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DeSci Solutions: Unlocking the Scientific Data Creator Economy
Recorded: April 18, 2025 Duration: 1:08:33Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of decentralized science (DSI), highlighting key trends such as the rise of decentralized clinical trials, the launch of innovative platforms like Bonfires, and the growing interest in AI's role in scientific research. Strategic partnerships and funding initiatives are also emphasized as crucial elements driving the growth of the DSI ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, let's kick things off. Super excited to be here this week with Protocol Labs, diving into DSI, have had some good support and conversations with the
Protocol Labs team, different players within their ecosystem. There's so many overlapping elements
with what's happening in DSI, what will be happening in DSI as some different projects
keep moving forward, and also just addressing some of the different broader
trends happening in the world right now whether that's from a funding perspective whether that's
from a perspective of a greater focus on AI and data or connecting individuals more different regional or local elements into a more global, broader conversation
too. And we'll be diving into each of these topics pretty deep today here with Josh from
Desai World, who's been driving the charge forward for years now in the DSI space at this global scale, tying in a whole bunch of really
cool technological elements to realize some of these different visions within DSI, and also
connecting with those individuals and at a more local kind of level as well to really push all
of this forward. So super excited to cover all of the latest updates there.
And I promise you, they're super, super exciting.
And then also here this week with Barrett,
who's the co-founder of Causality Network,
focused on verifying scientific data and providing truth,
especially when we're in this age of such importance
and focus on data in these different equations, making sure that we're focusing and being able to recognize what's real versus what's not.
As well as tying in a more community aspect.
So he leads DSI London, just finished up a conference there, as well as Muse Matrix, a DSI fellowship program.
So if you aren't yet following Josh and Barrett, you should be. You absolutely should be if you
have any interest in DSI, which I'm assuming you might have some level if you're checking out this
space right now. For some context on me, I'm Erin McGinnis. I've been building in the DSI space for four years and really interested in how can we connect some of these people in conversations with technology to change systems and move them forward.
and use matrix. And so if you have any questions about DSI, want to get involved in the space,
please reach out to any of us and we can help connect you into the right people since we're
connected to a whole bunch of the awesome other people building an ecosystem. All right, we got
through some high level, what can you expect from the speakers here today? But to kick things off,
Josh, would love for you to introduce yourself and maybe a more in-depth, proper definition of
what DSiWorld is and maybe some of the most recent projects you're hyped about. We'll dive in more in a few
minutes though. Cool thanks Aaron. Your intro was lovely and I don't want to overdo it. So yeah
founder of DeSciWorld. DeSciWorld does quite a few things but primarily we could consider ourselves
as a community hub. The actual company itself, Desai World,
has since 2021 been doing a number of advocacy projects
such as information aggregation on the Desai space,
creating content and articles and just generally flag bearing
at conferences around the world, speaking on panels
and doing presentations about what actually is Desai,
just pure onboarding
dsci generally and then we started doing conferences hosting our own we upgraded our
platform on the information aggregation side to include projects events jobs and there's more
features coming so dsci.world is sort of a home page for dsci that's the idea and then we decided
to really push forward on the community and advocacy from the grassroots level, in particular from researchers, but mostly down
to students and the on-chain participants who don't really see the applications of science on
the blockchain. And so it's really trying to bring them into the DeSci space with a positive mindset.
And then given that's the sort of social side of DeSciWorld, for the
last two years, we've been building on the technical front as well. We've actually been
building a shared data layer protocol called Knowledge Network, and it's optimized for AI
agent use. It's essentially a shared vector database. So it's readable primarily by AI agents.
And to complement the creation of that data protocol, we've also built a novel AI agent framework called Bonfires, both of which are yet to be released.
Bonfires is actually to be announced next week.
We've soft announced it a number of times, but the full official branding of that goes live next week.
And Bonfires is an AI agent platform designed to improve group coordination.
As the name suggests, you gather around the bonfire and you use the platform
to coordinate yourselves and your group around a specific purpose. It can be doing research,
it can be making money, it can be organizing a birthday party, whatever it is, the bonfire will
help you to do so. And in the process of achieving your purpose, you're actually creating useful
insights and knowledge which are shared and stored on the knowledge network,
which is that shared data protocol.
So Bonfires interacts with the knowledge network
and shares it amongst all of the other agents
and Bonfires connected.
And all of this should create the underpinning
of what we call a knowledge-backed economy
where people's knowledge and insights
are actually paid and verified and tracked
moving into the AI-driven future.
Amazing. I'm so excited to see what all gets unlocked and explored with these technologies
and for the full launch coming soon of bonfires. But first, Barrett, passing it over to you,
if you can give an introduction, as well as an overview of
Causality Network.
Hello, hello, hello. Hope you guys can hear me okay. Yeah, cool. Awesome, Josh. I got
to see a preview of the bonfire project at the TSI London conference related to the Galapagos
Islands. So super excited
to see you guys build. I know you guys have been doing it for a while. So yeah, really
cool. Excited to see that do its proper launch. Quick intro to myself. I used to be a medical
doctor and I got crypto pills and became a DGEN. and then i've come back in the form of full-time dsci guy
um i run dsci london so we do like monthly meetups annual conferences we just had a conference
still recovering so you can probably see or hear that my voice is a bit croaky and that's from that
weekend uh but no it was good really big turnout a bunch of academic staff had not been exposed to dsci not realized
that there's actually a collective group of builders trying to reimagine what the scientific
system could look like and it was really cool to see energy from a bunch of newcomers
uh i myself i work on a project called causality network and. And kind of TLDR is like, you know, right now we're on Twitter.
If you are browsing your feed and you see some images,
do you know if they're real or not?
You probably don't, right?
And maybe if you go, your keen eye has spotted it
and it would have fooled maybe someone that's a bit old,
someone that's not really techie.
It's got to the point right now where any image on social media,
you don't know whether it's real or fake. And thinking, what if the same thing happens in
science? How do we know data is real? If I'm a scientist, I claim I've done a research study,
I send you the raw files. How do you know I didn't just chat GPT it? And the kind of context
that fraud in academia is massive. It's something that isn't spoken about a
lot. The incentive structure is set up in a way that you are going to get a massive amount of
fraud because there's no incentive to publish negative data. You only get grants. You only get
your career made if you show signals. So it's no surprise that there's a bunch of fake papers.
Probably one in seven papers is fake.
And this is like a pre-AI figure.
So going into the future, I think it's an existential risk for science for us to actually know if data is real or fake.
And that's what we do. We have a protocol that runs on hardware itself that cryptographically signs data, giving it effectively like a digital birth certificate.
So, you know, it actually came from a hardware and it wasn't AI generated.
So I will go right there.
Excited to be on this panel with you guys and some interesting listeners.
I see Pamela in the crowd as well.
Shout out Pamela.
I see Ray as well.
Shout out Ray.
And yeah, looking forward to the rest of this panel.
Amazing.
And all three of us were just at DSI London, as you were sharing, just finished up this weekend.
Really great in-person community tying together traditional scientists, people on the investor side, different folks researching from like a regulatory perspective, as well as those driving the charge forward in DSI.
Were there any key trends of conversations, points being made this weekend at DSI London,
whether that's from the perspective of DSI solutions actually being built out or different needs from those scientists?
Any trends of conversations you might have had?
Yeah, I'll jump in.
By the way, just a quick shout out to Barrett for tirelessly organizing DeSci London every
month.
It's actually a monthly meetup the last Thursday of every month in London and then the annual
conference once a year.
It's been the best DeSci conference of the year every year for the last three years and will likely
continue to be so so just wanted to say that but um yeah it was really interesting this year
like i said it's we've been there the last three years me and barrett and erin have been uh been
there every year and i did feel a little bit like the furniture at this point it was really nice i
felt like a bit of an old head sort of every with my old friends that were
there and all these newcomers in, it was, it was a really lovely atmosphere.
Um, but given.
That there was lots of newcomers and there was this sort of those who we,
who we know very well and those who we've never met.
It was really, uh, interesting to see that the trend was pretty much entirely.
How do I get involved?
Like, how do I get started?
Um, and it was it was a a positive
thing because you had lots of fresh you know fresh minds wanting to come in and actually utilize the
tools and see the potential of decide they they arrived without too much background knowledge and
wanted to be involved but it on the other hand uh should have showed a little bit the weaknesses in
the design space in general to the opportunities for people to actually get started with something right with a product or a tool that they can immediately use to improve
their their workflow as a scientist it's something that many in the space are working towards like
as i mentioned we have a wonderful thing coming out that will help but it's not out yet and it's
been many years that we've been building um some projects for example pamela's in the in the
audience i know that valley
dow have been working on their own product it's called flow and that's coming out uh pretty soon
actually i think it's in beta so it was really on the one hand it was amazing and homely to see
everybody uh and to see so many new faces but on the other hand it did sort of show right you know
how do we actually on board these people how do we actually get them to use
tools and so i think that you know as the market comes back into into play and people have a bit
more money to spend i think that that's going to be the focus of the next eight months to a year
for everybody in dsai is all right we've got the community we've done our messaging we've got our
groups and our sort of roots now we need to make something that people can use. And that was sort of the
takeaway that I got from the newcomers. Completely. I think that also ties into this
broader combo of just contributing to science in new ways, what the scientific economy or
creator economy looks like and what different tools are needed or technologies are needed to either coordinate and enable that or unlock some of this broader participation of scientists and folks from
all different types of backgrounds.
Barrett, on your side, organizing, having touch points with all of the people coming
in as speakers and the overview of attendees as well. Any recurring combos or themes or key takeaways from the conference this year,
maybe in comparison to last year or just things you heard coming up repeatedly?
I mean, because I was doing the organization, it was mainly I had to do stuff.
Unfortunately, I couldn't speak as much as I can to people compared
to, you know, if I was just attending. Definitely massive uptick in people talking about AI and the
different things that that can enable. The fact that even a lot of the kind of mindshare with
Web3 has been, we need these decentralized models. We don't want decentralized companies owning it,
et cetera, and how that naturally flows into these sites So I think we had, I think, probably a quarter of the talks or maybe a bit
more actually related to AI, whereas last year, maybe it was just one or two. So that's been
definitely the kind of distinction between the conferences. Completely. Throughout the conference, I was doing a lot of interviews with
kind of a wide variety of different types of attendees, as well as speakers, and a recurring
theme that was brought up. And even Sarah Hamburg kicking off the whole space, or the whole conference,
talking just about the importance of data verification within this whole
equation as well. Josh, see your hand up to elaborate on a point. Yeah, no, sorry, I was just
saying I had a point, but feel free to keep going on yours. But my point was, yes, AI obviously is a
big part of it. I think that there is a real positive trend towards people
having criticisms of Desai. It was something that I noticed that people were actually happy to put
their hands up and ask questions saying, you know, why are there tokens or why is there this funding
mechanism or like how does this actually benefit? There were some of these questions that I saw,
but even in the sort of panel setting but especially
in in the conversations in private in the hallways i heard many people i myself had a few conversations
about some of the criticisms towards the site and it just shows the maturity of the space actually
the people who have been there for a long time are willing to critique the space themselves and
receive criticism but also that new people are coming in and seeing the work that's been done
for for the
past few years and having criticisms to put forward. We're sort of at a stage now where
we're not even like, oh, it's brand new. We're trying things out. It's like, okay, yeah, this
is a problem and we need to fix it. And it's really wonderful to see because it does, like I said,
it just shows the maturity of the movement that we've had the first wave of pure random innovation
and something stuck. And those things that are stuck, we are now beginning to sort of look at and say, can we improve on this method or where can we sort of bring something new into it?
And the entire conference, I heard many, many things in a very good natured way about that exact concern that some of the things we're doing are not working or some things need to be improved.
And it was just really, really nice to see, actually.
Completely agree on that point i think it does show that uh desai and and the ecosystem is continuing to mature and move forward and also create space for okay these different things
have been tried or experimented on in this type of way how might that be able to evolve or how might that need to be different
as other factors in the world are also evolving. And with more participants coming in, more
curiosity, more people leaning into a more DSI driven approach, I think we'll be able to see
even more and more of those questions being asked as
well as answered. And some of the projects such as what you're building at DesaiWorld with these
knowledge networks and bonfires tying in kind of that different initial sources of data into kind
of the global mindshare, I think are great mechanisms to help achieve that,
as well as verifying where is this data coming from. And I know a lot of these applications
are geared towards science, but it's also part of this broader kind of more community
cultural conversation, in my opinion, as well um josh if you're able to give
an overview of what a knowledge network is for anyone not familiar um in general or with your
guys's particular work would love for you to set that foundation sure um i i think the easiest way for people to grasp it from the outset is either a shared data layer
or more complex, a decentralized knowledge graph. A lot of people in science are familiar with this,
so we can stick with that as an idea. A decentralized knowledge graph would mean
you're contributing data or some kind of knowledge to a shared database which is finding relationships
between all of these data building this knowledge graph using contributions from many people from
decentralized sources knowledge network our system is kind of in some ways a knowledge graph it's it
contains multiple versions of graphs vector graph and knowledge graph and a DAG, which is a directed acyclical graph. So a one way knowledge graph. It uses a combination of all these things. But
what it is, is a permissionless data layer that people can contribute to and read from
in a decentralized manner. And the cool thing about the knowledge network is that it tracks
the provenance who created that data and it tracks the
retrievals and how often that data is used elsewhere in the network and because what we
have now is a proof of who made it and how often it's being used or how useful it is we can actually
ascribe a value to it and provide that value back to the people that created that knowledge um it's
it's primarily driven by ai agents because it is a vector
store and it's most efficient to do so and what this means is that you can have an agent handling
a particular task that it's that it's made for or that that that creator cares about um and actually
you can de-silo that by connecting it to the knowledge network to all of the other agents
and that means now that you have this sort of shared open source data layer for people
to contribute to and retrieve from.
There are some, you know, we could talk about the actual mechanisms of how data privacy
is preserved and stuff, but essentially a shared data layer.
And the really important part about knowledge network is the foundation of the idea, which
is we need a way to effectively monetize, capture the value of
knowledge which is created by people that is being used to fuel the AI economy. We call it the
knowledge-backed economy, which is providing a value to knowledge which people provide to the
machine. We can talk, Wax,ical about, uh, the underlying philosophies
and economic principles behind why knowledge extraction is so dangerous.
Uh, but ultimately we, we kind of all understand, right.
The data economy is using us as the fuel and we're basically getting none of it
back, and this is going to get way worse with AI proliferation.
And so our contributions to the AI training knowledge graphs needs to be correctly incentivized. And that's what knowledge network can do.
Amazing. And Barrett, I know we spend a lot of time thinking about that causality,
these different data provenance trails, as well as that creation step of where data is coming from. Can you give a foundation of what data verification
means within the context of causality? And maybe you touched on it a bit with just kind of the
foundation of there's a lot of fraud in science, but how does data verification play into this
broader kind of equation that Josh was laying out?
Yeah, so I see a lot of people talking about like on-chain data.
And to me, that doesn't mean anything because I can right now ask ChatGPT to generate that data, put that on IPFS, put put on ethereum and then now i've got on chain
data so on chain doesn't mean anything and the the reason is that there's no verification step
in that the verification step can only really take place at the physical hardware level where
the data was generated so if you're talking about i don't know like a pcr machine
where the actual fluorescence is being measured to then give the pcr result that's the only kind of
step we have to really verify that this data that you are seeing physically came from a reading that
was of the of reality and we can only do that in a cryptographic way,
in a way that the human could not have effectively forged that data
or forged the signature that's on the data.
So our thing goes kind of to the point that as soon as data is in the wild,
there's no tool or test or analysis that you can do
to tell you whether this data is real or fake.
The only chance you have is
when the data is physically being generated. And if you use things like TEEs, so these are
trustless execution environments, I've got a reasonable mindshare in crypto for other things,
such as securing bridges, such as allowing verifiable AI. Those same tools and kind of
physical infrastructure
that's being developed for a bunch of other things
can then also be repurposed to stamp or sign data
the moment it's being generated.
And when this comes into any kind of user generated data,
if you're trying to crowdsource something,
if you're trying to do anything
where the kind of wider people can participate,
as soon as you have something
that's got economic value now if i can put in my week tracker and earn you know tokens every day
i'm going to try to game that i'm going to try to set up 100 different fake accounts and then
spoof things to earn that economic value so anytime user generated data can be or can have economic value, people
are going to try to gain it. So for any of these projects to work where you have actual crowdsourced
data that is of actual value, you need something that's foundational and can authenticate that it
came from actual bit of hardware. So that's what we're focused on. Awesome. And part of the title of this space is about the scientific data creator economy and having
this verification layer is positioned to then unlock more people being able to contribute
or be creators of data.
If someone is still trying to kind of connect those different dots together, can you maybe paint a vision, Vera, of what the science creator or scientific data creator economy might be or might look like?
create economy so we've seen in a bunch of different industries so other mediums such as video
uh writing um artistry anything where a user can do something of themselves at home without
necessarily having an intuition above them and earn revenue so the kind of typical examples you
would think of are like a youtuber that can just create videos from the house. They've got YouTube that is their distribution mechanism, and then they can monetize and earn
revenue without needing to have a deal with a TV company or anything like that. And you see the
same in music with SoundCloud. You see the same in writing with Substack. So why not the same in
science, right? Like it's, I think, in line with the trajectory that we've seen of other domains
being kind of decentralized and distributed
because YouTube, in essence,
is a decentralized video platform.
There's always centralization in the algorithms
that dictates what videos get surfaced, et cetera.
But anyone with the correct hardware,
all you need is a laptop or or phone to create something can monetize
their creativity and you know i've always thought this thing is gonna happen in science and
the the early kind of things that these guys talked about has always been decentralized clinical
trials if you're a rare disease sufferer you've got something that maybe traditional science
isn't funding because it's not profitable enough,
people go on and do their own technical trials.
And this is kind of the early reason why I even got into CSI in the first place.
And the problem always was there.
How do you trust someone's data if they don't have a credential? If they're outside of an institution, how do you trust their data?
And really you can't, especially in the age of AI.
So that comes back to the kind of verification thing we
were talking about. But the crazy economy, it allows anyone to contribute actually useful data.
And I think this ties into a lot of what Josh is talking about, about these decentralized
knowledge graphs where you can have many different participants, each with their own skills,
expertise, whether they've got credential or not is effectively irrelevant. What matters is
the value and the authenticity and usefulness of the data that they're providing.
Absolutely. Josh, your original kind of background into this whole space is coming from a DeFi
angle. And you touched on earlier how like the financial aspects or the
incentives of kind of these entire economies or marketplaces is an essential piece to keeping it
all running and moving forward. Are you able to take some of what Barrett was sharing and
kind of lay out what this might open up in terms of different incentive models
or kind of this financial aspect tying into it?
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.
The problem is it's just there's so many different possibilities
for how scientific data can be turned into a creative economy but
like i feel like it might be easiest if we just imagine a particular scenario and you can take
your own versions of that um the scenario that i like to think of is like okay right now content
creators such as influencers are so well paid and most people a lot of kids you know young people
actually want to be an influencer like as their job, this is listed on my careers fairs and stuff is studies that say
young people want to be influencers. And, you know, we all go through Instagram or whatever
and see some of those influences that have, you know, five or 6,000 likes on a tweet and they put
out 10 videos a week. And it's like, man, you know, there's such a saturated market for it. And
the reason is because the money is so good because the demand is so high for content
for people to just like put their time into doom scrolling. And then an advertiser will
get better returns and pay for an influencer to be sponsored by them. And this, the demand
is so high because the users, the user content, the amount of eyes seeing this content is is so high and if we can imagine that as an incentive to do something that's not really that
great which is to spend your time videoing yourself doing kind of lame or you know whatever
pranks or whatever that's a poor outcome but the incentive is there to do so if we change that
situation where okay people were more interested in learning something or improving the material conditions of where they live or revitalizing nature or contributing to a global scientific goal or healing themselves or their families or any of these things which require like knowledge rather than just looking at a screen and consuming mindless content, things that require knowledge or data or scientific verification
to contribute to a knowledge economy in this way with a correct incentive so that your
contributions can actually earn you money.
Can you imagine the change that we'd see around the world if people pursued meaningful
research?
And research can be work, research can be play, research can be like,
you know, experimentation. It can be learning things. You're still researching when you're
learning. If people pursued research, incentivize research instead of incentivize content creation
in such a mindless way, the world would really would change overnight. And so with as causality
network is building a sort of hardware verification level. These are some of the foundations of what could be a knowledge economy where you have to have proof that the information that is provided is verifiably a belonging to that person and be real.
And as a result of X experiment or X hardware, even causality network could be used in like a camera to prove that the photo itself is real and such things as this.
Then once you have these foundational trust protocols so that you can know for a guaranteed fact that these things are real,
then you can start sharing them through, for example, a knowledge network and incentivizing them likewise.
And if you do that, now you have creator economy, but it's got scientific backing and scientific foundations.
And the foundations aren't just to waste people's time, it's to actually improve something. It could be
health, it could be nature, it could be a better line of thought around a very specific creative
topic, whatever. But that's how I really would hope that this all goes from a DCI perspective
and just a humanity perspective which is more
verifiable information more freedom of information exchange and incentives that are not aligned with
advertising or just general capital accumulation to faceless corporations but incentives that are
aligned to better knowledge outcomes for people individuals and yeah fine corporations can
participate too.
Yeah, I just want to say a couple points, 100% agree everything you said. A couple points,
one of the things you said about kind of the younger generation, Gen Z, etc, about what jobs they want to be. Yeah, YouTube influencer or influencer is number one compared to maybe 20
years ago, where it might have been doctor, lawyer, engineer. The majority of the younger generation now wants to be an influencer.
And if you kind of think what that means to science and trying to tell this Gen Z or this younger generation who really value these kind of passion jobs,
where you've got both autonomy over anything from hours to what you actually focus on,
autonomy over anything from hours to what you actually focus on and trying to convince them,
okay, if you want to enter science, you need to work for 15 years as a postdoc to then
potentially get a professorship to then potentially dictate what you want to do.
I don't think this generation is going to be interested in that at all.
And that's why I think I'm very bullish on the idea of people wanting to pursue science and all these kind of interesting things.
And kind of second point to that is I meet so many people that have a science background that end up then doing something else,
whether it's finance, whether it's something that was just a lot more attractive and kind of capital, et cetera.
But then when you actually ask them, they don't really like their jobs and they kind of like science.
And then when you actually ask them, they don't really like their jobs and they kind of like science.
And had there been a route for them to have, whether it was money or autonomy or a combination of both, they would have stuck in science.
So I think there's a massive amount of people that want to do something in science.
And providing a route and a pathway is going to lead to a massive explosion and acceleration of research that ultimately is going to lead to
cures to things that we're worried about,
all kind of advancements that overall propels our species forward.
And the other thing that kind of just ties into that,
that it relates to decentralized education,
because maybe before to know about biology, etc.,
you had to physically go to a university.
Whereas right now, you can download a book online,
you can get a bunch of YouTube courses.
So even the kind of domain expertise that comes into
how someone can know what to do in science
is essentially decentralized due to Web, due to the Web 2.0.
So maybe, Erin, you can comment on some of the stuff
at Muse Matrix about decentralized education
and maybe how that ties into this create economy stuff.
Absolutely.
So yeah, at Muse Matrix,
started out as just seeing this need
within the DSI space of these traditional scientists
having curiosity and interest in DSI, but not feeling maybe technologically literate enough to be able to contribute into the and looking to have a different type of impact
with their skill sets, but not having that scientific background to be able to really
feel comfortable applying it within DSI or within the scientific domain. So building out this
fellowship program, a cohort-based peer-to-peer learning model where fellows are attesting to each other's
learning and teaching of different DSI topics over the course of a six-week curriculum,
building those connections in person for the in-person cohorts, and then plugging that into
a globally connected network as well. And down in the audience, we have Pamela from Desai Mexico.
She was actually a fellow during our second cohort and is now facilitating and leading
the third cohort taking place in Mexico. So it's also in this very modular and intentionally
designed to become more and more decentralized to create introductions or open
doors for different people to come into the space. Josh, I know you've done a lot of work at V-Sci
World as well around the entire world, building out different communities and creating those
invitations as well as if you want to touch on that element of some of the things you guys have done.
as well as if you want to touch on that element of some of the things you guys have done
uh sure we haven't done enough i'll be honest we have had a lot of opportunity and there's been a
lot a big gap in dsci for a long time for decentralized education and even just like
speaking of uh content right like high quality content for people to really, truly understand what, what DCI is. Um, there are like eight different videos of me delivering a talk of
what is DCI in various places around the world. So on YouTube somewhere. Um, and they will
give a really decent, like, this is what DCI is. Uh, if people want to watch those, but
ultimately there, there needs to be more educational content on,
A, the philosophy of why DSi is so important
and some worked direct examples of extraction
and overbearing rules and regulations and elitism in academia
to directly show some of the issues.
But I think most of the education into DSi
comes when the products are fully live.
And as we mentioned at the beginning of this call, there is relatively few products that people can utilize.
And so there's relatively few things that people need to get informed on and educated on outside of the principles of DSI and where the direction it can go.
And that's why the work that you guys are doing at NewsMatrix is so important, because it just educating people okay here's how dsai works and such but it's actually educating them to build
something to then contribute to that stack which we're all building um and i think that in the
coming year we'll see a lot more content from various people as people start buying crypto
coins and want to pump their bags they'll make content but i think internally to the dsai community
we'll see a lot more dsai world does have a lot of content planned uh but who knows if we'll
we'll get it out anytime in the next month or so amazing also would like to give a invitation for
you to go check out the dsai london account all of the talks uh from the conference will be posted kind of intermittently over the upcoming period of time.
So that's I can say those were some absolutely incredible talks to go get deeper insight into design, different neurotech topics, kind of a really wide span of different topics were covered at it.
So that's another great educational resource. Also would like to extend an invitation to everyone
listening right now to tap into your inner influencer. If you're learning interesting
things on this space right now, be part of this knowledge sharing economy and give
this space a share or invite someone else to come in and listen to this conversation because Josh
and Barrett really are dropping so many incredible points about where DCI is today, where it's
heading, and some of these different mechanisms to be able to enable this future that I think so many of us see.
Also, I would like to extend an invite.
If you have any questions or topics you would like to hear discussed on here, drop that in the comments down below.
And we can incorporate that into the conversation, too.
A couple housekeeping things to take care of. Josh, I would love for you to talk a little bit on this idea of localism and globalism and how knowledge can be connected from individual participation or small group participation into the larger sphere as well.
Cool.
A couple housekeeping things to take care of.
small group participation into the larger sphere as well um and any different examples people might
be able to kind of grasp uh when trying to understand that too yeah sure um i think
ultimately knowledge is like a multiplayer activity right you need to sort of okay you can
do it by yourself but once you have to sort of share it with someone for the most part and it
often is multiple people's viewpoints or the aggregation of multiple people's efforts or understanding of something which you apply to your situation.
And then you create your own further knowledge from that.
And so thinking that knowledge is just sort of a multiplayer experience, you've got to experience it somewhere with other people.
And really, we have sort of two classifications of where we experience something is on the global or the local
uh global being typically online a digital experience and local typically offline an
analog experience um and there's a really interesting growing uh sort of movement and
sort of philosophies around integrating both the global which is the
digital with the local which is the more grounded material analog universe and in particular we're
at the side world we're very inspired by the work of cosmolocalism so i invite everybody to go and
check out cosmolocalism uh it is from the peer-to-peer foundation chap called michelle bowens and a number of other really good thinkers and cosmolocalism is essentially uh what is light which is the global digital should be global and
shared and that's online that is data that is knowledge that is capital that is that sort of
information exchange should be global and shared and what is heavy, which is material things, supply chains,
labor, such things as this should be local. And that means source locally and distributed locally.
This is to improve, to reduce the sort of environmental impact that supply chains have.
You can go and look at some of the statistics around sort of certain things that are shipped
around the world twice in order to
arrive five doors down and how much of an impact this has this like really really unbelievable
that our world is structured in such a way really is crazy but this is the sort of idea of cosmolocalism
is to not forego the benefits of global capital and global knowledge networks but to harness those
even more so in fact to empower the locals so that people and their
environment they can be much more connected to their environment much more rooted in the world
around them uh the environment itself can be much more uh much better maintained and honestly the
quality of produce and the health you know that the the sort of quality of the food and the water
and the air would all massively improve if we stopped you know shipping everything from around
the world in order to consume and just generally a return in some ways to a connection to your land and to your community
is a really important thing that i think many are feeling and so cosmolocalism imbues both this
technologically but also uh sort of theoretically philosophically why it's so important and we at
the side world in particular we really believe in this. There's something called Ethereum localism, which is taking some of those learnings and basically using Ethereum as the technological substrate for people in a local setting to operate.
So you can imagine a local community center that utilizes Ethereum for paying its bills.
Everybody contributes to a multisit wallet and they pay their bills, something like this. And so Knowledge Network is actually built with this in mind. So as
I mentioned at the beginning, we have Knowledge Network and Bonfires, Bonfires being the interface
and Knowledge Network being the sort of data sharing. And so that's the Cosmo Local. The
Local is the Bonfire where folks will gather around and try and solve a task try and coordinate
towards a purpose in the process they're extracting knowledge they're extracting data they're creating
as a creator data or knowledge that might be useful elsewhere in the network which is then
shared globally uh via the knowledge network and so this sort of localism aspect is like
what you want to do that is necessary for your best survival,
your community's best survival, the nature around you, what's important to you, what interests you.
You can actually be a creator even on that local scale and through these mechanisms,
through blockchain, through AI can actually benefit on the global. And that's where you
tap into the sort of incentive mechanisms, the global capital and the
idea sharing and all the benefits that global knowledge sharing comes with. So localism is,
as I just described, really focusing on your material analog universe. But that doesn't mean
that you have to sort of hole up in a cave somewhere or drive a van into the middle of the
woods. Even if you do, you can still participate in the global economy, which is kind of what it's all about, right? We've built all this technology for this
reason and there's problems with it, but there's certainly lots of benefits to it. And so being a
creator on a local scale is really important. I think that people, if this technology works,
will find so much more meaning and contribute to their local environment. And if they create
knowledge and insights, if they create knowledge and insights,
if they create scientific data in the process of improving the farming
around their local area, et cetera,
if we can verify that and share that using these technologies,
then they can actually tap into this global economy as well.
Amazing.
I think that framework is really helpful for people to understand
how the individual connects into this larger
picture, as well as the role that each of these different environments play within this larger
equation of the future of science. And Barrett, I know you've spent a lot of time building towards
thinking about talking about just kind of opening up the space
so science isn't just conducted within an IV power
or that there's now more ability for participants
and scientists all over the world
to be able to contribute to science,
maybe through advancements in autonomous labs.
Can you expand on kind of how that connects in or just some trends along the way?
Yeah, multiple things kind of immediately come to mind. I mean, the first one is what I kind of
mentioned earlier about decentralized clinical trials. If you're a rare disease sufferer, there isn't sufficient funding
for there to be a clinical trial in your domain.
And if you look at, you know,
what is the actual cost to do a trial?
So I'll give an example,
and this is one of the earliest reasons
why I actually have had DSI in my mind
for probably like 10 years.
So when I did my master's,
was on chronic fatigue syndrome.
And since a rare disease, there isn't that much funding for you to do a clinical trial. It's probably like 10 years. So when I did my master's, I was on chronic fatigue syndrome.
And I read that there isn't that much funding for you to do a clinical trial.
And I met a group of patients that were doing off-the-book clinical trials.
The specific intervention they were doing was a fecal biotid transplant, which itself is a massively daunting task. And to be doing that in a decentralized way is something that you're not going to do without a significant impact but one of the early trials that they were doing was on a
drug called rituximab and you know to do a clinical trial in this disease group for let's say a patient
size of like 30 people it did the cost was in the hundreds of thousands whereas you could source this
drug from a lab in China for about
$500. But if you were a sufferer, you knew some other sufferers, you could, for incredibly low
cost, get the drug, trial it, and then see whether it improves your symptoms or not.
Obviously, this wouldn't be approved by the ethical board, etc. All of this would be
outside of the institutional norms. But it always struck me as really weird that
you've got a patient population that desperately wants a cure,
that'd be effectively happy to take anything
as long as it's vaguely co-signed as being safe.
But the barrier to someone doing that
was having to get through ethical approval
and the ethical approval cost
massive amount of time and money
to the point where it was unethical.
So that was always the kind of first thing
where I'm always doing the ability
for things to happen at scale
with people that want and have a need
for a particular outcome.
As we're going into the future,
things like autonomous labs
I think are super interesting.
One of the things I'm really passionate about and I kind of hypothesizing is we're going to have a massive democratization of lab equipment.
So right now, if I want to do a PCR test, I need to get a PCR machine. They cost anywhere between $25,000 to $50,000.
But there's been a bunch of people that have managed to kind of pack together 3d tent ones over
the last few years where you can get under five code and i think the extension of that over the
next three to five years specifically with gen ai being able to maybe to design for a pcb board or
a fabricated chip that otherwise might have taken massive expertise, and maybe a gen AI can do it very quickly,
I think we're going to see an explosion in equipment
that people can have at home,
which maybe 10, 15 years ago was exclusive to labs.
So that's even without the automated component,
just being able to make a lot of equipment at home
for sub one or two Ks that previously would have passed
like 50 Ks. And would have passed like 50K.
And then the extension of that is autonomous labs
in line with a super cheap equipment
where you can have things that are 100% remote, 100%,
you know, smart contract controlled
or otherwise remotely controlled
that are effectively equivalent to like an AWS server,
where if a group has enough interest to fund
a certain experiment, they can get ran in a verified way, but super, super cheap.
So I think all of these kinds of trends, whether it's like automated labs, democratization
of lab equipment, Gen AI making previous things that were now generalizable, are leading to
the explosion of data being generated in science.
A lot of that is going to be valuable.
Completely. Some of these different platforms, both within DSi and other technologies and trends
happening in the broader scientific landscape as well as the world globally,
I think will really create this opportunity
to unlock what science might be able to discover
and getting this actually into the hands of the right people
to either keep advancing it forward
or into the hands of people who need those different solutions.
I would love to kind of tie this space back into DSI a little bit more
broadly. If folks might have more familiarity with other aspects of DSI, maybe within a biodow
construct, can each of you connect the work you're doing, the platforms you're building,
connect the work you're doing, the platforms you're building into how this advances different
other DSI projects? Maybe Josh, if you're able to kick that off.
Yeah. DSI projects are going to need two things. Well, they're going to do two things. They're
going to have a bunch of people in a decentralized setting, either a DAO or something else,
bunch of people in a decentralized setting either a dow or something else working around a particular
topic or project so that needs coordination that needs something to connect these decentralized
people if anyone has worked in a crypto company or a dow in particular you'll know how disorganized
everything is and how hard it is to get consensus if you're a true dow and such um and that's what
the the network that we're building,
Bonfires in particular as a tool,
excels at is group coordination and governance minimization.
So just on the sense of project management,
task tracking, et cetera,
they could be used by any D-Site project from zero to high quality group coordination
for free, basically.
You can just join an existing agent's network if you want to create your own
there's some small fees but so that's the first one which is coordinating projects themselves
and then in DSi the idea is that projects will research something or move towards some kind of
scientific outcome or at least some knowledge production of some kind. Um, and of course, if you have the knowledge network, which is connecting.
The disparate groups of people who are researching things and producing this
knowledge through this knowledge substrate, then you're going to be able to.
Improve the reach of your information and get more people involved.
You're going to be able to distribute it to the right places.
Uh, and actually you're going to be able to receive an incentive for that so you have bonfires to help with the
coordination of the project and the people and knowledge network to help with the coordination
or the distribution of the knowledge itself which is gathered from anybody's dc project on any topic
so it is general purpose and that's the intention is that it's very kind of, I would say, foolish to define what is science and what is not or what is research and what is not.
And it's kind of up to the network to decide what information is valuable and what is not.
And that's the sort of foundations of the protocol we built.
Amazing. Barrett, if you can tie in what's happening at Causality into how that can help advance other dsite orgs to move forward and kind of fulfill their visions too.
a bunch of G-Site orgs are trying to do things outside the established norm.
And as soon as you try to do something a bit strange, a bit weird, some of the traditional
gatekeepers, whether it's journals, whether it's for the scientists, might not, you know,
might not agree with what you're doing. They might not think it's real. They might think it's some
kind of fake BS. So if you've got some means of verifying that you can say this is actually more
authentic than any other research and it's actually provable, then that allows those things to actually fulfill what their bigger vision is.
So I keep moving forward, expanding and realize a lot of these different visions, especially as more and more contributors are coming into the ecosystem.
And figuring out some of those incentives in a sustainable type of way based on different truth and trust mechanisms, good knowledge sharing environments to really allow for this advancement.
environments to really allow for this advancement. As we're nearing the top of the hour,
would love for each of you to give just any departing thoughts, maybe a point you want to
emphasize again, or for people to walk away with. We'll have a couple seconds at the end for
where should people follow along. So more just kind of a final statement,
either an invitation for people to work on something
or something to keep top of mind.
Josh, if you want to kick that off.
Eric, go ahead.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know the question I can pose to all of us is
if you guys haven't asked whether someone on the audience
or the speaker can fulfill it so if
there's anything in particular that can help take your project forward that maybe someone in the
audience or the speakers can facilitate that that also would be a cool thing so josh i guess
that's something that anyone here should facilitate
yeah sure thanks guys um for us we have been building a lot and so we're very excited to
be able to release the products and so the call to action will be just follow dside world and
follow our developments and when our products come out get excited use them like give us feedback
tell us where they're going wrong share it with your friends anything like that um but i will just say keep your eyes open to the trends of the market which is seemingly
month by month day by day trending towards something with meaning and with purpose away
from the meaningless and the purposeless um you can see it with the the debacle that base is going
through right now with they're trying to push content coins considering the name of the space that's relevant pushing content coins
through zora like just go and look at jesse pollock's uh twitter and look in the comments
there's so much distaste for the useless and the meaningless and the extractive that i think
anything that you want to do in this space like start thinking thinking about it, where the purpose and the meaning is.
And I think you're going to be really successful.
And I know a number of people in this audience who are working towards
something meaningful and it like the market hasn't agreed for three years
about meaning.
But I really think that's changing.
There's a really strong undertone of people who are just sick of the
extraction and the meaninglessness of all of the crypto activity.
And so that's my call to action is just do something with purpose
yeah i i completely agree uh i was actually talking to uh uh one of my friends that he's been in crypto for like four or five years and then recently he's been a bit jaded so he spent
like a year away and then i was talking to him a bit about some of the newer developments plus some of these newer layer ones and he was just like
bro why do we need another layer one and i honestly couldn't give him a genuine answer so i think that
is in a little bit with some things that you're saying um so answer the question that i set for
myself anyone here knowing anyone that is doing experiments using open source equipment, we would love to chat to them.
That's the easiest type of equipment to get verified.
So if anyone knows whether it's anything to do with science, water pollution, environment, air sensors, anything like that, we'd love to chat to any of them.
Actually, sorry, Barrett, I misunderstood misunderstood your point that was a great point uh call to action for
specific things if you have a project with a purpose that you can stay in one line and you
want to facilitate it on chain raise a bit of money for it uh using a decentralized raise and
have an agent to help you facilitate it then message me message dc world
we are going to release the platform permissionlessly in about a month and a half but we
are still open to people who want to come and get an agent a bonfire going around a particular topic
so uh if you have a thing that you believe is a purpose that can be achieved on chain then just
let us know so many incredible opportunities to take things forward.
If you have an idea, please reach out to Barrett, Josh, or myself.
Go follow along at Desai World, Causality Network, News Matrix, all down below.
If you're not yet following Protocol Labs, absolutely give them a follow too.
They've been a really great supporter of many projects in the D-Site ecosystem and
created this space for us to have this conversation today. I think those are some of the best ways to
stay connected with everything that we discussed today, as well as direct connections into being
part of these movements, pushing things forward.
Josh Barrett, any last thoughts on things you'd like to direct people to or closing thoughts?
Yeah, no, I'll just say in summary, what we're doing at Quisannock Network is applying the
most underlying ideological slash technological foundation of crypto which is don't trust verify
same way that has disrupted finance by building trustless systems we're trying to do that in
science and we we see ourselves very much as a foundational layer to help support and grow
other projects that build on top or can use our services so if anyone's interested please reach out
our services. So if anyone's interested, please reach out.
I know that we'll be using Quasality Network in the bonfires very soon. I'm sure that's going to
be a very powerful integration. And I don't have anything for people to get involved with right now,
apart from follow us. So for the next six weeks, stay tuned to our Twitters and get excited.
Thanks. And thank you, Erin, for hosting us. Thanks, get excited thanks and thank you erin for hosting
this thanks protocol labs and thank you barrett as well amazing thanks so much everyone keep doing
awesome things with purpose and let's make the world better with science in a decentralized
awesome friendly way uh we'll be back on plenty more spaces, so if you enjoyed this convo, give a follow, and let's keep the convo going. Thanks so much, everyone.
Bye.
Bye. Take care, everyone. Have a good Easter. Thank you.
