One symptom of a society-wide disease:
On a sidewalk in America, a 5-year-old girl steps around a guy passed out. Other guys are huddled around pipes and tin foil. The little girl grasps her mom's hand, worried.
A hundred thousand people die in America each year from drug overdoses. Depression is through the roof. Suicide is climbing, especially in teen girls.
When you see a person struggling, you might give them a dollar and a granola bar. If you could, you might offer a better gift.
While there is no instant cure for addiction, homelessness or sickness, studies have shown for 60 years—everywhere from Boston to Colorado to the Amazon—that psychedelics can help treat addiction.
What the microscope and the stethoscope are to the body, psychedelics are to the mind and spirit. Dozens of cultures think so. Amazonian shamans drink ayahuasca to find sickness. Mazatec curanderos eat mushrooms to see the roots of family strife. Psychedelics like ibogaine, Ayahuasca and mushrooms famously show people how they got hurt, who loves them, and who they love.
In every case, people do psychedelics together to solve problems. That’s what we’re aiming at here at PsyDAO—the psychedelic decentralized autonomous organization. We believe in Web3—the blockchain—as a way to bring people together, too. And so psychedelics and Web3, we believe, could help the West in our death spiral. So the next time you see someone addicted or despairing, why not give them a ticket to an Ayahuasca ceremony and some Bitcoin, or some mushrooms and some $PSY.
Watch our Manifesto:
Humanity stands at a crossroads. Ruin or revolution. - PsyDAO manifesto
We need better psychedelic microscopes and more skilled operators. For instance: ibogaine kills about one in every 200 or 300 people who try it. Psilocybin microdosing may damage heart valves. In today's Psychedelic Renaissance, researchers, therapists, and shamans search for new molecules, shape old ones, and find better uses for old ones.
The imperfection of psychedelic compounds is precisely one reason why we've launched DMXE—our groundbreaking research initiative into a novel dissociative psychedelic, led by our first Early Career Fellow, Zeus Tipado. DMXE has many of the properties of Ketamine, one of the most useful medicines on the planet, used for pain and depression, while lasting longer and being described as “softer” and “more visual,” two potentially useful traits. Our DMXE research could build upon the therapeutic potential of psychedelics and dissociatives, the things that make these substances so valuable for treating depression and PTSD.
Psychedelics have provided the human race with radical shifts in human consciousness. - PsyDAO manifesto
Too often, psychedelic progress isn't happening very quickly. No major new molecules have been approved by the FDA.
Things are moving slowly because we’re developing and legalizing psychedelics with old, dull, tools. Funding comes in trickles. Scientists waste their energy writing grants. Citizen scientists can't work without risking jail.
PsyDAO will revolutionize R&D and ownership of psychedelics IP using the permissionless, trustless, decentralized, and censorship-resistant web, web3 - PsyDAO manifesto
How are we different? First, we are a decentralized autonomous organization, a DAO. While there are leaders of a DAO, there's not a hierarchy. We're more like a cooperative, dozens of people working together on projects big and small. So we can take chances, and we're less bound by the directives of a few decision-makers.
Our OPSY initiative exemplifies this approach. OPSY is a Tokens for Data research framework that rewards participation in surveys. The idea was brought forth by community members who wanted a tool to help themselves do their job better, by paying people in tokens to do surveys about microdosing. Their idea was quickly funded by the community and now stands ready to be deployed. At PsyDAO, we’re creating a global community of researchers who can safely contribute to and benefit from collective discoveries, all tracked and verified on the blockchain.
PsyDAO members will be able to vote to allocate funding towards the studies and research they believe is most relevant, choose which data is shared, and govern how the output of these studies will come to market. - PsyDAO manifesto
After we make moves, we capture value using IP-NFTs—that is, non-fungible tokens containing intellectual property. This will allow the ideas behind new molecules or art to move with the speed of a Bored Ape to reduce the friction involved in everything around psychedelics.
This intellectual exchange is about to find a new home at Kene Cafe, a soon-to-open IRL space on the banks of the Amazon where Shipibo artists can gather and sell their tapestries. Kene Cafe—named after the intricate geometric patterns seen in plant medicine visions—is a real-time collaboration between indigenous wisdom-keepers and PsyDAO’s Web3 regens. We’re supporting the Cafe with funds and logistics.
Psychedelics have elevated the human mind beyond its humble limitations to help us grow and flourish. - PsyDAO manifesto
Our token raise validated our hypothesis. On Bicycle Day, April 19, we offered our $PSY token, the essential unit of value in PsyDAO, and we raised 661 ETH—about $1.4 million at today’s prices—for psychedelic science and culture.
Will $1.4 million worth of $PSY really solve anything real?
We hope so. In any case, we have to try something. After all—like in an action movie—the stakes keep rising.
It wasn't too long ago that we realized our true position: that we are an infantile civilization on the edge of an abyss. As communicated best by Carl Sagan—an unrepentant stoner—the sun will eventually expand and incinerate this planet.
If we are to preserve the light of consciousness, we need to make a shift in the consciousness of our society and ourselves. Psychedelics are an essential part of that shift. - PsyDAO manifesto
Our AI initiative, BeeARD (Bioeconomic Environment for Autonomous Research Discovery), puts many of our principles into practice. Funded through a democratic vote of our $PSYC token holders, BeeARD is a multi-agent AI system that addresses key challenges: generating high-quality proposals, streamlining data analysis, and unlocking fragmented datasets. Originally conceived as PsyBEE for psychedelic research, it has evolved to support any scientific field. We've minted an IP-NFT for the project—$BeeARD—allowing the community to govern and benefit from its development.
Our projects have multiple ways of doing things, but all of them aim for the same thing: a better, healthier life for as many people as possible.
If we're lucky, before the Earth explodes and leaves us homeless on a cosmic scale, we'll get on a spaceship and head out. To see this truth—and see yourself more clearly—think about getting yourself an ibogaine ceremony and some $PSY.
[One last note: DAOs are powered by regular people working toward their passions. If you believe in the power of psychedelics and Web3 and want to contribute to PsyDAO, please:
