DeSci and Metaverse: what lies at the interception of 2022 Web3 trends
In 2020, DeFi changed the financial landscape forever; in 2021, NFTs disrupted the way of assets ownership, culture and entertainment; GameFi and Metaverse trends attracted millions of people in 2022.
Art, communications, technologies, economy and finance are natively floating to Web3 space — and what about science? It still lacks real decentralization, experiences institutional influence, and seeks a supportive hand from funds to enthusiastic researchers to conduct practical experiments for human well-being.
Following the path of higher transparency, enhanced security and a community-driven approach, DeSci, or the Decentralized Science, was born. According to Ethereum Foundation, it is a movement that aims to build public infrastructure for funding, creating, reviewing, crediting, storing, and disseminating scientific knowledge fairly and equitably using the Web3 stack.
Advanced research methods and economy of DeSci
The key problem that modern science suffers from can be described with a single phenomenon — a “valley of death”, a metaphor often used to describe the gap between university research and its commercialization. Besides, funding is any scientist’s pain point: researchers spend days preparing proposals and reaching out for grants (an overall average of 34 days per proposal, says the observational study of Australian researchers).
NFTs said a new word (and not the only one) in the creator economy, shifting the value and rights from any middlemen to their owners and creators. It works well for science as well in the frameworks of gaining patents, trademarks, and copyrights. In 2021, the University of Copenhagen was the first to introduce NFTs being used for a transfer of intellectual property ownership in medical research (IP-NFTs).
What are the benefits of this approach and NFTs’ utility in DeSci for the community?
- First, such NFTs serve as proof that their owners are participants of a research experiment and have rights for rewards. The dedicated communities taking part in the donorship of data or funding the research become not only contributors but holders of IP rights.
- DeSci utilizes the decentralized power of blockchain technology to store data, thereby making it transparent and accessible from all across the globe.
- The transparency and ownership of IP rights will help researchers mitigate government censorship and control over true scientific data.
- For investors, this is an opportunity to find the next breakthrough in their area of interest and expertise.
Decentralized Science landscape is already vast, there are plenty of companies associated with biotech, art, scientific publishing, etc. Gaming will add value to this list and bring AI and big data-based innovations to next-gen practical use cases, meanwhile gaming metaverse turns out to be a cutting-edge and hands-on space for scaling up DeSci experiments and developments.
What Metaverse brings to the DeSci table
We at Farcana consider metaverse advocates and blockchain gaming fans to be early adopters of Web3 and enthusiastic donors of digital data crucial for big data science. Currently, we witness that Metaverse is becoming an outstanding environment for conducting experiments and building economic and social ties.
In their turn, Web3, DAOs and NFTs are up-to-date and convenient tools to create a new economic layer for DeSci. This shift has the great potential to boost innovations and make them viable on the market, increase research funding, and meet researchers and tech-savvy communities of gamers and Web3 adopters.
Having access to donors of digital data is the most important thing for any big data scientist, and metaverse is the unique opportunity to collect and analyze it. Farcana Labs is the first Web3 decentralized scientific lab and a global Farcana gaming metaverse spin-off that pursue DeSci in gaming/metaverse industry. Donors of data for Farcana Labs can be rewarded not only with funding but IP rights for solutions created on the basis of their data.
Dr. Dimitry Mihaylov, Chief Scientific Officer of Farcana and Head of Farcana Labs, shares his vision on DeSci:
“DeSci is an uprising star and promising trend on the blockchain and Web3 stack, and Farcana Labs as a scientific arm of Farcana gaming metaverse turns its eyes into this direction. We are conducting scientific research at the intersection of AI, big data, metaverse and gaming — now we see the way how its results can be patented, distributed and implemented on the market relying on the basic principles of DeSci.”
Soon, we will introduce our solution and platform in all their glory. And we strongly believe that the full acceptance of DeSci in the global scientific community will foster science funding significantly, and knowledge will no longer be stored in repositories.
