In Science We Trust. In Crypto... We’ll See

🍏your Sunday read 16th February 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

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Hey Scholar👋

Our story this week is about the convergence of two things I bet you’d have never imagined: research and cryptocurrency. It’s a super interesting microcosm of the research community, who believe that funding science with crypto is not only possible, it will make science better.

It goes without saying that this piece is written from a purely academic standpoint and is not intended to promote cryptocurrency.

So grab a beverage and your reading glasses, let's get thinking.

In Science We Trust. In Crypto… We’ll See.

Written by The Tatler

Even if you won’t admit to using Scihub, you have definitely heard of it. The (in)famous automatic paywall circumvention tool that could get you a copy of a paywalled journal article faster than you could say “institutional access” (at least before 2023, when a court order banned uploading new articles). Recently, Scihub had become so ubiquitous and so reliable that we forgot it wasn’t just a normal part of the Internet’s scholarly infrastructure, like PubMed, Scopus, or Google Scholar. And like other free services, we never asked where funding for its operation came from.

The question of how Scihub has managed to keep the doors to knowledge wide open without charging its users is fascinating:

the answer leads to a new, transparent, and democratic model that reimagines how we fund access to knowledge, maintain the scientific record, and support research.

Scihub’s costs include storing its collection of 88 million articles (which the Letter estimates to be about 100TB of data), purchasing new websites to replace the ones that get blocked, and, if you’re feeling charitable, a salary so its founder can meet her basic human needs (like food and shelter). All in all, the access it provides to researchers locked out of knowledge costs “a few thousand dollars a month”, per the website.

The service provided to the research community was nearly flawless (except for being illegal) and was funded by donations from users, primarily in cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. In fact, Scihub currently accepts donations in 13 different cryptocurrencies, including its own $scihub token. 

This funding model is significant for two reasons: first, it worked, and second, it gave rise to a movement known as DeSci (Decentralized Science) 

that aims to democratize scientific knowledge and funding using blockchain technology, a type of secure and shared digital recordkeeping system.

In a sentence, DeSci is about building blockchain-based communities that fund, organize, and govern scientific research through their own cryptocurrency tokens without relying on traditional institutions like universities and governments. It’s very radical but the benefits of this system according to its advocates are:

If you’re unable to access scientific research, have had your contributions to a project  ignored or struggle to convince funders of the merit of your ideas, then this all sounds rather spectacular.

And if Scihub can fund itself for 14 years (and counting) using more or less this model, then what are we waiting for?

DeSci sees institutional control over research - by universities, funders, and publishers - as the core problem it aims to solve. It envisions a decentralized, transparent utopia where anyone can conduct research, own their IP, fund and be funded, and access all knowledge. In this, DeSci is right:

institutions do keep the doors to research “locked” which allows them to profit from research and knowledge.

The commodification of research as a product that can be sold leads to paywalls; the individual pursuit of prestige for promotions and pay rises drives professors to exploit younger colleagues; expecting that research must generate economic value pushes funding bodies to favor projects with clear commercial or practical applications. 

However, spending more than 10 minutes browsing DeSci forums or X/Twitter threads will tell you that, despite its charming ideals, the young movement has kept the fatal flaw of the traditional academic institutions it seeks to destroy: DeSci is obsessed with money.

Blockchain has the potential to bring the best qualities of DeSci to life, but at the time of writing, its only major application is cryptocurrency transactions, trading, and speculation.

Money, and not scholarly advancement, is still the foundation of the DeSci model. It’s just crypto tokens instead of dollar bills.  

DeSci organizations range from plausibly conducting actual research (like AthenaDAO and DeSci Labs) to nothing more than crypto-investment providers (BionicDAO) and must, by definition, all operate within the crypto system, which is a financial one. 

Nearly all of them are funded by crypto Venture Capital and Investment firms that buy tokens to own IP in the hopes of selling it (or at least, profit from the resulting products): funding research is expensive, and members of a community buying a few tokens doesn’t raise enough.

The tokens unique to a community can also be bought and sold by anyone (it’s blockchain, after all), meaning their prices can be (and are) manipulated by speculative traders with no real stake in the research.

Tokens funding the research experience short-term, hype-driven spikes in their price following positive news on research progress, and dramatic drops when setbacks occur.

Organizations offer to pay their researchers in tokens, and with a share of the IP they generate, yet again linking a financial incentive to research. These tokens are, at best, a precarious way to store your funds, and, at worst, a mechanism to extract money from smaller participants in the system. 

The ideas behind DeSci are bold and certain elements are worth pursuing: moving beyond the PDF as the unit of knowledge for example, sounds rather exciting. Being able to bundle text, images, data, and peer-reviews into a single research object could improve transparency and the scientific record’s integrity. A clear log of individual contributions to research and meaningful recognition of the work done is also long overdue.

These good ideas are worth holding on to, but the financial nature of blockchain itself is a massive obstacle. Ultimately, DeSci is powered by a desire for cold, hard cash, just like the established research model.

Without the separation of financial speculation from the infrastructure of knowledge-sharing, DeSci won’t be the hero we need. 

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