Where’s That Big DeSci Boom We Were Promised?
Late last year, Decentralized Science (DeSci) was being hyped as crypto’s next frontier. Vitalik Buterin and Changpeng Zhao sang its praises. Ambitious promises were made. But months later, the momentum seems to have stalled. What happened? Is the idea too complex to implement - or is there something fundamentally wrong with it?
So What Even Is DeSci?
Let’s start with the basics. The term “DeSci” clearly echoes “DeFi” - and when we hear DeFi (Decentralized Finance), we pretty much get what it’s about. It means financial services - lending, trading, insurance, payments - provided directly between users, without centralized intermediaries:
- Need a loan? There are lending pools funded by the community, governed by smart contracts - no bureaucratic regulators to get in the way.
- Want to exchange assets? Liquidity pools do the job.
- Need to hedge against market crashes? Use collateral-backed stablecoins, with the collateral coming from other users in the network.
- Want to send money peer-to-peer? Use payment channels - no banks, no middlemen, not even miners.
All of that works beautifully because it’s based on crypto, and crypto, at its core, is about finance.
But science? What does crypto have to do with science - and why have some of the biggest voices in the crypto space started pushing the idea of “decentralized science”?
According to DeSci advocates, crypto can help solve several of the most deeply rooted problems in modern research:
1. Funding
Right now, if you want funding for your research, your options aren’t great. Either you “sell out” to a corporation - keeping your work secret so only they can benefit from it - or you rely on traditional grant systems that are slow, bureaucratic, and often riddled with bias. If you’re not connected to the right experts and foundations, good luck getting a serious grant.
DeSci offers an alternative: researchers can raise funds directly from the community through blockchain platforms. This is done via tokenization - issuing tokens that represent a stake in the project or a right to access the research outcomes.
The idea is simple: decentralized funding via DAOs and tokens lets money flow to science faster and more transparently, bypassing the old barriers - and ensures that the results benefit not just one closed institution, but the whole community of people who care about the outcome.
2. Letting scientists run the show
DAOs that bring together researchers and like-minded supporters are a core piece of DeSci. At first glance, they’re just a new way to pool crypto and allocate funding - researchers submit proposals, and the community votes on what gets backed.
But DAOs can go further. They can help scientists solve all kinds of structural problems themselves - not just funding. Governance, collaboration, project coordination - all done on researchers’ terms, not those of corporate boards or bureaucrats.
3. Rethinking intellectual property
Scientific discoveries can be published and shared in the form of NFTs, which makes their origin and authorship permanently recorded on the blockchain.
And thanks to the growing NFT ecosystem, these tokens - which represent intellectual property rights - can be easily transferred, licensed, or tracked without paperwork or delays.
This offers a powerful advantage: blockchains can prove who made a discovery first (complete with a timestamp), and smart contracts can automatically distribute royalties to the creators if the discovery gets commercialized.
4. Open access to knowledge
This is a huge part of the DeSci ethos. New platforms are being built to replace traditional academic journals with decentralized publishing and peer review.
If peer reviewers can be rewarded in crypto, DeSci platforms can attract a much broader community - not just a few tenured insiders. Reputation metrics for reviewers, and blockchain-based tracking of every edit or comment, can increase trust and transparency throughout the process.
Ultimately, decentralized publishing promises to make scientific communication faster, more accessible, and more transparent.
5. Distributed computation
Modern science often needs serious computing power. And projects like Folding@home have shown that volunteers are willing to donate their machines to help solve global challenges. (Back in 2020, during COVID, Folding@home actually became the world’s fastest supercomputer - over 1 exaFLOP of processing power.)
DeSci can take this further by adding crypto incentives: people could contribute their resources and earn tokens in return - just like early Bitcoin mining.
So Who’s Actually Doing DeSci?
ResearchHub
Let’s start with the platform that arguably kickstarted the whole DeSci conversation: ResearchHub.
Launched in 2020, ResearchHub was co-founded by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, and Patrick Joyce, with one mission - to create an open, collaborative space for discussing and sharing scientific research.
To incentivize participation, ResearchHub introduced a native token: ResearchCoin (RSC). Users can earn RSC for contributing to the platform - whether it's reviewing papers, writing summaries, or creating visualizations.
On ResearchHub, anyone holding RSC can:
- Post bounties for specific tasks (like peer reviews or graphical abstracts),
- Tip other users to reward valuable content,
- Vote on platform governance - from new features to how resources are allocated.
In this ecosystem, science isn’t dictated by journals or institutions. It’s built, evaluated, and rewarded by the community itself.
The SCIHUB Token
In 2023, a group of open science advocates launched a token on the Solana blockchain called SCIHUB - named after the infamous pirate library of academic papers, Sci-Hub. For years, Sci-Hub has made paywalled scientific articles freely accessible, bypassing publishers and copyright restrictions.
In a surprising move, an anonymous crypto user known as 0xAA acquired 22% of the total SCIHUB supply - and donated 20% of it directly to Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub, to help support the ongoing storage and distribution of scientific knowledge.
To be clear: SCIHUB isn’t really a DeSci token in the strict sense. It’s more of a meme token with a message. But it does show how crypto communities can rally around a cause - especially when it comes to making knowledge free and open.
Pump.Science
SCIHUB’s idea inspired the launch of a platform that openly identifies as part of the DeSci movement: Pump.Science - a project focused on funding longevity research through meme tokens. It went live on Solana in late 2024 and was presented at the Solana Breakpoint conference as a breakthrough concept.
But let’s be honest - there’s nothing radically new here. Just like artists mint NFTs of their work and sell them on marketplaces to gain support from collectors and fans, scientists on Pump.Science can tokenize their research ideas, and users can back them by purchasing the corresponding tokens.
The most prominent tokens on the platform so far are Urolithin A (URO) and Rifampicin (RIF) - both of which received backing from Binance Labs and are now listed on major exchanges like HTX, Bitget, and KuCoin.
The Innovation Game
The Innovation Game is a project designed to incentivize scientific innovation - particularly in computational methods. The idea is simple: researchers post open scientific problems, and participants compete to develop the best algorithms to solve them.
If your solution outperforms existing benchmarks - whether in accuracy, speed, or efficiency - it’s automatically recognized as the best, and you get rewarded, no voting or approval needed.
The system removes centralized gatekeeping and subjective judgment, relying instead on transparent, reproducible performance metrics.
And where does the money come from?
- When someone submits a new challenge, they can fund it by depositing tokens or stablecoins - this forms the prize pool for top-performing solutions.
- If a solution gets commercialized - licensed or integrated into a real product - the revenue can be funneled back into the system to fund future bounties.
- The project is also working to attract support from partner organizations, research funds, and grant programs that back decentralized science.
LabDAO
Of all the DeSci projects out there, the one I personally see as the most promising is LabDAO - a kind of “cloud lab” where researchers can share decentralized computing power and laboratory resources on demand.
Think of it as a blockchain-based marketplace for scientific services. A scientist can submit an experiment or data analysis task, and a distributed network of nodes - whether labs or servers - carries it out.
The platform is still in its pre-launch phase, focused on building the infrastructure needed to support decentralized research. But once it goes live, anyone will be able to contribute resources and earn rewards in return.
To me, LabDAO is the only real contender to Bitcoin in the entire crypto space. And here’s why:
- In Bitcoin, people earn rewards for solving mathematical puzzles that serve no purpose other than securing the blockchain.
- But what if block rewards could be earned by solving scientific problems - ones that help us better understand the world or improve human life?
- Sure, in the beginning, such a system would need outside funding. Scientists would have to pay for resources using external crypto or fiat money. The native tokens given for solving scientific tasks wouldn’t be worth anything at first.
- But neither were bitcoins. And one day someone paid 10,000 of them for two pizzas. The rest is history.
- If LabDAO (or someone else) manages to build a blockchain that’s just like Bitcoin - but where block generation contributes to real scientific progress - then maybe Bitcoin will start to feel obsolete.
So Where Is All of This?
The examples I’ve covered so far are just a few highlights. There are many more DeSci projects out there:
- YesNoError, a platform for auditing scientific publications, where users earn YNE tokens for catching errors;
- BIO Protocol, a system for collective ownership of medical innovations, tokenized as BIO;
- and a whole ecosystem of science-focused DAOs:
- VitaDAO (longevity and biotech),
- AthenaDAO (women’s health),
- AntidoteDAO (cancer research),
- GenomesDAO (genomic data governance),
- HairDAO (treatments for hair loss),
- ValleyDAO (synthetic biology),
- AxonDAO (neuroscience), and others.
So yes, the DeSci space is growing.
But still… it feels like the momentum that built up around DeSci at the end of 2024 - all those conference shoutouts, token listings, hype - has started to fade. What happened?
The Core Problem with DeSci
Here’s how I see it.
- Science moves slowly. You can’t produce meaningful results in a few months.
- But the crypto crowd is used to fast gains and instant gratification. If DeSci doesn’t deliver quick “x’s,” most crypto investors just aren’t interested.
- And if there’s no interest, there’s no demand for DeSci tokens. Their prices drop - and with that, the funding available for research becomes insufficient to sustain real scientific work.
- Eventually, many projects may be forced to shut down.
- And without success stories, the crypto community will lose faith in DeSci. At the same time, the scientific community will walk away disappointed, convinced that crypto isn’t the solution it hoped for.
Major DeSci tokens' rates in 2025
DeSci Could Be Crypto’s Next Chapter - Just Not Like the Others. Not as the next ICO craze, or a wave of DeFi forks, or meme coins gone viral.
DeSci won’t give you fast, easy money. It’s about long-term investment - and that’s exactly the kind of thinking that’s been missing from the current crypto narrative.
Most people today are looking for the exit. But DeSci could steer crypto in a new direction - one that earns the industry real credibility. One where crypto helps solve actual, vital problems.
And the projects I mentioned in this article could play a big part in that future. We just need to look at them differently: not as moonshots, but as long bets on real-world impact.
Maybe now is exactly the right time to invest in them - while the rest of the market is still ignoring their value.
And when you’re ready to do that, rabbit.io makes it easy. There you’ll find RSC, SCIHUB, RIF, URO, BIO, YNE - and many other tokens.
No registration. No limits. Just fast swaps, at the best available rates.
