TCRs for Research(er) Funding

To get started on token curated registries, I recommend the TCR reading list.

Current State Of Scientific Funding

No research is possible without funding, which is usually delivered in the form of grants.

The scientific community spends an extraordinary amount of time, energy, and effort into the writing and reviewing of research proposals, most of which end up not getting funded at all. To receive a grant, researchers must write an application, which can involve weeks to months of work. Depending on the field, the success rates to get accepted can vary between 9%-30%.

These proposals are then reviewed by other scientists in order to pick the winners, who could also be spending their time doing research. This means that, in total, millions of potential research hours are spent just allocating funds every year. Researchers are spending 40% of their time chasing funds to perform their studies.

The worst part is that most research proposals are fundable and solid, but under the current model, there’s hypercompetition and a shortage of grant money, so scientists have to constantly churn grant petitions in hopes of getting a piece of the pie.

Some Proposed Alternatives

There are multiple alternative funding methods put forward and in debate.

Researcher UBI

Simple basic income for every researcher, this would clearly remove most overhead from the system. The problem is that in most countries, funds would be insufficient to adequately fund 100% of researchers.

Liquid Funding

This proposal grants a smaller baseline allowance to every researcher, and then looks to leverage the network of peers to effectively allocate funds to the most promising researchers. The disadvantage of this option is that you have to somehow police that researchers are not self-dealing, either directly or indirectly under some kind of circular or quid pro quo scheme.

Using TCRs to Solve The Problem

We can use TCRs to increase fund allocation efficiency, greatly diminishing the time that researchers spend trying to acquire funds, and increasing actual research hours.

We can take some of the best qualities of both previous proposed systems, without inheriting the drawbacks:

• We fund researchers directly instead of funding grant proposals. This diminishes the number of decisions the system has to make. As we previously stated, most research initiatives are solid and worthy of being funded by current standards. We don’t really need to have very sophisticated filters in place. As opposed to UBI, only x number of researchers will be accepted into the registry, depending on the funds available, this can guarantee that participating researchers receive meaningful allowances.
• The TCR will filter the top candidates, but instead of relying on an implicit web of trust, there will be an explicit cryptoeconomic system with incentives designed to curate the best possible list.

There should be multiple TCRs and they should focus on curating a list of productive researchers in different scientific fields.

Each system would look similar to a regular TCR, with the addition of a fund, where donors can send money. This fund will allocate from its reserves at regular intervals to all researchers accepted into the registry.

Extra Variables

There are some extra variables required to manage the research fund, apart from the regular TCR variables.

period_duration: Time that passes between each allocation of funds.

percentage_allocation: What percentage of the fund will be distributed per epoch.

donation_freeze_time: How long are funds frozen before a donor can cancel a deposit.

In Conclusion

Using an ecosystem of TCRs can facilitate giving funds to the top researchers in every scientific field, while greatly diminishing overheads in comparison with the status quo. We are building such a system at OSN as one of our proof of concepts on different ways that blockchain technology can improve the current state of affairs in science. We will launch the first TCR specialized in curating blockchain researchers.

If you’re interested in discussing or learning more, you are welcome to join our telegram and continue the conversation.