The DeSci Divergence
Within the DeSci ecosystem, two distinct approaches have emerged to address traditional science's limitations. IP-Preserving DeSci maintains the current IP system and digitizes it through blockchain technology, primarily using IP-NFTs (Intellectual Property NFT) to establish patent protections. Open-source DeSci on the other hand completely removes traditional IP, making all research freely available and open source.
IP DeSci
- Maintains IP systems
- Decentralised funding
- Limited to selected orgs
- Not Open Source
- Grant applications
- No real time research sharing
- Maintained by companies
IP-Free DeSci
- Open use of discoveries
- Decentralised funding
- Anyone can participate
- Open Source
- Direct funding mechanisms
- Real Time research sharing
- Neutral protocol
DeSci is at its early stages, and a critical distinction exists between two fundamentally different approaches. Understanding this key difference is essential, as it shapes not just how these protocols are built, but more importantly, who can benefit from scientific discoveries. You stand at a crossroads - one path leads back to the familiar constraints of traditional IP systems, while the other ventures into uncharted territory. Should you choose to proceed, you'll discover the transformative principles of Open Source DeSci.
The IP Dilema
The intellectual property system in medical research emerged from noble intentions - to reward innovation and ensure sustainable funding for costly research and development. However, this well-meaning approach has created an unintended paradox in our modern interconnected world. While designed to protect and incentivize breakthrough discoveries, the current IP framework often acts as a barrier to the very progress it aims to foster. The system was originally conceived to strike a delicate balance between inventors' interests and society's needs, offering 20-year exclusivity rights in exchange for public disclosure of innovations. This made sense in an era of isolated research, but today's scientific challenges require massive collaboration and rapid knowledge sharing. The paradox becomes particularly acute in biomedical research, where the high costs of drug development are used to justify strong IP protection. Yet this same protection creates artificial scarcity of knowledge, forces redundant research efforts. In sequential innovation fields like biotechnology, where each advance builds upon previous discoveries, these restrictions create compounding inefficiencies. Most critically, while the current system aims to ensure fair returns on research investment, it has evolved to prioritize profitability over accessibility. This misalignment means that even when breakthrough treatments are developed, patent monopolies can make them inaccessible to many who need them most. The challenge now is to preserve the positive incentive structure while removing the barriers that inadvertently slow scientific progress in our interconnected age.
In the hyper-connected digital age, the concept of intellectual property is becoming increasingly obsolete due to the unstoppable flow of information. The speed and complexity of global knowledge sharing, combined with emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, and decentralized networks, makes tracking and enforcing IP rights practically impossible. Ideas, designs, and discoveries now propagate across borders and platforms at lightning speed, being modified and built upon by countless actors simultaneously. This fundamental shift means traditional IP-based research funding models are becoming unsustainable. When information moves faster than legal frameworks can track it, attempting to maintain IP restrictions becomes not just inefficient but futile. This reality demands a revolutionary approach to financing innovation - one that embraces the inherent openness of information rather than trying to contain it. The future of research funding must align with this new paradigm, where value is created through open collaboration and rapid iteration rather than through artificial scarcity and legal monopolies.
Knowledge and scientific discovery, particularly in medicine, could function as public goods rather than private property. The artificial scarcity created by IP rights contradicts the natural abundance of information and ideas in the digital age, where sharing and collaboration can occur at near-zero marginal cost.
Secrecy Incentive
Companies withhold early research findings to protect IP
Financial Cost
Companies prevented from using the full range of possible solutions because of IP monopolies
Duplication Issues
Parallel research teams waste resources working on identical solutions
Human Cost
Limited access to life-saving treatments due to patents
Open Source DeSci represents a fundamental shift in medical research efficiency. By making all research findings immediately available, teams can build upon each other's discoveries instead of wastefully duplicating efforts. Early-stage findings, which are typically kept secret until end of patent pending periods, become instantly accessible. This accelerates the pace of innovation by enabling cross-disciplinary collaboration and allowing researchers to explore the full range of possible solutions without IP restrictions. The result is faster, more cost-effective medical research focused on actual scientific progress rather than patent protection. When research is open source, the entire scientific community can contribute to and validate findings, leading to more robust and reliable results.
Open Source DeSci
The transformative power of open research is perfectly illustrated by Google's 2017 publication "Attention Is All You Need," which fundamentally revolutionized artificial intelligence. By openly sharing their breakthrough transformer architecture rather than keeping it as a trade secret, Google's eight researchers unleashed an unprecedented wave of innovation across the entire AI industry. This single paper, cited over 100,000 times, became the foundation for virtually every major AI advancement we see today - from ChatGPT to DALL-E to Stable Diffusion. While Google itself may not have immediately capitalized on this innovation, their decision to publish openly enabled smaller, more agile organizations like OpenAI to rapidly build upon and advance the technology. This case powerfully demonstrates how open research can accelerate progress far beyond what any single organization could achieve in isolation - even one as resourceful as Google. The transformer architecture's journey from a freely shared academic paper to the foundation of today's AI revolution stands as a testament to the extraordinary potential of open scientific collaboration.
Just as open-source software transformed the digital world, open biotechnology can revolutionize medicine and biological engineering. By creating a transparent, community-governed protocol for sharing research, we can accelerate innovation while ensuring equitable rewards and access. Modern biotechnology tools have transformed biological engineering into a computational challenge. The same way open-source software changed how we build the internet, we can now program and share biological solutions collaboratively. This new paradigm replaces traditional closed-door research with community-driven discovery, immediately shared and accessible at world-wide level through blockchain technology. Thanks to blockchain technology, we can completely revolutionize the IP framework and imagine brand new systems adapted to the 21st century. We can accelerate discovery while ensuring equitable access to breakthrough therapies. This requires new models of intellectual property and scientific collaboration, powered by blockchain that protect, finance and validate contributions.
IP-Free Discovery Assets (IP-FDAs) represent a revolutionary approach to scientific innovation that transcends traditional intellectual property constraints. Unlike conventional patents or even digitized IP-NFTs, IP-FDAs create immediate value from open research by rewarding discoveries while keeping them freely accessible to humanity. This new asset class enables researchers to receive fair compensation for their work without restricting the flow of knowledge, fundamentally transforming how we incentivize and accelerate scientific progress. By removing artificial barriers while maintaining economic incentives, IP-FDAs align the interests of researchers, funders, and society at large, creating a powerful engine for collaborative innovation.
A new paradigm is emerging: IP-FDAs. Unlike IP-NFTs which digitize traditional patents, IP-FDAs represent a fundamental shift:
- Research results immediately available to all
- No patent restrictions or monopolies
- Rewards researchers without IP lockup
- Promotes open collaboration
- Accelerates scientific progress
- Fully open source research
The Digital Renaissance: How Convergent Technologies Are Reshaping Human Potential
The convergence of AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology is ushering in an unprecedented era of scientific discovery. Just as the transformer architecture revolutionized AI, quantum biology is now emerging as a transformative field that bridges molecular biology and quantum mechanics, offering new insights into fundamental life processes. This fusion of disciplines is creating entirely new research territories where traditional boundaries between physics, biology, and computer science dissolve.
The open-source movement is catalyzing this scientific renaissance. Communities of researchers are collaborating across borders to tackle ambitious challenges in longevity biotechnology, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. The OpenFold consortium exemplifies this trend, bringing together leading companies and researchers to develop open-source AI tools for drug discovery. This collaborative approach is dramatically accelerating the pace of innovation, similar to how Google's open publication of the transformer architecture sparked the AI revolution.
These converging technologies are creating a clear pathway toward technological singularity. As quantum computers become more powerful and AI systems more sophisticated, we're seeing exponential advances in our ability to understand and modify biological systems. The integration of AI with quantum biology is particularly promising for extending human healthspan, with new biomarkers and interventions being discovered at an unprecedented rate. This technological convergence, powered by open-source collaboration and unrestricted knowledge sharing, could fundamentally transform human capabilities and lifespan within our lifetime, with an explosive surge in biotechnology innovation, potentially compressing decades of progress into years.
Dear Anon, we hope you've enjoyed your readings so far. We've covered a lot of groundbreaking concepts like IP-FDAs, untrackable IP and much more. Now let's have a look at the Etica Protocol, the blockchain that was created especially for this new era of IP-less scientific discovery.
Etica Protocol: The Blockchain Revolution in Medical Research
In an era where digital technologies are transforming every aspect of science, Etica Protocol is a revolutionary blockchain that fundamentally reimagines how medical research is funded and shared. Just as the open publication of AI breakthroughs catalyzed unprecedented innovation, Etica creates a new paradigm where medical discoveries can flourish without intellectual property restrictions.
Etica solves the central paradox of medical research funding: how to incentivize breakthrough discoveries while keeping them freely accessible to humanity. While the traditional patent system requires lengthy commercialization cycles that can span decades from discovery to market, Etica's cryptocurrency-based reward mechanism provides immediate value recognition for breakthrough research. This shift from speculative future returns to immediate rewards fundamentally changes research dynamics - scientists can pursue ambitious, long-term research while receiving continuous compensation for incremental discoveries. The protocol's economic model creates a virtuous cycle where openness accelerates innovation, which in turn generates more value for researchers.
Etica represents more than just a funding platform; it's a complete reimagining of how medical innovation can thrive in the digital age. By aligning economic incentives with open-source principles, it creates a powerful engine for collaborative discovery that could compress decades of medical progress into years. Just as open-source software transformed the digital world, Etica aims to catalyze a similar revolution in medical research, ensuring that breakthrough treatments become accessible to all.
Etica Protocol: A Bitcoin-like Blockchain
ETI Token
- Protocol's main currency
- Used for voting & proposals
- 21M initial supply
- 1% annual inflation after initial supply
- Research & voting rewards
EGAZ Token
- Network operation token
- Used for transaction fees
- Rewards blockchain validators
- Similar to Ethereum's gas model
- Secures the network
- No ICO or premine
- Initial distribution phase over decades
- Supply charts: https://eticanomics.net
- Mining + Protocol rewards
- Designed for wide distribution with RandomX mining
- Community-driven project
Both ETI and EGAZ are 100% community owned with no team allocation, no premine, and no ICO.
Tokenomics & Rewards
2022-2026
Initial Phase
2.1M ETI/year2026-2030
First Halving
1.35M ETI/year2030-2034
Second Halving
675K ETI/year2034-2038
Third Halving
337.5K ETI/year- Initial supply: 21M ETI by 2055
- Final inflation rate: 1% per year
- Scarcity: less ETI than XMR until 2083
- Details here: https://eticanomics.net/coinshalvings/2045/
The Future is Near
Welcome to the future of science
https://www.eticaprotocol.org/Start of Etica Medical Research in 2025:
Connecting researchers worldwide without borders
Q1 2025, AQGenesis launch:
AI and Quantum specialised organisation. The first open source research organization dedicated to medical research on Etica
2025 and beyond: Open Source Treatments
Patent-free medical solutions for humanity