The data doesn’t always come in, and the science suffers.

Balázs Szigeti is a researcher at the University of California San Francisco, studying some tricky subjects, such as the effects of psychedelics for chronic pain, eating disorders, and depression. He conducted one of the largest real-world, placebo-controlled studies on psychedelics, along with Robin Carhart-Harris, Amanda Feilding and David Nutt. In it, psychedelic microdosers were sent surveys and asked to self-report on cognitive tasks at various time points—to see if microdosing is helpful, harmful or neutral.

With a study like this, there is, of course, a huge hurdle: People are people—they get distracted, they lose track of their survey logins, and the questions go unanswered.

"You launch these studies and the attrition rate tends to be very high," Szigeti says. "Only about half of the people who sign up are actually completing them."

High dropout rates mean a huge waste of time for the researchers, and big gaps in their knowledge. No research team has yet found a way out. And attrition is a systemic problem in subjects beyond psychedelics.

"Attrition is a headache, but dropping out is understandable," Szigeti says. "After all, participants are not compensated in any form."

A New Ecosystem Arrives

Today, Szigeti is teaming up with PsyDAO, a community owned and governed research funding network, to use new technologies to launch an exciting solution. He's working with Chris Byrnes, a lawyer with Calyx Law, re-imagining intellectual property, Tyler Quigley, a technical specialist at Calyx Law, and Warren Winter, a developmental neuropsychology researcher turned data scientist.

They've created OPSY—the Open Psychedelic Science ecosYstem. OPSY is a portal through which data can be submitted to a research project and participants are rewarded.

Like so many projects at PsyDAO, OPSY aims for more participation in science—and therefore better results.

The Magic of Tokens

In the past, researchers have rewarded survey participants with money or gift cards.

OPSY uses tokens.

Tokens, as you might know, are valuable digital assets—the most famous token is Bitcoin.

Tokens open an exciting world of possibilities that has never existed before, for both participants and researchers.

“In traditional survey studies, value is created only for the researcher who publishes the data,” says Szigeti. “With OPSY we want to change that, and reward participants, so now the value creation is bi-directional.”

OPSY tokens not only have monetary value, but they can also represent partial intellectual property and governance rights.

Using the tokens, people can vote on the project’s future. If someone has 5% of the tokens, they could have about a 5% vote in some governance decisions about the project's future. This gives study participants the ability to have a say in how their data is collected and used by researchers.

OPSY tokens can be provided to participants more anonymously than dollars. And in some cases, token holders can track project funding.

With these perks, the team hopes to motivate participants to stay in studies for longer, increasing the size and quality of datasets. Larger, quality datasets can provide valuable insights into how substances work in the real world, which could lead to better medicines in the long run.

OPSY integrates with a tool researchers already use to gather data, Qualtrics. Once a participant finishes a Qualtrics survey, the data is submitted through OPSY, and tokens can be sent to their wallet.

Meanwhile, researchers can capture rare/difficult datasets, including those pertaining to naturalistic psychedelic use over long periods of time.

Beyond Psychedelics

OPSY will begin with psychedelics, because there is a need for real-world evidence of their effects in humans. However, OPSY can be used for any real-world research that faces financial or privacy-related challenges in recruiting and retaining human research subjects. For example:

• How do lifestyle changes affect diabetes?

• What side effects did a clinical trial miss?

• How effective are existing drugs for off-label use?

[Read more details in the OPSY Whitepaper]

Tokens are Here Now

Tokens may seem like some futuristic abstraction. Yet, Bitcoin's price is discussed on the evening news, and financial systems are adopting cryptocurrency for international payments.

With all this press attention, awareness and use of blockchain technology is growing. One estimate is that, while less than half of Americans knew about the technology in 2021, now 80 percent do. And somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of Americans now own tokens.

OPSY is tapping into that growth, putting the power of tokens and DeSci in the hands of any researcher who wants it. OPSY Mints as IP-NFT

This week, OPSY took a technical step that is, nevertheless, important for the future of science: it registered the intellectual property of OPSY on the blockchain, minting its IP-NFT with Molecule, a leader in DeSci. IP-NFTs are non-fungible tokens representing intellectual property rights, which enables programmatic licensing and revenue sharing.

[For more, read "Intro to IP-NFT" and "Why mint an IP-NFT?" by our incubator, Molecule.]

DeSci: A New Scientific Funding Mechanism

OPSY lets any research team get in on the ground floor of an exciting new field: Decentralized Science, or DeSci.

DeSci is a new financial layer built on crowd participation and the magic of the blockchain to pay for research and dole out intellectual property. This crowdfunding model can give scientists more independence from traditional grant systems.

“If you have a good idea and you can convince the community, you can get money,” says Szigeti.

PsyDAO is part of the BIO Protocol, a group of DeSci DAOs using blockchain technology to fund research on fertility, long COVID, neurodegeneration and other underfunded areas of science. BIO's project was recently opened to the public and is now valued over half a billion dollars. The public who are backing BioDAOs are betting that this new financial layer can lead to quicker and better science.

Funders can directly back PsyDAO on its BIO funding page.

Ready for Some Technical Details?

OPSY's tokens are built not on the Bitcoin blockchain, but on Ethereum—a decade-old, well-trusted blockchain network used by computer scientists, artists, and innovators using the programmability of tokens and smart contracts to solve real-world problems. Ethereum can handle complex tasks like managing scientific data and automatically sending rewards.

OPSY's smart contracts guarantee that when participants submit data through an OPSY-facilitated study, they will be rewarded with Ethereum-based tokens such as the stable coin $USDC—which can easily be exchanged for dollars—without compromising their privacy along the way. Participants will also be awarded OPSY intellectual property tokens (IPTs), which give them governance rights over OPSY, empowering participants to play an active role in how their data is used.

The USDC tokens will work for anyone who has a crypto wallet, including very common ones like CoinBase and Metamask.

[Read about PsyDAO's tokens, and how our $PSY token sale raised $2 million for psychedelic science and culture.]

First Projects

The OPSY team is in talks to launch our first collaborations with some of the best and brightest in the psychedelic field. The first project planned will focus on long-term psychedelic use. Why is this important? The vast majority of studies focus on what happens after a few psychedelic drug sessions. Here, the team instead wants to focus on how years, and decades, of psychedelic use affects people in ways that are not feasible in traditional clinical trials.

Soon, OPSY will mint IPTs for the project. A portion of the OPSY IPTs will be sold to the general public to fund the initial OPSY projects.

“Everybody understands traditional academia is broken, we just do not have an alternative yet," says Szigeti. "Experimentation is the heart of science and DeSci is an experiment to fix science. I am beyond excited to be a part of this experiment."

The data, and the breakthroughs, are closer than ever before.

To learn more about OPSY or use the tech in your research, email tyler@psydao.io or join the PsyDAO Discord channel about OPSY.