Unlocking Research Innovation with IP-NFTs: How to Get Started with Decentralized Funding

Author: Morgan Weaver

Perhaps you’re a seasoned researcher just getting into Decentralized Science (DeSci), the oft-described meta of scientific research structuring and funding with a Web3 core. Naturally, you’re curious about DeSci’s potential for opening up novel funding mechanisms for your latest study. Terms like ‘TradSci’ and ‘fractionalized real-world asset NFTs’ abound, and don’t seem to alleviate the opaqueness of this brand-new field. If you’re here to learn about how DeSci can enable new funding mechanisms for research, lower costs, and empower patients and researchers, read on. The future of DeSci is brighter than a quasar — and far easier to harness for research innovation.

Today we’ll aim to clarify this jargon-dense and technical new field by discussing DeSci itself, as well as novel funding and intellectual property models that empower researchers and builders, rather than purely benefitting capital providers and entrenched institutions that may constrain biomedical innovation. We’ll cover successful real-world examples of how to secure funding in DeSci, with attention to more grassroots, decentralized mechanisms as well as traditional single-entity sources such as science DAOs. We’ll also mention some pitfalls to avoid when structuring this research, and show how DeSci can help projects remain structurally responsive as the aim of the research itself evolves. This can help in avoiding loss of funding and intellectual property rights, coordination failure, and more.

And, in case you’re eager to jump in and get started immediately, scroll to the end of this article for direct links to funding applications and funding FAQs as well as other useful links to VitaDAO and Molecule. If you’d prefer a bit of theory, background, and technical structure, read on.

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As we know, science is expensive. The cost of taking a typical therapy from lab to market is around $2.3 billion per asset¹. This is assuming that researchers actually choose the appropriate benchmarks and disease targets; sometimes they don’t, and there is no funding for a second chance. Sometimes existing grants may not be flexible enough to handle a pivot, or a patent timeline may be running out, which can also stymie further development. It is conservative to say that many hundreds of promising therapies lie in biomedical research’s notorious ‘valley of death’² for this very reason.

Moreover, several underfunded areas of research stand to benefit from DeSci funding and the non-traditional approaches it offers — women’s health, psychedelics research, and enhancement technologies for longevity are just a few of these underfunded areas. Rare disease therapeutics, for instance, can be difficult to develop when they therapies may not generate enormous returns to investors, in addition to the fact that recruitment can be challenging when only a few dozen patients at a time may qualify for study participation, and are scattered throughout the world. This has the collateral outcome of raising costs for these rare disease therapeutics, to the detriment of patients. And for those aiming to conduct translational research, many funding opportunities abound just as they do in more traditional science funding.

Intellectual property is another issue. Often, institutions and capital-providers retain intellectual property over those who provide actual innovation. Innovators are in exchange bestowed with reputation and likelier access to resources, but not retention of the rights to their own ideas. This can also have a stifling effect on innovation and individual motivation. How can researchers retain control of their IP?

Decentralized Science aims to attack these problems as well as many other issues commonly found in institutional and traditional research arenas, where processes have become strangled by funding, regulatory, and cost issues, as well as deeply ingrained cultural and structural barriers. The first concept we’ll cover is both intellectual property and research funding innovation: enter the IP-NFT.

IP-NFT stands for Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Token. It is a digital asset consisting of one or more legal documents describing intellectual property rights, research agreements, and related material recorded on a blockchain, which serves as a highly secure and tamper-resistant registry of data and transactions. The IP-NFT is attached to valid, real-world legal documents, and is also considered an asset in its own right. IP-NFTs can be used to prove ownership, IP content, research dataset policy, and more. From there, we can fractionalize this asset or elements of this asset (IP rights, dividends, governance) into Intellectual Property tokens (IPTs), and distribute it across researchers, institutions, funding providers, and advisory councils. This quote from the VitaFAST whitepaper sums it up nicely:

“As smart contracts on Ethereum, IP-NFTs can be permissionlessly transferred peer-to-peer, made composable with DeFi, used to distribute governance to groups of stakeholders, built upon to unlock new ways to interact with and develop IP, R&D data, and NIPIA (Non-IP Intangible Assets, like trade secrets and publicity rights), used to empower crowd control of ethics in commercialization, and create unprecedented liquidity in IP markets through the development of this new asset class.”

This innovation opens up many creative and decentralized funding opportunities, especially for early-stage and translational research with niche interest groups, and areas of research not eligible for traditional funding, such as enhancement therapeutics not targeted at disease states. The tokenization of an IP-NFT opens the door to Kickstarter-like early funding by various communities, as well as decision-making support and fiduciary incentive by token-holding governance members. An IP-NFT-creator may choose to assign certain governance privileges to trusted experts in the field, while allowing general token holders privileges such as general voting and Discord group access. This may be accomplished by whitelisting members for highly technical votes, which is accomplished by interacting with the smart contract itself and adding certain wallet addresses to the contract’s allowlist, if it has one.

Note that while DeSci funding is a powerful opportunity, it is also a new frontier, and should not be directly compared to traditional institutional, federal or venture grants. Token-based funding is ideal for early and translational research that tests promising new ideas. More familiar grant endowments may be less flexible in terms of an investigational pivot, but token-holding governance participants may request more frequent engagement and updates, especially if voting on the direction of research is part of this agreement. Engagement is an essential part of community-driven funding, whether through familiar channels such as social media and podcasts, or bespoke DAO governance platforms such as Tally or Snapshot. See an image of DAO tooling below — many options abound, and are worth comparing.

Many DAO communication tools exist to facilitate voting and coordination. Credit @nichanank.

Additionally, fundraisers should focus on crafting documentation describing the research in an accessible manner aimed at both scientific and non-scientific audiences. Scientists, laypeople, patient communities, and institutions should be able to understand the scientific proposal, so it may make sense to create both technical and non-technical materials to better reach a broad audience. Many channels to facilitate interest in token-based funding are available — from more traditional academic and trade conferences to Decentralized Science to Web3 events and publications. If this sounds a bit overwhelming for our academic readers, rest assured that community engagement and PR are part of what DAOs can offer the research community as it engages with DeSci and Web3 more broadly. Web3 is an inherently social and community-driven space, with Discord and X (Twitter) presence, on-chain analysis and metrics, governance tools to ease governance participation, and many members with dual Web3 and scientific literacies to offer to the academic community.

Further opportunity arises for smaller laboratories with limited resources. A common labor model in Web3 is the bounty system — an à la carte, public request for specific work in exchange for a set amount of payment. Smaller projects may therefore outsource specific elements of a project to collaborators at other laboratories and institutions in exchange for shares of IPTs, further incentivizing collaborators to ensure the success of the project.

One of the most powerful features of IPTs is the fact that these tokens can be permissionlessly operated, unlike traditional IP rights, which require redrafting of legal documents at every modification — an expensive, tedious, and burdensome administrative responsibility. This is just one example of how IPTs can lower the cost of research operations and eliminate administrative overhead.

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A quick word on governance for those who are unfamiliar with on-chain, or smart-contract-facilitated governance coordination, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and token-based voting. While the topic of DeSci governance and token-based research coordination warrants a much lengthier discussion of its own, we would be remiss to ignore this critical element of tokenization — so let’s take a look at some important concepts, and become better equipped to avoid potential missteps. Further resources, and a DIY quadratic voting tool to experiment with, are available at the end of this article (4, 5, 6).

Originators of a single IP-NFT that has been fractionalized into IPTs (tokens) may choose to retain centralized governance amongst researchers and advisors, or allow the token holders to vote on the research structure itself. Token-holding voters may have many incentives for their decisions — the likelihood of curing a disease, the potential to increase the value of the IP token, the quality of research outcomes, the statistical integrity of the dataset, or other aims.

Attaching a token to governance participation is optional, and is at the discretion of the research group. In the case that governance participation (that is, voting rights) is not attached to a token, holders may still use the token as an IP asset.

Token-based governance, for that matter, is not an all-or-none proposition. The IPT creator may choose to allow some elements of research to be open for community governance, or may choose to delineate some voting proposals as advisory rather than as absolute decisions, for example.

Another option for governance structuring is to set tiers or minimum token-holdings that must be met for a holder to have certain kinds of voting privileges. For example, participants must hold at least 100 tokens to vote, and must have held them for at least three months. Or we might tier token requirements for very critical decisions. We may also choose to whitelist (DAO-speak for allowing a specific set of onchain addresses some privilege) certain token holders for voting regardless of their holdings, such as the first 50 addresses that acquired the token. Setting a 1:1 ratio of votes to tokens is a classic and simple DAO model that has been used extensively in early Web3. However, this strategy has the side effect of creating whales — jargon for an individual whose token holdings create a disproportionate amount of voting power, negating many of the other voters’ voices and possibly creating a kind of DAO oligarchy.

One creative solution to this governance bug is quadratic voting, in which a voter may assign as many votes or voting credits as they like to different options in a proposal, where the voting power is proportional to the square root of an individual’s votes. This means that if I have 4 voting credits and my neighbor has 1, and we vote on different items in a proposal, using all of our credits on our preferred items, my 4 voting credits count as 2 votes, and my neighbor’s count as 1, even though I have 4x the voting credits. So if my neighbor and two others, all with just 1 credit each, vote on the same item, they can outvote my 4 voting credits, which again count as just 2 votes. This helps to blunt the effects of whales, encourage participation, and empower individual voters. Let’s imagine that the voting period hasn’t closed yet, and my chosen outcome is only 10 votes away from winning. I’d have to somehow purchase or acquire 100 voting credits in order to sway the outcome. Thus by exponentially driving up the marginal cost of a single vote, as opposed to a linear 1:1 price tag per vote — we deter the most well-resourced voters from having a disproportionate amount of voting power.

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Now that we’re familiar with some core concepts in DeSci, let’s look at a few existing projects that have been successfully funded by IPTs, and by extension their parent IP-NFTs.

One of the most popular and trusted IP-NFT models was developed by Molecule, a DeSci funding and tokenization platform. The model consists of two legal contracts: a Research Agreement describing the researcher-sponsor relationship, and an Assignment Agreement which assigns the Research Agreement to the owner(s) of the NFT itself. The latter is the Web3-specific legal innovation that transforms our standard TradSci contract into a blockchain-enabled asset. The Research Agreement “includes provisions for confidentiality, intellectual property rights, data ownership, and publication of results. It may also specify the terms of any licenses or patents that may result from the research…In addition to specifying the research activities to be undertaken, a Research Agreement may provide for the sponsorship of related activities such as conferences, seminars, and workshops.”³

As we can see, there is much room for creative structuring and distribution of rights and privileges surrounding research governance, assets such as study datasets or therapeutics, and publication. Project founders may structure the Research Agreement however they like, ranging from a partial ownership approach to a more all-encompassing one.

Once the IP-NFT is created, it can be fractionalized into IP tokens and tap into the rocket fuel that is Web3. Molecule makes this easy, secure and convenient by providing a Tokenizer contract which mints IPTs from a given IP-NFT. You can read more about this contract and how to use it here, test it out yourself on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet here (implementation contract for web3-savvy users may be found here), and, when you’re ready, mint your production tokens on the official contract here, as provided in Molecule’s documentation. This allows research groups to bypass the traditionally expensive and painful process of smart contract development, 3+ independent smart contract audits, and secure deployment, a fraught process to those who are not experienced protocol engineers or who are entering from a Web2 background.

Molecule’s model is being used today by many funded projects, such as Dr. Viktor Korolchuck’s autophagy activation drug discovery platform, based at Newcastle University. Interested parties may read the IP-NFT documents before deciding whether to fund the project through the purchase of VITA-FAST tokens. The VITA-FAST token was met with a 1700% oversubscription — a successful fundraising effort that demonstrates the viability of this model.

VitaDAO logo

VitaDAO, a DAO focused on the funding and enablement of moonshot longevity biotech, has funded a number of projects in exchange for shares of IP in the form of IPTs. Many of these initiatives have been small, early-stage, translational investigational endowments in areas such as autophagy, RNA therapeutics, novel small-molecule therapeutics, and other projects. VitaDAO thus acts as a single-source funding provider, which will be more familiar to traditional academic researchers than token-based fundraising. You can read more about specific projects on VitaDAO’s projects page. In this way, VitaDAO’s governance participation and IP rights are quantifiable, visible in blockchain transaction records, and easy to modify via addition or removal of tokens. Governance participation is visible onchain, enforcing transparency amongst the DAO.

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In this introduction we’ve covered just one of the ways in which investigators are securing funding for their projects via the powerful and flexible concept of the IP-NFT and IPTs. We’ve touched upon how these constructs can drive community engagement of patient communities, DAOs, and other stakeholders. And while traditional grant funding may still be appropriate at some point in the journey from lab to industry, DeSci-native funding can still help protect early IP rights, incentivize innovators and core contributors through ownership of their own ideas, and provide a great deal of flexibility via close contact with stakeholders. DeSci opens up many avenues for partnership across science and tech, and helps less traditional projects secure funding and support.

To take the next step to research funding, interested parties might start with VitaDAO’s Funding FAQ page, and then apply directly via this form on the website under the ‘Researchers’ page. You may also join the Discord community to get access to VitaDAO stewards who can answer any specific questions you may have. If you’re still curious about the technical aspects of governance, IP-NFTs and IPTs, or DeSci DAOs, be sure to check out Molecule’s and VitaDAO’s further documentation and Discord and X communities, where subject-matter experts, engineers, scientists, and community members can help you power up your next project with DeSci.

1. Cost of pharmaceutical asset development: https://www.genengnews.com/gen-edge/the-unbearable-cost-of-drug-development-deloitte-report-shows-15-jump-in-rd-to-2-3-billion/
2. Valley of Death: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-010818-021625
3. Molecule IP-NFT design: https://docs.molecule.to/documentation/ip-nfts/ip-nft-legal-structure
4. Quadratic Voting: https://blog.tally.xyz/a-simple-guide-to-quadratic-voting-327b52addde1
5. Host a quadratic vote of your own: https://quadraticvote.co/
6. Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531