From Open Software Movement to Open Research Movement: Why DeSci will be the next big wave for Web3

By: Jason Fang, Managing Partner at Sora Ventures

Science is a very broad terminology that covers anything from chemistry, biology, and physics to robotics, rocketry, and IoT — it echoes almost anything that improves the lives of human beings. However, the procedure from research to application requires an enormous amount of capital injection, time, and resources which historically have been backed by centralized entities which also own the IP and dictate the lifespan of the research.

Decentralized Science or DeSci is the idea that science-based projects can be open-sourced to form communities that fuel the mission financially, through knowledge sharing or other forms of resource sharing. This is meaningful because this provides the option for researchers, professors, and scientists to continue their work with greater autonomy without being forced to take certain commands from any centralized authority.

Most importantly, we have seen this trend of investment occur in 2015 and 2016 when the core investment for blockchain funds was investing into enterprise use cases that surrounded companies that had a hybrid technology stack (usually 90% non-blockchain, 10% blockchain) but most of them could not continue their fundraising round because the idea of a token was not available or the team was too conservative. A lot of the companies that these funds invested in were also around biotech, healthcare…