Pump.Science, a nascent protocol built on the Solana blockchain and responsible for the RIF and URO tokens, is a spin on memecoin incubator Pump.Fun.
Posted November 18, 2024 at 3:18 pm EST.
Decentralized science (DeSci), a movement to create public and permissionless infrastructure using blockchain technology for scientific research, is picking up steam.
According to Google Trends, which gives a value of 100 for peak popularity, worldwide interest in the term “decentralized science” was at zero for most of 2024 and has since increased to over 51 as of Nov. 17. Similarly, artificial intelligence platform Kaito signals rising mindshare in DeSci as shown by the whole category jumping 54% in the last 24 hours to a market cap of $1.3 billion, per CoinGecko.
The climb in attention toward decentralized science comes roughly one week since Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao attended a sub-event of Ethereum conference DevCon in Thailand dedicated to DeSci.
Spending more time with innovators, one roomful at a time. Wanna join our Labs incubator?
Many thanks to @VitalikButerin for the special appearance. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/0gRTryeFCa
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) November 13, 2024
While biotechnology companies typically own their own IP, firms participating in DeSci are crowdfunding capital for their experiments in exchange for token holders having some rights to the intellectual property.
By using blockchain technology to remove centralized intermediaries, the goal of DeSci is to increase access to scientific data, enhance transparency in the peer-review process, and motivate global coordination between scientists and researchers, according to a March blog post from Binance Academy.
VitaDAO on Ethereum
On Monday, VITA – Ethereum-based governance token for VitaDAO, a life expectancy-focused DeSci project – reached an all-time high in price of $6.34 and market cap of roughly $160.8 million representing a climb more than 39% in the last 24 hours and nearly 210% in the past seven days, data from CoinGecko shows.
Emerging in 2021, VitaDAO, which aims to enable people to fund and participate in early-stage scientific projects through crypto rails, has a $53.8 million treasury.
Two notable tokens emerging from the VitaDAO ecosystem centered around age-related diseases are VitaFAST and VitaRNA, both of which have jumped 289% and 123%, respectively, in the past seven days. From a technical level, VitaFAST and VitaRNA are intellectual property tokens, which “help accelerate research by aligning incentives around a community of stakeholders that have an opportunity to govern IP and contribute to research itself,” wrote biotech firm Molecule in an X post from Oct. 22.
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Ethereum’s Buterin has also argued that the battle for longevity is worth fighting for. In his 2021 appearance on computer scientist Lex Friedman’s podcast, Buterin said, “I hope to see the concept of seeing your parents and grandparents die just slowly disappear from the public consciousness as an experience that happens over the course of half of a century, the same way that getting lost in a city slowly disappeared.”
Pump Science on Solana
Meanwhile, RIF, a token associated with gamified longevity research platform Pump Science, has jumped 111% in a 24-hour span and 192,588% over the previous seven days, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of $227.2 million, per trading analytics platform DexTools.
Pump Science, a protocol that aims to finance, research, and develop chemicals that increase the time a person and an organism can live with both physical and cognitive functions, is a spin on the highly successful Solana-native memecoin incubator Pump.Fun.
“The way that [Pump Science] works is when a market cap on any of these compounds… crosses $10,000 on Pump.Fun, then the experiment data is deployed live on Pump Science,” said Paul Kohlhaas, the founder and CEO of Molecule, the firm behind Pump Science, in a speech at Solana Breakpoint in Singapore.
The ticker RIF is based on the compound antibiotic Rifampicin, which is typically used to treat bacterial infections, the compound’s Wikipedia page states. At presstime, rifampicin is the focus of an experiment that live-streamed on Pump Science to gauge whether the antibiotic can prevent aging in flies. The token RIF is a tokenized representation of the science experiment being conducted with the hypothesis that rifampicin aids with longevity.
Tokens deployed on Pump Science such as RIF “represent real-world [intellectual property] governance rights to the underlying compounds data [and] to the experiments being traded,” added Kohlhaas.
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RIF is one of two tokens currently on Pump Science with the other being URO, short for Urolithin A, which has a market cap of $112 million, growing 228% in the past day and 132,503% over seven days. According to Pump Science’s documents, the experiments “are tested in worms (C elegans) at Ora Biomedical on the Wormbot, or in flies at Tracked Biotechnologies in the FlyBox.” Per Kohlhaas, the average cost to run an experiment with worms is $300. Ora Biomedial is a private company that develops small molecule therapeutics, while Tracked Biotechnologies is a private firm that uses artificial intelligence in its phenotyping system.
Wormbot is an automated robotics platform that can screen the health and survival of up to 144 populations of worms. FlyBox is a system used to test compounds and drugs on drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly.
