BIO Protocol - Building out the DeSci Space: What You Need to Know
BIO Protocol - Building out the DeSci Space: What You Need to Know
Decentralized Biotech Research, BioDAOs, & More
We’ve been covering DePIN quite a bit lately. But what about other real-world industries that can potentially benefit from decentralization and crypto integrations? Today, we’ll discuss DeSci. Decentralized Science, AKA ‘DeSci’ looks to target various pain points of traditional scientific research, with many projects specifically looking to use crypto in and around biotech. Biotech typically refers to various medicines that leverage the human body’s own processes to produce a desired result.
What exactly does DeSci do that warrants the use of crypto and blockchain in an industry that seemingly doesn’t need it at all? For one reason or another, Biotech and the pharmaceutical industry downstream of it, has found itself impacted quite a bit by government bureaucracy and a lack of transparency. This has actually become somewhat of a talking point, albeit a smaller one, among political figures like RFK Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. Their gripe comes from the lengthy procedural process to get innovative drugs and medicines approved by the FDA, which affects the cost basis and return schedule for founders and investors, and more importantly, can filter out potentially helpful drugs from entering the consumer market.
We’ve recently seen the rise of Ozempic, which has brought new interest from investors to the GLP-1 area of biotech. During COVID-19, there was interest in new forms of psilocybin medicines and other innovative areas of biotech. In today’s edition, we’ll specifically cover BIO Protocol. BIO Protocol aims to be the new home for decentralized biotech, already inking strategic partnerships and integrations with some of the top DeSci projects in the space.
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Background on BIO Protocol
BIO Protocol describes itself as the liquidity hub for the DeSCI sector. The role of BIO Protocol is essentially to crowdfund biotech ideas, giving interested consumers the chance to fund scientists and biotech professionals collectively. Basically, BIO sort of serves as a Kickstarter, but for Biotech.
The team behind BIO Protocol has also already helped to create existing projects in the DeSci space, including Vita DAO, which focuses on longevity science, and Molecule, which focuses on the tokenization process for early-stage biotech ventures. With this in mind, it’s easy to see the overlap these projects have with BIO protocol, and why the team’s skillsets might transfer nicely.
BIO Protocol basically takes their past experience and builds a framework to apply it more generally across the DeSci space. What this look like is the enabling of a BIO Protocol ecosystem, where different groups can form to create their own DAOs, called BioDAOs. These DAOs could focus on anything, from nootropics to Hair loss research, and anything else that falls under the broad biotech category. From here, specific IP can be created and then tokenized via the BIO Protocol.
The advantage of crypto in this scheme might not be apparent at first. What BIO Protocol does is basically bring the investors, scientists, and consumers much closer together. In some cases, these groups might consist of the same people. In traditional biotech, the range of products and medicines that can get funded is reduced to only those that can have a large payoff. As mentioned earlier, biotech typically is expensive to get off the ground, and the time it takes to get drugs approved can be quite lengthy. This means that only things that can have a relatively high payout are likely to get funded. This leaves a lot of ideas that people are still interested in, left behind, with research efforts halted.
BIO Protocol also democratizes the investment process, using its own BIO token to facilitate early-stage funding “on equal to or better terms than VCs or other institutions”. The aim of this process is to more or less automate or abstract away the process of managing liquidity so that BioDAOs can simply focus on discussing and contributing to research around their selected niche. BIO Protocol, as one of the first generalized protocols in the DeSci space, has already built up a decently sized ecosystem of some of the biggest DeSci projects.
BIO Protocol is one of the most nascent industries in all of crypto, especially of the more serious ones. According to coingecko, the entire sector has a marketcap of just ~$500M. A lot of this comes from various DAOs, including Hair DAO, VitaDAO, and others. This might seem trivial, and in a sense, it is. But these DAOs do have the potential to grow into something bigger. These group members are all people who are interested in improving a specific facet of their life and health, and the traditional route of getting ideas approved by the FDA is rather slow.
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