Welcome to the BlockchainAIForum where your technologies questions are answered. Today, part three of the Unbound Science project is on the menu. In this final series, I cover the project in greater detail, including: challenges facing science, maintaining organizational governance and financial independence, platform economics, and more!
At Unbound Science we believe scientific research has never been free to truly explore the unknown and we have made it our mission to unbind science. Throughout the course of human society, science has been subjected to control for reasons that include ideological, political, religious, and of course economic. The Unbound Science platform encourages imagination and fringe experimentation. However, some knowledge could be catastrophic in the wrong hands. Potentially dangerous research proposals, including but not limited to military weapons, experimentation with black holes, nuclear energy, and DNA modification, therefore will not be permitted.
Challenges Facing Science: Unbound Science proposes to address the six most pressing challenges facing independent science research:
Corruption: Until now, science has been dominated by agenda-based research. Facts have been created in controlled experiments, as opposed to funding open experimentation to discover the actual truth. Unbound Science has come up with a way to disintermediate the donor’s agenda.
Security: Undoubtedly, scientific research that destabilizes the status quo can jeopardize the security of scientists. Scientists who disrupt society through their inventions could face security threats from business/government incumbents who fear losing oligopoly market power, or ideological fanatics who are enemies of progress.
Preservation: Stop for a second and consider all the science humanity has lost due to destruction, be it natural or man-made. Lost science is a crime against humanity. Unbound Science is committed to do its part to end the tragedy of lost science research.
Finance: Financial independence is nearly impossible for the vast majority of scientists. Often scientists spend inordinate time soliciting grant applications and thereafter submitting monitoring reports to the handful of granting institutions.
Subjugation: Unbound Science envisions an end to the current system where new technologies allow one society to take great advantages over all others, and remove their freedoms and even their own ability to advance as a society. It has taken generations and even centuries for subjugated peoples to even get back to zero, let alone be able to compete on the global stage. By empowering the entire workforce of 8 billion people on the planet with the same access to tools and capabilities, human progress can accelerate forward like never seen before.
Distribution: One marketplace to share plans and rights across the world, in a single click! Scientists can generate recurring revenue from different contracts, including consulting, licensing, and leasing their IP. They can track all their clients and royalty payments from one place, instead of having to worry about cheap knock-offs and lawsuits hampering the true representation of their work.
Solutions to the Challenges Facing Science
Complex problems require comprehensive solutions. Hence, Unbound Science proposes an open-source scientific research platform, driven by and for the community. Our summarized solutions to the sxi challenges are listed below:
Addressing Corruption: We surveyed which sectors could provide the largest amount ofdisruption and benefit to mankind, and have not yet been adequately addressed by traditional science, Open-Source Science, or DeSci yet. Therefore, we’ve selected four areas to start, with more potentially being added later. At platform launch, benefactors may elect to contribute to one of four pools:
- Energy
- Food Technology (air, water, soil)
- Pollution (focus on clean-up)
- Quantum Research
Instead of a benefactor donating directly to a project listed on a proposal board, the funds are donated to a pool. These funding pools are controlled through votes, with different weights given to donors, scientists, partnership science foundations, and the Open-Source Science community. These donation pools are powered by cryptocurrency, and legally owned by a tax-optimized entity for issuing tax write-offs to donors (where applicable).
Addressing Security: Scientists may opt to stay anonymous or pseudonymous, building an on-chain reputation and be judged solely by the merits of their work, both for their physical protection and for the sake of fairness. If you can do the work, your formal educational background (or employment) does not matter. Of course, a scientist with an already prestigious track record may choose to display their full personal information, for the sake of obtaining funding and asserting a greater influence.
Addressing Preservation: To participate, scientists agree to upload all research data, notes, blueprints, and final instructions for replication to blockchain(s). Scientists can choose a variety of mechanisms for when to begin sharing this data, such as keeping it private until their work is complete, or their life is presumed to have ended.
Addressing Finance: The platform features a “YouTube-like” interface, with a game-show-atmosphere experience for scientists to pitch concepts to a rotating panel of judges, who host the funding competition in seasons, each with several phases. Scientists no longer have to fill out an enormous application and wait six months for a few thousand dollars. They can simply submit a 5—8 minute video describing their idea. Winners in phase one are awarded their requested budget to develop a Proof of Concept. Winners in Phase 2 are given their requested budget to create a final prototype ready for mass production. Winners in Phase 3 are awarded their requested budget to create a mass production factory and further innovation laboratory.
Addressing Subjugation: In return for funding, scientists must declare their inventions open-source, and share all of their experiment data, processes, and all other documentation for anyone to use and copy without restrictions. Winning scientists will earn revenue from the creation of “originals”, consulting contracts, and leftover general prize money. One of the other benefits of releasing open-source technology is that scientists do not also have to become international business owners in order to achieve success. By sharing the technology, they do not need to open their own factory and deal with all the costs and headaches of starting a global manufacturing enterprise. Their vision becomes reality a lot faster, cheaper, and there are still plenty of profits to be made for the scientist.
Addressing Distribution: A marketplace is available for sharing buttoned-up packages of building plans and licensing agreements for worldwide production and distribution by third-parties. Open-source licensing for individuals, leasing of IP in exchange for royalties from corporations and governments, as well as consulting contracts to ensure the production is done at the highest of quality. Scientists can track all their business relationships through one place.
Maintaining Organizational Independence: Voting Caps and Weights
To prevent any particular group from dominating the process, Unbound Science has decided to put limits on the number of tokens that can be used to vote, per project. For instance, there will be a cap of 100,000 tokens for general users, 150,000 for admins, 200,000 for scientists, 500,000 benefactors.
Unbound Science seeks to allow everyone to have a voice in what gets brought into the world. However, some voices should be amplified given their dedication, commitment, actions and participation. Hence, user actions can achieve milestones to unlock new features, higher voting caps and voting weights. The actual milestones will be finalized after the beta launch, and based on community suggestions. Below is a hypothetical example:
The benefactor limit is 500,000 tokens at a time with which they can use to vote on a single proposal. If a benefactor reaches a milestone of $1m USD donated, their voting cap raises beyond 500,000, to 1,000,000. Actual milestones will be finalized after the beta launch, and based on community suggestions.
Further examples of specific actions that might unlock higher caps: user votes in every season within a calendar year, scientists get nominated to game show, scientists become game show finalists, scientists win the game show, scientist data passes peer review, users hit pre-determined milestones for watching videos (e.g. 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 hours etc.) and Admins successfully filter out 100+ pieces of spam and/or fake data. Weights (counted as a multiplier of tokens used in their vote)
- Top 30 Most Active Benefactor Wallets: 2x
- Scientists who have contributed research: 1.5x
- Scientists who have been game show finalists: 2x
- Scientists who have won the game show: 3x
- New scientists this season: 1.4x
- New community members this season: 1.2x
- Scientists with more than 1 year of participation: 1.1x
- Community members with longevity: 1.0x
- Admin votes: 1.0x
- Wallets with transactions from to banned/suspended/muted users: 0.5x for the amount sent to them.
Maintaining Financial Independence: Handling Donations
Benefactors send USDC, USDT, DAI, ETH, WBTC, MATIC, BNB, AAVE, LINK, COMP, UNI, MKR, or SNX to the inbound vault. The price of assets are calculated against the benefactor’s local currency, and a 503c donation document is generated and emailed to the donor. Non-stable assets are deposited into Aave, Compound, and Venus vaults, where they will be used as collateral to borrow stablecoins if needed to replenish the pool’s spending, otherwise they will be left to earn interest and appreciate over time. Stable assets will transfer to cold storage via MPC vaults. This will be a manual process, handled by platform management, on behalf of the pool owners (consortium of non-profit organizations).
Empowering Scientists
The current science funding system is sub-optimal and characterized by long applications, needless forms, and busy-body gatekeepers that take months or years to come to a decision on whether or not to sign off on financial support. The Unbound Science way gathers funding from the public, then lets members of the public and scientific community work together to vet and allot financial support in a more streamlined, transparent, and easy to participate manner.
Like a TV show, funding is handled in seasons. Each season has a show-host and a panel of judges, selected from the community, by the community.
- The first phase of a season qualifies proposals from scientists or requests from the community.
- The second phase of a season announces approved proposals from Phase 1. Preliminary funding is requested by the scientist and given approval or adjustment by the judges handling this season. This funding is intended to give a scientist support for a Proof-of-Concept or Minimum Viable Product.
- The third phase votes on which scientists will be funded to finish solving the problem. Not every team will be ready at the same time, and may delay their participation into future seasons whenever they are ready, without further qualification.
Approved funds will be sent in USDC or USDT to scientists via newly generated vaults (i.e., Cardano), separated by team, and per project. This helps minimize security risks and also makes accounting an easier process than if all funds lived in the same vault. Stablecoins can be off-ramped into fiat, through Ethereum bridges like Jagon and Wanchain. Funding in vaults is unlocked during various epochs, to ensure lapses in development and abandoned projects are not rewarded. More details on epochs below.
Progress Reporting
Approved and funded proposals have a page created where they can be tracked publicly, with regular updates and achieved milestones required to qualify for the release of the team’s next epoch of funding. Data must live on a non-censorable decentralized third-party platform; Notion or Asana links are considered invalid. Updates are received in PDF format which is indexed by IPFS, Arweave, and Spacemesh for immutability. Physical storage (not just the metadata) is suggested to live inside web3-native storage enclaves like Internet Computer or Iagon. Upon an update being accepted by the community, funding for the next epoch is unlocked and made available.
Research essentials must be uploaded and stored on-chain as open-source with the full intent of helping future generations of scientists. This includes materials lists, notes, diagrams, blueprints, schematics, code, graphics, trials data, metadata, and anything else of importance (excluding names of participants and sources of materials).
User Accounts
Every user signs up with a general community account – everyone starts in the same place.
There are 4 types of user accounts:
- General Community
- Scientists
- Donors
- Admins
General Community users can earn platform tokens for:
- Watching videos
- Liking videos
- Commenting
- Hitting milestones in discussion forums and on-site time
- Consistent voting during live shows
Scientists can earn platform tokens for:
- Uploading videos
- Uploading documentation
- Participating in peer review discussions
- Being selected to participate in the game show (as contender or judge)
- Advancing to the 2nd or 3rd round in the game show
- Successfully voting out scams/fake content
- General Community actions
Benefactors can earn platform tokens for:
- Making contributions to donation pools
- General Community actions
Admins can earn platform tokens for:
- Removing spam/fake content
- Being voted in as a game show judge
- More General Community actions to be determined at a later date
User accounts are private by default. Nevertheless, users may elect to make certain elements of their profile and user data available for the public to see. For instance, users may link existing web3 wallets via WalletConnect, rather than making a whole new identity. Users may self-identify their account type, and fill in profile information if they wish for this information to be shared with the public.
Benefactors
The ideal benefactors are passive donors looking for tax incentives, and the scientifically curious. Traditional science funding sources, e.g. governments, foundations, and private institutions are welcome and encouraged to participate.
Unbound Science recognizes that traditional funders may opt out lacking control over decision authority. As an entry point to facilitate a transition, Unbound Science may encourage traditional funders to consider the Visionary NFT acquisition option. This option may be the preferred route, for passive revenue sharing and aligning incentives. The platform also encourages “retail users” looking for tax write-offs and seeking to apply their money towards making the world better, faster.
Upon confirmation of the transaction, the donor’s wallet will receive an NFT certificate that functions as a receipt and states the amount of the donation with a thank you message.
A yearly leaderboard will track the top five donors and they will be issued a special NFT, which is soul-bound to the donor’s wallet. These special NFTs are likely to attract airdrops and invitations from other projects who wish to do business with scientific donors. Furthermore, these NFTs will be minted on Ethereum main net, as it is most prestigious and likely to attract quality airdrops. The soul-bound aspect means they cannot be sold or moved. They will be minted/destroyed as the leaderboard updates. It is a temporary digital badge/trophy, as opposed to the tax-break receipts, or scientific data dynamic NFT containers, which are immutable and forever.
Benefactors will be informed and must comprehend a critical fact: Unbound Science works as a pool of liquidity. Once donated, benefactor funds will be pooled together into one commingled account. In other words, the design of Unbound Science is for benefactors to provide funding to a liquidity pool, as opposed to a common experience on similar donation websites, where each individual funding their own accounts and then choosing where to grant those funds. Unbound Science is doing things differently. Each of the four starting subject matters (Energy, Pollution, Air/Water/Soil, Quantum) have their own liquidity pool from which the community votes how much to give in grants and to whom.
Example:
Whale A donates $100, and receives 100,000 number of voting tokens. With his/her tokens Whale A decides to vote for Proposal A, using all 100,000 tokens. Community donations are pitiful this season, and raise only an additional $100. Community receives 100,000 tokens split among participating members. Community votes to reject Proposal A, but approves Proposal B to receive 100% of the season’s pool. Community participants had a higher voting weight so the vote swung in favor of the community. Also voting caps limited Whale A’s total vote to 1% of the entire vote. Whale A’s entire donated funds have been allocated to Proposal B. Whale A’s gets refunded and his/her new balance sits at 999,000 for future seasons.
Scientists
Current research is funded by institutions and universities which then retain all the rights and intellectual property. Just consider when was the last time we heard about a person or small team of people inventing something? Almost never. It’s always this corporation or that university. Unbound Science returns credit and control back to the individuals and groups who put in the work. Everything is undergoing a digital decentralized revolution; science should not be left behind.
Scientists will sign up on the platform with their personal information and credentials via third-party plugins. Once verified, the information will be encrypted and stored on-chain. Scientists may selectively divulge information to the public, or remain anonymous, only showing a pseudonym and degree status. Scientists may check or uncheck whether or not they are willing to collaborate with other scientists who have similar proposals or ongoing research. Scientists who are willing to collaborate are given a special badge on their profile, and an extra 10% voting cap over those who are unwilling. Universities who are recognized leaders in research and research fundings, who have led the way previously, will be invited to participate in this new way of doing things, even though this method of conducting fundraising may be laughed away at first, as was Bitcoin in finance, or cloud computing in tech.
Technology Distribution
When the research is complete, scientists will upload their compiled data to a marketplace where it can easily be licensed by global manufacturers or governments, or may be used freely if the scientist elects. The scientist can keep track of their consulting contracts, royalty payments, licensing fees, and open-source contracts all in one place.
Under The Hood
Unbound Science is a web-based application that rides on top of several different web3 technologies. The scientific research itself requires rigid and publicly supported blockchain with years of decentralization and proven security, while identity, data storage, marketplaces, and IP management are served up from a redundant array of options.
Currently involved in the development stack: Secret Network, Flux, Optimism, Fileverse, Story Protocol, Internet Computer, Arweave, Evoke Marketplace, and more. Essentially, anything that can be connected via Secret Network’s “Secretpath” between Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos can be easily integrated.
Emerging Market
The Unbound Science team conducted comprehensive research on market conditions and possible competitors. We discovered two critical facts and those were the guiding lights as we formulated our project. First, there is a unmet need in the marketplace for this service. The evidence is the existence of four other market participants in this space. Second, as described below, existing market participants are not truly comparable to Unbound Science on matters that are materially important. For instance, only Unbound Science proposes decentralization, security, community, and sensible tokenomics as core principles. Hence, Unbound Science is the only known project capable of meeting the market demand. The other market participants are as follows:
- Recerca – fundraising tool for research. They do many things very well, including winning 2nd prize at the Hedera X Filecoin Grant Program. The shortcomings Recera suffers is insufficient decentralization by design. Moreover, the Recera project does not feature tax incentives and they failed to solve the headaches of needlessly lengthy, dull and monotonous funding applications. Council still acts as gatekeepers to donation.
- Experiment.com – fundraising tool for research. Donors can browse research proposals and causes, and donate in accordance with their concerns. This project resembles a kickstarter marketplace design. The project does not adequately solve centralization issues, nor application issues, nor is it built on web3 technology that can operate independently. Furthermore, there are no associated tax incentives.
- inTheory Research Markets – funding tool for research and reputation. The platform allows scientists to create patents and pieces of research as NFTs thus facilitating research financial transactions. Last, the platform allows licensing or purchasing of intellectual property (IP).
- Molecule – Similar to Experiment.com, but focused only on BioMed research. Raised a $13M seed.
Platform Tokenomics. Tokens are created for voting and earning achievements on the platform. These are not intended to be used for investment, speculation, expectation of profit, trade, or ownership of Unbound Science. The community may use their accumulated pile of tokens to vote for their favorite science proposals. Gamified tasks will be a fluid evolution to continuously keep the community engaged, but may represent milestone achievements through hours of video watched, comments made, finding hidden easter eggs around the site, etc.
Total Supply: 1,000,000,000 platform tokens
Platform Token Emissions: To be determined.
“It’ll take a lot more than words and guns
A whole lot more than riches and muscle
The hands of the many must join as one
And together we’ll cross the river.”
– Puscifer, The Humbling River
Follow us on X @unboundscience
Until next time,
Yogi Nelson
Blockchain & AI Forum 