# DeSci London Roundup By [Retrox Blog](https://paragraph.com/@retroxblog) · 2023-02-03 --- We are reminiscing about an exciting few days at the [DeSci London Conference](https://www.desci.london/) at the Francis Crick Institute from the 15-16 January 2023. It was an extremely vibrant and stimulating event with people from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels in the DeSci space. All the talks, discussions and informal exchanges were memories to be cherished and furthered our excitement about the potential of decentralized science. Hackathon Victory ----------------- Prior to the commencement of the conference, there was a DeSci hackathon, where Jan built a decentralized peer reviewing platform, teaming up with Stefan from Molecule. The p33r review project which is currently operational on Polygon Mumbai and whose code can be accessed on [GitHub](https://github.com/elmariachi111/web3-peer-reviews), combines elements of existing projects, namely the [AntsReview](https://github.com/naszam/ants-review) smart contracts and our very own [OrcidAuth](https://orcidauth.vercel.app) registry to incentivize reviewers through financial compensation and reputational enhancement. A key aspect of the project is the ability to connect Ethereum addresses with authentic academic credentials and identities (in the form of ORCID ID’s), serving as a deterrent against Sybil attacks and spam, while also enabling editors to screen for conflicts of interest and allowing reviewers and editors to establish reviewing histories by from the data recorded on the blockchain. Additionally, a privacy-preserving cross-signing protocol was implemented to ensure that the identities of peer reviewers remain confidential while still permitting reviewers to confirm their authorship of a review through control of the relevant private keys. Of course, rewards are also sent to private addresses. In future, privacy preservation can be streamlined with zero knowledge proofs, but this was a quick and simple way of demonstrating the concept. Although, Jan suffered a bit of an accident the day of the hackathon presentation and couldn’t attend, all went smoothly and p33r review won the top prize! ![(PSA: no fingers were actually broken in the hacking process!)](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/fd3f78ba33e47d7d3762a6fe251c37350364820749ea1fc6ad49256d601746a3.jpg) (PSA: no fingers were actually broken in the hacking process!) You can rewatch it on the DeSci London youtube channel: [https://www.youtube.com/@descilondon](https://www.youtube.com/@descilondon). Conference Highlights --------------------- Now on to the actual conference, there were too many great talks to mention all of them but we’ll share some of our highlights. Newcomers to the space were gently introduced by Jelani and Josh from [DeSci World](https://desci.world). Vincent Weisser from [Molecule](https://www.molecule.to) had the opportunity to interview Vitalik and discuss his excitement towards the advancements in DeSci. Vitalik expressed his eagerness to see the implementation of soulbound tokens and POAPs for credit and credential management, particularly in the context of efficiently funding public goods. He also emphasized the importance of improving the funding infrastructure for educational projects in various scientific disciplines and evaluating their effectiveness. Additionally, he looked forward to the development of DeSci prediction markets. The talks were about a variety of topics and we’ll structure our recap along some common running themes; namely DeSci infrastructure, decentralized compute and Bio-DAO’s. Infrastructure is a pretty wide ranging term used to capture all those projects which are seeking to build blockchain based applications which support the development of science in a sub-discipline agnostic manner. There were a few standouts here which we want to highlight since many are working towards goals similar to ours. The first highlight was a presentation by Gnosis, where Frederike Ernst described Gnosis as a platform with credible neutrality, that is, without credible backing from a nation state or university. Instead, Gnosis Chain is supported by a large number of individual validators who are running nodes on their home PC’s with modest hardware requirements. Moreover, fees on Gnosis Chain are much lower than on Ethereum mainnet. Having such a platform, whose validation is independent of any powerful single entity, was as she argued, mission critical for the future of DeSci. Indeed we have seen some DeSci applications such as the OpSci/[Verse registry](https://verse.opsci.io) run on Gnosis Chain, which brings us to our next talk which was from Lindsey at OpSci. Lindsey talked about the possibility of minting a “holo” which aggregates your existing credentials from ORCID, GitHub & Twitter and creates a profile for any Open Science application. Profiles will be seamlessly integrated with Hypercerts (a concept developed for optimally fund and reward research in accordance to its impact by Holke at Protocol Labs). This paves the way for building a decentralized society where everyone’s research projects, contributions and credentials can be viewed on their OpSci profile, which would facilitate international and inter-disciplinary research collaboration. We really enjoyed Lindsey’s talk and share the same vision of building a better blockchain backed science registry for unthinkably many applications. Now that we mentioned [Hypercerts](https://protocol.ai/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/), there was also an exciting talk by Holke Brammer where he carefully explained the underlying ideas of Hypercerts (semi-fungible token building on ERC-1155) which capture the scope & timeline of the proposed work, as well as the predicted and actual impact. Protocol Labs aim to launch a first pilot project in February and some interesting discussion came up about how the “double impact claim” problem would be resolved, i.e. how it would be ensured that no one could claim impact twice for the same actual research work and how the impact assessment would proceed. Everything was very much still work in progress but Holke had clearly thought very carefully about a lot of eventualities. We also heard an exciting talk from John Fletcher who has worked on an incentive mechanism for accelerating scientific growth and fostering innovation. Scientific problems can often be construed as inverse problems, such as figuring out the initial conditions which give rise to a particular simulation outcome. [“The Innovation Game”](https://hackathon.the-innovation-game.com/welcome) focusses on such problems and proceeds by allowing network participants to submit better algorithms for solving important scientific computational problems, a list of which has been curated by a committee of scientific experts. Since the computationally less demanding algorithms are favored, those submitters are rewarded for sharing these incrementally improved methods within the network. In addition to that, larger scale parties in the network are obliged to pay a fee to use these improved algorithmic methods and hence there exists a self-sufficient cycle. One of our favorites was the Dune talk by [David Kell](https://twitter.com/dvdkll), since I initially had very little appreciation of Dune’s relevance to DeSci, but was pleasantly surprised. Initially, David discussed reputation in the professional world and traditional scientific ecosystem, which very much follows a top down approach. On the other hand, your reputation on Dune (i.e. your road to Dune wizardry) is calculated based on the number of stars your dashboard gets, which is much more in line with the open source software movement’s way of assigning reputation bottom up and giving the average user more power. This could serve as an interesting primitive for decentralized scientific communities. Moreover, he live-coded a Dashboard which fetched data for DeSci grants from GitCoin and that really highlighted the power of Dune for visualizing and concretizing any blockchain based data stream which is relevant for decentralized science applications. For instance, a Dune dashboard could be used to visualize peer reviewing data if it is stored on chain as proposed in the p33r review project. Looking at funding distribution or voting outcomes for impact funding would also be extremely interesting. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/473cb003611eeb82834aa82d100d58bdc18017c4ac079564dfb806cbc647ffbe.jpg) Another interesting talk was given by Chris from [DeSci Labs](https://www.desci.com) who also aim to build general purpose DeSci infrastructure. The idea here is to combine publishing of manuscripts with the publishing of code, data, methods, metadata and any other materials that may be of interest for other researchers. These research objects would not just be open access but also open for anyone to add to them, this also encompasses version control and neat tools for enhancing the efficacy of collaboration. Retrox was represented by Jan who talked about the importance of credentials and Sybil resistance in science. Particularly important for the advancement of DeSci is the integration of existing credentials in web2 with web3. The title of the talk was hence “Web3 credentials for Web2 scientists”. Science is really about developing theories and models to better understand the world and credentials, whatever form they may take, guide scientific discourse. Moreover, as Jan argued, we need Sybil resistance tools to hold people accountable and to safeguard protocols by tracing on-chain research activities to unique researcher identities. Beyond showcasing the OrcidAuth registry, some examples of tools which can be stacked on top were shown, such as composable researcher profiles, social scientific networking, on-chain peer review as well as optimal research fund allocation. There were also some exciting talks on the topic of decentralized computation. Iryna from Protocol Labs shared some developments from [Bacalhau](https://www.bacalhau.org) who embrace the computer over data concept. Unlike in traditional machine learning applications, data is not processed on a single machine, server or centralized AWS container, but rather it is processed by several nodes in a decentralized computing network, which offers interesting scalability advantages and also makes the protocol more resilient. [Algovera’s](https://www.algovera.ai) team also shared some of their recent work and highlighted the power of language models when carefully applied in the right context and when fed with the right data streams, as Richard demonstrated the effectiveness of a customized ChatGPT for a Notion workspace. Present were also a large number of research DAO’s who have focussed on a particular sub-discipline and are actively funding and supporting research in a a particular domain. This is extremely exciting insofar as these are some of the first real examples of decentralized research collectives tackling all the components required for successful research advancements. We heard from [Vibe Bio](https://www.vibebio.com), who work towards accelerating the discovery of rare disease cures, as well SpaceBioDAO who seek to conduct experiments in space to supplement traditional biomedical science. The conference finished with Niklas, the founder of [LabDAO](https://labdao.xyz), who talked about his journey into DeSci after he wanted to retain the ability to cooperate internationally after his visa expired and he moved back from America to Germany. Moreover, he described some revolutionary funding mechanisms (such as quadratic funding) which are currently available to promising young researchers and could have a transformative impact on how more diverse, disruptive and innovative research directions are pursued into the future. Conclusion ---------- In sum, we thought the conference was a huge success. Jan secured a hackathon victory for Retrox and talked about the importance of credentials and identity in DeSci, and some new relationships with Molecule, DeSci World, and others were established. We’re really excited about the work being done in the world of on-chain credentials, research funding, and peer review, and we look forward to continuing our push on the frontiers of decentralized science! --- *Originally published on [Retrox Blog](https://paragraph.com/@retroxblog/desci-london-roundup)*