Decentralized science, drug research, pursuit of immortality, chemical compounds... Seeing these Desci concepts, most of my friends should have the same idea as me. This is another new narrative to make money, a total scam.
Yes, I went into @bioprotocol with a bias.
As I read more materials, there is still one question that I cannot answer - in addition to founding Bio Protocol, the team actually directly founded or participated in the operation of projects such as Molecule, VitaDAO, PsyDAO, Pump.Science, etc.
Familiar script, continuously launching projects to raise money? Since it has directly or indirectly participated in so many projects, why did it create Bio Protocol? Why did Bio Protocol still get investment from Binance Labs?
After in-depth research on Bio Protocol and communication with Dr. @octopusycc @HaotianGuo_qb, I have a new understanding of Desci and Bio, which may help everyone better understand the Bio and Desci tracks.
[I would like to state in advance that I am not a great debater, and I have never received any promotion from Binance and Bio. Even this Twitter account has never received any advertisement so far (I would like to accept it, but no one has contacted me, woo woo woo).]
What is Bio Protocol?
Bio Protocol is the Desci Token LaunchPad platform, and it is also a financing platform for traditional drug researchers in the cryptocurrency circle.
Researchers can set up a DAO and apply to join Bio, and then $BIO token holders will vote to decide whether to allow the DAO to join and fund its development.
In the best case, the ecosystem should achieve a positive flywheel as shown in the following figure, that is, a circular system of scientific research based on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and commercialization of intellectual property (IP):
1) DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)
Select and fund the most promising scientific research projects and decide where to allocate funds.
2) Research IP (Research and Intellectual Property) Tokenization
The research results are transformed into tokenizable intellectual property, and the benefits are realized through the following channels:
IP-NFTs & IPTs: Minting intellectual property into non-fungible tokens (IP-NFT) or other forms of tokens (IPT).
NewCo Spinouts: Incubate new companies and bring research results to market.
IP Licensing: Licensing intellectual property to traditional business partners and obtaining licensing fees.
3) Proceeds
Once the intellectual property is monetized, the proceeds flow back into the DAOs’ coffers to fund more research projects.
Prior to Bio, the team’s startup project was @Molecule_dao, official website: https://www.molecule.xyz/, a platform for tokenizing drug research.
Drug researchers have raised funds based on the platform, such as Percepta, an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant research project based on cat's claw vine (Populus tomentosa), which raised 127.7325 ETH. Currently, tokens have been issued based on Base, and the token is $CLAW. Purchasing tokens means purchasing the IP copyright or revenue rights of the project.
@Molecule_dao
It is difficult to say whether the platform is successful or not. The platform can indeed raise tens or even hundreds of ETH for financing research projects, and the MCap of drug tokens can also exceed tens of millions of dollars.
And Dr. @HaotianGuo_qb said that the financing "can indeed support a postdoc + the rent of a laboratory table for a year" and "is enough for scientific research for a small project."
However, first of all, the Molecule project is indeed unpopular; secondly, the authenticity of the researchers, progress management, etc. cannot be fully trusted through the information disclosed on the website, or some of their cheating behaviors cannot be restricted;
Third, we have no idea whether the drug can be commercialized, how long it will take to be commercialized, what position the research occupies in the field, and whether it has the possibility of commercialization.
Fourth, after purchasing IP tokens, what rights and interests will be obtained and whether commercial benefits can be obtained are completely unknown. Even the official Docs indicate that no returns can be guaranteed. Currently, there is only hype value. Of course, I believe everyone will have these questions.
The core reason for these doubts points directly to a key issue - trust assumption.
The reason for the above problems is that the cost of "trust assumption" is too high, and investors must believe in the Molecule team's ability to screen and follow up projects.
This is why the team founded Bio Protocol, leveraging DAO to pool resources, decentralize trust assumptions, shift them from the team to the community, and more importantly, cut legal risks and responsibilities.
Bio is a community where $BIO holders make decisions, and decide whether a DAO can join Bio and receive funding. Each specific DAO is the researcher and specific executor of the drug. The sub-DAO that is admitted can receive $100,000 in funding, and must transfer 6.9% of the tokens to the Bio mainnet.
Is Desci a story or a real application?
At first, I thought this was a story that simply stayed at the narrative level, until I saw an interview with founder and CEO Paul Kohlhaas https://www.molecule.xyz/blog/paul-kohlhaas-desci-the-future-of-decentralized-science-zima-red-podcast . In the interview, he described his past experiences and the current state of the drug development industry.
The industry currently faces a lot of "trust assumptions" and resource mismatch problems.
The following content is from Paul’s interview.
Current status of drug development:
For many diseases, because there are few patients, pharmaceutical companies do not make any profit and will not do additional development.
Around the age of 16-18, Paul was active in online biohacking forums such as Erowid, where communities conducted drug research in an “open source” manner.
The diabetes patient community developed its own open-source insulin synthesis method, which later formed the "Open Source Insulin Movement" in the U.S. The cancer patient community is also working to find alternatives because many treatment drugs are expensive and unaffordable.
In medicine, there are many diseases that pharmaceutical companies are not interested in. Often, these diseases are rare diseases with too small a patient population for pharmaceutical companies to be willing to bring drugs to market.
Although the FDA provides special approval pathways for these disease areas, such as Orphan Drug Designation, it is still difficult to get a drug approved.
The Open Source Pharma Foundation is a group of researchers from around the world, such as UCL and some Australian universities, who submit new drug targets to an open source code repository that can be found on GitHub. This is how they make their research public.
These efforts are often funded by foundations like the Gates Foundation or other international humanitarian agencies, but these organizations often lack sufficient funding to bring drugs to market, and many times projects stall.
Once researchers upload a drug target or potential treatment to a GitHub code repository, they can no longer apply for a patent. Without patent protection, pharmaceutical companies and funding agencies are often reluctant to pay for the high costs of subsequent development and clinical trials for the drug.
Phase III clinical trials can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, especially for certain diseases. No patent means the drug can only be marketed as a generic, making it impossible for any company to recoup its investment through drug sales.
As a result, many open source drug projects, such as the Open Source Malaria Project, have been unable to obtain funding to complete drug development despite making important progress.
Secondly, the “trust hypothesis”: Current traditional financial investments in biopharmaceutical companies are more based on the academic background of the investment team.
@HaotianGuo_qb
From the perspective of an insider, "biopharmaceutical companies use PPT until IPO", "Moderna was founded in 2012, IPOed in 2018, and only had its first product after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This is already a very successful example, and it was finally implemented for you to see", "Quantum Si, the leader in protein sequencing, only published a paper and had a PPT after it went public in 2020."
Again, Paul mentioned the liquidity issue for biotech stocks.
Biotech stocks typically trade based on the value of their assets, with their prices also influenced by the company's "burn rate" for developing those assets. Generally, the price of such stocks will steadily decline, reflecting the company's continued consumption of funds during the development process.
However, when positive data comes in, the stock price may rise 5 or 10 times in a day, while when negative data comes in, the stock price may fall 80% to 90% in a day.
In other words, for investors in sub-DAOs such as $VITA $PSY $GROW, the returns from purchasing these tokens come from their continuous release of scientific research benefits to the market.
Because if these sub-DAOs really conduct drug research and development, they need to sell coins to cash out and invest the money in research and development, and there is a possibility of failure in this process.
Therefore, for traditional biological companies, the best option is often to obtain huge amounts of financing and then put the funds in the bank to earn interest.
Paul has a clear understanding of the existing problems. He said:
Currently, the focus is on the early preclinical development stage, with the goal of transferring intellectual property from universities and providing financial support to researchers, laboratories or teams, usually between $200,000 and $1 million, to complete preclinical research, meaning they can be purchased and continued developed by biotech or pharmaceutical companies, thereby achieving a seamless transition of technology.
This is to overcome the problem that a lot of innovation stagnates in the academic stage. Many early biotech companies fail not because of insufficient innovation, but because of lack of funding and market visibility. For example, Pfizer has only 12 drug scouts in all of North America, responsible for working with universities to find intellectual property.
In the early development stage, the regulatory burden is light, so we focus on this area. However, once entering the clinical stage (such as applying for an investigational new drug IND), the regulatory requirements will increase significantly.
We also know that the current liquidity and resources of the entire community are not enough to support large-scale clinical trials. In the long run, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) we built may initiate clinical trials autonomously or even create spin-off companies to coordinate these trials. This is an exciting vision, but to truly realize it, we still need stronger real-world integration and financial support.
However, @HaotianGuo_qb also poured cold water on this, saying, "What can you do with $1 million? It's all gone if you discover a new drug that may be effective against a known target."
So, in summary, I believe that the original intention of Bio was to solve existing problems in the field of drug research. Moreover, changing the inherent writing methods of traditional industries and linking more individuals to participate in a decentralized, trustless and token-incentive way is exactly the original intention of the existence of blockchain.
It is very appropriate to solve this problem with blockchain, but this road will take a very long time, maybe several years or even decades, and it requires huge investment.
$BIO Token Economic Model and Split Analysis
1/ Initial Allocation
Total Supply: 3,320,000,000
BIO Token Status: Non-transferable Max Supply: Uncapped, determined by BIO governance. New BIO can be minted for protocol or network growth, which requires replacing existing BIO tokens by deploying a new token contract.
The initial circulating chips are 39.05%, and the public offering has huge profit-taking, so there may be heavy selling pressure in the early stage.
2/ Initial distribution of BIO In the Genesis phase, the total supply of BIO will be divided into the following eight categories (see the table and chart below): Community: 56% Community Auction: 20% Community Airdrop: 6% Ecosystem Incentive: 25% Molecule Ecosystem Fund: 5% Investors: 13.6% Core Contributors: 21.2% Advisors: 4.2% Molecule: 5%
Project Expectations
Project expectations mainly come from the following aspects:
1) Binance ecosystem positioning problem.
After missing out on the on-chain MEME and AI Agent concepts, Desci may be the track choice that Binance needs very much.
2) Desci can accommodate a huge amount of funds, and the return on investment is not easy to verify by a certain model, which is actually very conducive to the entry of some unknown money (you know what I mean)
3) The poor have their own IQ tax, and the rich certainly have their own IQ tax. The demand for longevity is a typical IQ tax for the rich. After all, when you have money, you will want to "leave a name in history" and realize your personal value, rather than just pursuing money. Education and medical care are very suitable investment areas; secondly, the pursuit of longevity is also human nature. @cz_binance @VitalikButerin and former Coinbase CTO @balajis are all very interested in the Desci field.
4) The $BIO token model is a very good way to cut off the cost of scientific research, avoiding the embarrassing situation of directly using the mother coin $BIO as scientific research investment and constantly selling coins. On the contrary, as long as the sub-DAO scientific research makes progress, it will empower $BIO.
