for sure um but I mean we have technology to dramatically improve on these systems and then be able to look back and say wow somebody's getting a Nobel Prize for this but here's all the hundreds of people who

contributed to this maybe we should reward them too maybe they get an airdrop you know like and the funny thing about is like an academic paper it lists all the people on the top of it but it doesn't say who did what right so you could have a research paper with hundreds of people on it and the last name is the advisor and the first name is the lead author and then everywhere in between is very complicated on who did what but there might be little notes like these people did experiments but like but with blockchain you know exactly who who did every single part and like who contributed good data who contributed about it and with that why that's important is not for like rep

it's for reputation but also you can reward people like oh I really enjoyed this part of the paper I'm going to reward this specific person right and there's I'm assuming there's more ways to make this really really codified rather than just like putting ethereum addresses next to people's names there's a uh I think there's like the idea of like um identity yeah right there's like the value graph of all of these things um one thing that the reason why detox caught my attention lately is that it seems to fit the same mold of other movements that we've seen in crypto which is there's this uh spark that just

happens because someone figured out a basic pattern and then that started to get copied a bunch and I think uh maybe correct me if I'm wrong but I think the story starts at um Vita Dao Vita Dao uh and that was like the first D side Dao that like created this archetype for other science people to be like oh there's something there and then it spawned more and more and more D side Dows and now there's like a slow Cambrian maybe not slow Cambrian explosion of D side Dows being formed

and it's like I think that's the kind of the top of the rabbit hole of this whole thing is that right I think for a lot of people it is I mean longevity is huge in crypto and in Tech in general um vitadel is doing amazing work big fan of what they've been doing also the folks of molecule who've kind of built that whole ecosystem around uh around vidadel they're they're doing a lot for the space for sure and really trying to template that that sort of bio-dial model um with their whole incubator accelerator program um that's I think one type of DSi project right this is like I'm not going to call it an investment

Dao but it's like a it's a dab that is essentially trying to fund and support specific areas of research that will hopefully have some sort of translational application you know maybe we'll lead to a drug that will go into the clinical trials one day um are you curious for something your new products um and I mean this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately which is that there's like science can mean a lot of different things there's so many different fields of Science of course and they all do things a little bit differently I mean we're all kind of surrounded by or unified by the same principle that we're

trying to understand how the world works and gather data and analyze it and use a scientific method to create better models of the world around us um but science can mean basic research which is just like fundamental basic research like math you know that may not have some specific application like a drug or a cure for disease and then there's things down the line like biomedical research that is trying to find Targets for drugs to hit to cure types of cancers um and they have different types of problems like in terms of how they're funded or how you incentivize them but I

think that brings me to the topic of incentives which I think is the other superpower that crypto brings to the problems that science has so the the thing I was talking about where like these Vita Dows these there's one I interviewed was a synthetic biology Dao there's many of these things is that Desai what is DSi like how do you how do you put a border around this thing like what actually is it what is DSi I guess that's what we're here to answer right make a movement it's like what is

defy it's in the same way it's it's people that are looking to do or what is a network State it's people that are looking to exit the existing system to some extent okay and use blockchain as an important part or dids or collaboration or putting data on chain um but I think it's it's very dependent on the actual project it's an idea I mean I think we can look at the the current DSi landscape the projects that people are working on what's happening in the space who's giving talks at the

various great DSi conferences and meetups that have been happening over the past year or so um and I kind of have like three buckets I like to put it into one is funding so funding is a major problem in science we need more money for science how do we get more money for science how do we create better more liquid markets for biotech intellectual property for example um that brings up topics like ipn FTS stuff like that so that's one thing funding second of course is something we talked about which is publishing you know the the current publishing industry academic

publishing industry is kind of crazy and people who aren't in Academia aren't aware of how how nuts this is I mean academic publishing houses have I think the highest margins of any industry like way higher than anything it's it's really absurd because essentially people pay to publish in these journals and then peer review is done for free by scientists in those fields and then they charge universities individuals whoever wants to read those papers huge fees to

access those papers it's like a triple payer model is what some people call it so that's the second publishing and the third is well not just third but I think uh reputation systems attribution data Providence all that like all the other things that yeah and much more I would also add reproducibility so um like one of the big problems in science is uh papers are too complex to be replicable or the data sets are not open or the basically a lot of stuff can't be reproduced and DSi has an

emphasis on reproducibility through many eyes on data um through putting the data on chain so that it's immutable so that it has provenance and tracking and reputation associated with each of it because I think we're going to go back in 10 years and see that so much of the data so much of scientific research is just hard to reproduce so you can't build on it whereas like a GitHub project you can just download it run it and see that you can run you can uh you know build on it and that's an important part of science

is being able to reproduce and build it yeah I think another one more bits had would be the actual execution of science I mean there are projects like lab Dow that are trying to build new tools and infrastructure for scientists to actually do scientific work in a more reproducible way um so yeah decides a lot of things right okay so there there is no boundary there's no border on what is and is not Desai it's not just this growth of dows who are doing very various things across the the science space it's just there's

a lot more tools in the crypto world that are being leveraged for the pursuit of Science and there's no really better way to like put a boundary on it other than that yeah I like to kind of summarize it as using blockchain technology to improve the systems and institutions of Science and like create new incentives for science you know like how do we something I've been asking myself is like how do we create a world where everybody wants to be a scientist and has the opportunity to be a scientist if they want to be a scientist I don't think everyone should be a scientist or wants to be but you know

how do we increase that number yeah I mean I think in the same way d uh defy brought about many different types of Traders DSi has the ability to bring out many different types of scientists and many different people who can contribute to science whether that be through uh collecting specimens around the world of nature or of like uh testing out different uh nutrition or stuff like that and um it has the ability to open up science

a lot more so that that very much just fits into the mold of crypto right democratizing access lowering the barriers of Entry making things more permissionless making things more um kind of disrupting the incumbents no matter what yeah always kind of tables table Stakes for the things that crypto touches maybe um you guys can use your imaginations put on your imagination cap and just like Fast Forward 10 years what's the Bold case of DSi what's the bulkates of Science and how and and how because crypto enabled it and DSi fulfilled all

of his promises what does this new world look like yeah um it's like GitHub for science so it's as easy to do and reproduce science and get credit for science as it is to uh use a GitHub package today I love that I mean that's a good question both case for Desai I mean in 10 years I'd be really happy if most of the new research and most of the new data that is being generated is is going

on to some sort of decentralized storage system and able to be accessed permissionlessly with a record of who did the work who built on the work what kind of computation was done on it and you know we kind of disrupt this whole model of the PDF as the token of knowledge yeah progression um but it's so much more than that I think I think I would really I'd really like expect to see new funding models to appear new ways of rewarding people for their scientific contributions again science

takes time but at least having the framework in place and and seeing early results so that would be what I'd love to see yeah well while talking to some of these uh the Dows um it was a Vibe bio it was one of the dials I was uh on one of the interviews I have in this track uh it was interesting to see that there's an explicit investment thesis an investment case for some of these things where like you put in capital this Dow goes and funds projects it funds new medicines do research for new medicines and then the Dow owns that IP or that provenance may

I don't know what to call it but that I that whole concept and then that Dao grows in capital because it produces one medicine that is demanded by the market so the fact that there's like Financial uh Financial incentives to grow this thing makes me uh pretty bullish just on this idea of being able to converge science in financial incentives in a ways that hasn't that has been full of friction right we already know that the bank list Nation knows the frictions of the traditional Financial system uh they are probably at least now starting to

wake up at the very least to the frictions of the sign scientific community and I think the whole idea of defy and DSi is that we get to take friction away from both and turn on this propeller of innovation and maybe that's another way to articulate this whole thing yeah I I mean I think a lot of so maybe there shouldn't be barriers to contributing to scientific knowledge like anything you do throughout the course of your day should be law could be logged and you should have the ability to contribute that or you have some sort of insight you should be able to contribute that

um have have your data be shared and and be rewarded for sharing the data and there's some things that actually lend itself very well like you were talking about earlier around diet and nutrition I think this is something that has the ability to really take off in DSi because this is something that is very longitudinal so any anything you eat you should be able to take a picture of that thing put it to some Dao say how you felt share that data set that data set is purchased and then everyone who uploaded a picture of their food and

their data point of how they felt after it could can could be rewarded when this data set is purchased or this is for the my new share of data that they contributed exactly and this is something you can actually do with the DB Dao is like you get rewarded based you get you fractionalize a large data set so that when it's purchased everyone who contributed to it gets a portion of the rewards but this is something that works very very well for DSI other things are a little they're not to say that they don't work as well but they're a little trickier like I want to do like scanning

electron microscope research it's a little harder to democratize than something that is uh uh that more people can participate in yeah yeah and again so many so many different uh Dimensions to Desai as an idea as a as a field if you want to call it a field or a narrative maybe um and you're talking about defy and DSi coming together right so um something that I don't know if it was Paul or Tyler from molecule who kind of birthed this bio-dow ecosystem including

vetodal um I remember a talk that I I watched from from one of them back in like 2018 and I only saw this a year and a half ago but it really inspired me because they were talking about the idea of Ip nfts as enabling a much more efficient biopharma IP Market intellectual property Market because now you can sort of wrap intellectual property and nft rapper and fractionalize it and create much more transparent and liquid markets and enable things like prediction markets for you know drugs that are in clinical trials

um because the the whole biopharm industry had it's very opaque it's very very hard to access unless you're an accredited investor it's actually probably impossible so they thought well how do we bring more liquidity to this use this to fund more research and sort of hyper financialize a lot of these things a lot of these ideas like has happened in in crypto and I think a lot of scientists are turned off by right that term but I actually see it as a superpower of crypto that can really fuel a lot of innovation and a lot of Discovery and I mean

yeah I want to come back to scientists and crypto but I mean the the term hyper financialization generally turns a lot of people off we definitely need to find a new term for that the way that I've explained this in the nft space is like a lot of the resistance to nfts came because like oh you're putting Finance in in our art get your Finance away from our art and I always try and flip it around on them it's like well you're actually putting your culture into Finance like these aren't opportunities to take your culture and make our finance less Banky and more artsy and so

like finding new ways to explain like yeah hyper financialization but also you know incentives compensation rewards upside growth all of these like adjectives that have been uh missing from so many different other Industries also accountability so like science is accountable-ish but if there's a chain connecting everything together you can see where the weak points are and you can start to tighten them up a little bit uh which I think is probably needed at some point definitely I mean so one thing I feel like I need to say is that

um there's this question of onboarding scientists into web3 even with DSI really picking up steam over the last year it's still hard to get typical scientists working in Labs working in universities to kind of pay attention to this because one scientists want to do science like most of them don't want to be writing grants and exploring new things they want to work on what they're interested in second crypto has a pretty bad wrap among the you know the rest of the world the rest of the world right so if you say the word crypto to a scientist they kind of recoil with disgust they lose interest they don't

want they don't want to hear about it they they think it's all monkey jpegs and scams um and I mean you know of course scams are a problem in crypto right but the other thing is you're not you're not wrong yeah so so when I talk to my colleagues about DSi I start off with blockchain technology and start explaining why blockchain technology is unique and why an immutable Ledger enables you know us to do things in a trustless way and then they start paying attention they start thinking oh okay so I thought it was just money I thought it was just