Perhaps you’re a seasoned researcher just getting into Decentralized Science (DeSci), the oft-described meta of scientific research structuring and funding with a Web3 core. Naturally, you’re curious about DeSci’s potential for opening up novel funding mechanisms for your latest study. Terms like ‘TradSci’ and ‘fractionalized real-world asset NFTs’ abound, and don’t seem to alleviate the opaqueness of this brand-new field. If you’re here to learn about how DeSci can enable new funding mechanisms for research, lower costs, and empower patients and researchers, read on. The future of DeSci is brighter than a quasar — and far easier to harness for research innovation.

Today we’ll aim to clarify this jargon-dense and technical new field by discussing DeSci itself, as well as novel funding and intellectual property models that empower researchers and builders, rather than purely benefitting capital providers and entrenched institutions that may constrain biomedical innovation. We’ll cover successful real-world examples of how to secure funding in DeSci, with attention to more grassroots, decentralized mechanisms as well as traditional single-entity sources such as science DAOs. We’ll also mention some pitfalls to avoid when structuring this research, and show how DeSci can help projects remain structurally responsive as the aim of the research itself evolves. This can help in avoiding loss of funding and intellectual property rights, coordination failure, and more.

And, in case you’re eager to jump in and get started immediately, scroll to the end of this article for direct links to funding applications and funding FAQs as well as other useful links to VitaDAO and Molecule. If you’d prefer a bit of theory, background, and technical structure, read on.

🔬

As we know, science is expensive. The cost of taking a typical therapy from lab to market is around $2.3 billion per asset¹. This is assuming that researchers actually choose the appropriate benchmarks and disease targets; sometimes they don’t, and there is no funding for a second chance. Sometimes existing grants may not be flexible enough to handle a pivot, or a patent timeline may be running out, which can also stymie further development. It is conservative to say that many hundreds of promising therapies lie in biomedical research’s notorious ‘valley of death’² for this very reason.

Moreover, several underfunded areas of research stand to benefit from DeSci funding and the non-traditional approaches it offers — women’s health, psychedelics research, and enhancement technologies for longevity are just a few of these underfunded areas. Rare disease therapeutics, for instance, can be difficult to develop when they therapies may not generate enormous returns to investors, in addition to the fact that recruitment can be challenging when only a few dozen patients at a time may qualify for study participation, and are scattered throughout the world. This has the collateral outcome of raising costs for these rare disease therapeutics, to the detriment of patients. And for those aiming to conduct translational research, many funding opportunities abound just as they do in more traditional science funding.

Intellectual property is another issue. Often, institutions and capital-providers retain intellectual property over those who provide actual innovation. Innovators are in exchange bestowed with reputation and likelier access to resources, but not retention of the rights to their own ideas. This can also have a stifling effect on innovation and individual motivation. How can researchers retain control of their IP?

Decentralized Science aims to attack these problems as well as many other issues commonly found in institutional and traditional research arenas, where processes have become strangled by funding, regulatory, and cost issues, as well as deeply ingrained cultural and structural barriers. The first concept we’ll cover is both intellectual property and research funding innovation: enter the IP-NFT.

IP-NFT stands for Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Token. It is a digital asset consisting of one or more legal documents describing intellectual property rights, research agreements, and related material recorded on a blockchain, which serves as a highly secure and tamper-resistant registry of data and transactions. The IP-NFT is attached to valid, real-world legal documents, and is also considered an asset in its own right. IP-NFTs can be used to prove ownership, IP content, research dataset policy, and more. From there, we can fractionalize this asset or elements of this asset (IP rights, dividends, governance) into Intellectual Property tokens (IPTs), and distribute it across researchers, institutions, funding providers, and advisory councils. This quote from the VitaFAST whitepaper sums it up nicely:

“As smart contracts on Ethereum, IP-NFTs can be permissionlessly transferred peer-to-peer, made composable with DeFi, used to distribute governance to groups of stakeholders, built upon to unlock new ways to interact with and develop IP, R&D data, and NIPIA (Non-IP Intangible Assets, like trade secrets and publicity rights), used to empower crowd control of ethics in commercialization, and create unprecedented liquidity in IP markets through the development of this new asset class.”

This innovation opens up many creative and decentralized funding opportunities, especially for early-stage and translational research with niche interest groups, and areas of research not eligible for traditional funding, such as enhancement therapeutics not targeted at disease states. The tokenization of an IP-NFT opens the door to Kickstarter-like early funding by various communities, as well as decision-making support and fiduciary incentive by token-holding governance members. An IP-NFT-creator may choose to assign certain governance privileges to trusted experts in the field, while allowing general token holders privileges such as general voting and Discord group access. This may be accomplished by whitelisting members for highly technical votes, which is accomplished by interacting with the smart contract itself and adding certain wallet addresses to the contract’s allowlist, if it has one.

Note that while DeSci funding is a powerful opportunity, it is also a new frontier, and should not be directly compared to traditional institutional, federal or venture grants. Token-based funding is ideal for early and translational research that tests promising new ideas. More familiar grant endowments may be less flexible in terms of an investigational pivot, but token-holding governance participants may request more frequent engagement and updates, especially if voting on the direction of research is part of this agreement. Engagement is an essential part of community-driven funding, whether through familiar channels such as social media and podcasts, or bespoke DAO governance platforms such as Tally or Snapshot. See an image of DAO tooling below — many options abound, and are worth comparing.

Additionally, fundraisers should focus on crafting documentation describing the research in an accessible manner aimed at both scientific and non-scientific audiences. Scientists, laypeople, patient communities, and institutions should be able to understand the scientific proposal, so it may make sense to create both technical and non-technical materials to better reach a broad audience. Many channels to facilitate interest in token-based funding are available — from more traditional academic and trade conferences to Decentralized Science to Web3 events and publications. If this sounds a bit overwhelming for our academic readers, rest assured that community engagement and PR are part of what DAOs can offer the research community as it engages with DeSci and Web3 more broadly. Web3 is an inherently social and community-driven space, with Discord and X (Twitter) presence, on-chain analysis and metrics, governance tools to ease governance participation, and many members with dual Web3 and scientific literacies to offer to the academic community.

Further opportunity arises for smaller laboratories with limited resources. A common labor model in Web3 is the bounty system — an à la carte, public request for specific work in exchange for a set amount of payment. Smaller projects may therefore outsource specific elements of a project to collaborators at other laboratories and institutions in exchange for shares of IPTs, further incentivizing collaborators to ensure the success of the project.

One of the most powerful features of IPTs is the fact that these tokens can be permissionlessly operated, unlike traditional IP rights, which require redrafting of legal documents at every modification — an expensive, tedious, and burdensome administrative responsibility. This is just one example of how IPTs can lower the cost of research operations and eliminate administrative overhead.

🧬

A quick word on governance for those who are unfamiliar with on-chain, or smart-contract-facilitated governance coordination, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and token-based voting. While the topic of DeSci governance and token-based research coordination warrants a much lengthier discussion of its own, we would be remiss to ignore this critical element of tokenization — so let’s take a look at some important concepts, and become better equipped to avoid potential missteps. Further resources, and a DIY quadratic voting tool to experiment with, are available at the end of this article (4, 5, 6).

Originators of a single IP-NFT that has been fractionalized into IPTs (tokens) may choose to retain centralized governance amongst researchers and advisors, or allow the token holders to vote on the research structure itself. Token-holding voters may have many incentives for their decisions — the likelihood of curing a disease, the potential to increase the value of the IP token, the quality of research outcomes, the statistical integrity of the dataset, or other aims.

Attaching a token to governance participation is optional, and is at the discretion of the research group. In the case that governance participation (that is, voting rights) is not attached to a token, holders may still use the token as an IP asset.

Token-based governance, for that matter, is not an all-or-none proposition. The IPT creator may choose to allow some elements of research to be open for community governance, or may choose to delineate some voting proposals as advisory rather than as absolute decisions, for example.

Another option for governance structuring is to set tiers or minimum token-holdings that must be met for a holder to have certain kinds of voting privileges. For example, participants must hold at least 100 tokens to vote, and must have held them for at least three months. Or we might tier token requirements for very critical decisions. We may also choose to whitelist (DAO-speak for allowing a specific set of onchain addresses some privilege) certain token holders for voting regardless of their holdings, such as the first 50 addresses that acquired the token. Setting a 1:1 ratio of votes to tokens is a classic and simple DAO model that has been used extensively in early Web3. However, this strategy has the side effect of creating whales — jargon for an individual whose token holdings create a disproportionate amount of voting power, negating many of the other voters’ voices and possibly creating a kind of DAO oligarchy.

One creative solution to this governance bug is quadratic voting, in which a voter may assign as many votes or voting credits as they like to different options in a proposal, where the voting power is proportional to the square root of an individual’s votes. This means that if I have 4 voting credits and my neighbor has 1, and we vote on different items in a proposal, using all of our credits on our preferred items, my 4 voting credits count as 2 votes, and my neighbor’s count as 1, even though I have 4x the voting credits. So if my neighbor and two others, all with just 1 credit each, vote on the same item, they can outvote my 4 voting credits, which again count as just 2 votes. This helps to blunt the effects of whales, encourage participation, and empower individual voters. Let’s imagine that the voting period hasn’t closed yet, and my chosen outcome is only 10 votes away from winning. I’d have to somehow purchase or acquire 100 voting credits in order to sway the outcome. Thus by exponentially driving up the marginal cost of a single vote, as opposed to a linear 1:1 price tag per vote — we deter the most well-resourced voters from having a disproportionate amount of voting power.

🧪

Now that we’re familiar with some core concepts in DeSci, let’s look at a few existing projects that have been successfully funded by IPTs, and by extension their parent IP-NFTs.

One of the most popular and trusted IP-NFT models was developed by Molecule, a DeSci funding and tokenization platform. The model consists of two legal contracts: a Research Agreement describing the researcher-sponsor relationship, and an Assignment Agreement which assigns the Research Agreement to the owner(s) of the NFT itself. The latter is the Web3-specific legal innovation that transforms our standard TradSci contract into a blockchain-enabled asset. The Research Agreement “includes provisions for confidentiality, intellectual property rights, data ownership, and publication of results. It may also specify the terms of any licenses or patents that may result from the research…In addition to specifying the research activities to be undertaken, a Research Agreement may provide for the sponsorship of related activities such as conferences, seminars, and workshops.”³

As we can see, there is much room for creative structuring and distribution of rights and privileges surrounding research governance, assets such as study datasets or therapeutics, and publication. Project founders may structure the Research Agreement however they like, ranging from a partial ownership approach to a more all-encompassing one.

Once the IP-NFT is created, it can be fractionalized into IP tokens and tap into the rocket fuel that is Web3. Molecule makes this easy, secure and convenient by providing a Tokenizer contract which mints IPTs from a given IP-NFT. You can read more about this contract and how to use it here, test it out yourself on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet here (implementation contract for web3-savvy users may be found here), and, when you’re ready, mint your production tokens on the official contract here, as provided in Molecule’s documentation. This allows research groups to bypass the traditionally expensive and painful process of smart contract development, 3+ independent smart contract audits, and secure deployment, a fraught process to those who are not experienced protocol engineers or who are entering from a Web2 background.

Molecule’s model is being used today by many funded projects, such as Dr. Viktor Korolchuck’s autophagy activation drug discovery platform, based at Newcastle University. Interested parties may read the IP-NFT documents before deciding whether to fund the project through the purchase of VITA-FAST tokens. The VITA-FAST token was met with a 1700% oversubscription — a successful fundraising effort that demonstrates the viability of this model.

VitaDAO, a DAO focused on the funding and enablement of moonshot longevity biotech, has funded a number of projects in exchange for shares of IP in the form of IPTs. Many of these initiatives have been small, early-stage, translational investigational endowments in areas such as autophagy, RNA therapeutics, novel small-molecule therapeutics, and other projects. VitaDAO thus acts as a single-source funding provider, which will be more familiar to traditional academic researchers than token-based fundraising. You can read more about specific projects on VitaDAO’s projects page. In this way, VitaDAO’s governance participation and IP rights are quantifiable, visible in blockchain transaction records, and easy to modify via addition or removal of tokens. Governance participation is visible onchain, enforcing transparency amongst the DAO.

🥼

In this introduction we’ve covered just one of the ways in which investigators are securing funding for their projects via the powerful and flexible concept of the IP-NFT and IPTs. We’ve touched upon how these constructs can drive community engagement of patient communities, DAOs, and other stakeholders. And while traditional grant funding may still be appropriate at some point in the journey from lab to industry, DeSci-native funding can still help protect early IP rights, incentivize innovators and core contributors through ownership of their own ideas, and provide a great deal of flexibility via close contact with stakeholders. DeSci opens up many avenues for partnership across science and tech, and helps less traditional projects secure funding and support.

To take the next step to research funding, interested parties might start with VitaDAO’s Funding FAQ page, and then apply directly via this form on the website under the ‘Researchers’ page. You may also join the Discord community to get access to VitaDAO stewards who can answer any specific questions you may have. If you’re still curious about the technical aspects of governance, IP-NFTs and IPTs, or DeSci DAOs, be sure to check out Molecule’s and VitaDAO’s further documentation and Discord and X communities, where subject-matter experts, engineers, scientists, and community members can help you power up your next project with DeSci.

Thank you so much checking out my article. To help this information go where it will help and educate the most, please share on your favorite social media platform.

If you’d like to support freelance crypto journalism, please mint an NFT version of this article below!

1. Cost of pharmaceutical asset development: https://www.genengnews.com/gen-edge/the-unbearable-cost-of-drug-development-deloitte-report-shows-15-jump-in-rd-to-2-3-billion/

2. Valley of Death: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-010818-021625

3. Molecule IP-NFT design: https://docs.molecule.to/documentation/ip-nfts/ip-nft-legal-structure

4. Quadratic Voting: https://blog.tally.xyz/a-simple-guide-to-quadratic-voting-327b52addde1

5. Host a quadratic vote of your own: https://quadraticvote.co/

6. Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2003531

The curious technophile ventures forth across the small and wondrous meatspace of a pop-up city-within-a-charter-city in Roatan, Honduras, chronicling the emergence of an experimental biotech startup hub, crypto-augmented Special Economic Zone, and nuclear reactor of liberal governance, big brains, and disruptive ideas¹.

Gazing out at a horizon so vividly turquoise that I begin to question whether my coffee has been trendily microdosed, it is easy to mistake this globally-renowned SCUBA destination and idyllic Caribbean getaway as a mere tourist haven. Postcard-perfect palms sway in a breeze that feels gentle as bathwater, laden with small coconuts which occasionally drop to Earth. Grass roofs top shallow fishing and diving docks, just as in too-perfect vacation stock photos. Small waves break against the world’s second-largest barrier reef, just a kilometer from shore--a penumbra of fantastical corals surrounding something possibly much stranger to us land-dwellers.

Framed in this vivid environment is a buzzing hub of ambitious STEAM activity, alive with provocative and audacious ideas, and an unquantifiable mass of intellectual horsepower and optimistic creativity. The air is laden with, What if? Legal engineers, doctors, biohackers, web3 developers, research scientists, psychologists, community builders and entrepreneurs in myriad verticals have convened in tropical Roatan’s Pristine Bay for a 2-month pop-up network city called Vitalia: The City of Life, with a theme that sounds surreal to many: Make Death Optional.

Why here and why now? Vitalia was chosen as a physical manifestation of what some might classify as a Network Society--a decentralized group cooperating and coordinating their energies around a set of unifying philosophies, which occasionally physically manifests-- permanently, temporarily, centrally or in a decentralized manner. The concept was popularized by Balaji Srinivasan, whose interactive and streamlined book on the concept, The Network State, may be read in its entirety, free of charge, here. This touchdown on Caribbean shores is no accident--Roatan is home to Próspera ZEDE (Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico), a Honduran Special Economic Zone and charter city. Founded around 2021, Próspera is considered one of the most autonomous of existing Special Economic Zones, including Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai. Próspera’s financial backers include Pronomos Capital, a fund led by Patri Friedman, the founder of the Seasteading Institute and backed by Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferriss and Marc Andreessen--well-recognized names and veterans of startup societies and early investing. However, these names make up only a small fraction of investment into Próspera and their role has been overstated by the media. Most of Próspera investors are not as well-known, include only a few institutional VCs, and invest in the space out of conviction--a bet on a different future which they believe should exist. Próspera’s success seemed too early cypherpunk, not ready even for the most forward-looking VCs. Given its continual and steady development over the course of recent years, this may soon change.

The concept of Próspera is uncomplicated: streamlined legal code and liberal governance, paired with the goal of economic prosperity through entrepreneurship and rapid development encouraged by low business taxes, will empower residents, citizens and businesses, and allow Próspera’s government to cover its own operating costs, unlike many existing governments. In addition to fresh legal and policy approaches, financial technologies such as cryptocurrency are part of this plan to empower residents, citizens, and businesses. For example, Próspera hosts AmityAge - a Bitcoin Education Center that has onboarded roughly 60 businesses on the island to accept Bitcoin payments. Próspera also offers cryptocurrency as legal tender, and accepts payments from multiple blockchains including Ethereum and Solana. Businesses can be incorporated here (e.g. LLCs) quickly and efficiently. And since law may be copied, one can, for instance, set up a Delaware-style corporation, or copy and iterate on a variety of other legal structures that have proven successful in the past.  Businesses in the ZEDE are free to transact in crypto without securities laws, and they are allowed to tokenize their assets and require no capital gains tax. The ZEDE itself has investment protection under both national law and international treaties, granting investors, entrepreneurs and residents the stability to build and invest with a long time horizon.

Próspera’s jurisdiction includes several parcels of land including Pristine Bay, consisting of loosely themed neighborhoods including the Beta District. The Beta District harbors Duna, a 14-story residential tower currently under construction, and Las Verandas, a luxury golf resort including larger villas and condominiums for year-round living, plus a small piece of land on which GARM Clinic, a medical tourism destination offering cutting-edge longevity treatments, sits. Próspera ZEDE’s jurisdiction also encompasses a mainland Honduran shipping port (Satuye, in Las Ceiba) where port workers and their families are expected to live, facilitating shipments back and forth and by extension speeding along the significant construction that is needed to build this charter city.

Before delving into Vitalia, we’d be remiss to ignore VitaDAO, a closely involved organization that sits at several intersections including longevity biotech, web3, culture, startup incubation, and funding mechanism innovation. For non-web3 readers, I direct you to a quick introduction to the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a web3 concept consisting of a collective of participants, working under some common goal, that coordinates decision-making and resources through code in a permanent ledger--a blockchain. VitaDAO’s bottom line is to slow, stop, and even reverse aging, which includes the extension of healthspan as well as lifespan.

You may be wondering at this point why aging is a target--not cancer or osteoporosis or metabolic syndrome, or even addiction. Aging is VitaDAO’s target because of the 150,000 human deaths per day on planet Earth, roughly 100,000 are caused by aging itself, which includes age-related disease that is a direct result of the aging process³.  Let us sit with this for a moment: aging is more deadly than any disease, group of diseases, or cause of death including accidents, addiction, war, starvation, or infection.  If aging itself were viewed as a primary disease, two-thirds of these deaths could be prevented if a cure were reached.  And if the aging process could be reversed, delayed, or otherwise mitigated, we could look forward to living a greater number of healthy, productive years--years spent with our families, partners and communities, years learning, pursuing growth and picking up meaningful longer-term projects.  The potential of the human species and civilization as a whole, unfettered by mortality, is incalculable.  At this point we can direct critical and inquiring readers to VitaDAO’s Longevity Briefing Primer for a more detailed overview of this goal, its supporting philosophy and mechanisms.

What’s more, in industrialized nations, up to 90% of deaths per year are related to aging and age-related disease³.  Perhaps most provocative of VitaDAO’s founding vision is the idea that aging is a disease, and that we should make death optional by understanding and eliminating this disease*.* This idea creates friction in the US regulatory system, as the FDA currently neither recognizes nor legitimizes the development of therapies aimed at the enhancement of currently healthy people, as opposed to the treatment of disease or disability. The FDA does not currently recognize aging as a disease.

So if aging is a target, what is the shape of the organization that aims to prevent it?  VitaDAO is composed of scientists, researchers, web3 and web2 professionals, academics, dealmakers, venture capital, and others collectively pushing decentralized science forward in the arena of longevity and enhancement biotech, complemented by web3 technologies, to solve some of the most persistent problems of traditional science.  Examples of problems VitaDAO is working to solve include the high cost of Big Pharma-style clinical trials, averaging $2.3 billion per therapy² according to Deloitte, and the regulatory bottlenecks of conducting clinical research.  Other persistent issues of traditional science in academia and institutions, or “tradsci”, include the gatekeeping and misaligned incentives of academic publishing, patient data privacy and sovereignty, and access to and compensation for dataset usage. This is all backed by a belief that the current biomedical research apparatus is failing to deliver treatments and progress in a timely manner, and the data-backed observation that Big Pharma has stagnated for years, failing to bring treatments to market for sick and dying people.  While approved pharmaceutical drugs occasionally do unknown harm, as opposed to known side effects, deaths from the lack of therapies that weren’t approved sooner, or were mired in regulatory complications kill far more people than those who die from approved drugs.  According to Zina Sarif of Yendou, a melanoma research foundation, 10,000 cancer deaths per year could be prevented by existing drugs stuck in long trials.

Here in Pristine Bay we witness the tinder of an enabling legal platform combined with the spark of innovative biotech and other industries, agitating for faster, cheaper, more efficient regulatory processes. And Vitalia, a gust of oxygen funneling in a migration of scientists, researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs for the pop-up city and its numerous mini-conferences, with aims to convert some of these to permanent residency.  Part of this thrust consists of four conferences: two on Longevity Biotech bookending the event, the second on Crypto Cities & Startup Societies, and the third conference on AI & Tech Progress.

The first of these 3-day weekend conferences, Longevity Biotech Part I, featured notable speakers and serious contributors to the fields of longevity, rejuvenation biotech, geriatrics and gerontology, such as Aubrey de Grey, José Cordeiro, and billionaire biohacker and elven-skinned longevity advocate Bryan Johnson. I sat in on two days of lectures. Surprisingly, there was not a huge emphasis on lifestyle interventions--considering that so far, even a rigorous regimen of sleep, healthy diet, social wellness, and stress management can only get us so far, with the most genetically blessed of us, lifestyle unknown, living to about 116 or so. An increased healthspan augmented by lifestyle, so the common thread went, will allow us to access the next available rejuvenation technologies as they arrive, until a final innovation to stop aging is found.  Cryonics, or whole body or brain preservation by special freezing techniques, are currently considered a great Plan B amongst many longevity experts and researchers.

Talks during the first Longevity Biotech conference focused on dozens of potential biotechnologies for rejuvenation and making death optional.  Rather than wishful thinking about juice cleanses or sleep protocols prolonging life far past anything we’ve seen so far (which lifestyle advocates admit won’t take us to immortality), talks focused on bone marrow rejuvenation, cohesive theories of aging such as mitochondrial dysregulation and biological clocks located in individual bodily cells as well as specific clusters of cells in the brain, and even the occasional homebrew science project, such as an introduction to the art of running an electrical current through muscle tissue (monkeys and scientists) to express target molecules, such as ebola antibodies, based on injected mRNA.

The second conference, Crypto Cities & Startup Societies, spanned the weekend of February 2-4. In the spare weekend between conferences, Vitalians explored the island’s bays, reefs, eateries, and other local gems. A bonfire with ecstatic dancing was thrown on the beach in front of the Pool Club, a sprawling, multi-story building on Las Verandas and the de facto center of gravity of the event that houses coworking, an aerial silks space, a gym, meeting rooms, cold plunge and sauna, a salon, and a biohacking lab. Other weekend entertainments included locally grown cacao, freediving certification, local art, Lionfish spearfishing, Palmetto Bay and its brewery, and local Howler monkeys. An all-ages, Vitalian DJ’d party at Roatan Yacht Club with dancing, open laptops containing glucose data charts, and intense philosophical conversations about consciousness and the nature of work unfolded.

What separates Vitalia from a Web2-style conference, or even a Web3 conference (some of which exude a distinct festival energy), is both tangible and not. Many of the organizers involved also had a hand in attending or organizing Zuzalu and Zuconnect, two legendary Web3 events that concentrated the best and brightest--intelligent, creative, weird and open-minded dreamers with diverse backgrounds, mostly united by their agency and idealism. These events were founded by Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and you can read more about his reason for creating these genre-defining events here. Part of Vitalia’s unique culture is its do-it-yourself approach to organizing--anyone can organize workshops, events, activities, and groups. Hackathons spur infrastructure development and experimentation to support the Vitalia and Zuzalu-adjacent community itself with open-source, tailor-made event tooling such as ZK-gated forums, ticketing, and scheduling software. Attention to the whole person is also something that separates this event from a typical Web3 conference--wellness activities abound--from holotropic breathwork to men’s and women’s groups, to circling and authentic relating, to meditation and pilates and yoga and improv. Artists and psychologists and podcasters and scientists rub shoulders with hackers and VC investors. The Zuzalu formula, the Zuclear reactor, is alive and well at Vitalia. It feels less like a tech conference and more like a summer camp for gifted adults, where conversations flow freely and cross-pollination of ideas is abundant.

Vitalia isn’t just high-caliber brains, but heart as well. International community-builders work with New Governance experts to engineer a culture and a city that will stick--something that will have staying power and encourage people to plant their flags, start families, and build in a technological, regulatory and ideological frontier nestled in the tropics, given a shot at changing the world by investors, innovators, and the Honduran government.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to support my writing, feel free to mint it as an NFT (at a bargain price!) or tip morganjweaver.eth!

1. Tribute to Neil Stephenson’s 1996 Wired gem, Mother Board, Mother Earth, on the intro.

2. Cost of pharmaceutical asset development: https://www.genengnews.com/gen-edge/the-unbearable-cost-of-drug-development-deloitte-report-shows-15-jump-in-rd-to-2-3-billion/

3. Age-related mortality statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging-associated_diseases#:~:text=Of the roughly 150%2C000 people,is higher%2C reaching 90%25.

4. Honduran criminal law applies in the ZEDE--things that were already illegal in Honduras, such as abortion and illegal drugs including psychedelics, are also illegal in the ZEDE.

Recently I had the pleasure of learning to use Tenderly’s Simulation endpoint to simulate a complex transaction: I had to fake a Safe multisig vault owner signing and proposing a transaction to a Compound Governor-style DAO, and the general vault address wasn’t an approved proposer, nor did I have any private keys to sign with.

Along the way I had to calculate the storage slot and value of a mapping(mapping==>struct) where the struct variables were packed in a single slot.

If you are trying to calculate a complex storage location, here is how to do so, with a state override example to fool the voting token contract (COMP or similar) into believing the multisig vault sender actually has cast enough previous votes to qualify for submitting a new proposal.

The state overrides being submitted to the COMP contract on Tenderly are as follows (but stay tuned for the additional Safe threshold override--we’ll get to that later):

• COMP Token contract: checkpoints[][0].votes = 25000000000000000000005

  • COMP Token contract: checkpoints[][0].fromBlock = 17035677

  Where our Checkpoint struct is:

  struct checkpoint {
      uint32 fromBlock;
      uint96 votes;
  }
  

  It is critical to note that only a single slot address and value pair are given for both state overrides on the 2-item checkpoint struct in the COMP Token override in code, since these are packed in adjacent slots in EVM storage. It looks something like:

  const STATE_OVERRIDE_TWO_VALUES = {
  ['0x<SOME_STORAGE_ADDRESS>']:'0x000000000000000000000000000000000000054b40b1f852bda000050103f19d'
  }
  

  There are several ways to calculate this, either in the Tenderly simulation UI or with solc's --storage-layout flag, evm.storage; or see example at https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.15/internals/layout_in_storage.html#mappings-and-dynamic-arrays. We can also do it by hand.

  The storage slot calculation is as follows:

  The mapping declaration for checkpoints on COMP is at slot 3 (go ahead and verify on evm.storage by pasting in COMP’s address).

  keccak256(k . p) is where the mapping from slot 3 (that’s p) stores members of key k, where p is concatenated to k

  …note that for value types the bits are stored little-endian and must be left-padded with zeros, while for strings and byte arrays it's just unpadded data, big-endian style.

  Now concatenate the padded uint256 slot number after uint256 representation of the key:

  keccak256(uint256( . uint256(3))) Now concatenate this with the second value of mapping[a][b] with the same key-value rules: keccak256(uint256(0).keccak256(uint256( . uint256(3)))) this gets us slot 0 of our struct: struct checkpoint { uint32 fromBlock; uint96 votes; } but how do we write data if two struct members are sharing the same storage slot!? Well, since the EVM packs struct members in slots, we know these two are sharing a slot but only using the last 128 bits, which will be packed from first to last in the lowest digits as a base-16 hex representation, where each hex digit represents 4 bits of our 128 bits of the 256-bit memory slot used by the struct. So uint32 fromBlock should have 8 hex digits and be packed first in the 64-digit hex number. If we use block number 17035671, that should look like: 0x00000000..........0103F19D ....and looking at the hex representation 25000000000000000000005 for our uint96 votes variable, it's: 0x0000000...54B40B1F852BDA00005 Now concatenate them, making sure you're capturing the single zero on the left of the fromBlock since value types are left-padded with zeros à la little-endian: 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000054b40b1f852bda000050103f19d Et voilà: you now have the data payload for the state override to slot keccak256(uint256(0).keccak256(uint256( . uint256(3)))) on the COMP Token contract's checkpoint mapping so that your Multisig sender can appear to be a legitimate proposer when running a Tenderly transaction simulation. P.S. If you found this article while actually trying to simulate a DAO proposal on a Safe vault, you’ll also need to override the vault’s voting threshold to 1 signature and spoof a prevalidated signature. First you’ll do something like this for the storage value of the state override: const THRESHOLD_ONE_STORAGE_OVERRIDE = { [`0x${'4'.padStart(64, '0')}`]: `0x${'1'.padStart(64, '0')}`, } …and then you’ll need to fake a pre-validated tx signature of a vault owner/spoofed msg.sender like this: const getPreValidatedSignature = (address: string): string => { return `0x000000000000000000000000${address.replace( '0x', '', )}000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001` } and include that signature in the SignedSafeTransaction extension of SafeTransaction for programmatic usage: const signedSafeTransaction: SignedSafeTransaction = { ...safeTransaction, signatures: getPreValidatedSignature(tx.spoofedSigner), } The above SignedSafeTransaction is: interface SignedSafeTransaction extends SafeTransaction { signatures: string } and is an extension of SafeTransaction, both of which we cite as interfaces in the script: interface SafeTransaction { to: string value: string data: string safeTxGas: string baseGas: string gasPrice: string gasToken: string refundReceiver: string nonce: string operation: string } So remember to submit a prevalidated signature from one of the vault keyholders when sending the simulation transaction on a Safe vault and you should be ready to go. Thanks for reading this, and I hope it helps you! Feel free to reach out on Twitter/X @morganjweaver or LinkedIn /in/morganjweaver. You can find me building web3 security automation at OpenZeppelin.

At the time, I’d only intended to travel until the complex phenomenon that is burnout began to fade, hoping that I’d somehow regain my desire to contribute to America’s tech economy. Something was wrong, and I wasn’t sure what it was, though I had a vague sense that my life was no longer in balance, and probably hadn’t been for some time, despite friendships, regular exercise, and a healthy diet.  This is not that blog post, but perhaps another time we can explore tech burnout.

Unexpectedly, I got over my burnout minus one week into my planned 6-month travel period.  This is also another blog post, but for the sake of cohesiveness, I’ll give you the condensed version: I went out for a good-bye drink with my best friend, who invited me to a Web3 conference in Amsterdam that was happening in a couple of weeks, one week before my official last day at work.  Overcome by a sense of nihilism and despair, I acquiesced, thinking I’d go look at tulips in hope of making a tiny dent in my burnout with some gentle tourist activities.  The sort of thing that looks pretty on Instagram, but may or may not hold any therapeutic value for the burnt-out developer. I visited a couple of conference events, and experienced a paradigm shift.  Up at 4 AM feverishly reading EVM documentation, I saw the future, and it lit me on fire.  I found the frontier I’d always dreamed of, since growing up as a weird kid in a rural island nowhere with a subscription to Wired and a stack of 2600 ‘zines.  I dove into Web3 and applied to a competitive (free) bootcamp with Encode Club, then a security fellowship focused on contract auditing with Macro, which would begin one week after the boot camp ended.

Since that week in Amsterdam, I have been traveling continuously for 4 months through mostly Latin America, Europe, and soon a month each in the UK and Near East.

Along the way, I’ve met other digital nomads and crypto nomads.  I’ve interviewed (a polite term for ‘relentlessly badgered’) them about topics ranging from checked luggage to duration in each country to international tax and immigration law. I’ve attempted to read between the lines when they mention their conference peers noting that they were still wearing the same outfit several days into the conference. Some are a little more extreme—take Vitalik’s 40-liter backpack travel guide.  Some spend a month per location. Others have an absolute minimum of 4-5 months per location.  Some travel in loose or highly-organized packs, with or without a ‘director’ of sorts, while others travel solo, or with a romantic partner or friend.  Some choose coworking and coliving spaces.

While some have full-time jobs for DAOs or corporations (including international companies or companies based in their countries of origin), others are freelance or bounty hunters. I am currently a student, and spend about 20 hrs per week on lecture and homework—sometimes more as I prepare for my security fellowship with pre-coursework.  So consider the perspective, and take what you will.  Rather than offer a ‘top 10 must-have digital nomad travel tips’ or some other clickbait, I’ll summarize a slightly more philosophical set of principles for thriving in our cyberpunk future, starting with Part I of this series:

I. Reconsider Consumerism and Materialism:

Most Americans are used to the yearly 2-week vacay to Mexico or Hawaii (or, God forbid, 3-4 ‘long weekends’ actually spent flying to and from weddings) or some other block of time where they will typically pick up a handful of souvenirs, if international travel, or perhaps engage in some personal shopping. This is all fine if you have a house or apartment to come home to and dump your accumulated goods.  How nice!  A case of wine, a new hat, some exotic handicrafts!  When traveling continuously for months, this is neither practical nor enjoyable.  You will literally carry the burden of your consumerist tendency to accumulate on your back and in your hands, dragging it behind you in the form of luggage (if you’re the wheeled-luggage type), so choose wisely.

Rather than buying loads of low-utility objects (my personal weaknesses are art and fine fragrance), consider what you need and integrate that instead. For example, foreign toothpaste, a journal, or a great sweater made of local fiber when the season begins to turn.  While not souvenirs per se, these items are connected to your travels, and act as ephemeral or less-than-ephemeral reminders of your experiences.

Many of these utilitarian things will disappear as you use them up.  So take pictures or simply become more comfortable with the fleeting and transitory nature of travel.

Some of the best souvenirs do not take up space in your luggage.  Relationships and experiences don’t weigh a gram, and can last far longer than any material object. And you’ll never get sick of revisiting an awesome memory in the way you might get sick of looking at a pice of art that’s been on your wall forever.

As Americans especially, consumerism is encouraged as part of daily life, a vehicle for aspiration, a sign of success, even a form of nationalism. If you’re not afflicted with this cultural programming, lucky you!  However, one way to scratch the itch without actually accumulating low-utility stuff is to consume in a way that leaves nothing behind—that is, going out to a great restaurant.  This could be solo, with a friend, a date, or someone from your current expat or topical meetup group.  This could be a food tour you’ve booked via AirBnB or TripAdviser. It could be a $1 roasted fish on a stick from a street vendor, or a 12-course meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant.  Food is a necessity, so why not leverage the experience while traveling?

Another small strategy that I really love for avoiding the curse of stuff is embracing a more digital form of consumerism—one of my favorite projects is POAP (https://poap.xyz/)—short for Proof of Attendance Protocol—that allows you to collect a (usually) geolocation-linked digital token for events attended in person. The tokens are custom illustrations, date-stamped and often with a short description, and sometimes limited in quantity like NFTs. It’s a fun way to keep a memento from events without having to sort through a pile of SWAG from a conference—how many pens, t-shirts, and branded buttons do you really need, anyway?

Finally, if accumulation is inevitable, realize that you can always pull the emergency ripcord and ship your belongings to friends or family.  Perhaps you thought the climate would be wetter and you didn’t need that technical raincoat after all, or you received a tapestry blessed by a shaman, whatever the situation—costly as international shipping may be, some things are worth sending home for a variety of reasons.  Just be sure to include a ‘thank-you’ gift in the package if you’re shipping to a friend or relative for safekeeping and free storage, if you don’t have an address to go back to.

This concludes Part I of of my guide to crypto nomadism, or really lightly-crypto-flavored digital nomadism.  I intend to cover more elements of life as a nomad at length in future posts.  Let me know what you think on Twitter—find me @morganjweaver!

This article is not about maximalism as it pertains to a single coin or chain. I would like to delineate the concept of crypto or web3 maximalism as a belief in the inherent value of the plurality of blockchain technologies and ideas and the synergistic effects therein. If you were here to figure out whether to be a BTC, ETH, Doge, Ape, or gold futures maxi, this won’t be very useful.

Pluralistic crypto maximalism is essentially about humanism. Crypto is a fairly new field, and has only been gaining traction and public acceptance as something beyond a mechanism for money laundering or the purchase of illegal goods in the last few years. We might put a rough date on this turning point of increased public acceptance somewhere around 2017, when ICOs began to pick up at an astonishing pace, with ~800 ICOs that year. Crypto has seen several bear/bull cycles, but continues to grow rapidly as a field. Ads for various coins and web3 companies can be seen at the Superbowl, and even in fortune cookies (I’m looking at you, FTX). But what is the advantage of the maximalist approach--*the more, the better!--*and how the hell am I going to convince you that this is somehow connected to humanism? Read on.

Pluralism and its flourishing of ideas, experimentation, and seemingly Quixotic ventures (various memecoins, NFT and exotic derivatives, etc) contributes to one of the most powerful and civilization-forwarding forces on Earth: entropy. Crypto pours additional gasoline on this fire with its diverse user base. Attending my first web3 event, I met lawyers, artists, psychologists, product and project managers, frontend, backend, and fullstack developers, mathematicians, event producers, and others from a wide array of disparate industries. I did not notice this diversity of thought or background in the two GMAFIA companies at which I had previously worked or interned.

Diversity of thought is important. It fuses disparate ideas, unlocks oblique reasoning within the interstices between fields, and creates a richer, higher-dimensional solution space which can be leveraged for complex problem-solving. One weakness of the largest, most centralized tech companies is the hiring strategy of vacuuming up fresh CS grads from university--whereas crypto companies don’t really take this approach, and crypto/web3 is scarcely taught at the university level, somewhat like DevOps--it’s a discipline that is learned by doing, and still too young to be part of most standard computer science curricula. This reality tends to attract the most passionate contributors to web3. Not those who go because it seems like a sound career with which to support a family and a mortgage, or people whose parents did crypto and force their kids to follow in their footsteps, but people who choose a risky yet exciting new frontier.

In a volatile industry where many previous economic and financial axioms no longer hold true, we need wild ideas, disparate backgrounds, and passionate builders to solve novel problems. Passion is, in this author’s opinion, the ultimate nootropic. Radical thinking is needed as a survival strategy.

This kind of problem space currently doesn’t have many ivory towers or glass ceilings...yet. A well-known element of crypto is the anonymous community. Many brilliant anons are self-professed teenagers, dropping hot takes on Twitter or day-trading or creating digital assets and selling them with no corporate W-2 or parental permission. Whether this is true or not, the opportunity to contribute anonymously underscores both the potential for diverse contribution, and the synergy of contributors in the space who may not otherwise feel socially accepted due to their age or other demographic characteristics. Web3 escapes the homogenizing, centralizing tendencies of the US tech scene because crypto is not centralized to the US. Consider how much of tech is centralized to a few powerful American companies and universities.

Let’s not forget the humanism of the decentralizing tendency of blockchain technology and decentralized web3 organizations, whether technical, like many blockchains, or socio-technical, like DAOs. Distributed compute, distributed resources, distributed social power, and distributed responsibility puts more power in the hands of individuals. While there’s plenty of VC funding in web3, there are still countless organizations that disperse power, like the many grant-funding DAOs--in contrast to the existing model of aggressive-growth, shareholder-driven startups that are often portfolio items in a diversified investment fund. But do read the fine print--not every crypto company or organization is truly decentralized, and there are countless DAO structures with varying degrees of centralization across a spectrum. DYOR.

Let’s recap why web3 + crypto maximalism can be viewed as a more humanist endeavor than the current powers that be in tech:

• Diversity of thought and background in contributors leverages cross-disciplinary knowledge, creating richer solution space for problem-solving

• Welcomes anonymous contributors who otherwise wouldn’t participate

• Risky new frontier pulls in the most passionate contributors

• Non-US-centered movement pulls in far broader global community

• Decentralization of technological and socio-technical structures pushes power to individuals, not shareholders, accruing more value for contributors and community

• The very need for a broader swath of humanity to generate radical ideas for unforeseen new problems, and less hierarchical, more distributed social structures, as well as welcoming nature to outsiders and non-tech people creates a far more inclusive social onboarding experience

It is my hope that this article has taken a reasonable stab at defending its somewhat audacious thesis. Of course web3 + crypto is not humanist in the sense of one giant pile of puppies and rainbows where everyone is given a free club t-shirt and a freshly-baked cookie at the door, but that web3 + crypto is humanist-leaning in a structural sense, and it is my aim that this article has given you an idea of how it accomplishes this.

P.S. For a bit of levity on this topic tempered by empathy and a deep understanding of the crypto zeitgeist, please enjoy Vitalik’s In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to question, comment, tip, or shit-post the author: Twitter: @morganjweaver | Other stuff: morganjweaver.eth

A preface for anyone reading this: burnout is real. It’s insidious, and it slowly leaches your motivation, sense of accomplishment and mastery, and ability to have a meaningful career. I finally decided to do something about my own burnout after more than a year, a woefully long period of time in which to languish.

A pearl of wisdom for anyone experiencing burnout, especially those of you who are earlier in your tech career, or any career: perhaps our most critical asset for both survival and a life meaningfully lived is our ability to productively engage. Let’s break this down. Does this imply that work is the most important thing in life? Absolutely not. Whatever is important to you is the most important thing in life. But your ability to productively and enthusiastically engage is an indicator of overall mental and occupational health. Creativity, flexibility, willingness to take good risks, and open-mindedness live in this place of meaningful engagement.

What this means is that burnout has a complex network effect that extends to many areas of a person’s life. Burnt out at work? You’re probably not the best parent/partner/community volunteer/friend/etc. right now. Getting un-burnt out is really difficult when you’re already burnt out. Most of the blogs and personal accounts I read suggested that burnout can take 3 months to two years to recover from…assuming you’re not working. If you are not independently wealthy, this may not be an option.

Which brings me to the fun part of this inaugural blog entry: Web3.

I heard about ETH Amsterdam (more specifically, DevConnect) while out having a drink with my best friend, who runs ZK startup risc0. Depressed, disengaged, and flattened by my stressful and chaotic startup job, I decided to come along to Amsterdam on a whim, expecting to attend one or two talks, and otherwise view some tulips and a museum or two populated with the art of the Dutch masters.

On day 1 or 2 of the conference, my head was blown off. What does this mean? I met other people who had web3 careers, worked for multiple DAOs, and seemed to love their jobs. Previously, I’d believed that web3 was solely for speculative investments and market manipulation plus illegal activities. Perhaps some of that is enabled by web3, but there were some far more important takeaways:

1. Anonymity on the blockchain allows us to make transactions in a hostile network, with people we don’t trust. Maybe you and anon3927455345 both donate to a cause that focuses on improving solar technologies, but anon3927455345 voted for a politician you really don’t agree with. We’ve just leapfrogged over our primitive, tribal ape brain to hack political polarization, one of the largest threats to stability and democracy. This alone is incredibly powerful: the ability to ensure certain actions regardless of who we’re collaborating with, because code overrules wetware, which hasn’t changed in tens of thousands of years.

2. The inverse of allowing trust with strangers we might have implicit bias against is that anonymity and pseudoanonymity allow people to participate without being discriminated against. This means that people who have historically experienced unfairness and discrimination can participate without being treated as less than human, leveraging anonymity and participation + action rather than what tribe or degree of normal a person might be branded with.

3. I was impressed with the degree of quality that protocols and primitives produced by developers and organizations. ENS is incredible, for instance. The EVM, atomic loans, and Geth validator software are all pretty amazing too. The velocity and quality of technological innovation is stunning, coming from Web2, where a handful of large companies (I’m looking at you, FAANG/G-MAFIA) act as brain trusts, sucking up the world’s dev talent to have them work on things like how to sell more ads, and how to hack your primitive human brain to increase shareholder return.

4. Speaking of the devs, I noticed the everyone at ETH Amsterdam was on the younger side. Probably 35 was near the top. I met plenty of really, really smart people in their 20s and early 30s, from nontraditional backgrounds, though plenty had dropped PhD programs or interned at Goldman. It would appear that the smartest, freshest talent is coming to Web3. I got the vibe that I would hope the early 90s DotCom bubble must have given off. I was too young to have participated in that boom, but had always dreamed of living on a technological frontier.

5. There was a shocking number of non-technical attendees. I met lawyers, a psychologist, plenty of finance people, product and business people, artists, NFT brokers, etc. Web3 appears to have a really solid cultural foothold across industry verticals, yielding something extremely valuable and robust: diversity of thought. Web2 suffers tremendously from a lack of diversity of thought. It’s a bubble. Developers aren’t exposed to as many people who are non-developers, and it shows. There isn’t as much innovation, and nothing really felt radical in Web2 over my last 8 years in the space. As a weird 12-year old with a subscription to paper Wired, I read about a glorious future led by intelligent, radical, creative, and visionary nerds. Much later in grad school, I realized that the cyberpunk future I’d dreamed about as a kid was going to look a lot less exciting when working for a large tech company. But I’m getting off-point. Diversity of thought plus anonymity plus greenfield equals thriving, innovative tech.

6. We’re setting sail for lighter-weight tooling, and backend’s not going to look the same. Web3 is web-native. Tooling lives on the web. IDEs like Remix are lightweight. Discord and Telegram are also dev tools to the extent that technologies evolve rapidly, and talking to the people that use a tool or made it themselves is faster than waiting for a documentation update. On this account, Twitter, the main Web2 platform that Web3 seems to embrace, should also be considered part of this ecosystem. As a backend dev, I was shocked to see that entire backends are being replaced with smart contracts, and I could not be more excited.

7. Did you get this far? I’ve saved one of my favorite takeaways for last. Smart contracts are written in a language of incentivization. Sure, it’s code, but transactions manipulate tokens and value. Anything with value can be incentivized. What if we write code that incentivizes a better world? This is maybe my favorite and most critical takeaway from my trip down the rabbit hole. If code can skip over greedy, biased human wetware, perhaps we have a chance at building a better future after all. I’d much rather pay some fraction of a dollar to avoid getting lambasted with brain-hacking, irrelevant ads based on predatory bulk data-harvesting practices. If we can incentivize fairness and humanist values via indelible, decentralized code, smart contracts have the power to overhaul society for the better. DAOs are already showing us how this is done with radical experiments in governance and culture.

Ok, these were my top takeaways--I’ll save critiques for a later post.

Thanks for reading my blog, anon, and I hope you found this interesting. Feel free to contact me on Twitter at @morganjweaver. I’m morganjweaver.eth in ENS, and my Telegram handle is the same as Twitter.