DeSci Hub - The World of DeSci

Transcript

Okay. So, hi everyone and how are you all doing? I hope it has been a good start for you at DevCon. So I am Arya and I'm the community manager at DI India and I am also a volunteer from the DSI hub community hub right here at DevCon. So you will in fact like find our hub located next to the snack station. So maybe like come grab a bite and join us or do the vice versa. And for the next couple of minutes I want to show you what decentralized science is and what you can do about it in this week.

But uh yeah before we begin uh there's a small polling for you all. So like there's no need to scan any QR maybe like raising your hand is just no need for QR. Uh you just need to raise your hands and that is enough. So maybe even like let out a cheer or two if you find the questions or the situation relatable. So yeah like uh raise your hand if you have ever hit a pay wall. Me too. Yeah. So like you find a perfect article, you click and it asked for $30 to $50 for a single paper and if like keep your hands still up if you have like simply gave up or like looked for

another paper in those times. So yeah, the next question uh raise your hand if you have ever waited for a funding decision. And the meme here it says that would you rather have $19 today or a billion dollars tomorrow? Well, when it comes to research funding tomorrow, tomorrow can be a super super long time. And in a niti IO le survey it was found that researchers in India they have to wait for 7 to 15 months just to hear whether the grant was approved or rejected let aside the sanctioning of the grant as a whole. And the last question uh raise your hand if you ever

viewed a research if you ever reviewed a research article for free like you are not being paid for it at all. So yeah, like the that's most uh that's what it's like for most researchers and it isn't an accident. So it's how basically the the system works. And in a 2020 study, it was estimated that reviewers worldwide they spend over a 100 million hours on unpaid peer review work which is in fact a lot. So the question that brings to that brings us to this hub is like what happens when we you know like apply decentralization to science. Again

it's not a slogan that we are talking of but rather as a real experiment as to how science is funded, reviewed, owned and shared. So let's start with a problem that is in numbers. First comes the money of course. uh what we see is that academic publishing is roughly $19 billion business every year and over 50% of it is held by five publishers Elsir Springer Nature uh Taylor and Francis Wy and Sage and on top of that what we see is that Elivia's profit margin alone in 2023 was nearly 40% and this is the kind of profit margin that we usually associate with

big tech. Now think where this raw material where these research paper that is being put into picture where exactly it's coming from. What we see is that researchers they write the papers other researchers they review them and universities they pay to produce them. Then al then followed by that what we see is that the universities they also pay to review them and then pay again to access them. That's just the starting point of this entire vicious cycle of what a traditional life cycle of science and academia it looks like. And here lies the structural tension. On the left what we see is that knowledge is produced everywhere. Everyone is

producing knowledge like researchers, institutions, reviewers and communities across borders. Say from labs in Kolkata to labs in Nairobi to labs in Sao Paulo. And on the right we have in infrastructure uh that stays pretty much concentrated. So funding, publishing, access and ownership it rely on very small number of institutions. So the people they are producing knowledge are they are everywhere. But what we see here is that it's there's a lot of gatekeeping that's involved. So the question is simple that can we build a more open alternative and that is what DAI is trying to find out which brings us to what is DSI in fact

so decentralized science or DSI it's a global al open alternative to current scientific system uh the second line matters the more because it applies open decentralized infrastructure to how science is funded created reviewed credited stored and shared. So notice that funding is not the only thing that DI cares about. Many people they hear DI and think crypto grants but let me tell you that it's much more bigger than that. Now I want to underline the fact that DI it goes beyond putting science on a blockchain. So blockchain is a tool, a shared record that is very hard to

change and that helps with the trust factor here in DI. But science it does not fix by itself. The larger experiment is rather about coordination. How we fund the work, how we show the evidence, how we reward the contribution and govern the shared knowledge together. So without a single gatekeeper the tools are Ethereum the smart the smart contracts and Dows and the experiment the experimentation or the experimental factor here is the humans who are involved. So in case if DAO is a new term for you it basically stands for decentralized autonomous organization.

It's a community that votes on how to spend a shared fund and a smart contract releases the money automatically. Coming to the scientific life cycle in DI, think of the research project in six steps. Fund, research, share, publish, verify, own and yeah like so the DI it experiments at every step not only just the first one. So step one is funding that is to create more parts from an idea to resource. Crowdfunding it lets many people back a project with small amounts whereas community funding it goes further because groups decide what to back together. For example, we have

on our DI ecosystem we have spark funding which has funded over 249 projects with an amount more than 700 thousands of dollars. And then there are Dows and public goods mechanisms where communities they vote on proposal in in an open and smart contract releases the money. Then there is VA DAO which is pretty much well known in its field for longevity research and it they are the best known. So if you think that Dows they uh released the fund without in fact consulting or without seeing the ethics behind the science or verifying the ethics behind the science then that's not the case because serious Dows they still use e experts and ethics to

review the proposal and the point isn't that you know like crowd isn't that the crowd replaces the experts it's about making funding choices more visible and participatory in nature. So the step two is about step two and three rather it's about research and share open collaboration. It lets teams form across institutions and borders. So in a lab in Mumbai can work with a biologist in Buenos Aries without waiting for a formal ownership uh or a partnership and open data with provenence. It simply means that you can trace what has happened in the scientific field so far and you can also further build on it. So any of you who has tried to repeat

someone else's experiment without the raw data, you know what exactly I'm talking about and why this matters in the first place. So step four and five is to publish and verify. Open publishing means accessible outputs and with open accessible outputs with transparency. The opposite of the pay wall question that you raised your hands earlier for. and verification. It treats peer review and reproducibility as visible contributions not just invisible favors.

So remember the hands for reviewing for free question. So on popular the site platform like research hub and approved peer review earns you in tokens but only after a quality check. The principle is the point that publication becomes one stage in an open evidence trail and the reviewer they ultimately get the credit. The last step here is ownership. Who owns scientific work? Who and who receives the credit on IP and licensing? Transparent terms can make ownerships easier to see and govern. With IP NFT, a token is uh linked to a legal agreement that defines the right over a piece of research. If a company later licenses

the result income, it flows back to the researchers and the funders. And on uh on attribution what we see is that contribution records it recognizes more of the people behind the work whether it's just a data curator or students who have run the experiments in the project or the reviewer it basically tries to acknowledge everyone and because DI is still in early stages there is a lot of things evolving in terms of the legal legalities and the framework but the idea here is to give credits wherever it is due.

Now you'll notice something about all six steps. No single organization can do them alone and that is the common denominator here. So think of DSI as a shared effort and as an open call for collaboration. So what we see here is that there are a lot of factors involved. There's developer infrastructure, there's biotech, there's AI, meeting science, IP and ownership, research funding, Dows, open communities, peer review, and of course coming back to DCI communities. They are the glue here in the DI ecosystem. They onboard newcomers, run events, translate between scientists and builders and keep

the whole thing running. That's the part that my team does. And for starters, let's just like quickly zoom into what DI Asia, what the DAI community looks like in Asia. It connects independent communities across the region from DAI Taiwan to DAI India's, DSI Cino, DAI Soul, DAI Tokyo and a lot more. So each DI community, they adapt to their own research system, language funding uh and they share what they learn. And in case if you have missed my talk to intro to DAI India uh at this which happened at the hub earlier this morning, I'll be more than happy to tell you more about it sometime later. And if you want to

learn about DAI Asia, we have a talk coming up on Friday. So you at the DAI hub and you feel free to join it. So now for the most awaited part of the talk about DSIHub at Devcon at what exactly we are doing about it. And if any of you think that why a hub like why a hub at Devcon at a crypto and web3 conference well what we want to emphasize here is that DAI it needs a place to meet. On one side there are researchers and scientists. On the other side there are Ethereum builders and the world of the side in the in the middle with surrounded by founders, communities,

students and projects. At most conferences these groups they don't they probably like walk past each other and maybe don't even share or maybe like they don't even share a common conference to begin with and here they sit at the same table at DevCon. So even because like Devcon agrees that's why we are here and we are like one of the 14 communities hubs that got chosen from 32 proposals. So thank you to DevCon for giving us this opportunity to be here and this is our third season. So it's all started in 2024 at Devcon Southeast Asia and Bangkok when we ran the first D world of DIHub the one in this photo and there were four themes built on the

principles of eeky guy which is body mind heart and soul in 2025 it moved to dev connect in Buenos Aries as world of dai part of the road to dai from ethl latam and now it's here in Mumbai so each season it grew from the community each season it grew from one season to the another and was shaped by the local community. The hub is an initiative of Dai world, Dai Latin, Dai Asia and Misoriv Dao with on ground uh representation from DAI India and support from a lot of other communities from cancer dao ETH panda dao d live dai dai soul dai taiwan and dai Tokyo. So,

and there are the people. This hub is run totally by volunteers across different parts of the world. Uh Joshua, Brenda Swift, Koko, Franchesco and NFY, they are unable to attend Devcon this time in person. But uh Messi boy, Ira Harsha, Andre, Denise and I, Arya, we'll be we are here in Mumbai at Devcon. So just like if you see any one of us just like come by and say hi. So and coming to the agenda of the hub four days, four themes. Today is Tuesday which is body day where we are focusing on um biotech, aging, rejuvenation and medicine.

Tomorrow we'll be focusing on mind which has to do more about AI, data, neuroscience and space tech. On Thursday, it's planet day where we will be focusing on or having conversations about sustainability, positive future and climate tech. And day four is soul day when we are talking about community governance and academic engagement. So across the four days we have 21 speakers, 19 sessions including solo talks, workshops and a fireside chat plus five cross hub connect where we will be joined by aggregation hub, security hub, zoo zone, leg legacy hub, no uh legal hub and privacy hub to share

perspectives, compare the challenges and solutions and on Thursday we are running a poster showcase at our hub on behalf of of the Dai communities and Dows that were unable to make it to DevCon. So yeah, and now a few speakers you should definitely look out for. We have Ella uh who will be speaking on what has worked and what hasn't in DI. Johans on closing the drug discovery loop from AI design binders to robotic labs. Zan has a workshop on open-source auto research and so whom I'll come back to in a moment and for day two we have Malshu and Dai Taiwan Professor Anil with a

workshop on how space weather affects satellites then there's hit on gut and mental health hacking them without any pills HL on patient owned health data and a fireside fireside chat on DSI with tooling and agent tech AI with Praar Shikar and Abananish on day three we have lessons on longevity hubs from costs zoo with a workshop on existential hope and Dr. Saraka on decentralizing climate science on western cards and on day four we have Dravang speaking about the Oracle problem of science and Molly on the web three ecosystems and finally the speaker that I want to highlight here it is so sankaran who is

the founder of popwax which is building an open-source vaccines in Hyderabad in India. So popwork says that its work is primarily funded by um with agreements with gate foundation and bari which is vital public health and biocurity fund. So popfax so to say it's not really a DAO but it follows the same principles as DI and is built on it because the fun the the primary principle about popfax is that the funding is tied to open outputs and it is happening in India. So will be speaking at our hub at 4 p.m.

today. So do join in where his topic mainly revolves around open-source vaccines, biocurity and developing medicines to save a million of lives in a year. So now since you have heard about DEI how science is changing and you are of course invited to help shape it how you don't need to be a scientist or a coder if you fund review build design or are a good science communicator or good at organizing or if you write or if you just ask good questions maybe there's a place for you. So welcoming you all to the DAI hub and thank you for your time for being a part of this conversation.

My name is Arya the community the community manager at DAI India and I would like to now take your questions. Please raise your hand if you have a question. Yeah, at the front here. Yeah, >> thank you for your talk. Um, my only question is about uh when the laboratory gets the money, how like the laboratory can spend them with uh having the fact that they are crypto and uh no um

laboratory equipment producer acquires crypto. So that's the biggest gap I think. >> Yeah, that's true. So that's why I think more conversations around DI is required because academia is still operating in the traditional aspect in the very conventional aspect. So I think more conversations around maybe crypto web 3 can in fact open up this conversation because and that's why we need science communicators who can explain who can explain the concept well or people in the legal framework who can explain the concept well and probably like dismantle the you know like the norms around it.

So that's what I feel. Thank you so much for your talk. Um I was really curious about obviously this is DII India and about what you see the role of decentralized science is specifically in the context of India. >> So DI India it's pretty much still in the nent stage. The conversations around it are almost invisible. It's more of an if you know you know kind of a thing. So here at Dai hub at DevCon what we are trying to do is that we are trying to build trying to bring in people from traditional academia from then we have

the Ethereum builders and trying to build a conversation around it that look these are our shared problems these are our perspectives and what we can do together when we when we come together as a force. Yeah, thank you so much for your talk Arya. So, uh what do you think about uh so like the advancements in AI uh is really accelerating knowledge production, right? And there's uh like on Ethereum one uh issue that we are facing right now that there's an influx of a large amount of research posts and articles on

these forums and earlier it was uh we never used to call it like DA or anything but people would uh make research posts and uh they often used to get funded and uh uh you know eventually what what we call included in the protocol. But uh like if we stop gatekeeping in uh in the world of science, I feel there could be like a huge influx of uh like uh proposals or whatever you would like to call it with with the advancements in AI. So how would you like uh do the quality control in this in this case? What's your opinion about it?

>> Mhm. Yeah. So thank you for your question. So what I feel is that again like how you mentioned that with AI research is being accelerated and so is the data that's being produced or shared around it. So again just because data is there at the end of the day it say if we are consuming a piece of uh news article then it's on us that whether we move ahead to verify it or actually just like go blindly believing in it. So that's the same with science. Just because any science is getting funded or is being published, it doesn't means that it is always good science. So of course there have to be several um guard rails to it.

There have to be like several legal frameworks to be established around it and uh that's how we are building and growing the community together with the side. Yeah. Okay, I have a question. >> Yeah. >> Um, I first got in touch with DISA at Shelling Point in 22 and there's been quite some development since. You mentioned Vita already. I'm wondering these days, what gives you hope? What inspires you most about the future of this specific vertical?

>> The only statement that I would want to make here is that science is a public good and it should be treated like one. Yeah.