We are reminiscing about an exciting few days at the DeSci London Conference at the Francis Crick Institute from the 15-16 January 2023. It was an extremely vibrant and stimulating event with people from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels in the DeSci space. All the talks, discussions and informal exchanges were memories to be cherished and furthered our excitement about the potential of decentralized science.

At Retrox we have focussed on the development of on-chain infrastructure for optimally and retroactively funding public goods. We have decided to focus our attention to one particular type of public good; open source research and science. The advancement of knowledge is after all one of the most important human endeavors and we’d love to bridge the gap between the traditional scientific and blockchain ecosystems. The use of blockchain tools for improving funding, review and publishing infrastructure in science is a relatively new space with a lot of emerging ideas and promising proof of principle demonstrations (check out our existing review of the DeSci ecosystem in our last blog post here: https://mirror.xyz/retroxblog.eth/XhfnrUo6097VLTg7dM0FZ5W4UFvFcasZyrakSUYaTS4). What we realized in our review of this exciting ecosystem is that it requires a robust layer at the bottom which acts as an identity & credential management tool, as well as a Sybil resistance mechanism. This allows for a variety of verticals which can be stacked on top, such as a social networking tools for scientists, paper submission competitions or more general scientific funding competitions.

DeSci is a broad term used to describe a movement to overcome existing difficulties and bottlenecks in scientific research with the help of web3 tools and existing ideas and paradigms in the blockchain space.

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By: Jan Ole Ernst, Orlando Fraser, Fernando Almansa, Jessica Pointing, Konrad Kopp, Kyle Duffy