NFTs and Real World IP

Transcript

hi everyone i hope you've all been having a wonderful wonderful day um the conference started quite early already so i'm i'm grateful that you're still taking the time to to dive deep into a topic i think that is really exciting which is decentralized biotech um so hi everyone my name is paul kolhaus i'm the the founder and ceo of a project called molecule protocol i first got into biohacking around the age of 18 19 and [Music] i joined lots of online communities that were essentially exploring analogs to compounds there was open insulin communities they were essentially looking for alternative

treatments or open cancer research communities and these were essentially all little like reddit communities like subgroups that were forming to look for alternatives um for drugs that they simply couldn't access or that they couldn't afford and i found that really fascinating because it was a it was a way of doing open source drug development and i then started looking into how does big pharma work and how long does it actually take to bring drugs to market today and i started realizing that there's an enormous um [Music] divide between what people need and um and people's rights to access to medicine and what pharma actually provides us today and the way that

pharma works and i first learned about bitcoin in 2013 then quickly learned about ethereum was really fascinated by the open source software design that permeates blockchain communities then did quite a lot of work around data marketplaces essentially figuring out how enterprises can share data to make it more accessible for people to do computation on um and then eventually handling where i was like hey cool what if pharma work much more like an open source marketplace as opposed to the industry that we know today cool i'm going to jump right to it so what's the problem so today most early stage therapeutics are actually not developed in big pharma they're

developed in academia and in biotech startups and there's typically a stage there that is called the valley of death in pharma which means that many of the the great discoveries that are done in universities or even in smaller biotech companies actually never make it to the clinic they never make it to market and that's because the biopharma space is kind of pervaded by in transparency and the the cost of kind of doing business in pharma or getting funding and kind of capturing your ip is extremely high um so we find this this stage which is called the valley of death in the early stages and there's just kind of not enough things actually getting into the funnel and then many drugs fail as they reach

these as they reach these further stages um and because the market is so close that essentially means there's a lack of available treatments that actually do reach patients in the end and then those treatments are very expensive um for for patients today uh so this this process typically happens within one like within one company but it's also how the entire industry operates and so we started asking ourselves what would happen if intellectual property as an asset class was moved out of companies and into the public domain kind of enabling anyone to access that intellectual property and to begin working around it to begin transacting in it and if you think about how intellectual property works it's really a monopoly

that's granted by the government or the state in order for one organization to kind of capitalize on that innovation but what what ip and patents actually do is they encapsulate innovation within one company and they dis-incentivize anyone else to work on it um and in many ways the the pharma industry today is kind of similar to the software industry in the 80s and 90s maybe some of you remember buying like a windows windows cd to install a new windows operating system or even microsoft word with a long like cd key that was actually physically on the cd you had to enter it um and and then think what open source software has really done to um

to yeah to the software industry most of the apps that we download today on a phone are free there's no like key that you need to enter you don't go to a store um and pharma in that way really still operates in like in that 80s 90s software model and so we think there's a better way and there's a way to make potentially make medicine as freely available as as we download our apps on our phones today cool so at molecule we're on a mission to really decentralize drug development and at a very high level we're building a digital marketplace for biopharma ip so kind of like an open c for biotech ip so these are different research projects from different universities that are listed on our platform as well as biotech companies and so we've kind of

built a platform that is a mix between a research gate and an open c um so our mission here really is to make these university projects these biotech projects publicly fundable and move them into into ownership in the public domain um so we solved a really hard thing i don't know maybe some of you know the book um the hard thing about hard things and so what we built is really this this ip discovery marketplace where we're now linking nfts with real world legal rights and secure data access control and on the other side what we started building is a governance and financing app layer that can operate through daos that essentially allows these assets to now

natively go into web 3 and be collaboratively developed and uh so maybe some of you know flamingo dao or what's happening in the nft art space so quickly like nft artwork emerged and now already today we have an entire like space or industry of like funds that formed around this building portfolios there's no thousands that are curating ip you know that are curating artworks and nfts um like flamingoda for example and so we asked ourselves what if there was a flamingo dial for diabetes or a flamingodab for alzheimer's research or for cancer research essentially dao is being able to fund and co-own intellectual property on behalf of their

members and to actually curate the ip and openly work on it so this is a high-level overview of our of our tech stack so essentially essentially what we essentially the way that we we're designing this market is it's a it's a market with a supply side and a demand side and the supply side essentially consists of researchers that want to develop their ip um and they upload their iap and data into our system we then attach the ip to an nft which we called an ipnft and then that ipnft can now travel into what we call biopharmadols or biotechdolls and that's what connects kind of the funders and the researchers together

um so i want to talk to you guys a little bit about one of the first biotech styles that we helped launch earlier this year which is an organization called vitadao and then i want to explain to you how vitadao can actually now transact and and fund open research and transact in uh in ipnfts um so vitadow as a decentralized funding is focused on the decentralized funding and governance of longevity research and longevity research is a really interesting field it's one of the final frontiers if we think about if we think about life or medicine more broadly so longevity research is essentially developing many new approaches to medicine and it might fundamentally revolutionize medicine because if we can if we can slow down the process of aging

and the onset of certain diseases [Music] it really would allow us to redefine what it means what it means to treat people because if instead of treating the diseases that come when we age we treat aging itself as a disease um that could fundamentally redefine how medicine works today and um and the longevity space is is very interesting because it has a very high let's say overlap with the interest in crypto uh for for some reason it has a very high product market fit in the sense that there's many it used to be quite a fringy let's say fringy research industry um and uh and yeah okay so

i really like this quote from from nick johnson who asked what's the single most impactful thing that a dao could do with a million dollars today and um as we look at as we looked at biotech and and medicine more broadly we realized hey one of the most single impactful things for us is aging so we started building a a community around funding aging research and then democratizing ownership of new aging therapeutics and so vita now is a decentralized collective funding early stage longevity research its mission is to extend human lifespan and health then by researching financing and then commercializing longevity therapeutics in an open accessible and democratic manner

so the primary funders of actually longevity therapeutics for the past five to ten years used to be billionaires frankly um because they quickly realized that hey what's all this money worth if i if i like if i if my life ends at a certain point and but there's a danger here because if if billionaires become older and older and preserve their wealth continuously um you don't have a redistribution of wealth in society and also longevity therapeutics wouldn't be widely accessible to the general public so for us this is a perfect use case actually for a dow to make longevity

therapeutics owned by the public domain and so navitar and its members are nurturing and developing the intellectual property the licenses and the data sets that result from the projects that it supports and funds and now a big question is how can a dao a full on-chain entity own real-world biotech ip and this is really what we've been working on almost for the past one and a half years at molecule so we've developed something called the biopharma ipnft and for us this is a really big first case of moving nfts beyond art into really into the real world public domain so one thing we asked ourselves

was what if we um if what if what nfts did for artists and musicians what if we could do the same revolution in the sciences the speed of innovation in in medical research through that could could really be propelled and so what is a biopharma ipnft so for us it's a it's a new fundraising mechanism for early stage research but it's also a new ownership mechanism so and it consists of two components one is a new technical framework that allows to combine nfts with federated data storage and then with access control around that federated data storage so federated data storage

in this use case essentially means if a lab or a university is doing is performing work or research the data can actually stay on site but now the nft holder and only the nft holder has access to that data and can grant other party access to that data and the typical process around this is literally sending around pdfs or granting you access rights um to kind of the raw data it's the the industry has evolved very little and so this is a mechanism where you can now trade all research data um encapsulated in a specific project and then on the other side it's a new legal framework that utilizes sub-licensing agreements and essentially enables on-chain entities to hold ip so this is the more detailed technical

anatomy if you're actually interested in this we have a lot of blog posts and articles on our medium that go deeper into this but so as i just explained essentially it's a legal contract that can maintain the identities the name the physical address of the contracting parties so the first case this would for example be the university of copenhagen and on the other side it and actually contains the wallet addresses or the let's say the small contract addresses of the counter signing party so the way that this ipnft works is it's essentially a legal agreement that is entered between two parties the moment that a transfer or a purchase of that nft happens and then on the other side it's um it's the actual nft smart contract

and then it's the metadata json that's stored on rweav and then it's the encrypted ip and patent that is stored on on falcoin um so parts of this ipnft are open but the ip is not actually revealed the ip's only revealed to the two engaging parties but it can now be open to to many more parties if those parties choose to do that okay and so now what is vita down doing with these first ipnfts so vitadao now owns the intellectual property assets that result from all of the projects that it funds members contribute work or funds to join readout as an organization and now vita holders help curate and govern its ip so in the long run what what an

organization like vtdow could do it could essentially look through sorry the upcoming projects that are coming here and it essentially works with those projects and helps curate them and then bring them bring them to market uh so the typical funding range that we did is currently providing is between fifty thousand to one million dollars um fifty thousand for let's say very like smaller academic grant like projects and then upwards to one million dollar for for like larger um um larger projects the focus is really on early stage high-risk high-reward projects uh and we attempt to make very quick funding decisions that are much ideally much faster than than current industry processes

we launched vitadao through um agnosis auction and with a fair launch mechanism uh essentially ensuring that the in the early stages of the organization it's immediately distributed to its members so uh essentially what happened was a agnosis auction that that raised i think just over 2500 ether and um that's currently now in the veda dot treasury and is valued at i think just over just over 10 million dollars i think ether actually just popped so it's probably more now the organization is holding most of its assets at the moment in ether um and so that that funding is now being openly distributed to projects that apply to read it out and to its community

um this is just a depiction of what the overall ecosystem looks like so members can contribute funds or work they receive vita tokens in return and then they curate all of the the assets and the data that comes into the organization um just a very brief overview of the structure so you essentially have the members of etadao then you have different working groups that actually operate the data so there's a deal flow working group a longevity working group there's a legal working group so now these are all working groups that are helping as at a high level actually craft these ip and fts encapsulate the right data into the projects and then ensure that that the funding goes to the researchers yeah so this is actually an example of one of the first projects that vida dao

as a biotic dao voted on so this was a project with the university of copenhagen and at the cyber nuts and laboratory that is exploring 10 10 unique molecules for their life extending properties and so if any of those molecules are a hit vita down now fully owns all of the ip around that research and can start developing an ip or patent strategy around it so this proposal actually passed with an 88 yes at 12 no it was one of the first vdps um that we did discussed and so this is what this what it looks like on on the vita down front end uh video is essentially a molok v3 implementation um that we built with a native governance token attached

and uh so this is actually now what happened in the back in the like in the back end so this is the research lab in in copenhagen this is what like the this is what the copenhagen project looks like on our platform so like anyone can now discover this project and also begin potentially engaging with that research team yeah so this is the research team then they gave regular updates what's happening in the lab as soon as the funding started which is really cool so we're developing entirely new ways that research teams and laboratories can directly interact with patients so for example think if this so in this case these guys are developing longevity therapeutics but this could be a similar case for a diabetes community for example so allowing a diabetes community to

directly interact with a research team developing insulin and then the the scientists are actually now in our discord there's there's a specific disco group for them they actively engage with the community and they've become a part of this of this town [Music] the research team actually also has governance rights in the organization and it's a really interesting new way for them to actually openly engage with the community that is very excited about their work um very quick outlook how this has been going so read it out currently now it's only existed for about four months for five months um publicly but it already has deal flow of 50 to 60 very high quality longevity projects

um 10 to 20 of them are with leading academic labs across the world where we're now working on turning those into into further ipnfts um then vidal has also been approached by many longevity startups from pre-c to a series that want to openly work with the organization and engage with it and those startups are actually not interested in purchasing the ip and fts that vita dial is developing so actually now off boarding the ip again um yeah then we're also getting deeper and deeper into like biotech tokenomics so actually exploring like biotech ip mining like the protocol itself over time curates ip and in that sense uh is it yeah it's mining mining ip um

vita dao is kind of tvl over time if you think of it in defined terms will be a function of the amount of ipnfts that it actually holds in it in its um uh in in the organization and then and this is also something that we're very actively looking at molecule is the next step for us would be to fractionalize ownership in the individual ipnfts and then you essentially start having a curation market around around these research projects that are coming through our platform cool i think i'm already over i'm already over time uh thank you guys so much i hope you had a wonderful day and i'll be here for any questions [Applause]