DeSci (Decentralized Science) refers to a set of methods and organizational approaches to scientific research that aim to make the field more open, collaborative, and resilient through Web3 solutions. At its core, it is built on the decentralization of every stage of the R&D process, from fundraising and governance to peer review and knowledge distribution.
R&D (Research and Development) encompasses scientific research and experimental development activities focused on creating new products, technologies, and services, or improving existing ones.
CP Media has examined the theoretical foundations of DeSci in a separate piece. Still, the concept of decentralized science is best understood through real-world examples. Only by looking at projects that have already moved from concept to execution can their practical implications come fully into focus.
Decentralized Investment Funds as a Framework for Scientific Research
Funding is a core pillar of scientific research, and DeSci projects are emerging as a new model for capital formation. They enable participants in decentralized communities to make funding decisions publicly, based on formalized project selection criteria.
In this context, VitaDAO stands out as a notable example. It’s one of the most widely recognized DeSci initiatives and has been operating since 2021. In practice, VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that functions as a venture-style fund focused on longevity research and age-associated diseases. One of the project’s key institutional backers is Pfizer Ventures, which committed $4.1 million to the initiative in December 2022.
Project selection within VitaDAO is driven by open discussion and consensus-building across the community. Approved initiatives receive direct funding. To date, the community has supported dozens of scientific projects, ranging from fundamental research to applied developments in biotech. By early 2026, more than 30 research initiatives had been funded, with total allocations of approximately $4.7 million.
In some cases, the organization acquires a stake in intellectual property or future commercialization rights. As a result, the estimated fully diluted value (FDV) of VitaDAO’s research portfolio stands at around $60 million. The project’s scientific partners include some of the world’s leading academic institutions.
Comparable cases in this segment include:
- Cerebrum DAO focuses on identifying, funding, and promoting neuroscience research, with a particular emphasis on neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. To date, the organization has invested approximately $1.3 million across 7 projects. At the same time, the number of funding proposals has already exceeded 150, while the capital available for investment stands at around $4 million.
- ValleyDAO is centered on advancing technologies that address climate and environmental challenges through synthetic biology. The community includes more than 4,000 members, with roughly $4 million in capital available for project funding. One of its key partners is Imperial College London.
- CryoDAO specializes in funding and developing scientific research in cryopreservation, biostasis, and cryobiology. The organization manages more than $5 million in assets and has a community of over 6,000 members. Among the flagship initiatives it supports are Advanced Neural Biosciences and Oxford Cryotechnology.
Attracting investment to fund research and development is one of the most common applications of Web3 solutions within the DeSci ecosystem. By various estimates, between 20 and more than 80 decentralized organizations are involved in this space in one form or another.
Distributed Laboratories as a New Model for Research Collaboration
Most DeSci projects remain focused on funding, governance, and infrastructure. Still, a growing number of cases already involve members of decentralized communities participating directly in scientific work as researchers. This model doesn’t rely on traditional laboratories with dedicated facilities and permanent staff. Instead, it’s built around distributed research teams.
Within this DeSci framework, several core functions are handled at the community or protocol level:
- Defining research programs and scientific hypotheses
- Setting experimental design and research priorities
- Coordinating the work of researchers and external contract laboratories
- Aggregating and analyzing collected data
- Deciding whether specific research tracks should continue or be discontinued
The physical execution of experiments may take place in partner academic or commercial laboratories. Even so, overall control of the research process and accountability for outcomes remain with the DeSci project itself.
This model is particularly well-suited to fields such as computational biology and bioinformatics, where a significant share of research is conducted in digital environments. One example is LabDAO, which brings together specialists who collaboratively develop and use reproducible workflows for scientific data processing and analysis. The resulting data, methodologies, and code are then published as open-source outputs. In this case, the DeSci community effectively operates as a distributed laboratory.
Some projects function more like virtual research institutes. In these structures, community members participate in defining research objectives, overseeing experimental execution, and managing intellectual property. Here, a DeSci project acts as the operator of a full-scale research program, even though its execution is distributed across multiple contributors. One such example is Matrix Biosciences, a project initiated by VitaDAO. It has assembled a dedicated research team focused on studying treatments for cancer and age-related diseases.
Web3-Based Ownership Models for Research Results
The next critical stage, following capital formation and the completion of research activities, is turning scientific output into a managed asset. One that can be capitalized, licensed, and further developed.
A representative example in this segment is Molecule, an infrastructure platform built around the IP-NFT concept, or Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Tokens. The idea is to tokenize intellectual property, including patents, datasets, contractual terms, and associated rights, as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Once issued, these assets can be transferred, fractionalized, and used as a foundation for collective ownership and governance. The project’s developers frame IP-NFTs as an attempt to standardize legal agreements in the form of a digital asset. The goal is to simplify transactions in the intellectual property market.
On top of IP-NFTs, the platform enables the creation of IP Tokens (IPTs). These are fractional tokens designed to distribute governance and economic exposure around a single IP-NFT among multiple participants. Intellectual property and scientific results generated at the preclinical research stage often carry a high level of risk for a single investor. By engaging a broader community, that risk can be spread across many stakeholders.
Notable examples of such transactions include:
- In 2021, VitaDAO funded a research project at the University of Copenhagen based on a large-scale analysis of medical and prescription data from more than 4 million individuals within Denmark’s public healthcare system. The study identified several drugs that showed a statistically significant association with increased lifespan. The intellectual property generated by the research was transferred to the community in the form of an IP-NFT via Molecule, marking the first transaction of its kind.
- In 2022, VitaDAO financed a research project at Newcastle University focused on identifying new inducers of autophagy as a potential therapeutic approach to aging and age-related diseases. As the project progressed, VitaDAO fractionalized the IP-NFT, issuing 1 million governance-linked tokens that represent participation in managing the resulting intellectual property and subsequent R&D decisions.
- In 2022, ValleyDAO raised funding for a research initiative at Imperial College London aimed at metabolically engineering oleaginous yeast to improve the efficiency of microbial oil production. Community participation in the project was structured through the issuance of an IP-NFT, which secures the organization’s stake in the rights to the resulting intellectual property.
It’s worth noting that calculating the exact number of research projects backed by IP-NFTs is nearly impossible. These tokens are issued across different blockchains and platforms, and there’s no single registry that tracks them all. As of late January 2026, 46 IPT-based projects had been launched on the Molecule platform. Their combined market capitalization exceeds $16 million, and the total number of token holders stands at approximately 6,300.
Monetization of Expertise and New Models for Scientific Publishing
The traditional scientific model relies on paid access to peer-reviewed journals, while peer review itself is often uncompensated. DeSci projects are trying to change that dynamic by rewarding reviewers and other contributors for concrete actions that move science forward. These include discussion, answering questions, validating methods, and other forms of scientific communication.
A practical example in this area is ResearchHub, a platform focused on open-access research, publication support, faster peer review, and active community participation through financial incentives. Rewards are distributed using the platform’s native RSC token. Beyond its monetary value, the token also enables participation in platform governance and the funding of scientific initiatives.
The project was launched in 2020, and one of its co-founders is Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. ResearchHub collaborates with the Center for Open Science, or COS, and other scientific publishing ecosystems. The platform already hosts more than 7 million research papers and over 10 million comments, ratings, and reviews. Total rewards distributed to date exceed $1.3 million.
Other projects operating in this space include DeSci Publish by DeSci Labs, OpSci, Ants-Review, and several others.
Web3 Infrastructure for Publishing Reproducible Scientific Research
Modern research produces large and highly heterogeneous datasets. As a result, publishing final results as a static PDF often fails to capture the full scope of the work, let alone make it reproducible.
DeSci Nodes, a platform developed by DeSci Labs, addresses this limitation by providing tools to publish and manage scientific outputs as a single, interconnected digital entity known as a Research Object. Rather than focusing solely on manuscripts, this structure bundles data, code, models, analytical pipelines, and other related materials, while adhering to the FAIR principles: findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
The platform relies on decentralized persistent identifiers, or dPIDs, which are automatically assigned to each Research Object and its individual components within the ecosystem. These identifiers enable addressing, discovery, and citation of scientific materials across the web, independent of external publishing systems. To date, more than 20,000 persistent identifiers have been issued through the DeSci Nodes platform.
Providing Access to Computational Tools for Scientific Research
In research domains where progress is constrained by computational capacity and scalability, DeSci projects are helping build more accessible and modular scientific infrastructure.
A clear example is LabDAO, whose decentralized network also incorporates distributed computing resources. This makes resource-intensive biomedical research and experiments more accessible, reproducible, and scalable.
Within the LabDAO ecosystem, the team has also developed PLEX, or the Protocol Layer for Experiments. It’s a software and protocol layer that defines how scientific experiments and computational workflows should be formalized, executed, and reproduced using decentralized infrastructure.
Data Collection and the Rise of Patient-Centered Communities
In some DeSci projects, patients are no longer passive participants. Instead, they take an active role in research by contributing personal data and sharing real-world treatment experiences.
A representative example is CureDAO, which focuses on real-world patient experience data. Within the project, patients voluntarily provide information about their condition, symptoms, and treatment outcomes. This data is then used for research and analytical purposes. Patient participation is economically incentivized through reward mechanisms and involvement in project governance.
At the same time, CureDAO concentrates on analyzing real-world evidence and self-reported data. It doesn’t attempt to replace formally regulated clinical trials. Rather, it complements traditional research approaches by enabling scalable and decentralized data collection.
Other patient-oriented DeSci projects include:
- HairDAO, which focuses on researching the causes of hair loss and developing new therapeutic approaches, primarily in the context of androgenetic alopecia. The project relies on a lighter form of patient involvement, where participation happens at the community level through discussions of treatment experiences and the formulation of research hypotheses, rather than through systematic clinical data collection.
- AxonDAO, which is centered on digital medicine research and works with a broad range of biometric indicators. The platform allows users to retain control over their personal health data and share it for research purposes voluntarily.
- GenomesDAO, which specializes in genomics and hereditary research. The project aggregates genetic data and offers a model that enables users to securely store their DNA information, manage access to it, and grant permission for its use in scientific research.
Building Infrastructure for Decentralized Science Projects
A distinct category of DeSci projects focuses on providing infrastructure for launching and scaling decentralized scientific initiatives. A flagship example in this space is Bio Protocol, a platform that offers financial and organizational blockchain tools for communities, researchers, patients, and investors. These tools enable participants to jointly launch, fund, and develop biotechnology projects.
In practice, Bio Protocol operates as a multifunctional DeFi platform tailored to DeSci use cases. It allows early-stage decentralized biotech projects to raise capital, while also supporting collective resource allocation, shared decision-making, and joint ownership of research outcomes.
More than $15 million has been raised through the platform to support DeSci initiatives overall. The BioDAO treasury exceeds $65 million, and the community includes more than 90,000 participants. In addition, the combined market capitalization of DeSci projects listed on the platform surpasses $300 million, while total token trading volume within the Bio Protocol ecosystem exceeds $2 billion.
Across the broader DeSci sector, more than 260 projects were active as of early February 2026. Together, they involve over 83,000 researchers, according to data from DeSci Show.
A closer look at the DeSci landscape reveals a dense network of interconnections among these projects. VitaDAO, HairDAO, ValleyDAO, Cerebrum DAO, AthenaDAO, CryoDAO, Molecule, ResearchHub, Bio Protocol, and others form an emerging ecosystem whose scale suggests that decentralized science remains at an early stage of development.
At the same time, ties to traditional academic institutions, shared capital flows, sustained community engagement, and, most importantly, observable structural trends all point to the sector’s long-term potential. This momentum isn’t driven by speculative enthusiasm around digital assets. Instead, it reflects the practical advantages of applying Web3 solutions to the organization of scientific research.
