DeSci: The case for Decentralised Science | Gitcoin Blog

While writing this article I pulled together a very early “proof-of-concept” for a DeSci publishing platform called SciFoundry. So far, SciFoundry is an ERC721 smart contract hosted on the Rinkeby testnet. Users can mint their articles and receive an NFT which can be viewed on Opensea. Anyone can download the full article and its assets using the e... See more

An example of a DeSci system that conforms to these ideals might begin by replacing the primary currency of research scientists – published articles – with NFTs. These NFTs can be minted and owned by the authors, with the actual manuscript and associated code and datasets hosted on IPFS (or another decentralised storage such as Arweave or Filecoin)... See more

Part of the reason why “the best minds of [a] generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” is surely that they are properly incentivized to do so – DeSci offers the potential to radically alter how a new generation of great minds are incentivized to tackle major scientific and technological challenges.

Ultimately these structural problems with science funding and publishing have arisen from centralized control – a small pool of power-players sculpt the scientific landscape and have created a deeply imbalanced industry from what should be a public good.