...trying heroically on a podcast to explain why putting one’s house “on the blockchain” might be better than the current system. Eventually, after much grasping and a bit of “these things could all be NFTs,” McCormick ended up more or less where he began. “You’ve just re-created the entire mortgage infrastructure that already exists today,” a host... See more

Still in its infancy, DeSci lies at the intersection of two broader trends: 1) efforts within the scientific community to change how research is funded and knowledge is shared, and 2) efforts within the crypto-focused movement to shift ownership and value away from industry intermediaries.

We tend to retreat from unfamiliar concepts, especially when they're being pushed in our faces.

Minting IP as an NFT enables the IP to be financialised — it can be held by a DAO, tokenised, have a liquid market created around it, collateralised, and borrowed against.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

If you can't stand it when people talk about crypto, you're not alone.

The IP-NFT enables new fundraising and collaboration strategies for researchers by combining legal and technical frameworks with NFT technology. Early-stage research can be financed without endless grant applications, creating a startup and raising VC or needing to file a patent.

Funding is an especially acute pain point for scientists, who spend up to half their time writing grant proposals. Success in getting funding is heavily tied to metrics such as the h-index, which quantifies the impact of a scientist’s published work. The resulting pressure to “publish or perish” incentivizes the pursuit of novel research over work ... See more

If you’re a VC, financialization might seem natural and even fun. But most normal people don’t find financialization fun in the least. They view maintaining their 401(k) as a burden, they mostly ignore the stock market, and they don’t open their bills for a few days when they come in the mail. The idea that they’d want to get into a complicated fin... See more