What is DeSci: Guide on Decentralized Science in Crypto

DeSci or Decentralized Science is a segment when cryptocurrencies and blockchain are utilized to support scientific research in various ways. More specifically, DeSci should be referred to as an umbrella term for systems, practices and assets related to Web3 usage in science.

In this review, we are going to sum up what we know about DeSci — and what we don’t. Also, we will review the most promising DeSci cryptocurrencies and discuss potential use cases for the technology.

What is DeSci, most eccentric crypto narrative of Q4: Highlights

DeSci, one of the newest segments in Web3 and the most impressive crypto narrative of Q3-Q4, 2024, is attempting to address scientific research challenges with blockchain-based tooling.

• Decentralized Science (abbreviated as DeSci) is a concept for blockchain technologies, methods, assets and communities involved in scientific research;
• DeSci is addressing specific needs of scholars and researchers with transparent, trust-minimized, community-driven and cost-effective tooling;
• To accelerate global research initiatives, DeSci sphere offers latest developments of NFT, DAO, DePIN segments, as well as smart contracts and AI;
• Most crucial use cases for DeSci include data sharing, peer reviews for scientific papers, raising funds for research, data verification and more;
• DeSci cryptocurrencies represent a class of crypto tokens (altcoins) associated with Decentralized Science protocols.

As of early Q1, 2025, OriginTrail (TRAC), Research Coin (RSC) and VitaDAO (VITA) are the largest DeSci cryptocurrencies: each has a nine-digit capitalization. The net DeSci sphere market cap exceeds $1.1 billion.

What are narratives in crypto?

Narratives in crypto emerged as overarching themes, ideas, or broad concepts that catalyze market trends, community behavior and investment decisions of retail and institutional investors. These narratives are normally derived from technological innovations, market movements, or societal shifts, shaping how people perceive the value and potential of specific cryptocurrencies or projects.

Most prominent early narratives include "Bitcoin as digital gold" (increasing scarcity of BTC thanks to halving), "Ethereum as ultra-sound money," (macro effects of EIP 1559) and more. Narratives drive hype, attract developers and investors and impact token prices. They evolve as the industry matures, often reflecting broader economic, technological, or cultural trends, and play a crucial role in shaping the crypto ecosystem.

As cryptocurrency markets are getting more and more dynamic, narratives are usually short-living. Typical examples include DeFi Summer 2020, TikTok Meme Coin Mania 2020, Solana Summer 2023 and so on.

How to benefit from narratives in crypto?

Since crypto narratives are powerful enough to cause deep changes of market structure, there is a certain class of market actors interested in benefiting from narrative change.

1. Buy and hold assets of the most hyped narratives. This is the simplest strategy: just browse through the statistics of the dominant narrative, purchase assets and hold.
2. Launch narrative-themed tokens. Via no-code launchpads like Pump.fun on Solana or SunPump on Tron, everyone is able to deploy their token and benefit from sales;
3. Inject liquidity in a “narrative-driven portfolio.” In a more balanced move, one can choose a couple of altcoins unified by this or that narrative and distribute available holdings between them.

While investing in crypto narratives, digital assets holders should always keep an eye on market dynamics as such altcoins are typically more volatile than large-caps.

Key crypto narratives for 2024-2025

The majority of the latest cryptocurrency narratives only attracted the attention for a couple of weeks each. However, the ones associated with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) proved to be really powerful.

AI agents

AI agents are isolated programs that can be run on blockchains to perform basic-level tasks without human interference. For instance, one can authorize AI agents to buy tokens, issue stablecoins, burn coins, collect NFTs and so on.

In Q4, 2024, Coinbase unveiled low-code AI agents launcher Based Agent. It allows Coinbase users to create, test and deploy AI agents on EVM blockchains.

AI agents cryptos: Artificial Superintelligence Alliance — formerly Fetch.AI (FET), Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL), SingularityNET (AGIX), Spectral (SPEC), Autonolas (OLAS).

AI meme coins

AI meme cryptocurrencies should be referred to as a group of memetic coins created or promoted with the tools of artificial intelligence. For the vast majority of them, AI is a part of the marketing narrative while the real AI/ML tooling has nothing to do with them.

However, the intersection of two powerful trends (AI and meme coins) makes this segment attractive for various types of aggressive investors.

AI meme coins: Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), Turbo (TURBO), Zerebro (ZEREBRO), CorgiAI (CORGIAI), Act I The AI Prophecy (ACT).

DePIN

DePIN or decentralized physical infrastructure networks is a class of blockchain projects addressing on-chain governance for off-chain systems.

For instance, an ecosystem of GPUs governed by DAO represents a textbook example of DePIN. Also, a number of projects are researching the opportunities for distributed instruments to manage IoT tooling.

DePIN cryptos: Internet Computer (ICP), Render (RENDER), Bittensor (TAO), Filecoin (FIL), The Graph (GRT).

Also, AI cryptocurrencies, Solana-based meme coins and new L2s should be named among promising narratives in the midterm.

What is decentralized science (DeSci) and why does it need crypto?

Decentralized Science or DeSci is a segment of blockchain technology (practices, crypto assets, communities) that is tasked with supporting scientific research, investing in it and enhancing it with distributed tools.

DeSci: Basics

Decentralized science (commonly abbreviated as DeSci) is an emerging concept that brings decentralized technologies to scientific research, attempting to make it more inclusive, transparent, trust-minimized, democratic and collaborative. Mostly, DeSci seeks to address modern science challenges by enabling direct funding through crypto assets, maintaining distributed platforms for data sharing and leveraging financial incentive for most valuable contributors.

Relying on a decentralized tech stack, DeSci makes data tamper-proof yet accessible, fostering trust in research outcomes. Smart contracts might be utilized to automate funding contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) allow communities to collectively decide on key research principles and objects.

DeSci promotes open science by lowering the entry barriers to knowledge and democratizing participation. This approach is particularly impactful for underfunded areas of research, global collaboration and reproducibility.

DeSci: Tech concepts

Despite still being in its infancy, the DeSci movement originated a number of impressive technical and social designs aimed at bringing scientific research to the next level.

Decentralized research organization and publishing

First, DeSci technologies might be helpful in organization of research, publishing scientific papers, peer reviews and expertise. In the Web2 world, malicious actors can artificially increase their scientific metrics like h-index, or even tamper research results.

While using decentralized peer review mechanisms, the expertise for new text will be transparent and more credible, and much more difficult to be influenced by human factors. When the track of this or that scholar is visible on-chain, demonstrating fake results will make no sense.

Also, decentralized data sharing platforms will eliminate the problems of gate-keeping associated with limited opportunities and the high operational costs of the top modern scientific journals. Such tooling will be of paramount importance for young scholars.

Crypto fundraising for science

Then, cryptocurrencies as a resource-effective, transparent and inclusive way of fundraising (known since the ICO boom of 2016-2018) might be of paramount importance for raising money for scientific processes.

With DeSci funding tools, it will be much easier for researchers to raise funds for their programs. Also, decentralized and community-driven ethos of this funding will prevent researchers from being controlled by corporations and governments.

Also, thanks to smart contracts, investors might be able to track the team’s spending: processes, expenses, milestones, results and more. Multi-sig wallet designs will protect the funds from being stolen and ending up in centralized systems.

Tokenization of intellectual property

In scientific research, there is always a risk of plagiarism or wrong attribution of results, developments, know-hows and so on. Modern copyright protection systems might be unable to protect sophisticated data from being stolen and abused.

In DeSci, researchers can tokenize their developments as NFTs. Every modern NFT, including ERC-721 or similar standards, stores tamper-proof information about the creation details and associated content. Also, IP-related NFTs can be created at a negligible cost compared to Web2 copyright protection services and agencies.

DeSci: Promises and challenges

While DeSci demonstrates obvious potential to disrupt the processes of scientific research, there are a number of roadblocks it needs to overcome. First, it will always be facing resistance from traditional institutions and researchers.

Then, high volatility of cryptocurrencies might be dangerous for long-term funding programs. For instance, in the case of a 50% ETH price drop in one year, the compensation of researchers will also be reduced by half, which of course will have a negative impact on the program’s prospects.

Also, connection to blockchain-based systems of data sharing might result in their losses in case of attacks. Some of the data in the blockchain could never be recovered. Regulatory uncertainty in the majority of jurisdictions for digital assets is another challenge for DeSci progress.

At the same time, the transparency, cost-effectiveness, inclusivity and direct funding in DeSci make the segment attractive for researchers in various fields.

DeSci: Potential ways of development

The Segment of Decentralized Science has a number of potential vectors for progress. Some of the most promising include DeSci DAOs, distributed data storage and crypto-based financial incentives.

Forming decentralized autonomous organizations for research governance and prioritization will allow scientific communities (in universities, institutes, colleges) to vote on funding allocation and project approval.

Utilizing decentralized storage solutions like Render Network, BitTorrent, IPFS or Filecoin might be useful in research data secure storage. Also, such data systems might help in promoting open-access repositories to make scientific knowledge globally accessible.

Last but not least, creating token-based systems to reward researchers, peer reviewers and data contributors will attract new developers and scientists to such systems. Also, implementing reputation systems for transparent recognition of contributors has all chances to replace traditional scientific rankings criticized for biased results and data manipulations.

Vitalik Buterin on DeSci: What makes Ethereum (ETH) founder bullish?

The emergence of DeSci has already attracted the attention of cryptocurrency segment heavyweights. Back in 2022, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong mentioned his interest in NewLimit and ResearchHub, two DeSci pioneers.

Armstrong donated 2% of his COIN holdings early to support these organizations.

Binance co-founder and former CEO Chagpeng “CZ” Zhao also mentioned streamlined fundraising as a potential promising use case for DeSci.

Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin is known as the most active proponent of DeSci in crypto. In November 2024, Buterin and CZ even had a meeting on the DeSci event.

Also, peer reviews on scientific papers and fundraising for public goods were mentioned by Buterin as potential use cases for “info finance,” a completely new field of tech at the intersection between social media, news outlets and prediction markets.

DeSci cryptocurrencies in 2024: List

Now, let’s check out a list of the largest DeSci cryptocurrencies as of Q4, 2024. It includes the top 10 DeSci cryptos by market capitalization, as per CoinGecko.

1. OriginTrail (TRAC)
2. Rifampicin ($RIF)
3. VitaDAO (VITA)
4. AxonDAO Governance Token (AXGT)
5. ResearchCoin (RSC)
6. HairDAO (HAIR)
7. Urolithin A ($URO)
8. Hyppocrat (HPO)
9. Dynex (DNX)
10. Molecules of Korolchuk IP-NFT (VITA-FAS)

The aggregate cap of the cryptos mentioned exceeds $1 billion in equivalent.

DeSci cryptocurrencies: Brief overview

The right moment has come to overview 10 DeSci crypto products for 2024, their programs, assets and use cases.

OriginTrail (TRAC)

OriginTrail (TRAC) is an ecosystem of data solutions at the intersection between AI, blockchain and internet. OriginTrail (TRAC) pioneers the concept of AI-powered Decentralized Knowledge Graph, a multi-purpose data structure for DeSci, supply chain, RWAs verification and so on.

OriginTrail (TRAC) DKG solutions can power transport, construction, logistics, life science and healthcare data systems of various types. Also, OriginTrail (TRAC) can be used in metaverses, gaming, NFTs and DeFi protocols.

Rifampicin ($RIF)

Rifampicin ($RIF, the dollar symbol is used as part of the ticker) is one of the first tokens of Pump.Science, an emerging DeSci meme token ecosystem. As explained in its whitepaper, Pump.Science enables anyone to launch longevity experiments.

Drug developers (drug devs) can fundraise for experiments and secure the rights to the discoveries. Others can bet on which intervention will extend life in the different model organisms tested.

To fund the experiment for a particular intervention, drug devs launch a token, which represents fractional rights to the cocktail and is sold to pay for the experiment.

Within this eccentric ecosystem, Rifampicin ($RIF) represents the support for rifampicin, a battle-tested antibiotic used to treat tuberculosis.

VitaDAO (VITA)

VitaDAO (VITA) also known as The Longevity DAO is a longevity research initiative with a number of scientific programs studying aging, longevity biotech, brain tissue replacement, RNA therapeutics for longevity and other related practices.

The project also supports VitaLabs laboratory and VitaLabs Fellowship for young scholars. VITA, a project cryptocurrency, is used as both governance and fundraising instrument. In total, 10,000 members collaborated with the platform while the net amount of funds raised exceeded $4.2 million.

AxonDAO Governance Token (AXGT)

Promoted as the first-ever System-as-a-Service project in DeSci, AxonDAO develops, curates and funds decentralized science projects with Biometric AI instruments. Right now, the project unites 50+ scholars across 10 completed and 5 ongoing research projects.

AxonDAO is funding the development of precognitive voice analysis modules, non-invasive mood and cognition monitoring, health tracking apps and so on. AXGT serves as a governance token paired with the “ownership” asset AXDT.

ResearchCoin (RSC)

One of the first mainstream DeSci cryptocurrencies, ResearchCoin (RSC) represents a way of rewarding scholars for their contributions to ResearchHub, an independent academic information platform.

ResearchCoin (RSC) is a reward token anyone can earn by sharing, curating and discussing academic science within ResearchHub. The number of RSC earned for any given action is proportional to how valuable this or that action is according to the community. Within ResearchHub, RSC is used to properly recognize and reward users' backing platforms with their expertise.

HairDAO (HAIR)

HairDAO is an open-source research and development community where patients and researchers collaborate to develop a new generation of treatments for hair loss. The protocol allows patients and doctors to log their treatment experiences, contribute to cutting-edge research and earn HAIR cryptocurrency as a reward.

Also HAIR holders can vote on crucial referendums for project development, use their tokens to receive confidential information, including early-access to research data, and get discounts on all HairDAO-associated products.

Urolithin A ($URO)

Urolithin A ($URO) is another project from the pump.science experiment. It is designed to mirror users’ involvement in the experiments with Urolithin A, a natural compound derived from the metabolism of gut microbiota.

The product garnered much attention due to its pharmacological effects and potential use in muscle health and performance.

Hippocrat (HPO)

Hippocrat (HPO) is a decentralized healthcare data protocol. According to its team statement, Hippocrat (HPO) is tasked with transforming healthcare by empowering individuals to take control of their health data through blockchain and zk-proof tech.

The protocol is accessible via an easy-to-use smartphone application. HPO acts as a main DAO governance and utility token within various Hippocrat services.

Dynex (DNX)

Dynex (DNX) is a multi-purpose data protocol for various real-world use cases. Dynex (DNX) data structures are backed by proof-of-useful-work (PoUW) blockchain algorithms with thousands of miners who contribute GPU resources in a decentralized manner.

Fueled with this decentralized mining concept, Dynex (DNX) develops a digital twin for quantum computers that offers scalable and robust solutions for industrial use cases.

Molecules of Korolchuk IP-NFT (VITA-FAS)

Molecules of Korolchuk IP-NFT (VITA-FAS) is one of the projects featured on the VitaDAO platform. The tokens are designed to support Korolchuk Lab at Newcastle University, a team committed to identifying compounds that could potentially kickstart autophagy and rejuvenate aged cells.

DeSci cryptocurrencies: Quick facts

In this section, we are going to check out quick facts about the largest DeSci cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Also, four DeSci cryptocurrencies, including GENOME, TIG, GALEON and WEL, achieved market caps over $20,000,000 each in equivalent.

Wrapping up: What is DeSci and what makes decentralized science special?

DeSci or decentralized science is a segment in Web3 that addresses modern scientific problems with blockchain-based instruments. Decentralized systems fuel fundraising protocols, data sharing mechanisms, peer review services, supply chain management and so on.

The DeSci narrative is recognized by top blockchain entrepreneurs, including Vitalik Buterin, Brian Armstrong, Changpeng Zhao, Balaji Srinivasan. TRAC, $RIF, VITA and HAIR are the largest DeSci cryptocurrencies by market cap.