Longevity Meets Blockchain with Vitalik Buterin

On May 13, 2021, Aubrey de Grey and Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, met for a live discussion on YouTube. They discussed the intersection of longevity and web3, and the future of Biotech, Longevity Research, and Decentralization.

Highlights - Topics Discussed & Comments

• IP in Longevity and investing
• crypto community can help drive progress in Longevity (i.e. Zero Knowledge Proofs)
• issues with IP for metformin vs rapamycin
• philanthropic funding in longevity
• equilibriums of legitimacy
• positive feedback loop in legitimacy
• limitations of DAOs
• if the default is self interest how can the project benefit a large number of people?
• if incentives are tied to the success of one's own project can it work in Longevity?
• how to encourage collaboration with the current incentives
• since everyone is aging it would seem that solving it would be a common interest, however some people don't regard aging as a problem to be solved
• issues in the longevity space
• reluctance to speak optimistically about longevity in academia
• heretics are usually wrong and ambitious goals can work against you
• how can blockchains be used in longevity research?
• stimulating creativity between longevity and blockchain?communities
• when the sea change happens it will be sudden
• some countries more Longevity progressive
• Asian countries are behind the curve (with the exception of Singapore) but they could and will make a huge contribution?to longevity

Recording

Here's a link to the recording of the discussion on Youtube

Hosted by VitaDAO

The AMA was hosted by?VitaDAO the world’s first decentralized intellectual property collective. Its mission is to extend the human lifespan by collectively financing and commercializing longevity therapeutics in an open and democratic manner. VitaDAO and its members will own the IP assets that result from the projects it supports. Members can contribute work or funds to join VitaDAO by purchasing or earning VITA tokens. VitaDAO is a web3-based decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that can choose to interact with any suitable 3rd party to accomplish its goals. Each partnering service provider essentially answers to the members of the DAO and any engagement is subject to democratic decision-making within the DAO.

The longevity field has the power to transform our global healthcare system completely. Age-related diseases are among the most significant contributors to our global health burden and are responsible for the highest costs incurred by healthcare systems.

World Health Organization, 2020

VitaDAO Explained

VitaDAO is a new cooperative vehicle for community-governed and decentralized drug development. The core mission is to accelerate R&D in the longevity space and extend human life and healthspan. To achieve this, VitaDAO utilizes a combination of novel governance (DAOs), digital assets (NFTs) and financial market frameworks (AMMs).

VITA Tokens

VitaDAO is an open cooperative that anyone can join and support. Members of the public can contribute work or funds to join VitaDAO and become owners of its IP by purchasing VITA through contributing funds, valuable research data or IP assets. VitaDAO’s goal is to acquire, support, and finance new therapeutics and research data in the longevity space, and will directly hold IP rights in novel early-stage therapeutics while looking to grow a portfolio of both IP and data assets, which can be made available and monetized in novel data marketplaces such as Ocean Marketplace, promoting both open science and new business models.

Ownership and governance of the VitaDAO is relegated through VITA tokens. VITA can be obtained by contributing work, or funds, or other resources such as data and IP to VitaDAO. Ownership of VITA allows the holder to participate in the democratic governance of VitaDAO, directing its research, accessing and monetizing its data repositories, and managing its IP portfolio.

VITA tokens can be used to signal long-term support for individual projects. A member may stake their VITA tokens for a set time period until a project milestone is reached. Project milestones are predetermined by projects and measurable however, their outcome is uncertain, meaning members take additional risk by foregoing liquidity. When a milestone is reached, staked tokens are unlocked. In return for locking tokens, VitaDAO pays out regular signalling rewards to stakers. This process sends valuable signals to the market, as it showcases the confidence of members in specific projects. Furthermore, it reduces volatility and creates a circular economy to members, which actively contribute value and review project success.

Whitepaper Highlights

The Challenge

At its core, biopharma value creation is composed of intellectual property rights and research data. R&D has become prohibitively expensive and siloed, partially due to how IP business models incentivize monopolization of innovation through creation of thickets of patents in protected portfolios. These IP mechanisms prevent the open sharing of research data, inherently disincentivizing collaboration and transparency and they prevent the public and patients from having any real ownership in biopharma IP, even though their tax dollars fund much of the early-stage development. Outside of grants to fund basic research, early-stage funding for drug development is extremely limited. When drugs do finally make it to market, there are strong incentives for price gouging.

Value creation in biopharma centers heavily around intellectual property assets and patents as core drivers for funding and innovation. Intellectual property ownership as a business model has barely evolved in the past century.?Current biopharma business models carry severe limitations and R&D inefficiencies at the cost of those, who should be the core stakeholders: patients and researchers.

The Solution

We believe that the Future of the biopharma industry is transparent, collaborative, and open source. VitaDAO is an open cooperative that anyone can join, with the goal to acquire, support and finance new therapeutics and research data in the longevity space. The VitaDAO collective will directly hold legal IP rights to these projects and may develop a growing portfolio of assets represented as NFTs.

The Vision

VitaDAO will acquire and commission research, as well as own, develop and monetize the resulting intellectual property assets. In summary, VitaDAOs portfolio consists of:

1. NFTs representing intellectual property, patents and licenses to therapeutic research projects.

2. Data assets generated by funding R&D around its research projects and NFTs.

Vetted research projects from the longevity space will make funding requests to the VitaDAO, which can be voted on by its members. If successful, funding is given/raised in exchange for an ownership stake in the resulting IP.

Download the Whitepaper

Ocean Data-Market

One route of IP monetization will be the Ocean Market, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for data, where VitaDAO can securely publish selected parts of the research data/findings. This data has automatic price discovery and is published as an interoperable ERC20 datatoken. Ocean’s “Compute-to-Data” even allows private data to be bought & sold while preserving control and privacy of the data.

Join the DAO

DAO contracts and governance platform are in the final stages of development and expert working groups have been established. You can join the VitaDAO by contributing work, resources, IP or funding. Stay tuned for the upcoming launch based on a genesis contribution event!

VitaDAO Roadmap

1. Smart Contract Audit
2. DAO Framework Presentation
3. Genesis Contribution Event / Auction
4. First DAO Proposals
5. First DAO Vote Ends
6. Transfer of NFT / IP
7. Transfer of Funding to 1st Research Project

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* ETH reached a new all time high today:?$4,383

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This article was written by?Margaretta Colangelo.?Margaretta is Co-founder and CEO of?Jthereum an enterprise Blockchain technology company. She is associate editor at AI Time Journal and serves on the advisory board of the AI Precision Health Institute at the University of Hawai?i?Cancer Center. She is based in San Francisco.?@realmargaretta