Modern Science Deserves Modern FinTech

Science research today operates much like it did fifty years ago, despite massive tech advances in our world. This outdated system creates barriers that keep promising research locked in labs. We can’t get cutting-edge medicine with such antiquated science investment systems or brilliant professors still chasing citations in publications instead of chasing cures for dementia.

Yet we can do better. Patients deserve the life-saving and life-extending therapies that researchers already have discovered. How can we get it to them within the next ten years?

DeSci is the way. How so?

Let’s look at the status quo and then how to modernize it.

Science’s Underperforming Status Quo

Funding: Currently funding is highly scattered and overly concentrated. Scientists spend up to 80% of their time fundraising and 20% of time doing research, burning valuable time. Scientists change research fields depending on funding availability, neglecting potential breakthrough areas which unfortunately do not receive funding. Concentrated funding from private sources brings a strong conflict of interest that biases research outcomes toward for-profit sponsors and potentially away from other needed cures (like neglected tropical diseases). Moreover, most of drug discovery profits go to pharmaceutical companies, which are profitable yet not ideal for health outcomes. We would have better health if we focused on health care (prevention) and not sick care (treatment through pharma).

Replication: Up to 85% of science isn’t reproducible, wasting at least $170 billion annually (according to ResearchHub). Scientists work in silos and often fail to report negative results. So much of science is built on invalid data.

Problematic Intellectual Property (IP): IP remains analog in a digital world; not programmatic. Patents are monopolistic and have skewed incentives. IP rights are illiquid and thus hard to transact or transfer. Licensing also lacks global uniform standards.

Publishing: Science suffers from perverse incentives that use citations as a success metric, thus prioritizing quantity over quality. Scientific knowledge is inaccessible to those who need it. So much important scientific literature lives behind prohibitively expensive paywalls, inaccessible to many. Even $50 to pay to access a publication is too much for most researchers. Research remains in closed silos. Scientists also detest that HARKing remains in operation– a questionable research practice of presenting a post-hoc hypothesis at the beginning of a research report as if it were an a priori hypothesis.

Equity: Institutional elitism pervades, so many scientists get disregarded if not from Ivy League institutions. Age also matters, for less than 2% of U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding goes to under 35 year olds, and grants often go to the same baby boomer researchers. Internationally, funding is overly concentrated in the “global north” countries. Brain drain affects many nations, losing their top talent. Geographic isolation and language barriers also hinder equitable contributions to science.

Data Access: Private companies charge for researchers to access data generated by government grants (taxpayer money), a skewed publishing house monopoly. Patient data is siloed, making research hard. Research data sets are scattered between academia, startups, and businesses. Current researchers must rely on archaic tooling manually stored in inaccessible, siloed data centers. Consequently, medical data lacks interoperability between researchers. Only one country (the United Kingdom) has a working biodata bank.

How Does DeSci Upgrade the Science Model?

DeSci is a movement to improve science through decentralized public infrastructure for funding, creating, reviewing, crediting, storing, owning, and dissemination of scientific knowledge. In short, DeSci prioritizes collaboration while the status quo prioritizes competition.

Versus conventional science, DeSci offers these advantages:

Funding: In DeSci, funding comes programmable, faster, more equitable, crowdsourced, having higher risk tolerance, and decentralized. Data can get monetized when decentralized finance (DeFi) turns research intellectual property into digital assets on a blockchain– “tokenization.” DeSci can channel funding from 100+ sources into one research project via efficient crypto finance rails–something that would be way too costly and cumbersome to achieve via fiat finance rails. Imagine the bank fees and overhead costs of 100+ bank wires. That could cost less than $80 if using efficient, low-cost blockchain networks of DeSci.

Data Access: Data is immutability recorded on a public database (known as a blockchain). Patents gain improved transparency, for their content is available to anyone with an internet connection instead of being hidden in national governments’ paper files. Data becomes interoperable and open source. Scientific discoveries have clear provenance, preventing time-consuming arguments about science’s origin. (Note: disputed provenance set back science for years during the ensuing bitter controversy (pitting the Broad Institute versus University of California-Berkeley researchers) during the race to discover the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, (CRSPR) gene-editing technology as chronicled in The Code Breaker.

Replication: Scientific data sets are digitally preserved in the IP-NFT and thus other researchers can use them, saving precious research resources. The underlying data gets cited automatically in subsequent research thanks to DeSci Nodes and underlying Proof of Knowledge products (being built by DeSci World). The Nodes are an open-science solution for researchers who want to publish and manage manuscripts, data, code, and all other (digital) files and objects related to research, thus making it simple for scientists to create accessible, interoperable, and compute-enabled ad easily-downloaded research objects.

Intellectual Property: Tokenization allows for faster verification, better cybersecurity, improved liquidity, and potentially higher valuations for scientists.

Publishing: DeSci offers new incentives, open reviewing process, expedited turnaround, iterative, and improved access to researchers. When using DeSci Nodes, scientists use inherent citations that are tagged to the original data. Proof of Knowledge protocols can then feed research into artificial intelligence models to create an opinionated AI agent that can recommend treatments for specific genetic backgrounds. DeSci projects like ResearchHub use crypto tokens to incentivize academics to interact in a more open and collaborative way.

Equity: Anyone with internet connection can take part. Geography, class, racial, gender, academic affiliation no longer matter. The science matters, and DeSci enables a more true meritocracy. DeSci is a boon to patients as well. Undeserved medical areas can access funding by selling intellectual property non-fungible tokens (IP-NFTs) that reward scientists. While previously, large pharma companies cannot benefit from a global network of researchers because companies are competing among themselves. In DeSci, global collaboration is possible because investment collectives (DAOs) are aligned toward some use case (like ovary health).

DeSci isn’t just a tech upgrade — it’s a complete reimagining of how science works. By breaking down traditional barriers and creating new funding paths, we can build a scientific ecosystem that’s faster, fairer, and more effective at turning research into real solutions.

Merito is bringing this tech upgrade. Patients deserve it.