Abstract

The concept of DeSci (Decentralized Science) was first proposed in 2018, although has not yet gained widespread public attention, it is considered by Messari to be upcoming new narrative. DeSci aims to reshape traditional scientific patterns by establishing public infrastructure using the Web3 stack. The accumulated achievements of the Arweave ecosystem over the years not only align well with DeSci's development needs of DeSci but also have the capacity to support the entire DeSci ecosystem. With the release of the Hyper-Parallel Computer AO, the boundaries of DeSci are further expanded.

Author: Kyle@contributor of PermaDAO

Translator: Kyle@contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Tina XU@contributor of PermaDAO

The world of encryption is ever-changing. Following the approval of the Bitcoin ETF, the market witnessed an upward trend before the Bitcoin halving. Various sectors rotated, with sounds of joy and noise echoing, but soon returned to silence. As the market regained rationality, the "no handover" theory emerged. Cryptocurrency players still tend to seek novelty, and in the midst of a subdued market, DeSci, previously overlooked, began to be frequently mentioned.

The concept of DeSci first appeared in Martin Etzrodt's blog in 2018, where he attempted to propose a new paradigm to address issues such as peer review in traditional science. Despite receiving favor from capital like Coinbase and Pfizer, and attention from crypto leaders like Vitalik Buterin and CZ, DeSci has yet to enter the mainstream spotlight. However, the potential of DeSci should not be underestimated; it is a technological innovation that directly benefits humanity. This article aims to introduce DeSci and its significance, focusing on how Arweave can drive the development of DeSci, especially in the context of the introduction of Hyper-Parallel Computer AO.

Interpreting DeSci: Liberating Traditional Science

Source：https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decentralized-science-desci-singularis-holding/

DeSci, short for Decentralized Science, aims to liberate traditional science using the Web3 stack to establish public infrastructure for the fair and just funding, creation, review, authentication, storage, and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

obel laureate Randy Schekman once said, "Science knows no borders and should be open." DeSci, as a movement aimed at liberating traditional science, similar to SocialFi and GameFi, seeks to eliminate traditional constraints by leveraging decentralized technology and introducing token incentive mechanisms. In short, the success of DeSci holds profound significance for humanity, creating a space for "dreaming with peace of mind" in scientific research fields.

How DeSci Unshackles Traditional Scientific Constraints

The rise of DeSci stems from challenges and reflections on the traditional scientific system. The difficulties in the traditional scientific field are nothing but more than the age-old ills of the centralized world—such as funding monopolies, information asymmetry, and peer review issues, which limit the free flow and sharing of scientific knowledge. Additionally, researchers' rights are not fully protected, and they cannot fully own intellectual property.

Reshaping Funding and Capital Allocation Methods

In the traditional scientific field, obtaining funding is crucial but often challenging. Firstly, the population in scientific research is continuously growing, leading to financial constraints. Secondly, researchers need to spend time and effort writing funding applications and meet various quantified application conditions. Meanwhile, funds are controlled by governments or funding agencies, which may decide on funding research projects based on their biases, economic interests, or political purposes, leading to neglect of certain important research areas. As a result, researchers find it difficult to focus on their research.

DeSci breaks the shackles of traditional funding models using DAOs and NFT technology. Through DAOs, researchers can transparently obtain funding support, achieving decentralization of funds in the scientific research field. For example, VitaDAO focuses on longevity science research, providing funding support for research projects through crowdfunding and secondary financing. Additionally, the tokenization of scientific achievements provides researchers with new funding channels, such as IP-NFTs introduced by Molecule.

Innovating Scientific Collaboration, Publishing, and Peer Review

For researchers in the traditional scientific field, both external cooperation and access to shared resources are often restricted by their organizations or institutions, gradually forming information silos. In terms of publishing research results, they often encounter biases and exploitation of power, resulting in an inefficient publishing process. Furthermore, peer review in the traditional scientific field is unrewarded, inevitably leading to problems such as low efficiency or low quality.

DeSci addresses collaboration, publishing, and peer review issues in the traditional scientific field by creating a decentralized open platform, introducing incentive mechanisms, and eliminating intermediate links. For example, ResearchHub, dubbed the GitHub of the scientific field, introduces ERC20 tokens and provides a decentralized open platform, allowing researchers to freely publish and discuss academic issues, while incentivizing researchers to peer review published research results.

Ensuring Intellectual Property Rights

Whether it's copyright, patents, or trademarks, they are still controlled by research institutions, which is detrimental to the development of the entire scientific field. Transparent and open information is crucial for research work, especially for forward-looking knowledge. Researchers should have unrestricted access to relevant research results as much as possible to promote innovation and research progress.

DeSci adopts decentralized storage solutions to ensure the security and accessibility of research data. Researchers can access and share research data openly. Meanwhile, the IP-NFTs introduced by the Molecule project provide a new mechanism for managing intellectual property rights, allowing researchers not only to own the intellectual property rights of their research results but also to share the benefits they will generate in the future.

How Arweave Drives DeSci Development?

Arweave, as a robust infrastructure, can provide comprehensive support for DeSci. Besides supporting the permanent storage of data of any type and size, Arweave also possesses computing capabilities. Its native smart contract SmartWeave and the improved storage consensus paradigm SCP both adopt the core concept of "on-chain storage, off-chain computation". Arweave is not only the storage infrastructure for DeSci but also developers can develop DeSci applications based on Arweave. However, after the release of the Hyper-Parallel Computer AO, the potential inherent in Arweave has been greatly unleashed, creating a favorable environment for the growth of DeSci.

Arweave One-stop Platform: Embracing Data Storage, Encryption, and Publishing

Scientific research data is of high quality and importance, and the biggest concern is data loss, making Arweave the ideal decentralized storage solution for DeSci. Arweave's permanent storage technology naturally fits scientific data and all stored data is tamper-proof, traceable, and resistant to censorship.

However, Arweave itself does not have data encryption capabilities. For security and privacy needs, DeSci applications built on Arweave can encrypt data before uploading it to the chain using the Mind Network's fully homomorphic encryption technology (FHE). Furthermore, the AO ecosystem is developing the PADO project, the world's first zkFHE decentralized computing network, which combines fully homomorphic encryption with zero-knowledge (ZK) proof technology to provide comprehensive privacy protection for DeSci applications.

Additionally, Arweave can serve as a decentralized publishing platform for DeSci. Examples such as PermawebNew (news portal) have already emerged. Data is permanently stored on Arweave, and through indexing, data is dynamically loaded into Permaweb applications, allowing users to read published content just like browsing a Web2 frontend page.

Full On-chain DAO Governance: Addressing Funding Challenges

Transitioning from traditional authoritative institutions to DAO organizations frees from centralized constraints and eliminates lengthy intermediary processes. Compared to traditional science, DeSci makes financing more democratic and intelligent. However, most DAO organizations are still in the exploration stage. There are many factors affecting whether DAO organizations can operate stably in the long term, and perfect infrastructure is one of the key factors.

In exploring DAO solutions to DeSci's financing issues, the governance model of PermaDAO can be referenced. Similar to Bitcoin's POW mechanism, for DAO community members, proof of work directly represents the value created, and PermaDAO uses Arweave as the workload ledger for DAO organizations, where all data is traceable and tamper-proof. Contributors will receive corresponding $HALO Token incentives based on their workload, and then use the staked $HALO Token to obtain voting rights for governance proposals. Therefore, running specialized financing DAOs based on Arweave is feasible.

Atomic Assets Combined with UDL Protocol: Intellectual Property Rights Confirmation and Royalty Mechanism

Atomic Assets, based on Arweave, is a new NFT paradigm, perhaps more suitable for the DeSci field than IP-NFT. Unlike most "incomplete" NFTs, Atomic Assets achieves true intellectual property confirmation by fully uploading asset data, metadata, and contracts to the Arweave network, all bundled in a single Arweave ID. Additionally, Atomic Assets have no restrictions on storage capacity or data types, and can even be large files like applications.

Atomic Assets not only allow researchers to fully own the intellectual property rights of their research results, but also, when combined with the UDL protocol, establish a complete royalty circulation mechanism. The UDL protocol, Universal Data License, allows researchers to personalize the usage terms of Atomic Assets through predefined labels. Furthermore, Atomic Assets can be seamlessly listed on the BazAR exchange for sale. Researchers can not only immediately cash out and obtain financial support, but also enjoy potential royalty income from the data market generated by ContentFi in the future.

Stamp Protocol and Vouch Protocol: Building a Reputation System

Stamp is Arweave's native content curation protocol, allowing anyone to "STAMP" any content on Permaweb, similar to social media "likes". By "STAMPing" content, users and content authors can receive rewards in $STAMP tokens, providing motivation for peer review in DeSci and helping to filter out high-quality research results. Moreover, the Stamp protocol integrates the Vouch protocol, which verifies whether a wallet address belongs to a real human through the Vouch Twitter service. After verification, the wallet address can use the "STAMP" function of the Stamp protocol. As a result, all actions of researchers, such as creation and review, can be recorded. Therefore, the combination of the Stamp protocol and the Vouch protocol can create a trustworthy and traceable reputation system for DeSci.

Hyper-Parallel Computer AO Broadens the Boundaries of DeSci

The launch of the Hyper-Parallel Computer AO gives DeSci more possibilities. Arweave, as the solid foundation of DeSci, by providing available middleware, can also support any DeSci application. With the blessing of the Hyper-Parallel Computer AO, Arweave's potential has been greatly enhanced, covering various scientific categories of DeSci. AO allows any number of processes to run in parallel, with the ability to handle large amounts of data and unlimited computational resources, which can help DeSci promote the development of the most disruptive AI technology. Additionally, DeSci applications built on AO can communicate through processes to maximize the elimination of information silos.

Recently, the AO ecosystem launched the financial infrastructure Autonomous Finance, which introduces AI models to realize AI-driven new DeFi applications. In the near future, a batch of AI-agent AgentFi financial applications will emerge, and ContentFi applications are also indispensable. ContentFi applications can attribute and monetize data stored on Arweave, allowing high-value data resources in DeSci applications to fully unleash their potential in the Autonomous Finance ecosystem, while all participants can profit from the data market created by ContentFi.

Conclusion

In the progressive, intelligent, and automated era of Industry 4.0, the rise of DeSci redefines the pattern of traditional science, bringing new vitality and opportunities to the field of scientific research. Meanwhile, Arweave plays a crucial role in it. Arweave is no longer just a permanent database for DeSci but, after the release of the Hyper-Parallel Computer AO, is fully capable of carrying the vast DeSci ecosystem.

If "greatness" cannot be planned, then we see the "art of unplanned" in the alignment of DeSci and Arweave. Arweave has been seeking self-cultivation elsewhere but inadvertently becomes a stepping stone, providing broad possibilities for DeSci.

References

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