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Navigating the DeSciWorld. Episode 3: Climate, Anthropology, and Botany
Recorded: Sept. 11, 2025 Duration: 1:03:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, leaders from ValleyDAO and Miso Reef DAO unveiled groundbreaking initiatives aimed at leveraging blockchain technology for environmental sustainability. With a focus on funding biotech solutions and coral reef conservation, these projects highlight a growing trend in the crypto space towards addressing climate change through innovative partnerships and community-driven governance.
Full Transcription
. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello.
Hello.
Validao requested to bring you up.
Hello, Validao.
Hello, hello, DCI world.
Great, who do I have the pleasure of speaking with today?
Tom, head of marketing at ValleyDow.
Hey Tom, good to speak. It's been a while, it's been a while.
Yeah, great to hear you Joshua.
Cool, let's wait a few minutes.
Ed, wonderful, I'm very glad you're here my friend.
We will bring you up to join the spaces.
We're just going to invite Rodrigo. In fact, Rodrigo is here as well. Wonderful. The whole crew.
Let's bring you guys up.
Okay, Ed is here.
Hello, Ed.
How are you?
Hey, doing well.
Thanks for having me up.
All good, mate.
All good.
Miso Reef Dao, are you there?
Miso Reef, are you there okay we will wait a little bit for rodrigo to say hello all right guys let's get started
hey what's up man yeah i'm, how you doing? Yeah, I'm here. A pleasure. Thank you for the invitation, man.
Yes, always welcome, mate.
All right, let's just get started.
Doing good, bro.
I'm just going to do an intro and then we'll get started.
So today we're talking a little bit more about the natural world
in navigating the DSI world.
So today we have multiple projects who are listed under one of the categories
of either climate, anthropology, or botany live on the stage.
Typically in the D-side space, we're looking much more on the biotech side and let's say the more ephemeral biotech side, lab side.
We're looking more on the compute, hardware, verification, technical side.
Today, very excited to talk a little bit more about the natural world and how the highly technological things that we're doing in this space can actually be used in service of that natural world.
So I don't want to spend too much time on introductions, guys.
So when I say introduce yourself, say hi, who you are as a person behind the project, and then just a little bit about the projects that you're working on, and then we get started with some some deeper dives so why don't we start with mark you were first so
please go ahead at valleydow we're going first right cool um so hey guys i'm tom i'm the head
of marketing at valleydow and valleydowidao is basically a design collective funding and commercializing biotech
solutions for climate and
sustainability. And we work with scientists
who are building technologies, breakthrough
technologies like carbon negative
materials, sustainable cocoa
or hemp fiber, hemp
based fibers.
Okay.
Very nice and sweet. I'm very sorry.
Very sorry, Tom, for calling you Mark.
No worries. Not a problem. Good. Not sure where I got that from. Okay, great, thank you very much. Over to you, Ed.
Tell us a bit about what you're working on. Any projects, names, and a bit about yourself?
Yeah, I've been working in regenerative agriculture for a long time, both in how to change the way we're producing our crops, but
more recently been doing a little bit of work with Axon Dow, bringing in all the data that we have
on nutrient density and health and bringing that into the medical community that really could use
it and isn't aware of it. Yeah, the nutrient density of food today
is something that I really wish we had better systems
to know more about.
We'd love to talk a bit more about that after Mesa Reefdow
introduces himself.
So, Rodrigo, over to you.
Hey, what's up, Josh?
Thank you for the invitation.
And yeah, we're quite leading.
I'm Rodrigo Nunez.
I have been quite leading this initiative, like a crypto cooperative about coral reef conservation. We are quite eager to regenerate reef conservation itself in the core.
agent. We're planning to create modular web labs around it and basically create more biotech
with all these IP and all these kind of tools that Molecule and Bio has been quite implementing
for a while. So we just got listed a few months ago and we're quite eager to explore more.
Right now we're working on our website, the update of our website, and essentially, yeah, we're getting traction about many Asian communities. And that's quite awesome.
You know, right now I'm volunteering here in Egypt, and it's insane, you know,
many, you know, monitoring some coral reefs, and eventually quite eager to look and to create more citizen science surrounding many design projects.
So, you know, climate action is all about that.
And we are quite eager to close the loop of many regenerative and extractive practices that we have seen in coral reef conservation for a while.
So, yeah, it's quite exciting.
And, yeah, we have been quite grateful.
There are many PhDs surrounding this initiative.
And yeah, it will be quite insane to see how it goes.
Thank you very much, Rodrigo.
And Rodrigo, maybe just pull the foot a little bit away from your mouth when you speak next,
just as it kind of cracked every now and again.
But you're fine.
You're fine.
Okay, sorry.
No, it's all good.
Thanks.
Okay, so yeah, this is exciting. Because as Rodrigo mentioned, a lot of PhDs,
I would just say a lot of people generally are converging around the importance of like
doing things to improve the state of the natural world. And it's, we have a really great range here
on stage. So Valley Dow doing SimBio really deep in the weeds, the tech, the tech weeds,
so to speak. Ed doing actually deep in the
weeds, doing regenerative agriculture, in particular nutrient density is something that
we should talk about. And Rodrigo deep in the coral weeds, if I can say that.
A really nice diverse group here. So guys, please feel free to put your own opinions on it and also
your company's opinions and things like that, because i'd like to see a diversity of discussion
here as uh to be to be honest this is from my perspective one of the most important areas of
science that we can tackle right now which is how can we use technology use progress use in this
case blockchain to improve things in the natural world. So very exciting space ahead. So I want to start
with ValleyDAO. You mentioned synthetic biology. You mentioned some of the interesting initiatives
that you're working on. How for you guys are you applying blockchain and let's say Web3,
even AI, because I know you guys are working with AI. What technologies are you implementing
for the purposes of your project? And how is that specifically being geared towards the assistance of, in your case, climate?
Sure. Thank you for that question, Joshua.
So like I mentioned before, we help fund the research projects for the scientists, for the researchers.
And we help them to move the researchers from lab
to market ready products and we do it in two ways. First of all with funding and governance
through our community. So blockchain actually allows us to use the infrastructure
and lets us do the two key things which is tokenized intellectual property. So by helping fund those research
projects and by turning those research outputs into IP tokens, we make it possible for anyone
to support, fund and hold this kind of exposure to climate biotech technologies. And because of
that, you know, it's happening instantly pretty much, super fast. In literally 24 hours or 48 hours,
we can spend funding for a research project.
Where in, you know, real world,
in a kind of Web2 world,
it sometimes would take, you know, months,
months and sometimes even years.
So we actually allow those researchers and scientists to start working on their research project much faster and and we help
them get funded much much quicker and the second thing that the blockchain allows us to to do
in dc it's the community governance so we have our own token it's grow it's called grow it's a
grow token and our members people that hold the grow token vote on funding proposals strategy partnerships
marketing initiatives for example as well so this makes the decision making more transparent
and much more democratic than traditional funding systems where just a few institutions hold pretty
much you know all the power so we give the we bring the power back to the community. For example, right now we have a VP15,
which is a proposal number 15 at Valley Zao.
And it's about funding a project called TATFA.
So anyone that's interested,
TATFA is actually developing a product called Stromate,
a carbon negative biomaterial that locks CO2 into fire safe,
non-combustible building materials. And this is basically aiming to decarbonize the construction
industry. So there's a whole scope of different industries, of different scientists, of different
researchers all around the world that we help fund their research projects pretty much instantly.
And that's obviously all thanks to blockchain.
Yes, it is a wonderful application of blockchain.
The two most tried and tested, I'd say, in Desai specifically,
but also probably blockchain generally, is community governance for sure
and the tokenization of real-world assets, in your case, IP.
So this is great.
I have thoughts on ideas, but let's move on to Ed.
Ed, what is it that you see? I'm not sure whether or not the work you're doing right now directly employs blockchain.
If it does, how? And if not, where do you see the most interesting use cases for blockchain with your use case?
Well, people aren't really aware that farmers are really into tech and innovation we're trying to
discover how nature deals with health on the botany end you know we're using metagenomics
metabolomics um it's not really i'm trying to bring it into DSI in the crypto community a bit because that really
hasn't happened we've been more traditional DSI for a long time farmers working together so when
I say we it's sort of the farming community all working together on things we're now able to make
a plant so healthy it's by understanding the metagenomics in the soil and the nutrition intensely in the plant
that we're able to make plants that are crops
that are resilient to all pests and pathogens.
So we're really learning a lot about health.
And from that, then we brought into measuring the produce.
We found that the biome of the soil was the big problem that we had killed
it for so many years not just in agriculture but in many landscapes many ecosystems and that's what
really drives and we looked at nutrient density is there something really to nutrient density
because for a long time it was said that doesn't matter how you grow a crop
there's going to be insignificant differences well when we did the metabolomics and started
to take everything we produce on the farm whether it be a crop or an animal and looked at the
metabolomics all the metabolites and all the nutrient phytochemicals phytonutrients that
was a huge, huge variation.
And the number one factor was the soil biome that we've destroyed.
So we realized that like over 90% of the crops and foods that come from a farm
are only in the 10 to 20 something percentile of what they really could and should be,
which is a huge factor when we think about our food is more like
cardboard than it is all the nutrition we need. And we need to bring that into the medical community
now to have them understand when they're looking at longevity or health in general, what is health
and how does nature contribute to health? And been working with Axon Dow a bit because they've got a new GPU from NVIDIA.
And we have tons of data.
We have soil data.
We have crop data.
We have metabolomics data.
And my interest is to connect that all together.
We also have our own AI now.
It's really working really well.
It's a customized AI. So as I say, we're really
into the tech. We've made huge advances and we've got pretty much all the framework now.
Axon also has an advisor, Tristan Thompson, who's an NBA star, who's very interested in this,
very interested in the health of athletes.
And we think that, you know,
with so many of the foods that we eat causing inflammation,
inflammation is obviously not good for an athlete.
So it causes a lot of injuries.
So we think that we can now create a pharmacy,
not just the pharmacy.
So I'll land it there.
Awesome. Thanks, Ed.
Yeah, I mean, so it's interesting you brought up
some of these technologies because in particular,
AI is something that a lot of the D-Sci space
and just, I think, generally academia
and honestly, generally the world is converging on
as like the most important way to progress
their sort of field.
And we are doing the same at D-Sci World.
I know that ValleyDAO, you guys are doing the same.
So it's good to hear that you're doing the same. Do you have any sort of field and we are doing the same at dc world i know that validar you guys are doing the same so it's good to hear that you're doing the same do you have any sort of direct thoughts about
um which parts maybe just a simpler question which part of the data gathering process that
you are participating in now which part of that do you think would be most suitable for the blockchain
well i think pretty much all of it because we're very much into open source.
You know, most of the technology that we work on creating, we want to be open source.
We, you know, we suffer a little bit in fundings because we want to do open source.
We demand open source.
Farmers have always been open source. They all want to share because we, if we help each other do better, we all do better.
So, um, it's just a really good fit to, uh, do it. And I think it opens up science in a new way
and all the way to the product and the consumer doing good for the
consumer so yeah yeah that's for me that's one of the most exciting parts is like how do you reverse
the incentives and scientists and even yeah consumers of food or anyone participating in
the process gets incentivized for their participation rather than just harvested
um rodrigo my friend, tell us,
what is it that you guys are using the blockchain for
in the Mesa ReefDAO?
Yeah, for now, for example,
since a couple of years ago,
since two years and nine months,
we have been quite implementing certain pilots
only to fund projects.
I was quite impressed this year, for example,
because we just got highlighted as Missouri,
you know you know
it this report that missari just created about phd agents and it was quite impressive because
many dowels and many other projects usually have millions or thousands of dollars in their accounts
and we just have only raised you know a tiny amount of money you know but we have many researchers and
we have been implemented blockchain in terms of payments and attestation
coordinate certain gamifying things using PoApps and, you know, for proof of participation.
We have run like an undergraduate and graduate scholarship, you know, because many people
in low-mid-income countries essentially have this situation. They could not afford many things.
And essentially, I believe that blockchain right now in terms of payments has been incentivizing people to be more independent.
Our mission in Mesurif Dao is basically to create a new wave of researchers worldwide. I have met a friend, imagine a friend just need to go to Oxford,
you know, to study a coral genomics,
you know, degree.
So when he just finished,
go back to his hometown
and that reef was gone.
So, and that guy wanted to have,
to save that reef.
So, you know, everything,
I think that this,
I could mitigate this side could mitigate
this kind of migration to acquire knowledge.
And that's why we're focusing right now
in a knowledge graph for core reef management.
It doesn't matter where you're at,
you could essentially start, you know,
creating your own program with this knowledge graph.
We are going to compile, yeah,
we're in the process of compiling around 10K research papers.
And basically to put that on the knowledge graph, basically the O'Brien approach, We're in the process of compiling around 10K research papers.
And basically to put that on the knowledge graph, basically the O'Brien approach.
And that is the first, you know, our first part of the project itself, creating this AI agent of coordination.
And we have, this will be a token, Corolla AI, CRL AI, and we are planning to launch a governance token.
This governance token will be a polyp.
Polyp, every coral colony is quite, you know, the unit of a coral colony is called polyp.
And this polyp essentially will essentially play the role of any other kind of biodow,
you know, in terms of governance, creating proposals,
and basically create a new wave of incentives for researchers
that do not have opportunity to scale core restoration programs
everywhere in the world.
We just started this initiative and started piloting this project,
essentially, in Mesoamerica,
because many colleagues have been quiet in this area
and I have been monitoring this area for a while
with many enterprises and entities like Healthy Reefs,
Charity in the U.S., Coral Reef Alliance,
and the Nature Conservancy.
And we are quite iterating and working,
basically creating capacity building
and new onboarding processes since year
in traditional stakeholders, you know,
because many researchers are quite skeptic
about the potential use of this technology.
And for example, this year,
we're going to participate
on a Mexican Coral Reef Society Congress.
And it will be quite impressive
because we are going to have a workshop
and we will share our history about
the first track that we're quite working on
is the DISA AI agent.
The other one is basically a coral kit,
kits that everyone could use.
And the other thing is basically the modular wetlaps.
You know, we're trying to build modular wetlaps,
equal-shaped wetlaps in many locations
to mitigate this crisis.
This only for a situation, you know,
creating sociological impact on chain
and basically traceability, you know,
and create new standards, you know,
to do some monitoring stuff, you know,
in terms of restoration, conservation efforts worldwide.
And it's quite necessary.
I just had the opportunity to attend the UNO
conference this year. And, you know, there's a lack of standards, you know, worldwide. You know,
the UN is quite failing in that approach in the decade of the oceans. And we believe that
these sites could mitigate this in a proper way. That's why that is our approach for now. And we're
quite eager to see how it works.
And we have a lot of good receptions with traditional stakeholders, with the academia itself.
And we're quite eager to boost more of these initiatives with the assistance of bio and molecule stack.
Interesting. Nice, man.
Thanks for the update.
It's actually quite a lot of happened since we last spoke about, so that's really awesome.
And by the way, you should use bonfires for your coordination protocol because we built the thing.
But I'm really interested in what that last thing you said there about there's no standards or a few standards being set by traditional academia with regards to these sorts of things like decentralized science, even without the blockchain, just like how people can in a distributed way participate there's no standards for that and so this leads me actually to like one of my questions for you guys which is what are some of the potential negative
externalities of using desai as your primary vehicle and i'll i'll preface that so there's
of course you know scams onboarding is one thing.
We can talk about that.
Another one that's really interesting, especially for this conversation,
is the potential environmental impact of using blockchain and using AI.
Obviously, extreme amounts of power are required to run them.
A discussion that we've had many times before, I'm sure.
But it's also, as it's a decentralized permissionless system
essentially participation is is inevitable for anyone and what you know what can we do to
mitigate some of the risks around decentralized participation in the scientific process in a way
that produces negative outcomes and you know people imagine for example people trying to do
messer-reeftow related tasks and have zero
training, don't know what they're doing, basically are end up a danger to themselves and to the coral
reefs because of the work they're trying to do to help, but they actually have no qualifications
to do so. So these are some issues. And maybe I'd like to hear from Valleydale, because I know that
you guys, you've been around for a long time, working quite closely with the academic infrastructure.
I've seen, you know, you guys presenting at multiple student bodies and even universities. So what is it that you see, like how do you
see mitigating and what is it you see as big issues that in particular academia find when
the idea of using blockchain as part of the scientific process?
Sure, that's actually a really fair question. I'll try to maybe go over it as quickly as I can instead of like diving into details.
But, you know, power consumption would be one of the things that, especially thinking of all of us here in DCI operating in blockchain.
site operating in blockchain so you know early blockchain systems like bitcoin let's say um they
you know had valid concerns around the energy use um but the way we thought about it when we were
looking for different blockchains and different protocols where to launch our own grow token and
dip tokens um we were thinking about that and we decided that we want to operate on a kind of modern proof-of-stake blockchains
that are far more energy efficient.
So, for example, Ethereum, after the merge, consumes over 99% less energy than before.
So that was a massive factor for us.
And we also see it this way, that the climate and biotech solutions that we're helping bring to the market, such as the carbon negative materials, sustainable food systems, new biomaterials and all sorts, they have the potential to offset far more emissions than the blockchain layer ever would produce.
So the net impact is strongly positive.
And that's how we see it.
That's how we want to position ourselves. i hope this kind of answer is there it does and it's an answer that i i would
i would give a similar answer if i was asked that question but specifically for you guys i think it's
a very interesting question because your whole shtick is like let's use blockchain to improve
the environment right and then people will specifically say well doesn't that consume a lot
of power so i'm sure have you i'm sure you've had that question many times before.
A couple of times, maybe not that many times,
but a couple of times, yeah.
Okay, interesting.
Ed, do you have any sort of thoughts
on some of the negative externalities
of blockchain usage with these particular,
with the projects that you guys are working on?
Well, we're very much part of the environment.
For, like, for coral reefs, we're certainly, we're eliminating the need for nitrogen fertilizers
and the pesticides and the herbicides that create the dead zones.
So that's a huge advantage.
a huge advantage as far as our what axon's doing is we're they're planning on doing a solar farm
using dual purpose solar where we actually produce food on the land that the solar panels are whether
it be grazing or with the vertical solar we're able to do even crop farming.
And this is even at scale.
So we can make it a lot more efficient for the energy usage and for the environment.
And of course, we're big into photosynthesis, which is how we get carbon back into the soil.
And we can make massive gains, cleaning the air cleaning the water huge
environmental impacts across the board and doing it is efficiently energy wise we don't have to
till we save a lot of energy on farms save a lot of money for the farmers. Of course, nitrogen fertilizer comes from natural gas.
So if we can eliminate that usage or manure, any of those substances, it's a lot better for the soil.
It's a lot better for energy consumption.
So we can save lots of energy by the new paradigm shift in what we're doing with agriculture
and decentralizing the food
system so we're not trucking as much food all over the world all the time because of centralization.
Right. Yeah, this is a very important point that we at Deciwold are very passionate about is the
idea of localism, cosmo-localism in particular, but trying as much as possible to create shared
digital infrastructure that people can utilize in service of their local needs so that we do reduce the amount of, in particular, shipping, logistics, just the amount of waste that we make and waste and time and lack of ownership or sovereignty for local people that results of this.
of this so yeah I think there's a lot of crossover there for sure and the decentralization aspect is
So, yeah, I think there's a lot of crossover there for sure.
And the decentralization aspect is essential to that.
essential to that. Rodrigo I know that you've been in the space for quite a while doing let's say
people facing tasks and you've been wrangling dgens and you've been applying for grants and
doing all kinds of stuff that puts you directly in touch with the people who are using this
technology right now and from your like this is a tough question and i'm not asking you to name any names but yeah from your your experience in the space
what kind of potential issues can you see with opening up science permissionlessly to the people
i agree uh and i have the these heroes uh j like you, you know, that science needs to be a public good. But as every public good, you know, for example, in we are planning right now, that is one of our tasks, because if
we're planning to create like a design agent, like the O'Brien, we need to create the data
properly and we need to name this particular AI agent.
For example, only, you know, to put this perspective, I, we know, you know, in our, in our
traditional, in our traditional network, we have many top tier researchers in the world that have
been working in coral reefs. But if we put a name of a reef researcher in the AI model, essentially,
it will be quite massive. Okay, these guys in Polish, in French Polynesia, they'll just use this AI model
with the name of this guy.
This guy is quite backing this AI model.
So we need to start to create,
you know, or to do the tasks
that this AI model just say to us, you know?
So I have been faced some,
and I just sent some emails regarding
this, and many researchers are quite skeptic, you know, about the potential use of their names,
because they have a reputation system, you know, their age factor. And this age factor is quite a
thing in their lives. They don't want to be quite involved in this kind of things or these new technologies.
If they have not seen any, you know,
they want to test things with other experiences.
That's why, you know, I believe that Bio has been doing an awesome work and you as Bonfires have been doing
an awesome work into build these kind of new systems
using AI agents.
We have seen in the Web3 space, you know,
virtuals and all this,
but I believe that it's quite proper to build AI agents
with a good and robust knowledge of scientific,
scientific knowledge itself.
And the other thing, another aspect that I have seen
is that the skepticism, yes,
and many stakeholders are quite eager to support you,
but with a proper incentive model. You know, that's why we are quite into creating two kind
of tokenomics for now. This will be one of governance. We are planning to airdrop this
token with people that have been in the space
and actually with people that are quite eager
that just support us in the early beginnings
with this kind of approach to do science.
That's why we're quite eager to allocate a portion
in our tokenomics of governance token
in people that actually trust, you know,
the system that we are quite eager to create.
But essentially these have like a hard situation
because we're many researchers and me,
I'm quite concerned about, okay, how can we,
imagine, you know, to put this on perspective, I will try to be brief.
We just participated a year ago on the ReFutures Conference, and I just talked with some researchers
there talking about restoration practitioners, many restoration practitioners, you know,
stakeholders, well-known stakeholders in the Great Rear system and in Mesoamerica. And they say, okay, so how can we build proper systems using AI and Web3?
And I just participate on a workshop.
And every researcher, at least in the academia, you know, in the academic side,
are quite focusing in their own research labs or in their own institutions.
And I just got there, you know, on a workshop.
I was the only guy with a master's degree.
And I'm just listening.
And a woman that just invited me, because she knows that, you know,
the second iteration of open science includes so many coordination figures
that we have in traditional science.
She told me, hey, Rolo, do you want to say something?
I think that everyone is quite focusing in their own institutions.
So what do you think if we could develop
like a knowledge graph
that could eventually coordinate
many forts worldwide?
I think that that's the thing
that this consortia is looking for,
you know, because everyone is trying
to implement AI models, yeah,
for photogrammetry to monitor
how this ecosystem has been quite degrading all over the years.
And I have been monitoring coral reefs since 10, 15 years ago.
And it's insane, you know, we have been lost to dimensionality and all that,
you know, and all the functions in less than 20 years.
So I just said about the potential use of Web3 and all that,
and they were like, okay, yeah, but what about the IP? I want my IP.
You know, that was the thing that they do not say it in that way, but that was a huge concern.
And right now, I have seen that they're changing their ethos into build more open science and open source, you know, in terms of information of data sets
and everything like that. But they're more into, okay, who is going to start this first? And then
we could iterate it and recreate this model with our own values, you know? So it's quite, I believe
that I'm quite a skeptic too, but if someone doesn't know, doesn't do this right now,
I think that we are going to be the first ones that we're trying to iterate and create this,
this kind of model in coral reef conservation. And it's pretty good, you know, because we're
quite backed by many individuals, but my main individuals, right now, we just have a new core
member. This core member was Sanderson Mayfield he has been working
a ton
with a good background you know he has raised
a part of all that history
he had just
identified the same situation you know
that many there are many
bottlenecks in science and
he told me I remember he told me hey
is it possible that we could not
repeat the same model that I have seen in coral reef conservation since 20 years ago?
And I was like, it could be possible, man.
But we need to create a proper consensus mechanism and create new incentives that essentially could mitigate all the things that we have seen, you know? And that's why we're focusing right now in the AI model,
because we believe that we could coordinate in the core
certain actions and build proper incentives
with the people that are doing good, you know?
Yeah.
But I believe that you will see more updates on the white paper.
We just got to release our white paper internally.
We are eight members, so we're
quite discussing certain
things about this.
It will be released soon
in our webpage.
Let us know. We can signal boost it through our platform.
I'm interested. I'd love to see the progress.
Just DM me some stuff.
This is great.
You actually mentioned it right at the end there it's like what what can we do to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the previous
system and so you know i might be preaching to the choir here but there's a few aspects of blockchain
technology in particular that will allow us to do things differently i think from the existing system
um and i think the big one here is decentralized
verification. And this, I think, is something that a lot of the de-size space knows that we
are converging on that we need, which is some form of hardware system that will allow the results of
whatever experiment or recording or anything like this to be timestamped. And you guys may have seen
recently there's something called the ROC camera,
which has come out.
It's been pushed quite a lot
through the Ethereum community.
And it's essentially, it's a camera,
which when it takes a picture,
it generates a blockchain hash
of that picture being created.
So you have an actual proof,
an on-chain proof on Ethereum,
that the picture was not generated by AI,
that the picture was generated in reality.
And this is something that you may,
guys may be aware of, Causality Network,
and there's a few other people trying to deal with this problem.
But for me, that's the thing that is missing from allowing DeSci
to be a truly decentralized participatory system where people can trust it,
is that we need those hardware enclaves,
that system that allows results to be blockchain timestamped.
But that's my thought of one of the most crucial
parts of the DeSci stack. Do you guys have anything else over the last couple of years
of operations that you've been in DeSci that you think is still missing from the decentralized
science ecosystem? There's a few I can think of that's still missing that you think, okay,
if we do really want to have a successful DeSci future, we need these things. And so I'll say my piece,
which is verification, hardware verification mechanisms.
But is there anything else from your work in particular
that you think we need as a part of the DeSci Stack,
either you build it or someone else builds it?
Yeah, I believe, Josh, yeah, I believe that, for example,
we need to develop voting systems,
like Anon voting systems, with verification of certain credentials, you know, probably Google Scholar or probably LinkedIn, you know, to because many, many people that usually, you know, vote for certain projects or even for proposals.
They see, OK, this guy just vote for my project.
OK, but this is guy. This guy is my colleague, but I don't like his project, you know?
So to avoid this kind of, because everything, you know, is quite,
for example, in coral reef conservation, we have a lot of elitism.
So what happened?
That's why many global efforts are quite fragmented in first world countries,
you know? That's why many global efforts are quite fragmented in first world countries.
Right now, people and initiatives are quite focusing more in the global south.
I hate these words, but they're focusing more in low-income countries.
But by the end of the day, we could eventually solve these kind of situations if we could develop proper, say, case systems for voting for projects.
bellow proper, say, case systems for voting for projects.
And in my opinion, I believe that that will be the next thing that this I could tackle.
For example, we have seen the best examples of citizen science are basically into nature-based solutions these days.
And if you see all the scenarios that we have, many projects are quite eager to, yeah, I have this project, but okay, I like that project.
But my values as a researcher are not quite aligned because if I vote for that project, what would be the outcome if my institution just saw this?
So essentially, that's the problem that I just have seen, you know, in the traditional sector along these years.
Because, OK, a big entity is going to allocate millions in restoration or conservation projects in Latin America, for example.
And the voting process doesn't contain transparency.
voting process doesn't contain transparency and there are many bottlenecks in terms of the
allocation of the funds because there are many entities that usually allocate funds to themselves
in this rubric that is called, how do you call it this? Because many institutions take part of
these grants to use the IP of this.
So it's insane.
I believe that that is the...
So you're saying that the big change
that you want to see is better voting protocols, right?
So it allows people to have more trust
in what it is that they're trying to decipher.
Yeah.
And we have seen this with Volcone and other platforms,
but I believe that it necessary needs to scale
and identity plays a huge role.
I really appreciate why the human tech has been done
and it's quite necessary to develop that in this side.
Sorry, yeah.
I agree.
No, thanks, Rodrigo.
Thanks, Rodrigo.
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
Identity voting, massive part of this
because it's a lot of deliberation, right?
Deliberation happens in science.
Vidal, Tom, what is it that you guys from your experience have uh felt as a a very important need that we don't quite have yet in the design space yeah do you know what um well
first of all I think we just need to answer what would it be you know what would the end the ultimate goal of a kind of uh disciple stack ecosystem be
and i believe that it would be a an ecosystem where research funding business development
governance that's already been mentioned as well all integrate seamlessly you know and i think that
i could highlight three areas um where this is somehow already happening.
I'll explain in a second why and how.
But there are three areas that I think would play a key role.
So first of all, for any researchers and scientists,
you know, better tooling for research translation.
So we're actually building Flow.
Flow is our AI-powered platform that helps researchers
de-risk their science, build strong business plans, secure funding much faster, and fully
commercialize their research projects. And we do that. We've developed this platform. It's honestly
an incredible piece of software. And we're actually going to London
next week to Imperial College London, where with the Bezos Earth Fund, we're going to be integrating
Imperial College London for the students to use, to test it out, to try it. And it's already kind
of a second, third time when we're going to be using a bespoke version of Flow for actual students at actual universities.
So I think that this is one of the things for D-Cite to really evolve and fully kind of reach its potential.
It is using also artificial intelligence to create those kind of better tools for research translation.
Another thing is standardization of IP tokens and governance models.
So, you know, it is super important, especially for such a still small and brand new pretty much part and corner of blockchain,
which is this side and this kind of standardization of IP tokens,
and shout out here to Bio Protocol and our friends at Molecule.
Molecule has recently launched their Molecule Labs,
which is kind of the next step, the next level of IP tokens funding and creation.
And same with Bio.
Bio released the Bio V2 platform that also has some form of d5
aspects to it and and would definitely help and i think it's already happening and we can see
the dsci um interest from people that were completely from outside of science outside of
dsci but they actually enter in the space um doing their due diligence and researching the DSi projects.
But yeah, so bio and molecule definitely helping and trying to evolve the standardization of IP tokens.
Yeah, projects should be easily funded
and traded across different ecosystems.
So that's kind of the second area.
And the third one would be bridging to the real world.
So we're already trying to do that.
I know that there's so many different DSi projects out there that also working on this.
And, you know, it puts a massive smile on my face when I see that DSi projects and DSi founders are not just sticking to Web3, are not just focusing on a token, but they actually go in outside in real world.
You know, they're forming partnerships with universities,
but with biotech companies, policymakers, you know, DSi research doesn't just live on chain,
but for us to actually go mainstream, for us to get more people involved, because at the end of,
you know, that's kind of the goal here is to get as big of a community and to educate people on science
and use the side as this kind of bridge
to provide people with value,
with the knowledge, with new tech.
Yeah, so we just want to reach the bigger market
and ultimately the vast majority of the society.
I think these three aspects are yeah, are kind of key.
Yes, I think a lot of that, as you say, the translational work,
as you mentioned, Molecule and Bio have done a lot of work
in particular on that and going in directly to research institutions
and saying, hey, like, here's something that you can use today,
go and use it and it might help you.
And actually funneled quite a few millions,
I don't know exactly how many millions,
but quite some millions into the hands of researchers
directly through their launches. So it is a really fantastic process to
see. There are some, you know, when it comes to getting people like traditional academia into the
blockchain arena, there are some things that we have discovered, I guess, as an ecosystem,
I'm sure Bayou would say the same, that are pitfalls for people that are
coming into the space and getting understanding about wallets and security, etc. But also about
the culture of the on-chain community, in particular the tokenized community, about
some of the, let's say, the less savory aspects of being part of a token community. I know that
that shocked quite a few scientists and I hope that we can continue to get that right as a space about what we expose scientists to or what we ask them to participate in and how much knowledge they have about that before they commit to participating in it.
So I think it's a very important part of that progress.
So, Ed, from your perspective, what is it that we're missing in this space? By translational research, we've had the full stack of getting scientists into understanding
the business propositions, et cetera, and marketing their own ideas to the nitty-gritty
of voting.
Ed, from your perspective, what is missing from the DSI stack right now?
Well, the good thing that we look at, again, in the regenerative movement is we work with the practice i mean the
farmers of the practitioners they have a lot of incentives to be involved and work to bring the
data and the information all together and the tech and all that and consumers do too that's why in the metabolomics area of nutrient density
one of our groups uh has developed a meter because when you go to shop for let's say carrots and you
have three choices um if some you know we realize the variation is so huge one might score in the 20th percentile one might score
in the 40th or 50 and one might score in the 70 or 80th well for nutrition and health and your
economics of course you want to go with a higher quality and so we need to empower consumers with
a handheld unit and they actually go into a smartphone in the near future?
So we look at, and of course, it's beneficial to the farmer if they can measure the quality and nutrients in their food
because they can market that.
And food industries now are extremely interested in regenerative agriculture
because they see us as being sustainable,
where the
industrial system has degraded our soil so much and contaminated and higher and higher input costs
and more and more, you know, lack of resilience. All those things are things that the food companies
are really interested in because they need product long into the future or they
don't sustain so we really focus on a lot on the end use of everything that we do and a lot of the
funding and support can come through that because of the initiatives to the bottom line of all these different groups, including all the way down to the consumer.
So, and it's just how this integrates into the crypto DeSci community is something that,
it's not something that I'm very interested in.
I think the technology, the cooperation, the collaboration, how we work together in the crypto world of DSI is something that the people that really focus on that.
And I try to understand the best I can, but I leave it up to the people that have been working on the foundation of all this.
the people that have been working on the foundation of all this.
All we can do is apply how we look at it, how we approach it all, and see if it's of
any benefit to developing DeSci into the future.
Yeah, it certainly is going to take a whole village to build this ecosystem, right?
It's going to be probably converging technologies on the DeFi side, the governance side,
the localism side, the DeFi side,
all of these technologies
that hopefully will be built concurrently,
converged into a point
that actually we can make a meaningful try
at providing some kind of decentralized infrastructure
for science, scientists, consumers, farmers, everybody.
And I think this might be a nice way to end it.
And I'll stick with you, Ed, if you don't mind.
What is your moonshot for, let's say,
improving the state of nature,
our relationship with nature, et cetera,
in the future, powered by some blockchain technology,
some AI technologies?
Let's say the Deci stack is as purpose as it can be.
What is your moonshot example of what things could be like?
Well, I think the main thing we're looking at is understanding health.
Because all the times in the last few years I've hung out in the medical community, it's all about sick care.
and when it comes to talking to doctors or medical researchers the whole that you know doctors say I
don't have time to talk about health or nutrition and they're not taught about nutrition much and
of course we haven't understood nutrition very well or the extreme gaps in the nutrition um that we have that goes all the way down to the roots of the soil
so um we see a massive paradigm shift about to happen um because you know it's the health of
the planet it's the health of people it's the health of let me ask do you see do you see in
that future of let's say a paradigm shift in understanding of health and how food and agriculture relates to health, etc., etc.?
Do you see that being something that is, let's say, started decentralized probably,
but do you see it as something that gets legs because it's supported by the government in your country, in particular in the U.S.?
With RFK Jr. in office and many other people.
How do you feel about what you want as a paradigm-shifting moonshot
being supported by the existing system?
Do you see that as a thing that happens,
or it becomes a competition almost?
Well, since we've been in this a long time,
I've been in it for over 50 years and working on this,
and we realize that paradigm shifts aren't easy when they're a
true paradigm shift and it's never going to start top down it's going to start bottom up and that's
what we've done we're a grassroots movement's been going for years of dedication into it
but we've now hit the level where we have enough of the knowledge and science behind it all and to start getting
it out that's why we're producing documentaries like common ground kiss the ground bringing
athletes movie stars into giving the message educating the public i mean this is a grassroots
movement yet most people around the world have heard about
regenerative agriculture. They don't understand it much, but they've heard about it, which is
pretty impressive for such a, to start out with a handful of farmers, you know, a paradigm shift
to happen in something as big as food and health in the planet's health over 40 or 50 years,
and especially in like the last 15,
is actually incredibly fast for such a paradigm shift.
So, and we now, you know, we used to say,
can this something that, you know,
will change all over the world.
And in the last five, six, seven years, we've realized, yes, it's the only way we're going to sustain the health of people and planet for the future.
And nature alone, without having to think that we have to change it or to gene edit it or CRISPR it or any of that kind of stuff, all these organisms.
No, we just need to understand how to steward it
properly and how it all works and that's where technology has been huge in the last few years
through metagenomics third generation now metabolomics all this kind of you know all
this technology in the field we now have a new meter coming out in next year that's going to be able
to measure right out in the field all the different minerals um that are available in our
in our in our plant and need so um it's just it's all coming together now and um it's just a matter
of of getting it out there educating more people, bringing more,
because all this touches all of us, whether we're working on coral reefs,
whether we're working on health research in medicine,
whether we're looking at economic systems, as you said, decentralization of systems. Now that we have the technology to decentralize a lot more technology and infrastructure, small scale, you know, AI, all these things are coming together and benefiting what we're doing.
So we're extremely, we're so excited.
We just want to pass that excitement along.
Thanks. Whoever did the clapping.
I'm not sure how that happened.
Ed, really appreciate the words.
And yeah, I'm excited for your excitement.
You said you've been doing this 50 years,
and the fact that you're here in this space
talking about this technology and yourself are very excited
can only mean good things.
And so thanks, Ed, for joining.
Thanks for being such a steadfast defender of,
let's say, the natural order of things. Vallidao go ahead tell us what's your moonshot for the
next couple years or maybe let's say. Well I mean that is a difficult question um you know I would
say that at Vallidao the the. No no no I mean I mean your moonshot not Vallidao's moonshot.
No, no, no. I mean your moonshot, not Validao's moonshot.
Yeah, but it's like I'm incredibly passionate about what we do, you know.
So, OK, well, you know, I think that I can say for myself and actually for Validao as well.
So, well, the moonshot would be to turn the global fight against the climate change and food insecurity into a global collective where, you know,
literally anyone can fund, support, even shape,
break through biotech solutions.
I think we all would love to see a world where climate biotech
isn't just locked in labs or any kind of biotech,
not just climate, that isn't locked in labs or gated by institutions, but where students,
you know, scientists and everyday people can get involved directly. And at the same time,
I think it's about education, bringing people closer to science so they don't just consume
the solutions that we create and we work on, but they fully understand them, trust them,
and feel somehow this ownership over them as well. So if we can make climate biotech both
effective and inclusive, you know, we're not just solving the problems, but I think like we would be
building the next generation of scientific citizens, you know. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much. And yeah, more participation from more people.
That's exactly what we want to see. And last but not least, sorry, Tom, thank you so much
for your time. Thank you so much. Thank you. And last but not least, Rodrigo, my old friend,
tell us what's your moonshot? Hey, what's up, man? So basically my munshot, I agree with Bali Dao in terms of creating a new wave of citizens
and researchers, you know, using the Web3 and design stack.
Because, you know, as a practitioner in restoration and as a researcher in low-meaning country,
I believe that we have to create a new wave of coordination, build proper incentives with
stakeholders to mitigate all this reef crisis that we have been facing. And I don't know if you know
this, but the coral reefs are the most complex systems on earth. You know, there are many, you
know, it's, you know, they offer many goods and services to many nations worldwide.
And it's basically, there's a huge economy that could be locked if we could create more regenerative approaches
and avoid these extractive practices that we have been doing since years.
So I believe a future or a moonshot essentially will be integrate
all this framework that we have in coral reef biotechnology
and scale it worldwide, you know, with the assistance of AI.
With the assistance of Web3 and these iTools that we have seen,
for example, AI will be our first iteration,
then could eventually scale in coral aid kits
that could be quite everywhere in the world,
where it's a stakeholder or a collective or an NGO
that is quite trying to mitigate certain situations.
And the third part eventually will be the modular wet labs.
We believe that this could be a really good approach
to implement in isolated places,
that essentially many reef-rich nations
are the ones that do not have proper infra.
We believe, and I believe, that this could be mitigated with implementing responsibly
this kind of design stack that we have seen on the long run.
So my moonshot essentially is, and the moonshot of MesorifDAO in a way,
is to scale these conservation initiatives and create new standards using
indexes on chain for the trustability and monitor of these ecosystems worldwide.
And if we could have a decentralized repository with a proper creation of all these natural
products, profiling and extractions, this could be a good thing because many molecules
are well-known, man, are quite disappearing, you know, because these ecosystems are quite getting lost.
So essentially, you could implement these components in our daily lives, you know,
and to create more pharmaceuticals and to mitigate many, many, many problems that we
have as humanity in human health.
And our purpose for now is to scale conservation efforts and try to implement
certain biotech components into create more resistant corals you know and more resistant
fish and restore uh actions you know on the scaling this efforts worldwide starting in well
let's let's uh let's hope that the research that you do for that is done via Desai Method
so lots of people can participate as well
because I'd be very interested.
Rodrigo, I have to drop
because I've got a call that I've got to go to.
So I'm going to end the spaces out.
But thank you very much for your time.
Thanks, Ed.
Thanks, Tom.
Thanks, Juan.
Thanks, Molecular, for joining.
All this context has been recorded
and is going to be added to our Meta Desai Bonfire.
I will invite as many of you as I can once it's ready.
So thank you everybody for all your time and I'll see you next week.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Josh.
See you all.
Thank you, Josh.
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