What Is VitaDAO?

VitaDAO is a DeSci (Decentralized Science) protocol focusing on early stage longevity science research that improves lives. It funds and develops real world scientific research through Molecule’s IP-NFT and IPT frameworks.

Key Takeaways

• The Decentralized Science narrative uses blockchain and decentralization to improve funding and collaboration in science. 

• VitaDAO funds and develops real world research along with utilizing Molecule’s IP-NFT and IPT frameworks.

• IP-NFTs tokenize intellectual property on the blockchain, while IPT (Intellectual Property Tokens) are fungible tokens that represent ownership of the associated scientific research IP-NFT, placing control in the hands of the community.

• VitaDAO completed the first IPTs public sale for VITA-FAST, an IPT created for crowdfunding of ongoing research on autophagy.

This article is brought to you by VitaDAO.

One of the greatest challenges facing scientific research and drug development is the ‘valley of death’ that spans early-stage scientific discoveries and the development of that research into innovations that reach patients.

To overcome the valley of death, research projects must find the right investors for funding, and overcome other operational challenges before the product finally reaches the market. However, even if it reaches the market, such products are usually sold at a significant markup.

This is where Decentralized Science comes in. 

What Is Decentralized Science (DeSci)?

DeSci is an abbreviation for Decentralized Science. As the name implies, DeSci aims to use blockchain technology to develop permissionless and community-controlled facilities for the advancement and management of scientific research. DeSci projects present a platform for researchers to obtain funding, document their research, and share access to intellectual property without censorship or control by organizations. 

Ultimately, DeSci has the goal of transforming research funding by providing an alternative to traditional grants, VCs, and patents. Through blockchain technology, DeSci aims to return ownership of scientific research back in the hands of the public – the end beneficiaries of these technologies.

DeSci projects like VitaDAO are seeking means to employ decentralized technology to alleviate this issue. To date, VitaDAO has raised over $10 million for health research projects and about 40% of this fund has been dedicated to longevity research projects. 

“Community-led biotech will become the default – decentralized organizations where patients, parents, drug developers and researchers come together through aligned incentives to develop drugs quickly, cheaply, and ethically.
This is the promise of decentralized science, a community-driven, bottoms-up effort to put scientific funding, publishing, and radical experimentation back in the hands of the people” 

–  Tyler Golato: Molecule Co-founder & VitaDAO co-initiator 

Now let’s take a closer look at VitaDAO and how it’s creating a new paradigm of funding science. 

Understanding VitaDAO and How It Works

VitaDAO is a DeSci community governed by VITA holders that funds early-stage longevity research. Members of the DAO include hundreds of academic scientists and longevity researchers, in addition to pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and crypto industry heavyweights like former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. Together, the members of the DAO will vote on DAO proposals and participate in the incubation and commercialization of VitaDAO projects.

VitaDAO employs blockchain technology and tokenization from Molecule to develop a platform that allows researchers to adopt flexible approaches to managing and obtaining funding for their research. Molecule is a decentralized biotech protocol that is building a web3 marketplace for research-related IPs with the goal of connecting academics and biotech companies with funding, while enabling patients, researchers, and other investors to directly govern and own research-related IPs.

Molecule’s technology enables researchers to document their projects and findings on the blockchain through NFTs as IP-NFTs, which can represent full legal IP rights and data control. The IP-NFT can be sold to DAOs and their communities, and also further tokenized to grant holders governance rights over the IP in order to fund the next stage of research and development (IPTs) – we’ll take a closer look at IP-NFTs and IPTs later. 

While institutional funding has aided the advancements in science and technology over the years, both disciplines suffer from the rigidity and centralized control. With VitaDAO, the goal is to move funding back into the hands of an active and involved public, with the vision of improving collaboration and liquidity, enabling the discoverability of projects, and enhancing quality and cost-effectiveness.

What Is VITA? 

VITA is the governance token of VitaDAO. It grants its holders voting rights on VitaDAO’s longevity research funding proposals. Individuals and organizations can earn VITA by contributing research, funds, or other work that supports the DAO. 

The VITA supply is capped at 64,298,880 tokens, with 57.7% of these tokens remaining unminted and available in VitaDAO’s treasure to ensure the organization’s longevity. Of the remaining 42.3%, 10% was released through a Gnosis Token Auction, 12.5% to working groups that support the DAO, 10% to service providers that contribute resources to the DAO, and the remaining 9.8% has been issued to Strategic Contributors who provide expertise, ecosystem access, and financial support to VitaDAO.

Funding Science with IP-NFTs

IP-NFTs are non-fungible tokens that represent full legal IP rights and data access to scientific research developed by Molecule. Through IP-NFTs, researchers can fund their research projects by selling their potential future IP to an investor who is keen on owning the IP that may arise from the research project. Access to research data is gated through NFT ownership, where the IP-NFT owner is the only party who can access the data. 

Researchers can even use IP-NFTs for further rounds of fundraising, such as programming funding events into the NFT so that every time it is resold, a certain percentage is returned to the creator as royalties. More powerfully, IP-NFTs can be used to mint fungible tokens and sell those to fundraise.

These fungible tokens attached to the IP-NFTs are known as IP tokens (IPTs). The creator can specify the details of the fungible token, including the number of tokens to be minted. The minted tokens can be used to raise funds for the project and grant governance rights to holders around the research and its results, in a similar fashion to ICOs and IDOs. Now, let’s take a look at IPTs.

IPTs: Enabling funding and Governance

Molecule’s technology also enables IP-NFT owners to turn their IP-NFTs into fungible tokens (IP Tokens).  When an IP-NFT owner implements the Tokenizer function and creates a token for the project, they not only open the project to a novel funding system but also create a decentralized IP government for the specific research project. 

The decentralized IP government (aka IP DAO) consists of every holder of the IPT, either from the initial funding exercise, from purchases on exchanges, or acquisitions through P2P transfers. After the first mint and the initial funding exercise using the IPTs, the control of the project moves to the IP DAO. Further mint and management is approved by the community via IP DAO votes. 

IPT holders have extensive control of the project, including:

Control over the IP licensing process: Here, the IP DAO determines the parties involved and the terms of IP licenses. The IP DAO is also in charge of managing how the proceeds from this licensing are utilized. The IP DAO assumes the financial and governance rights of the project. This is in line with the goal of letting the public stay in control of the drugs and other products they use.

Economic rights: IPT holders have a financial right over the project they funded although this doesn’t necessarily mean financial benefits. The governance reach of IPT holders is mainly managerial. This means that the IP DAO decides how the profits from the project’s licenses, drug sales, and other activities related to the projects are managed.

IPT dilution: To expand the IP DAO or for any reason, a project can decide to mint more IPTs. This is equivalent to a share dilution program. In this case, the proposal must go through the community. 

VITA-FAST IPT tokens

VitaDAO’s first launch of IPTs is VITA-FAST, which enables token holders to interact directly with the work of the Korolchuk Lab at Newcastle University, a team committed to identifying compounds that could potentially kickstart autophagy and rejuvenate aged cells.

VITA-FAST is one of the earliest applications of IPTs. A total of 1,000,000 (one million) VITA-FAST tokens were minted using the Korolchuk IP-NFT. 10% of the supply will be sold to VITA token holders; these tokens will be vested for 2 months. The project researchers will reserve 5% of the total supply with a 4-year vesting period. Newcastle University will also receive 1% of the total VITA-FAST supply, while 10% of the total supply was used to provide initial liquidity on decentralized exchanges.

The funding process for the VITA-FAST project was managed by VitaDAO. The exercise was reportedly a success with 1700% oversubscription. While this is mainly thanks to public interest in longevity projects like the one Korolchuk is working on, it is also an illustration of the feasibility of VitaDAO’s technology and a testament to how an improved liquidity system can drive funding for a specific project within the VitaDAO ecosystem.

VitaDAO’s Role in BioPharma

Since its inception, VitaDAO has pursued cooperation with significant drug-related research projects while developing its technology. According to reports, it has raised over $10 million for human-related research and has channeled over $4 million worth of funding to longevity research. The VitaDAO is borderless, participation in its operations is open to individuals anywhere in the world.

By decentralizing its process, it serves a purpose for researchers and everyday drug users. Here are some of the contributions of VitaDAO to BioPharma.

Improves Collaboration and Liquidity

VitaDAO enables researchers to document their project on an immutable layer through NFTs. With publicly verifiable proof of ownership, researchers gain significant flexibility in how they manage their research, including collaborations and distribution of intellectual property. Access to research data is gated by the NFT, and its history and ownership record is stored on-chain.

VitaDAO also encourages collaboration, as researchers can create bounties to enable other laboratories around the world to contribute data to their project in exchange for a share of the IP that is developed by the collective.

VitaDAO is also a key participant in the bio.xyz network, an accelerator and meta-governance layer that supports a diverse range of BioDAOs (AthenaDAO, CryoDAO, ValleyDAO, HairDAO). Bio.xyz enables BioDAOs to fund, govern, and develop tokenized intellectual property (IP) from universities, companies, and researchers worldwide, catalyzing a Cambrian explosion of community-led translational science with shared resources, mentorship, network, and a suite of legal and smart contracts.

This IP-NFT represents full legal IP rights + data access control to biotech research and data at @ScheibyeKnudsen @uni_copenhagen.

Purchased for $325,000 & going directly to fund the R&D.

Virtualised IP is a new asset class.https://t.co/5wFwpX7A1qhttps://t.co/l3zal1TlV3

— Paul Kohlhaas // bio/acc (@paulkhls) August 17, 2021

IP-NFTs can also be tokenized for further funding as IPTs, where individual research projects can raise funds through the crowdsale of IPTs. 

Increase Quality and Cost-Effectiveness of Drug Development

VitaDAO believes that giving patients and researchers governance over medicines will increase the quality and cost-effectiveness of drug development. IPTs enable collaboration without losing the commercial opportunity that incentivizes progress in traditional entities, which, when combined with a stakeholder base of patients, researchers and other supporters, can create an arbitrage opportunity in biotech. By giving more equity to patients and researchers, who are searching for effective cures, this will ideally result in higher quality research at a lower cost. 

Enabling Discoverability of Projects

One challenge around academic research is its discoverability, as it can be challenging for investors to find the right research projects and vice versa. Through partnership with Molecule, a biopharma IP marketplace, researchers and biotech companies can list their projects and discoveries on Molecule to reach a wider network of investors including VitaDAO. This means anyone with an interest in these projects, such as patients and other biotech companies, can easily find them and fund these projects. 

Final Thoughts

You can now own a piece of scientific research. While this might sound simple, it represents a significant shift from the traditional way of research and development. Using blockchain and smart contract technology, VitaDAO aims to move power to the people through decentralization – a primary goal of blockchain technology. Like decentralized finance (DeFi), DeSci is a move away from centralized control. 

VitaDAO and DeSci as a whole are offering researchers a new method of fundraising by tokenizing research and related data sets. Interested parties can purchase a share of specific research projects through IPTs, or engage in governance decisions around which projects to fund. 

Having said this, note that the DeSci narrative is still in its early stages. Before investing in any project, always do your own research and understand how the project works. Finally, this article is only for informational purposes and should not be taken as financial or investment advice.