Pfizer-Invested Longevity Research, A New Paradigm for Decentralized Science
Colin Wu .
2023-02-01
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Author: @0xMavWisdom
On 30 January, DeSci track longevity startup VitaDAO announced the completion of a $4.1 million funding round from Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, and Pfizer Ventures, the investment arm of Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, marking Pfizer's first investment in the Web3 space. VitaDAO will use the funding to further fund longevity research projects and biotech startups that will be spun out of DAO next year. As a result of the news, the VitaDAO governance Token VITA rose by 60% in a short period of time.
DeSci (Decentralised Science) is an initiative to create a public infrastructure for the fair and equitable funding, creation, review, crediting, storage and dissemination of scientific knowledge using Web3 tools, including NFT, smart contracts and DAO. While humanity has experienced an exponential wave of technological development in the last two centuries, there are still various financial and information access barriers in reality, and the combination of technology and Web3 may be one way to address the pain points. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has also spoken about the use of quadratic funding and DAO tools such as VitaDAO to fund and organise scientific projects in a show on decentralised science. In this article, I will briefly analyse the DeSci space, using VitaDAO as an example from the biotech sector.