Idea Machines Distributing Innovation with The VitaDAO Core Team [Idea Machines #42]
A conversation with the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization — or DAO — that focuses on enabling and funding longevity research.
The sketch of how a DAO works is that people buy voting tokens that live on top of the Etherium blockchain and then use those tokens to vote on various action proposals for VitaDAO to take. This voting-based system contrasts with the more traditional model of a company that is a creation of law or contact, raises capital by selling equity or acquiring debt, and is run by an executive team who are responsible to a board of directors.
Since technically nobody runs VitaDAO the way a CEO runs a company, I wanted to try to embrace the distributed nature and talk to many of the core team at once. This was definitely an experiment!
The members of the core team in the conversation in no particular order:
Links
Automated Transcript
VitaDAO
[00:00:35]
In This conversation. I talked to a big chunk of the VitaDAO core team. VitaDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization or Dao that focuses on enabling and funding. Longevity research. We get into the details in the podcast, but a sketch of how a DAO works is that people buy voting tokens that live on top of the Ethereum blockchain.
And then they use those tokens to vote on [00:01:35] various action proposals for me to doubt to take. This voting based system contrasts with more traditional models of the company. That is a creation of law or contract raises capital by selling equity or acquiring debt, and is run by an executive team who are responsible to a board of directors.
Since technically, nobody runs for you to doubt the way it CEO runs the company. I wanted to try to embrace the distributed nature and talk to many of the core team at once. This was definitely experiment. Uh, I think it's your day. Well, Oh, well, but I realize it can be hard to tell voices apart on a podcast.
So I'll put a link to a video version. In the show notes. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Vita Dao.
What I want to do so that listeners can put a voice to a name is I want to go around everybody say your name and then you say how you would pronounce the word VI T a D a O. Tim, would you say your name and then, and then pronounce the word that [00:02:35] that's kind of how I've done it.
Yeah. And so I'm the longevity steward we can help kind of figure out deal flow on, edited out, so. Awesome. All right, Tyler, you're next on. It is definitively Vieta Dell. Yeah. And I also help out with the longevity steward group. I started starting longevity group and I'm the chief scientific officer and co-founder at molecule as well.
And then Nicholas you're next on my screen. It's definitely beats it out. And I'm also a member of the longevity working group in this science communication group and also currently initiating and laptop. Great. And then Vinson. Yeah. So it's the same pronunciation weeded out, but I'm helping on the side and also on kind of like special projects, like this incline where that I took around, we had recently and yeah, in Lawrence.
Lauren Sajjan Vieta thou. And I [00:03:35] also steward the deal flow group within the longevity working group. And I think we should all now say as a hive mind, Paul Paul has said at the same time, oh, sorry. I'm going to say bye to dad.
Mess with her in yeah. Hi everyone. My name is Paul cohost. I would say, be to down. I actually wonder what demographics says, Vida, like RESA. We should actually look into that. It's interest, interesting community metric. I'm the CEO and co-founder of molecule and one of the co-authors of the VW.
I also work very deeply on the economic side and then essentially help finalize deal structures. So essentially the funding deals that we've been carry through into molecule and yeah, very excited to be here today. And maybe we can jump back into Lawrence adjusted
we
well, [00:04:35] also, so the thing that's confusing to me is that I always assumed that the Vith came from the word vitality. Right. And so that's, that's where the idea of calling it a fight Vita doubt, right? Because like, I don't say vitality, I say fighting. In German, it's actually retaliatory. Yeah. So it's just like the stupid Anglo centrism that is from the Latin, I would say from the word life.
Yeah. Cool. So to really sort of jump right in, I think there's the, to like, be very direct, like, can we like walk through the mechanics of how the, how, how everything actually works? Right. So I think listeners are probably familiar with sort of like the high level abstract concept of there's a bunch of people.
They have tokens, they vote on deals you give researchers money to, to do work, but like, sort of [00:05:35] like very, very mechanical. How does the dowel work? Could you like walk us through maybe like, sort of a a core loop of, of like what, what you do
Yeah. So I mean, the core goal of the DAO is really to try and democratize access to decision-making funding and governance of longevity therapeutics. And so mechanically, there's a few different things going on and anyone feel free to interrupt me or jump in as well. But, so I would start from the base layer is really having this broad community of decentralized token holders, which are ultimately providing governance functions to this community.
And the community's goal is to deploy funding that it's raised into early stage. Clinical proof of concept stage longevity therapeutics projects. And these basically fall between these two, let's say points where some tension exists in when it comes to translating academic science. So you have this robust early stage, let's say basic research funding mechanism through things like the NIH [00:06:35] grant funding, essentially.
And that gets really to the point of being able to do, let's say very early stage drug discovery. And there's also some sort of downstream ecosystem consisting of venture capital company builders, political companies that does let's say late stage funding and incubation of ideas. They're more well-vetted, but between there's this sort of problem where a lot of innovation gets lost, it's known as the translational valley of death.
Yeah. What did we try to do is we try to identify as a community academics that are working and let's say, have stumbled onto a potentially promising drug, but aren't really at the point yet where they can create a startup company. And what we want to do is basically by working together as a community, provide them the funding, the resources, in some cases, even the incubation functions to be able to do a series of killer experiments, really deep risk of project, and then file intellectual property, which in exchange for the funding, the dowel actually, and this is, this is sort of mechanically enabled by a legal primitive that we've been developing a molecule called an IP [00:07:35] NFP framework, which basically consists on one side of a legal contract, typically in the form of a sponsored research search agreement between a funder and a party that would be receiving the funding, the laboratory, and on the other side of federated data storage layer.
And so the way this works is basically beat a doubt would receive applications. Some of these projects could, for example, be listed on molecules marketplace have an IPN T created meta dealt with would send funds via the system to the university and in exchange, they would hold this license and essence for the IP, that results from that project.
And then within the community, we have domain experts. For example, we have a longevity working group which consists of MDs. Post-docs PhD is basically anyone that has deep domain experience in the longevity space. They work to evaluate projects due diligence and ultimately serve as sort of a quality control filter for the community, which consists of non-experts as well.
Maybe just people who are enthusiastic about what. And beyond that, there's also additional domain expertise in the [00:08:35] form of some people who have worked at biotech VCs, for example, people with entrepreneurial experience and through this community, you basically try to form, let's say a broad range of expertise that can then coach the research or work with them and really help the academic move the IP and the research project towards the stage where, where it can be commercialized.
And now VitaDAO stewarding this process. They have ownership in the IP and basically what would happen is if that research has out license co-developed sold onto another party, just made productive in essence and. It's successful in commercializing those efforts and received some funds, let's say from the commercialization of that asset, that goes back into the treasury and is continuously deployed into longevity research.
So the long-term goal is to really create this sort of self-sustaining circular funding mechanism to continue to fund longevity research over time. And now within that, we could wrap it all into, you know, there's a bunch of like specific mechanics in there. I would love to, to rabbit hole, [00:09:35] I think Vincent, yes, to and on the kind of very simple technical layer, kind of very initially we started off just having this idea and putting it out there and then like having like a kind of Genesis auction where everyone could contribute funds.
Like some people contribute 200 bucks and others contributed millions. And in exchange for that. Just like as a, there is an example, like for every dollar they gave, they gave, got one vote in organization. And then this initial group of people that came together to put, to, to pool their resources, to fund longevity, research, got votes and exchange, and actually with these votes, basically they can then what Tyler described make on the, on these proposals that that are vetted through the longevity working group, they can make a vote if it shouldn't get funding.
And, and that's of course kind of like the traditional, like model of like a Dow and of like token based governance and boating [00:10:35] and yeah, which we did of course was like kind of like a very easy mechanism that got it started, but then the storm of course can also be useful for different purposes and can also incentive.
People working on specific projects, research has also getting told and so kind of getting a governance, right. And organization in exchange for good and contributing work. Nicholas, did I see your hand? Yes. And maybe one thing to add here that takes a bit of a step back. It's adding, adding the question.
Why does all of this matter? Why does the style framework Adderall fall? And I think when you, when you look at the way currently academic research works, basically the incentives for the scientists and the moment that something is published in a peer reviewed journal, so that the system is optimized for peer review publication.
And then on the other hand, on the translational side, when something, you know,[00:11:35]
Turning into a medicine return on investment. And they're basically calculating a risk adjusted net present value of the project. Now, the problem with a lot of biomedical research is the science has, is done. The paper is published, but a risk adjusted present value of the project is still approaching zero because there there's still some key experiments are missing or to get that experiment off the ground.
And actually this is where the doubt can come in and using new technologies to basically financialize the IP and make it more liquid. And may, maybe more specifically the asset isn't created, you know, a lot of research you know, the NIH has not focused on therapies. I mean, not the creation of new therapies where value is actually created.
They'll, they'll do clinical trials on existing therapies, but, but you know, the real value inflection points are not done through basic basic research. So, so that's where we hope to solve. Got it. So, [00:12:35] w I think in my, in my mind, the thing that's really interesting about Vieta Dow, as opposed to other dads is, is the sort of like interface with the, with the world of atoms that that's like a pretty, pretty unique and exciting thing.
So there's, there's, there's a lot of mechanics there that I'm actually interested in digging into. So like one thing is in order. So, so sort of all, in order to. Give money to a researcher even at some point they need to turn it into dollars or euros in order to buy the equipment that they need to, to do the research.
And so are they, they're like taking the, VitaDAO token and then converting that into, into currency. How does, how does that work?
Yeah, I can speak to this or Paul or if you want to, if you want to speak to it. So, I mean, I can, I can maybe kick it off. So one of the things that's really important and that we've been really focused on at molecule is ensuring that the process of working with researchers, which goes [00:13:35] well beyond just working with the research, right?
You need to work with the university, with the tech transfer office. You need to negotiate a licensing agreement and all of this can happen in a way that is somewhat seamless and it doesn't require them. Let's say having to do all of their interactions with it, let's say a. You know, this sort of ephemeral entity that exists on the Ethereum blockchain.
So we've basically created rails by a molecule for things like Fiat forwarding we're negotiations with the TPO for a lot of the legal structures to ensure that it's as smooth as possible, the Vino tokens themselves don't actually play into. We can, we can give those to researchers as an incentive and to people who perform work for the community.
But that is not actually the, what is, what is given to researchers. Researchers. When, when a proposal is passed within the community, we have a certain treasury and ether, for example, that we've raised over over a period of time that is liquidated and sold for USD decency. And then that USB-C travels via off rails that molecule has created to ensure that the university [00:14:35] can just receive beyond currency.
So I mean, a big part of this. Know, defy in a lot of ways has some advantages in that. It never has to really interact with real world banking systems. This is a challenge in the D space. We still have to interface with tech transfer offices. We still have to, you know, speak to general counsel at universities and make sure that people are comfortable working this sort of way.
And I would say this is probably one of the most significant challenges and the reason that, you know, a lot of legal engineering and a lot of thinking went into how to create the base layer infrastructure that allows us to actually operate in this space. So it's, yeah, it's a challenge. It's something that we're always trying to iterate on.
I mean, we imagine a future where universities do have wallets. You know what I mean, researchers do have wallets, but it's going to take some time for that future to be realized. And in the midterm, I think it's really important to show the world. The dowels can work effectively, especially these types of dowels that have a core mission, vision of funding research.
They can do that productively even given the constraints of the, of the current. And [00:15:35] so that, so, so like negotiating with tech transfer offices like they, I assume need to sign a sort of an analog legal agreement with a analog legal entity. Is that correct? And is that, is that like, is molecule that, that legal entity or like, how does, how does that work?
Yeah, so maybe so to reiterate what Tyler said, there's actually nothing stopping that say from a university to directly engage with a doubt. I think it's more that those systems don't exist it, and there's not enough, like precedents to kind of enable those. There's also much larger, for example, question of like, to what extent could it litigate against the patent and actually actually enable, enable this protection.
And so if you did operates through a set of different agents so these are analog, real wealth legal partners, and some molecule is one of those legal partners in essence. So we can, we can ensure that we are the licensing party, for example, with a tech transfer office. And then we enter into a sub licensing agreement, for [00:16:35] example, with with B to them.
And in the same sense as what were tologist explained, we also then ensure that all of the, the, the payment flows and the. Are compliant to Kahn systems, something that we've realized it's, it's, it's really important to kind of bridge this emerging with three world with the real world to really make it as seamless as possible.
And not for example, for us that yeah. University to go through the process of opening a Coinbase account figure out what is USB-C actually. But I mean, fundamentally I I like to use this analogy. If you can make an international EFG with like a big number and a swift number, like actually crypto is much easier than that by now, but it's a much less much less adopted system, even from an accounting perspective.
Accounting for funding flows in, in this decentralized system is very simple. Like the, the proof of funds is very easy to provide because you can visually see where every single transaction can be traced back to. But so the way that we've tried to design really the flow of funding within. With Nvidia down within molecules to make it as seamless and [00:17:35] interoperable with the real well today as possible.
And also to ensure that we have the highest degree of legal standards, legal integrity. So we work with with specialized IP counsel and IP law firms across the world in different jurisdictions to really ensure also that any IP that we adopt funds and that is encapsulated within these IP NFTE frameworks is future-proof.
Because that, that's something that became very apparent for us. When we, when you work with IP, you can't really, you can't really make mistakes in terms of how you protect the intellectual property. And you also have a responsibility to actually the therapeutics that are being developed there, because if you, if anything was to invalidate the IP that could fundamentally influence whether a potential therapeutic can actually ever reach patients.
Yeah. And so I think that the, the, the one. The question is there has to be a lot of trust between the Dow itself and sort of the, the organization or [00:18:35] people doing the negotiation and sort of holding the IP and forcing the IP. Because, because there's like at that sort of Dow analog interface there's is my impression is that there's no like enforceable legal contract.
Right. So is that correct? I'm just, I'm just trying to like wrap my head around, like the actual. It is an enforceable legal contract, actually. So the initial agreement between let's say molecule and the university is a typical stock standard sponsored research agreement that you would do at sea, between between two parties, like a pharmaceutical company and a university, for example.
So these are, these are the same agreements that the universities use. In many case, we plug into their pre-existing templates. Those typically have within them an assignment agreement or an ability to sub-license where the company or whomever is doing this initial licensing then has [00:19:35] the right to license exclusively the, the resulting intellectual property, or in some cases, even the full rights of the agreement molecule now engages in.
Fully contractual, fully enforceable, typically in the context of Switzerland where the company is based agreement sublicensing agreement with the Dow via the election by via the election of this agent process. And now, so I would say the weakest part of that, if you want to think about where the sort of core let's say.
Yeah, like the breaking points are with in that process would be, would be around the fact that there is required a large amount of trust in the agents, but really what the agent is doing is, is actually putting themselves at risk. They're taking on legal liability in some cases on behalf of the dowel.
And so. Something if that Peyton was, let's say that agent made offer something or wasn't able to honor their agreement. I mean, there is full legal recourse that it could be, that [00:20:35] could be taken. But this is, yeah. Again, when you look at Peyton enforceability and Indian electoral property landscape, most of these things like, you know, you find out what works through, through litigation.
These things have not been litigated yet. There's not really precedent for enforcement here. But this is also what it takes to innovate in the intellectual property landscapes. So it's, there is a tension between these things, but it, yeah, maybe to your original question, there's a lot of, is a lot of trust, certainly involved in I'm thinking about when we go, we go stuff is that there's like no first principles of it.
It's just sort of like poke it and see what happens. Yeah, maybe as an interesting, it will be interesting case studies before it becomes relevant to us because in the space, kind of like some of the core protocols, like units open curve, I actually governed by dolls now. And actually they are now enforcing the IP actually at the courts.
So even before it will be come necessary for us, there will be cases and case studies of kind of like it's very big organizations like a human 12 or [00:21:35] curve enforcing and going through the courts like this, even this year or next year already cases that are coming up. So it will be really interesting to see what are the legal precedents or like a Dow and forces is yeah.
IP through agents basically. And I think there will be precedent before we will have to kind of in false our IP. Yeah.
Well, it's literally saying your name. Well, one thing to add there. So to reiterate what Vincent said as well, I mean, that was a very quickly become powerful economic agents. And I think enforcing enforcing let's say processes in our legal system is often a function of capital. So I think if you did that, for example, was to ever get to a point where it had to enforce one of its one of its IP cases.
It would definitely have the financial backing to do so, and it can operate through agents to kind of enforce the validity of its IP. And then the remaining processes that's, that's considered like the relationships between agents are really [00:22:35] subject to the same legal processes that we have today.
When two companies enter a entered equilibrium, and if a biotech company enters a sponsored research agreement with the university, the trust agreements that are set up there are, are, are not different. And, and the underlying legal contracts that we using are also the same, I think. Back to Vincent's point, there are actually first cases where Dows are enforcing their IP.
This is in the context of fits in ICU, open source software development, where, where a dowel let's say has developed a certain protocol, but that protocol is open source. But it's probably running under a specific software license and the Dow is not choosing to actively enforce its its IP against someone who infringed against that license.
I think one additional aspect here is to when we think through trust and where is trust, concentrated and power concentrated from the Dow is to note that that, although there are these agents that are available for a Dodge interact with the real world, the capital's [00:23:35] concentrated within the network of token holders.
And, you know, just on a technical level, there's this multisignature wallet that holds all the funds and that's controlled by members of the community. And it's all basically in a token gated way. And that network structure, that social network, which is basically the Dow, I think can be very well compared also to some kind of association where you have people all across the world, collaborating, they're all aligned by, by a token incentive to pursue one shared mission.
And then the Dow the network. Start agreements with various agents. So it's not really relying on one particular agent fulfill its mission. If there was a situation which trust or agreement with one individual real-world agent know w would be broken, then still most of the capital wise with the Dow and the Dow would have the ability to engage in a D and an agreement with a different entity.
It's not like there's one entity or one vulnerability. When, when you think [00:24:35] through the contact zone between the digital Dow and the physical company, and speaking of agents at what level does the entire membership of the Dow folk, right? Like, are they, are they voting on every decision? Like we want this person as our lawyer, we want this person.
Yeah. Yeah. Now basically to make it kind of concrete there's like, of course, like a core team and stewards who actively working and we'll also have of course some yeah, for example, on the, on the longevity side, helping to solve steel flow, doing all of these activities, and then it's mostly on the bigger funding decisions, for example, should we fund this project with automation dollars, but it won't be on, should we hire this designer that will be like autonomy, for example, with the.
The design team to hire a designer and budgets that are basically voted through. So it's not, micro-managing kind of in depth sense, but it [00:25:35] kind of more the key overall big decisions, what the community was able to do. So, I mean, early in the, in the community's formation and in the Dallas formation, there was a governance framework that basically laid out a series of, of, of decisions as to how governance actually functions in the doll.
And there's in B doll, there's this sort of three tier governance system moving from conversation that is quite stream of consciousness oriented in discord, moving to semi formalized proposals for community input in a governance framework called discourse. And then ultimately. Things that make it past that stage, moving onto this sort of software platform for a token bass boat.
And part of that governance framework that was initially created, also invested a certain amount of decision making power within working groups and also set thresholds on what those working groups were able to spend, what sort of budgets they had and where they needed permission from the community ultimately to make decisions.
So there might be. No for decisions greater than $2,500. That requires a [00:26:35] soft phone for things more than $50,000 requires a token days vote. And this is really important because as you can imagine, early on the organization, it can be super chaotic and really, really unproductive if every single decision that that was making needs to have this sort of laborious community-wide boat.
But this is also a really interesting sort of iterative experiment, but I think many dollars are participating at the moment, which is really trying to figure out to what extent you can involve the community in a productive way in the sort of day-to-day operation. What's differentiates, differentiates a token holder from a contributor, from a core team member, from a working group member.
How do people sort of move along that funnel and traverse those sort of worlds in a way where you get the most productive sort of organization? And this is something that is, I would say, being iterated on and improved constantly based on, you know, the, the sort of dialogue happening between the team and.
And actually on that note, I have one vaguely silly question, which is why are all Dow's run on? [00:27:35] This is, this is, this is my, my, my biggest, my biggest complaint is I, I cannot pay attention to like streaming walls of text. Yeah. So it's like, how did, how did that emerge? Like, has anybody done a, a doubt, like, just run on like a forum or by email or something?
Yeah, it is actually the biggest bag holder in most DAOs that operates. I'm just kidding. Actually. It's it's of course almost like mimetic it's like, that's how, like a lot of crypto projects, even like three, four years ago began to organize. And I think it's, it's ultimately, it's just the tooling. Like they were like slack and discord, this court to coordinate, and this court was much better in like enabling to participate in a lot of different channels very easily.
But we're going to be, I think it's a lot about like, even like file sharing. All of these things you need, which go beyond. But ultimately there are kind of like some leading doubts that emerge just as a telegram chat between [00:28:35] five friends. And that I know like the leading, like art collected, I was like, please, it doubt.
And that was just like five friends on a telegram or something. So of course you can envision like every possible way and model. Ultimately, I think it's, it's more like a, became a pattern that like a lot of projects organized food like this. Yeah. And I think there's also this like feedback thing that occurs with like the more people that are organizing by a discord in the early days, the more that people started to create like token integrations and token gating and things like snapshot and all of these sort of things where now there's like, because of that, a bunch of tooling from an integration perspective, that is, that is now developed, that makes it easier to operate in a community like that than it would be to have a slack channel, for example.
Yeah. The best part, there is a serious lock-in effect. If you start your new Dow, the best choice is to go with discord because that's where all the other books, we, you know, folks that are already active plus you can leverage a lot of bots to allow you to token gate access or [00:29:35] send notifications, similar things.
And another question is how did you all become the core team?
Just show up Tyler and Paul probably could start telling them. I think maybe one interesting thing is that ultimately like every journey is kind of individually, but ultimately most people are just like saw very initially or like at a similar idea and kind of, it's almost, I think like, like a shelling point where like like also like, like I literally tried to register longevity doubt just the domain two years ago, before we, even before I met anyone who wasn't a Dow.
And, and so I think there's like, and I think it's a similar story, even for Tim that, and then ultimately of course, there's like some mechanism of discovering it and, or like hearing him about the idea or meeting, like, ultimately for me, it was meeting Tyler and Paul because of molecule and then for a lot of people, actually, they just saw an interview.
They saw [00:30:35] an article about it, jumped into discord, introduced themselves, for example said, yeah, we would love to help on the website. I would love to help on the view flow and then started helping and ultimately through that mechanism. And I think like, People like bubble it up basically, and just started writing an article or doing a low or, but then became more and more integrated parts of most kind of like, like work themselves into it.
And also of course, like like a lot of people have never met each other in person or is it like, and, but it kind of like this, this trust I think emerges and builds up doing like just engaging and helping progress the Dow as a whole. But I think it's, it's actually really interesting, exciting to see kind of like just this like global coordination emerging out of like the shared purpose or mission.
And a lot of people just stepping up and like initially we didn't have a token, we had $0 and they were like people who like spend weeks, we building a website pro bono without [00:31:35] expecting anything like re like really good research has joining me into this. Before we even had like $1 funding to give towards research.
So I think it would have to, yeah, that's kind of also the inspiring part. I think about a lot of dialysis that it just naturally emerged and everyone can do this a bit of like no boundaries, but then yeah, self-selected almost,
On Nicholas raising his hand was going to give him a chance to say something,
right? Yeah. So I think there's the saying, I've read a couple of days ago that some ideas are occur in multiple different brains at the same time. And I think that's really what also happens if we, to Dow Vincent let's think about this for some time. Lawrence had basically stopped developing mobile applications, really figured, you know, focused on aging research, Paul and Tyler thought about this topic.
Marketplace for ideas, intellectual property. Tim had been, I think, thinking about this idea and, you know, basically crop funding, academic, or just fundamental research as a community for some [00:32:35] time. And I've been sufficiently frustrated with the way academia currently works and have been actually also thinking about, okay, can there be some kind of mechanism where a community bootstraps itself into existence and funds, scientists and entrepreneurs within its community.
Everybody pays a little and then you can actually allocate a lot to the really good ideas. And in some ways I think, you know, we all have some kind of predecessor to this idea. And then when we each had these individual time points heard about it, there was just a, who was a very intuitive decision to join.
I think it's like a certain amount of serendipity, a certain amount of like Twitter network effects, like a weird variety of things. Like you know, we started out with like just like white paper and an idea. And then, you know, through, through that, got in touch with a couple of different people, but then people just start showing up.
I mean, weird. The most interesting thing for me about the Dow experiment is like early on, we had like this [00:33:35] sort of like, okay, people want to be working with group members. This is like pre doubt. Not even like Vincent saying no token yet, nothing trying to figure out, like, how do you organize this community?
How do you do something meaningful? We were like trying to collect applications or something. And then it's like, some people would apply and we're like academy, who's going to be good or whatever one person who's now the lead of the, of the tech working group, this guy, Audi Sheridan applied and was rejected, but then just like made himself super valuable.
Like he started doing things that were like, no one else could do. Became an invaluable member of the community. And then we sort of realized like, why are we doing this application thing? Like people just show up there's things that need to be done. Sometimes we don't even see what those things are.
People have good ideas, they make proposals. And all the sudden, you know, you, it's not like a company where there's a hiring process. There's very little, you can, anyone can show up on the discord tomorrow, identify some pain points, make a proposal, and just demonstrate to all these other people [00:34:35] that they have value to add to the community.
And then, you know, there's, there's a sort of process there, but that process is, is still very loose. So I mean, most people who are here even on this call showed up through some like, like Nicholas and Vince were saying, I had been thinking about this before. We're sort of attracted to this magnet that is now a selling point for crypto in longevity and just had really great ideas about how to improve the community and elevated.
And that's sort of, that's sort of, for me, the magic, I mean, You know, six months old now, roughly, I guess it'll be about six months and you know, the community is like 3,500 people or so, and, you know, hundreds of researchers, you know, dozens of people who are contributing pretty often, I don't mean some people full time at this point.
And that's like a, a growth cycle to go from like a white paper and nothing to, you know, a bunch of money to fund R and D a bunch of intellectual capital you know, pretty strong political force in that amount of time would be [00:35:35] unprecedented. I think, for, for a company, especially something that's like bootstrapping from a community, not raising money from didn't raise money from BCS or anything like that.
Just like had an auction for a token. It's to me, this is really interesting, and it sort of proves that, like, in terms of organizing intellectual capital and monetary capital, it's a really, really powerful mechanism. And so sort of related to the company point, or are you, are you worried about the sec.
I mean, a huge amount of thought has gone into like the legal structuring and middle engineering and the dowel. So, I mean, the way it basically works is that the intellectual property that the Dao holds in the form of B's IP NFTs are not owned by the token holders. The token holders can sort of govern them by proxy through this governance, token and dividends are not paid out either.
So the idea is to create, you know, it's not a nonprofit organization and the. As an organization is trying to make profit to further fund longevity research, but those dividends don't flow to, to token holders. [00:36:35] So there's not, you know, it's, it's, there's several prongs of the Howey test that are essentially being broken under, you know, whether it's things like making profits from the efforts of others and the fact that no one in the organization is directly profiting from, from sort of commercialization efforts the Dow is doing.
But yeah, I mean, this is something, you know, thinking about the interaction between the Dow and the sec or, or, you know, like securities concerns played a pretty big role in the design thinking around the entire organization, the structure, because, you know, you can also go different routes. You know, some security token route or, or, you know, this, if you go these sort of routes, you really end up just excluding huge numbers of people from, from participating.
So the goal here was like, how do you maximize participation in a way that is still ultimately creating value, but not necessarily creating value? You know, it's plumbed individual token holders, but really for the field of longevity as a whole and to move the needle on research. Got it. [00:37:35] So maybe, maybe to add a couple of points here.
So the way that Vita token is fundamentally designed as a governance and utility token and at its highest level, you can think of it as something that is actively used by all members to curate the IP and the projects that they want to fund. And something that taught us that earlier is this, this very strong with typical let's say security, security, like assets, you have direct low dividends.
You have very clear expectation of profits. In this case, first of all, you need to actively do something to be a member of VitaDAO and to then actively help to curate the IP. And the rights that come with it be don't token. There's no way that you could like say, okay guys, I'm out. And I want to take my share of IP that I helped create with me, which is also typical thing that you might have.
You could have this as a shareholder, or if you're kind of in like more like a limited liability partnership type setting. So in this case, the Dao owns the IP and there's also, no, VDX not any expectations of profits that you could have because first of [00:38:35] all the goal here is to fund, to fund research, and really open up that research and then to try and make it accessible for the wealth which could actually mean open sourcing the research or open-sourcing the IP thus killing its commercial value.
So that's a beat that discovered some. And it deem that discovery to be so important that it had to be open sourced and, and made accessible and thus they could never become a patient of all therapeutic down the line. Token holders have full rights to do that. Whereas I think if you, if you had a typical setting where you had a company and it was the whole, the shareholders and those shareholders had a very clear expectation of profits that would never fly in most normal companies.
And so because there is no direct expectation of any, any potential returns that are made, there's not even the potential for return per se. And then there's that there's the full of governance option to essentially not commercialize anything. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. And actually sort of not quite related, but so, so I, I would say that that therapeutics.
[00:39:35] Sort of a very special case in the sense of it's like very IP based there's, there's sort of very much a, like a one-to-one correlation between IP and product and those products can be very lucrative. So, so that's sort of why, you know, the therapeutics as, as an industry work. Do you think that the, the sort of the beat Dow approach could work for research and development outside of the therapeutic world?
I guess as you're maybe, maybe rephrase your question, Ben is, yeah. It's just like, I guess the question is, is like the sort of idea that you can create incredibly valuable IP that like. It's fairly unique to the world of therapeutics and in many other sort of technological domains th the value really comes from like building the company around some IP and IP is [00:40:35] not that important.
So yeah who wants to go for it? Go for Tyler. No, I was just gonna say quickly. So, I mean, I think absolutely because it also, it doesn't doubt doesn't need to be also IP centric, for example, Bita doc and have the holding data that was being produced by something. And that data could have intrinsic value.
Similarly, meted out could try to get involved in manufacturing or create products. I mean, there's many different design flavors for these dowels. And I think the governance framework around this, and let's say the organizational capacity and the coordination capacity can be applied to many different problems in many different industries.
And I think even the intellectual property thing does hold true well beyond therapeutics. So with therapeutics, you're right. They're very, very expensive to develop, which is why you tend to get this enforceable monopoly to try and basically incentivize people, developing them, but in textiles or engineering or, you know, [00:41:35] any sort of field where.
IP plays a role. You could even apply almost a one for one one-to-one sort of model here, but beyond that there's many different flavors of assets and that sentence that adult could hold the other than probably most excited by is really things like data, which I think can be really, really powerful or software, which could be similarly powerful.
And then, which I think a lot of dowels are already, already doing. For example, maybe it also has as one point also in addition to like, even like activities, like funding I P directly and kind of like having like a self fulfilling or like also you know, sustainable funding cycle there. We also, for example, had like these efforts that are completely philanthropic, if you like, and just helping to use also our community and to, for example, put together like this donation round on longevity and like exploring kinetic donations, like basically where, like I also like this idea even like before Kind of be the Dow existed.[00:42:35]
And I was like, okay, now we're like, kind of, there's like enough people and enough attention to do this. And the doll basically donated $65,000. But then for example, we literally donated 400,000 and we helped curate a projects which are all purely philanthropic, which are like open source projects, different even like, like NGOs doing like different projects and and basically helped also get our community together to donate to these different projects.
And then talking a little bit for me, it's like, like one example where it's like really powerful because you have this like shining point of like crypto people were interested to fund longevity and they're not just interested to fund IP and FTS in a sustainable loop, but also to explore other funding experiments or other experiments.
Like what another one we were discussing is like a longevity prize or like grants and fellowships for young people entering the field. All of that is actually kind of like advancing the whole cause and the whole community [00:43:35] and, and, and the core focus and activity of funding, IP, because with growth, our community and, and yeah, the whole field.
So I think that's kind of actually an interesting point is that we are not limited to kind of funding IP, but it's of course, one of the core mechanisms we're engaging in. Yeah. I would add that there's also value in the community itself. Imagine Bitcoin, right? Anyone can fork it Instagram it's, it's a simple app.
Anyone could have made a copy, but there's most of the value there and the net there that gets built. So here we have a team, right? The stellar team and the Dow itself is ultimately our R D. Awesome organization here. It got born in a Genesis by itself. It's a smart contract. So it's sort of unique in that way of it.
Of course, someone interacted with the smart contract. It can be someone anonymous, but it issued 10% of his tokens, which by the way are [00:44:35] 64 million which is we're on 64 million, which is about the lifespan in minutes of the longest lived person, John Como. And that's sort of Beaky right. We can only extend that if someone lives longer than that, but anyone could buy those tokens, right?
It's a fair auction including us, including random people. And then there was a vote to empower a core team like us. Yes, some of it, most of us here got involved before. But the cool part is anyone can start showing up and contributing a lot of value and ultimately the community can decide to do make them a core contributor to make them a steward of even some other efforts, right.
Even something that we haven't thought about. There's always room it's permissionless. That's, that's something special definitely a metal experiment right here. And it's an experiment of sort of organizing people towards a common goal and a different way to make experiments, scientific experiments and, and figure out how to advance the therapeutics.
We need to extend our healthy.
You would actually be [00:45:35] curious. If I could ask you a question, Ben, on, on your thinking on, on poverty, how do you think, like, something like that fit into your thinking on just like new institutions for funding science, because you also mentioned this, like, it could also be a model of course, like we're potentially exploring it all.
It's four different areas. And ultimately for me, it's like, if there's like big of enough of a community that is interested to fund something, like, like one of course, very like public example could be something like climate change or something exciting, like space. They would probably be at some point a community that would form resources and community to fund those research areas.
It would be curious to hear from you, like kind of yeah. How you think for you to dial in the framework that you're outlining there. Like you're listening to the work? No really well with like pop up on this theme, you're exploring. Yeah. I mean, frankly, the reason I, one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation was to sort of form those thoughts.
So I [00:46:35] will be able to answer that much better after sort of like going after this. Right. So I think the, so just some of the tricky pieces, I think outside the domain of longevity is like longevity is, is very, you know, exciting to a lot of people with money both in the crypto community and outside of it.
And so I think that's, you know, it's like, there's, there's lots of people who are excited about space, but from my experience, space, geeks tend to not be that wealthy. And so, so there's a question of just like you can, you can have a very excited community, but I think the real thing is like how much are those people really willing to put their money where their excitement is?
That that's, that's a big question. Another question is, is for me that I think about it is like coordination around research. So, so I think another sort of great thing about therapeutics is that you really can, there's sort of like this nice, like one-to-one to one where you can have one [00:47:35] lab develop one therapeutic, which corresponds to one piece of IP, which corresponds to one product.
And obviously it doesn't always work that way, but that's, that's sort of like a pretty strong paradigm, whereas with a lot of other technology it's. Sort of that, that attribution chain is very hard to do and it involves lots of different groups contributing different things. And so, and you need someone coordinating them.
So this is, this is a lot to say. I think that there's very much something here. That's why I'm interested in it and why a lot more people to learn about it and why we're talking about this. But I, I think it's, it, it w it needs a lot of thought as is. It's not sort of like, I, I don't think that you could like, literally take what you all have done and just like, copy paste it for, for other domains.
But that isn't to say that. Modify it and do something. Cause you know I think it's actually really, really pretty. Yeah. I mean maybe if I can speak on that [00:48:35] quick. So I think Dow will be a highly use case specific. It's actually been an interesting site. I've been I've I started writing about thousand mid 2016, 2016.
There was an article that I wrote on like, what would happen if we combined let's say AI conscious AI systems with Adar. So kind of having adapt, having operated by autonomous agents in essence. And so what happened after the Dow launched, which was one of the first dollars on Ethereum? It was, it was a big complex autonomous kind of setup where the Dow was almost entirely just controlled through through dot holders.
But then that also enabled a. An attack vector that essentially allowed someone to hack those core contracts. And then kind of the Dallas space went into a long period of of considering whether something like this should ever be attempted again. And people became, began to variously, very cautiously build out these systems.
And there were, there's a couple of projects that over really over five years already have tried to build like generalizable Bal frameworks. And many of those projects have kind of have [00:49:35] you have failed that it actually providing frameworks that really got to mass adoption. And I think w whoever, someone, when, when you start building a down, it's kind of like, when you say, like, I want to build a company and there's many ways to build companies.
And the difficult thing is not incorporating the Delaware or getting the bank account set up. And that's what sometimes people think today when they set up a doubt that like, oh, okay, it's a multisig, it's a discourse. But you obviously need that entire ecosystem that you're building. You need to think about, like, what is the, what is the value creation model for this style?
What's its, what's its unique value proposition based on a value proposition, what type of community do I want to build? What type of culture do I need to implement that value proposition that will attract that community to help me? So we've needed that. For example, we've been very conscious about the type of open community that we wanted to build.
And then this goes into all sorts of follow on questions. It's like, where do you actually get funding from to do what you do? And based on where that funding comes from, that will influence the culture of the community. For example, if you have a Dow that's funded by [00:50:35] several groups of larger VCs, that thou will be very different from a cultural perspective.
And also from its goal is then a down that is funded by an open. Where now the individual members are much more, let's say engaged because they put some of their funding in. So they want to have a say on how to control it and what it gets used for. It's going to be very interesting to see, I think in the coming years, if, if generalizable frameworks and register, like just press a button and like spin up it, that you can already do that.
There's many systems that do that, but I keep being surprised that like, they're actually not being very actively used. I think what is really important for example is to build basic infrastructure that can serve industries. And so, for example, if this is something that we we've been very focused on a molecule like drug development, isn't that different, whether you're saying you're developing longevity therapeutics or counts of therapeutics like the base kind of the base infrastructure and how you interact with the real world, for example, through IPS the same We kind of realized like decentralized drug development through Dallas, for example, could only really work if that was not a way to own IP.
And then, but now I think for example, I [00:51:35] think a community like meta down will be very different than let's say a Dow that's focused on rare diseases where you're working with several patient advocacy groups. And it's not like there's a huge general excitement, unfortunately about diseases that are, that only affect small patient populations.
Whereas aging affects affects all of us. And now the data that we're currently, for example, building out at molecule is called SIDA which will be a Dao that's focused on exploring and essentially democratizing access to psychedelics and mental health. Again, because we feel this is a topic that has a very broad appeal and where we can, where you can very effectively scale culture and also apply and also apply some of the frameworks ta-da.
Yeah, maybe just one other thing. I think it's important to highlight in terms of how we think about this as well. Like the reason that dowels are interesting, even for me, like the reason that crypto is interesting is because it's effectively just a sandbox environment to try experiments that create behavioral outcomes like token engineering and token economics is [00:52:35] simply a way to motivate certain outcomes and certain behaviors in real time, sort of building and production, texting and production and academia.
If I said, I want to change drug development, I want to change the way that pharmaceutical companies behave. I could probably write a paper in like nature reviews, drug discovery, and maybe kick off a policy discussion that ultimately isn't really going to move the needle at least on like a tangible timeline around how these things get solved.
But what's interesting about those is that you can basically say I have this idea. There's the stakeholders that I want to incentivize to behave a certain way and achieve a certain outcome. And you can just like deploy this with software and start doing it. It's really crazy. I mean, the, one of the most interesting comments that Vitalik said, we hosted this topic.
comment that resonated was that like, he felt the biggest sort of gift to humanity that corporate provided was this sandbox environment for experiments. And I think [00:53:35] as a scientist, this is one of the things that, that really, really strongly resonates. It's like move beyond the theoretical and go directly to the apply and start testing things in production, seeing what works.
And I don't think we can say confidently that like dolls are biotech dolls. They're better than biotech companies. And achieving goals and drug development. But I think in a couple of years, we'll have a bunch of data points to suggest the things that Dallas are really good at, at least with this design implementation we'll know what they aren't good at.
And because the organizations are so flexible and because they operate through this very iterative governance model that you have the ability to always be tweaking and always be improving. And so this for me is what's really, really exciting. It's like this crazy experiment that you're doing pulling in people from all over the world, independent of geography, geography.
Like I haven't, if there was another tool kit to do it, that was an on crypto. We probably would have built it using that like it's. And, but really that the point here is. I haven't seen a better way to [00:54:35] scale incentives to a large group of people. Then we went three and crypto. So to me, this is, this is the most, yeah, I think we're done when it comes down to the point of the rights before that ultimately it's about a community, even with sidearm, like there's no token, there's nothing.
We literally just set up like a telegram chat, invited some interesting people. They self selected themselves into now. It's like 500 people. We hosted like meetups and there's like ideas emerging out of all the people. And ultimately it doesn't really matter like how it's almost implemented or if there's a token, but it was like, what does community is to share the values and the culture of it and like, Like a shared mission also.
So I think that's really, for me also, what's interesting to takeaway is that also looking at like the most successful projects in crypto has probably been projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum and, and I think a big part of the team success was its community and its culture persevering through thick and thin, like building and improving the protocol [00:55:35] together, building on it, being incentivized to build on it.
I think that's like, like a major takeaway is that it would've made it. It's like all about communities and yeah, shared missions. Did you have your. Yeah, everything I'm curious about is how have tech transfer offices responded to this? I, I assume that there've been many conversations with them. I put cards on the table, don't have the highest opinion of the innovative-ness of tech transfer offices.
And so I I'm wondering how, how have those interactions gone? There is surprisingly technophobic organizations for supposed to like, suppose to be like focusing on innovation. Yeah. Supposed to be helping out professors and researchers sort of bring innovation into the real world. But I would say on the whole, you know, not necessarily by fault of their [00:56:35] own, but rather just because tech transfer is largely a failed business model.
Instructionally is not operated well. It's a couple of general councils sitting in an office that are not domain experts in any one field have typically grossly inflated ideas of what innovation is worth. It's challenging that said we've been super lucky, lucky to engage. Some amazing people at tech transfer offices that are really, I mean, and this is self selecting, right.
If you're inter if you're interacting with us, probably amongst the most forward thinking let's say tech transfer people, so keep a list of them. So that like
right. So that like, so, so like then, then if you can get some kind of feedback loop where, like you say, like, okay, these are the best tech transfer offices to work with. And then people start working with them and then all the other tech transfer offices start seeing. Totally. I mean, but this is what happens.
[00:57:35] Like the first one does it. And then they've sort of de-risked it for the others. And this is what we see happening with every subsequent one that goes for it. It's easier to have the next conversation. We also learn more about how to work with them, how to structure these deals. I would say the main thing here is that tech transfer is largely not profitable.
There's very, very few tech transfer offices in the world that are cashflow positive. Their business model is in danger. Their existence is in danger and they desperately need new ways of innovating the smart there's outside of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, not that many that are really doing big things.
And I think what we see is that there are people in even smaller tech transfer offices around the world that recognize this and are actually really, really hungry for a different way of doing things. And those are the people we hope to work with. But yeah, you're right. It's not the most, not the easiest.
Let's say stakeholder group to engage. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Having said that though, [00:58:35] because we've been so this is also for example, a core role that we see that we see at molecule. Again, tech transfer can be standardized, like working with tech transfer. It doesn't matter if you are outsourcing in longevity asset or.
And what we've actually made as I got developing systems that are as close as what they're used to today makes life massively easier. So the kind of things to avoid is to create the impression let's say. So even within Veit about in terms of negotiating contracts next steps around the IP it's important to realize that there's not a thousand people in a, in a discord like that will then contact the university or try to get involved in the research, make decisions.
It's also then important to realize that these funds are like, it's not, they're not coming from kind of anonymous accounts in this like weird ether that is kind of the cryptocurrency space. But kind of. Give those stakeholders, the assurance that that we using the same process that they used to, that we've developed sophisticated legal [00:59:35] standards.
And then all of this can run kind of through the existing banking system once it's, once it's bridged into them. And actually once you provide those assurances, it's surprisingly easy to work with them. In, in some cases, not in all of them, but I think as an organization, we, for example, I think can be much easier for them to work with them.
Let's say a venture capital firm that wants to out lessons, the IP is setting up a company has, and then engages in three to six month long negotiations. I think the tech transfer offices that we have engaged, I've been pleasantly surprised how quick and easy they can actually be to work with a Dow or a decent size community.
If the right structures and processes are. And like one out of every 20 is just some person who's like, oh my God, this is so cool. I also love when I play around in defy, I'm also into, it happens rarely, but when, when that happens, you're like, okay, this has got to work.[01:00:35]
And also work with, sorry, go ahead. We also work with companies that themselves have negotiated with the TTOs and they can, sub-license a stake. And either first of all, they can also work with the company molecule and the molecule can be, don't even need to know necessarily about via that way initially.
Right. Molecule can have a sponsored research agreements with that startup or with the TTO. There was a company they don't TTO is, might prefer to work directly with the company, right. Or even a revenue share. We can have royalty agreements as an, as a, as an FDA as well. With, with the company a startup, right?
And if, if, if the deals are too slow, we can work directly with our ups initially. And as things open up and this gets more popular and they see that there's a better place to go. So you have the, the, that was a bidder, you know, maybe other people in the crypto community can become bitters [01:01:35] for these IP NFPS.
And it can be a much better way to sort of decide as a market what the value of assets are. And so if you have an asset that, that the market would this market more and more liquid market would value higher, why would you go with the traditional players when you can get much, much better terms?
And so I think they will get convinced once they what they see that. Yeah. And I think also one thing that like today we funded like a new project as well. And what the research has said also that he was pleasantly surprised how quickly it went from like application to funding. So I think it was within four weeks or something, which I think is not common for like planning to funding.
And I think that's also something that like and a lot of researchers are also really excited to have a community behind them that is really excited to follow the progress, to publish a process, to do interviews and the video about their research and, and connect to the other research we are funding.
So I think that's [01:02:35] also like a huge value proposition to the researchers. And speaking of applications is this is a question from on Twitter. All of your proposals seem to have passed with like resounding consensus Not necessarily, not necessarily, no. It's I think there was one or two that would almost almost 50 50, but like really, like I would read on some there's like resounding like almost like a hundred percent voting in favor on two or three, there was like only 60% of voting in favor.
And what I think is interesting, what I observed as a pattern is that like on the ones people voted against it was mostly in working group members voting against, but the community was like oftentimes voting in favor. So like, my feeling was like, the community wants to fund a lot of things and then things keep everything that is getting listed for funding should be funded.
But then the people that in turn the, like [01:03:35] some of them who might've looked and, and help you diligence. Sign up something might be really excited by it and some might vote against it. And I think that's really the thing, because ultimately you can even see in the voting we voted. So you might like seeing the names of the people who voted and you see, okay, this person that is leading the longevity working group voted against it.
And then that's of course a signal for someone to also vote against it. But of course there's also kind of evaluation. Write-ups so you can imagine like a four people looking at a proposal and actually some are really excited by it. And some said we shouldn't fund it. And that would be reflected in the evaluation would reflect the reflected in the voting because the person who are excited by it vote.
Yes. And it was not no. And that will also of course go into the voting of the, yeah. Of the normal voter. There might be also a selection bias. Cause we, we only put things that make sense on up to a vote. Right. So [01:04:35] we didn't put any crazy thing, like a head transplant research or even the, okay. Maybe that might be exciting for them.
I know some, some, some crazy thing that the community would be like what, that's not research into how to make Lamborghini live longer now. That will obviously be downloaded by the community, right? Yeah. So then it's kind of like a selection criteria. Like it has to fulfill a certain quality criteria if you like.
And it needs like the requirement to have like potentially at some point some value that could be captured. And I think a lot of actually things like, like kind of all the things that someone in the community has been excited by God got put on chain. And I think also in the future, there will actually be many more proposals that might be very close calls.
And, and so, so just to, to clarify. Like propose sort of funding proposals go through a working group before it [01:05:35] goes up into, to a community vote. Okay. That basically the main experts, like what also taught us at early off, like people are like, we're in this research also investors in the field and present like re deep domain experts who are also of course look at the criteria.
So on our actually main page com we also have like a kind of like the way acquirements and like a FAQ for, for applications. And a lot of like, some of the applications also didn't fit the criteria. So we couldn't put them towards the proposal, but yeah. When does science makes sense? I like some people I'm excited by, it will be put up on a P as a proposed.
I think what will happen over time. So there's a lot of proposals also that uh, uh, that are being worked on and that are almost like in the funnel. I think what'll happen over time. You'll see a lot more diversity or proposals as well. I personally think it would be cool to just get a lot more crazy or ideas on that because also like in something that we've read as it is only once it goes on chain, does it actually like, cause like the [01:06:35] final debate whether we're doing it or not, but and then I think, what do you also see as there's lots of like, almost like housekeeping proposals but it's important that they're actually put up to all token holders to sign on because finding at the end of the day toggles are really the executive for the organization.
And so it's important to even, and then no one would disagree, but if we say, Hey guys, we're going to change our governance process because we realized it's better to do 1, 2, 3, and everyone agrees with that. There's no big disagreement on this, like housekeeping. But in a way that the, that the governance framework is designed we have to put everything on chain and then it gets voted through.
We've also read as for example and I mean, these are all like, so veto is not just like this community or this funding vehicle, but it's also a whole set of smart contracts that the Dao actually operates through. So you need to operate, put things to vote and like formally then execute them through those, through those smart contracts.
So to speak, I think is also really important in a, in a trust the system, something that we've also realized though, like it's quite, it's a little bit and you learn as you go. [01:07:35] You launch kind of you launch a product and architecture, and then you refine it as you go along. We've also reduced, for example, that can be cumbersome to constantly have people actually use gas.
So a boat can cost, depending on the congestion congestion of the film network at Gaston, a vote can cost anywhere between 10 or $20, which can be a lot. And let's say, if you have, let's say, if you have a, a thousand dollars worth of tokens, and let's say you're a very small, a smaller but committed community.
That, that that's, that can be a high cost to actually interact and participate in the system. Let's say for larger holders that's less of an issue, but that wouldn't actually then serve the democratic kind of, I think, vision of the organization. So something that we're doing for example, is moving on a gas, this voting system, where essentially, almost imagine you just check all of the balance that everyone has, and then people vote with their balance as opposed to actually on chain moving tokens.
So those are continuous improvements that we're doing, and that would actually mean that even more proposals micro life, but it could also mean that that there's a [01:08:35] higher, let's say that there's more discussion, like a smaller discussion around those proposals. Yeah. In, in theory, just do this with a spreadsheet.
Like that's also the, of course the meme with with crypto, it's like a spreadsheet blockchain to just spreadsheets in the simplest form. But I think what's really the key thing. And I think. Like web two. And like our old world of banking is a spreadsheet that kind of like is controlled by the bank or the state, for example.
And it, and like, if you were like a researcher and your state, doesn't like your research, they will just block your research a spreadsheet if you like with your money's in it. And definitely, I think it's, that's the power is that it's trustless and not owned by your state or university of bank, but that it's like, yeah, it's condomless and trustless.
But I think on, on the funding side you could also do it, but then you need to trust someone. So maybe you have the spreadsheet or [01:09:35] maybe you have to access rights to the Google spreadsheet. And I think that's ultimately where it breaks down. It's like, ultimately, you, you couldn't do it in web two way, like a dolls.
And I think that's like an interesting, yeah, cool. Well, I think we all need to jump. Is there any, any, any last thoughts that you want to sort of leave in people's heads about this? That we didn't touch? Maybe like one key one instead it's like, like everyone should take a look at the website, read it out at comment, feel free to jump in discord, introduce a 74, if you want to join, because we're really always looking for like more researchers, more enthusiastic to, to join us.
And I think it, like, we kind of like the first one who kind of pulled it off with some funding and some first project, I think there will be more and more interesting research projects and research styles. So it's like the whole like decent, less science-based projects emerging. So there's also like.
The interesting ones, but we can even, maybe in the show notes, also some, some interesting resources [01:10:35] beyond kind of each dowel also have lists of in general, just decentralized science efforts. We're excited by like, from research by also yeah, funded by the Coinbase founder as a, for decentralized publishing, but it hasn't been designed to surprise us what, like Adams is working on and a bunch of different projects that we can, can leave in the show notes for those who want to rabbit hole into the simplest science, because I think it's really interesting new field emerging,
maybe as a last coming from my side as well. I think we're beginning to see that all of this as possible. And like, I think if you dream big enough, like we can actually build these things out and actually make it happen. If you, if any of your listeners have a cool idea about trying this approach in another therapeutic area that they're passionate about or even just.
Having ideas about exhilarating systems that could be built to support this. We're already seeing. Yeah. Lots of other builders kind of come into this ecosystem and, and we're really excited to like build [01:11:35] together. The great thing about with three is that it's highly composable and interoperable really in the way of like open API as in a, in, in, in a sense like similar to the open source software is really open and interoperable.
So we need keen. If any of your listeners want to get involved in B2B, I have ideas about building other doubts, what maybe they even just want to explore the IP and Ft framework. So something as well as like, if you have a cool research project that you want to get funded you can already get that funded through, through, through an NFT.
And that entire infrastructure is built and, and exists and something that we're also looking yeah. That I'm looking forward to is really opening up scientists, scientific funding and making access, make it much more democratic, democratic, and accessible for anyone to come in and fund this. It doesn't have to be adopt like if you want it to, if you want it to finance a specific project, or maybe you were at a couple of friends, start up a small group that starts identifying early stage assets in universities.
And then essentially bringing them on chain. Now you can own them. You can transact in [01:12:35] them. And even at a later stage, you could, you could decide to set up a doubt. So some of the founders, for example, that are approaching as a. They're like, oh, I want to start it off because I have this research about it.
I mean, like, wait, you really needed the bow for that, but because the value, but you want to create an ecosystem. It's really good to though, to center the down around the use case. But yeah, that's also something important to read as also not everything needs a, yeah, like to put out a call call-out bounty.
We give out referral fees. If, if you refer to us research projects that make, or, or non-academic researchers or team, or even a startup that we could do a deal with if we end up funding that we do give out the percentage to be able to bring it in. So we're excited to find out all the.
Unheard of on undervalued research into aging, of [01:13:35] course, and longevity from anywhere in the world. Excellent. Well, I really appreciate all of you taking the time, taking more, more than, more than the time. And yeah. Keep up the good work..