DeSci: Can AI, Biotech & Crypto Solve Ageing?

TECH IN THE NEWS

Spirited Away — Spirit Airlines has filed for bankruptcy after losing $2.2B in 5 Years. It has secured $300M in financing to stay afloat and plans to end its bankruptcy in Q1 of 2025.

Humans Only Please — President Biden and China’s Xi Jinping have reached new landmark agreements on AI nuclear controls, ensuring that only humans will make decisions on nuclear weapon use.

Rally Fades — The post-election stock surge stumbles due to inflation concerns, rising yields, and policy uncertainties affecting pharma and defense sectors. Optimism remains amid strong earnings and growth.

FCC Vendetta — Brendan Carr, Trump’s FCC chair pick is expected by analysts to target Big Tech and penalize TV networks for political bias, and to expand the agency for political leverage.

Green Light for AVs — The Trump admin reportedly plans to ease regulations on self-driving cars. Tesla stock rose 5% Monday on the good news this heralds for its "robotaxi" plans.

COMPANIES TO WATCH

Nvidia Faces Music — There is trepidation ahead of Nvidia’s Q4 earnings report, with expectations of $18.4B net income and $33B revenue. The company's new Blackwell chip, despite overheating issues, is projected to generate $5-8B in revenue.

Goldman Sachs — The asset management giant plans to spin out its digital assets tech platform (GS DAP) within 12-18 months, partnering with Tradeweb Markets to form an independent company to advance digital financial services.

The Exploration Company — The EU private space company raised a $160M Series B to develop Europe's first reusable space capsule. The round was led by Balderton and Plural with Bessemer, NGP, and two European Sovereign funds.

162% Surge — FT reported Trump Media is in advanced talks to buy Bakkt, the crypto marketplace backed by NYSE’s parent company, pumping Bakkt shares 162%.

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THE HOTTEST THING IN TECH
DeSci: “The Only Game You Can Play Forever”

Amidst all the hype around AI and cryptocurrency at the moment, an exciting recent trend combining AI, biotech and blockchain is also getting a lot of attention, decentralized science (DeSci). Most of the hype is on social media and crypto media currently, but it has potential to eventually spill over into the wider public awareness as the movement grows. With many in the scientific world increasingly feeling that political tensions in traditional scientific institutions are impeding open scientific inquiry, DeSci may be a growth trend to watch for future investment opportunities. 

What is Decentralized Science?

DeSci is a movement leveraging blockchain tech to build a more equitable and fair system for scientific research. It aims to improve the funding, creation, review, crediting, storage, and dissemination of scientific knowledge by using Web3 tools, such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and crypto tokens. This community-driven approach allows for collaboration in the scientific field by fostering an incentivized and open environment. DeSci seeks to address issues in traditional science such as expensive academic publishing fees, difficulty reproducing research, inefficient and biased funding models, unused intellectual property (IP) hoarding, and data accessibility and storage.

Driving The Recent Surge

The first decentralized science (DeSci) platform on the Solana blockchain launched recently Pump.science is funded by the Solana Foundation to advance longevity research, and has attracted over $300M in value in under a month across two tokens. The tokens relate to real-world tests on longevity compounds Urolithin A ($URO) and Rifampicin ($RIF) on various organisms. The sale of tokens will occur at key milestones as the token's market cap grows, with the funds being used to finance progressively advanced tests, starting with tests on worms once it reaches $69k, flies at $1M, mice at $4M, and eventually human trials at a $10M market cap. 

Promising compounds can be formulated into a final product at any stage of the Pump.science research pipeline. The platform offers live-streamed experiments, providing real-time data similar to Twitch, allowing users to observe the effects of compounds on longevity. Future plans include enhanced animal performance tests, research funds, AI agents, a product marketplace, and a science fund in collaboration with Daos.fun. The platform encourages community involvement by allowing anyone to submit ideas for new compounds to be tested in the future. 

Also, this week Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) revealed his company is watching the DeSci trend, saying, "We need decentralized science. A lot of good researchers are not being funded." Watch out for Binance to launch a project soon.

Last October, another DeSci DAO, VitaDAO, kickstarted the first DeSci spinout biotech company, Matrix Biosciences, in collaboration with Vera Gorbunova of the University of Rochester’s Aging Research Center with an initial $300K grant. Matrix is exploring hyaluronic acid-based compounds, aiming to pioneer in cancer and aging treatments, utilizing insights from cancer-resistant naked mole rats. 

Where is Desci Headed?

As AI advances, the cost of performing biotech experiments is coming down drastically, opening it up to the public like never before. For example, the MIT Jameel Clinic just released Boltz-1, an open-source model for accurately predicting the 3D structure of biomolecular complexes. It is the first fully commercially available O-S model to achieve accuracy comparable to Google’s AlphaFold3, a significant advancement in democratizing access to sophisticated biomolecular modeling.

The DeSci movement is moving towards a future where decentralized, crypto-based platforms will accelerate the discovery and development of healthspan-extending interventions through a multi-level "game". A key aspect of this future is the concept of "stadium science," where real-time data from experiments will be live-streamed to a global audience, fostering engagement and speculation.

Platforms will also allow for "permissionless experiments", enabling anyone to submit compounds for testing for under $100. This will remove cost and gatekeepers to encourage mass submission of ideas, increasing the likelihood of discovering valuable life-extending products. The ultimate goal is a crypto marketplace where successful interventions are transformed into products, benefiting researchers, early backers, and consumers. The high IP value for compounds on DeSci platforms could eventually even lead to commercialization rights bidding wars among suppliers.

TRENDING TOOLS AND BUZZY TECH
Tools

BlackRock — iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) options begin trading on Nasdaq today.

IBM — Unveiled two free public AI solutions for sustainable urban development.

Mistral — New tools: web search with citations, editable content "canvas" tool.

Twenty — An Open source Salesforce-like CRM with a big contributor base. 

Biotech AI — 1. MIT - Boltz-1 o-s biomolecular model matches AlphaFold3. | 2. Arc Research Inst - Evo LLM interprets, generates genetic sequences. | 3. - Stanford -SEQUOIA predicts gene expression in cancer cells from biopsy images.

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