I initially had doubts about DeSci. Crypto is replete with narratives—many more than actually promising applications—and great storytellers can get rich on speculation alone, without ever producing anything of value. These incentives mean the space is full of false prophets—all preaching some new gospel, hoping to cash in on the latest trend. If they dump their bags before the music stops, they can make off with millions before the masses wise up to the con. Over time, you learn to be suspicious of these pitches and their purveyors, so amidst this torrent, DeSci seemed like just another story in a sea of many.

But my skepticism ran deeper than narrative fatigue. The worlds of crypto and scientific discovery seemed fundamentally misaligned. Crypto is fast-paced and temperamental—at its base impatient and focused on quick returns. Drug development, on the other hand, is a slow game in a heavily regulated industry, and clinical trials can take years to bear fruit. It's an explicitly long-term play, at odds with any hopes of getting rich quickly.

Crypto enables internet-scale, permissionless capital formation. Anyone can post a wallet address or launch a smart contract and accept backing from people around the world. Many immediately recognized this as revolutionary and discussed how it could—combined with advancements in governance and smart contracts—be used to create the companies of the future, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Participants could contribute capital, vote on proposals, and smart contracts would ensure that resources were allocated appropriately and profits shared as anticipated.

But DAOs didn't take off like everyone expected. There are some prominent, active examples, but most energy went elsewhere. Over a decade into the crypto revolution, two major use cases emerged. In the developing world, people used crypto to access dollars via stablecoins, to hedge against inflation and facilitate foreign trade, and in developed markets, it was used to wager on which meme ticker would grab the most mindshare. Regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. didn't help—effectively establishing transparently worthless memecoins as the safest projects to launch—but even regions with friendlier legal environments failed to produce anything groundbreaking. This led to a general malaise. Was this really the culmination of the cypherpunk story? Crypto's killer apps were dollars and gambling? Some tried to go with the flow—accepting that crypto would always be a highly speculative space—and tried to figure out how to redirect some of this gambling impulse to doing good. Most notably, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum cofounder, wrote a lengthy post around this idea of memecoins for good. And though a handful of projects have made significant charitable contributions, memecoins, by and large, continue to be rank speculation.

Given this background, I remained dubious about this gambling for good narrative, but an article from Zee Prime Capital challenged my perspective. The piece breaks down how the current, top-down funding paradigm fails rare disease investigation and proposes that permissionless capital could be just the fix. Drug discovery often follows this path: (1) A university applies for backing from some public institution like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2) If the work shows promise, the university partners with early-stage biotech investors (funds or accelerators) to form a startup and conduct further studies. (3) Some major pharmaceutical firm with the requisite sales, marketing, and manufacturing knowledge to produce the drug at scale acquires the startup. The grant system is slow and bureaucratic, but it has merits. It imposes a degree of rigor on the process. Applications are vetted by experts in the field, reducing the chances of allocating resources to bogus projects. But this approach also requires teams to dedicate much of their time to crafting perfect grant proposals and forsakes scientific work outside of the prescribed interests of the funding bodies. A lack of conventional safeguards could allow charlatans to exploit DeSci platforms, garnering funds for bunk science built on shoddy foundations. But the risk of misallocating resources is worth it if we can direct some funding where it’s desperately needed, and we can also expect these platforms to get better at screening out questionable proposals as they mature.

Zee Prime argues that DeSci could bring the return of the Victorian gentleman scientist—a wealthy individual who uses his bountiful resources and leisure time to pursue scientific inquiry for the benefit of mankind. In the past, this would have included figures like Benjamin Franklin, and some have suggested Bryan Johnson, former Braintree founder of "Don't Die" fame, fits the archetype today. While the typical gentleman scientist has been a man who made his own wealth, I don't see why we couldn't use crypto to elect our own. Universities are full of passionate graduate students who would love to throw themselves into their work, and the world is full of people who would happily support studies into the rare diseases afflicting their loved ones.

If DeSci just meant securing capital for research that would otherwise go unfunded, that alone would make it worthwhile. But when combined with DAO mechanisms, it could do much more. Token holders could vote to establish requirements for scientists, such as providing specific materials or reaching certain benchmarks, and only release funds if these conditions are met. And if a researcher falls short of their commitments, participants could also vote to dissolve the project and return the remaining capital. Immutable blockchain records would ensure that the contributions of individual scientists are adequately recognized, instead of being subsumed into the story of a larger institution.

It's not only crypto storytellers who believe in DeSci. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer gave the movement a vote of confidence by investing in VitaDao, a group exploring life extension. Big pharma is not particularly innovative, and their internal R&D efforts and budgets are limited when compared with publicly funded academic research. Zee Prime notes that "By 2018, more than one-half of the top 30 drugs were sourced from academia, including 6 of the top 10." Despite the profits of leading firms depending heavily on taxpayer-supported research, it's often contended that American citizens don't benefit from this contribution nearly as much as they should. In fact, Americans pay the highest drug prices in the world. Those seeking to remedy this perceived disparity between civic investment and public benefit could stipulate that any treatments developed with the aid of IP they backed come with fair pricing guarantees.

A profit-seeking model is one approach, but a research DAO could explore other avenues. The DAO could instead be a charity where your contribution gives you a say over the direction of the scientific work. Siqi Chen gave us a look at what this charity-with-a-vote option could look like. Chen is the founder and CEO of the fintech startup Runway, and in September of 2024, his daughter Mira, then four years old, was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, an adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma. While largely non-fatal (90% of children survive), it's associated with a number of adverse effects, including stunted growth and possible blindness. Being both rare and survivable, it attracts little attention or resources.

Siqi and his wife, Yi, began making personal contributions to the Hankinson Lab at the Children's Hospital of Colorado, the only North American organization focused on the condition. Chen shared Mira's story on X, and on Christmas Eve the couple launched a GoFundMe. They were met with a flood of support, and many in the crypto community asked Chen to share a wallet address they could send money to. Chen initially shared an ETH wallet, but after enough insistence, he created a Solana wallet as well. A member of the Solana community created the memecoin $MIRA and sent Chen half the supply. Within two weeks the $MIRA community donated a million dollars to the Hankinson Lab and hundreds of thousands to other initiatives. Inspired by this success, the family went on to create MiraDAO, an organization focused on investigating and treating rare pediatric illnesses.

DeSci represents the best of crypto, employing permissionless systems to fill the gaps—to self-organize and solve problems unaddressed by our current institutions. The existing grant regime has been extremely helpful in developing treatments for many illnesses. But it's a utilitarian arrangement, operating within resource constraints to offer the best results for the most people, so funding research into rare diseases that affect fewer people is out of its purview. However, there are mountains of people willing to support that research and many others willing to conduct it. For some it's a bet they can feel a bit better about, and for others it's a new, more democratic kind of charity. People are going to speculate anyway, so why not channel that desire into deepening our understanding of some disease and possibly inching us closer to a cure? Given the choice between DeSci and guessing the dog coin of the day, I think many will choose the former, because despite what the initial innings of the crypto revolution may suggest, people are much more than degenerate gamblers. Sure, we'd all like to be rich, but money isn't just a vehicle to pull a lever to get more money. $MIRA showed us money is also a way to express hope and solidarity, to build community. Most DeSci projects will fail—that's the nature of both science and speculation—but for once, crypto's gambling impulse might actually solve something bigger than who can flip their bags the fastest.