Extra Edition: A Case for DeSci in Africa.

A guest editorial by By Mosadoluwa Fasasi of DeSci Nigeria on the history of the Decentralized Science Movement and its uptake in Africa

“Nullius in verba” - Take no one’s word for it.

Yes, the motto of the Royal Society of London.

Officially founded on November 28, 1660, after a lecture by Christopher Wren at Gresham College. The society was a loose network of Natural philosophers (later called Scientists) who had been meeting since the 1640s. Their goal was to improve natural knowledge by observation and experimentation. Robert Hooke was the society’s first Curator of Experiments, responsible for coordinating experiments at the society’s meetings. This is widely recognized as the first public demonstration of science.

But a revolution began when Henry Oldenburg, the society’s first Secretary, began to catalogue the society’s discoveries and disseminated them across Europe. Called “Philosophical Transactions”, the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It wasn’t “peer reviewing” or “publication” as in the modern sense (although it did set the stage for it). At the time, it did only one fundamental thing: it made knowledge public. Oldenburg published at his own expense, barely making any profit, but the idea of co-creating and co-sharing knowledge stuck.

Fast forward three centuries later. The open science movement starts to gain momentum as researchers chafe against the paywalls, publication delays and gatekeeping that have calcified academic publishing; a complete departure from the ideals of the Royal Society of London. ArXiv launches in 1991, Paul Ginsparg’s preprint server for physicists. The Budapest Open Access Initiative formalizes the movement’s principles in 2002: research should be “free and unrestricted” online, especially if publicly funded. Open access journals like PLoS ONE launch in 2006, daring to challenge the Elsevier-Springer duopoly. Sci-Hub appears in 2011, Alexandra Elkabkyan’s “pirate” library for the global research underclass, and suddenly millions of papers that cost $40 (or more) each are made available to all. The open science movement is, in many ways, a return to the Royal Society’s original ethos; before scholarly publishing became a multibillion-dollar industry built on unpaid peer review and extractive institutional paywalls.

The Origins of De(centralized) Sci(ence)

I describe DeSci as an evolution of the Open Science movement because the core ideals overlap. The only difference is in “decentralization”, i.e leveraging the Web3 stack (technologies such as decentralized finance, DeFi, and frameworks such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, DAOs).

In 2004, David Koepsell, philosopher, legal scholar and later co-founder of EncrypGen, was teaching a course called “Research Integrity: Why Good Scientists do Bad Things”. The course was built around Robert Merton’s “Ethos of Science”, four principles (organized skepticism, universalism, communalism and disinterestedness) that Merton had argued were essential for science to function. By 2008, Koepsell was at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, running peer-training programs on scientific integrity and coordinating the creation of institutional review boards. Later on in 2010, he published “Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science” in Social Epistemology. His argument: the internet, specifically wiki technologies, could resolve the tensions in Merton’s ethos by making science “speedier, more transparent, and democratic”. He called it “Science 3.0”. Six years later, after stints working with Mexico’s National Commission of Bioethics and publishing two books on research ethics, Koepsell gave a talk at his alma mater that sparked EncrypGen: “The Blockchain and Personal Genomics: tracking rights and responsibilities securely”.

By December 2016, the abstract had materialized. Koepsell and his wife, geneticist Dr. Vanessa Gonzalez, incorporated EncrypGen to build a blockchain-based marketplace for de-identified genomic data. The prototype debuted in May 2017 at the Bio-IT World conference in Boston; by 2018, the first public product launched: a peer-to-peer marketplace eliminating large data brokers and settling transactions in $DNA, a native cryptocurrency. The term “DeSci” itself was coined internally at EncrypGen in early 2021, riffing on “DeFi” (Decentralized Finance), which had become a crypto rallying cry. Koepsell and his team first used it publicly on February 26, 2021, during a YouTube AMA and within a year, the term had gone from internal branding to a movement identifier.

The Current Models

I should mention that the DeSci ecosystem is still quite young and these models are still a work in progress. However, after tracing the philosophical and technological origins, the guts of DeSci in the Global North reveal themselves in two working frameworks:

Model 1: The Molecule AG Path – IP Tokenization and DAO Commercialization

Molecule AG, founded by Paul Kohlhaas and Tyler Golato in 2018, is the backbone for DeSci’s most ambitious experiments with decentralized biotech. Think of it as the parent company enabling an entire family of bioDAOs; from VitaDAO (longevity and senescence research) to HairDAO (hair loss therapeutics), PsyDAO (psychedelic science), and AthenaDAO (women’s health). The structure is modular: Molecule AG coordinates the DAO ecosystem, spinning off specialized DAOs as operational companies funded and governed by community participants.​

The crucial mechanism here is IP tokenization. Scientific intellectual property (traditionally guarded by patents and venture capital) is fractionated into blockchain-based tokens (IP-NFTs), which can be crowd-owned, licensed, or sold to pharma giants, all via DAO governance. The birth of the BIO Protocol meta-DAO solves the classic focus problem: too many niches within biotech to align everyone on a single crown-jewel. Instead, small, focused DAOs like VitaDAO can pursue their particular science, raise liquidity through IP tokens, run targeted crowdsales, and offer autonomy to their communities. Capital flows in through project tokens, equity positions, and strategic partnerships. Profit is made via IP licensing, sales, or even product commercialization (as with HairDAO’s actual haircare products).​

Model 2: The ResearchHub Path – Platform-Based Collaboration and Incentives

ResearchHub, founded by Brian Armstrong (the Coinbase CEO) in 2020, takes a more centralized but radically incentive-driven approach. Rather than a protocol, it is a unified platform aiming to modernize peer review and research collaboration for all domains. Here, the central problem isn’t just technological but the broken incentives behind reputation and reward in academia.​

In ResearchHub’s system, reviewers are paid (yes, actually paid) for submitting thoughtful feedback on research papers, typically $150 in RSC tokens per high-quality review. There are bounties on posted research questions and funded studies, all rewarding constructive contribution. Content creation is incentivized by upvotes, like Reddit but remixed for scientific value. The liquidity model is direct: tokens earn value as more researchers use the platform, generating network effects, and (eventually) premium institutional features or hosting services for universities.

The difference is structural. Molecule AG’s DAOs and tokenization approach seek to decentralize everything (ownership, governance, funding) while ResearchHub unifies the conversation, sets incentives to the forefront, and lets community rewards drive collaboration. Both models see financial liquidity as crucial: whether it’s the flow of investment into DAO treasuries and IP-NFT projects, or platform tokens cycling through peer review and creation.

Contextualizing DeSci in Africa

DeSci Nigeria is Africa’s first decentralized research infrastructure, and over the last 11 months, I’ve been leading a lean but mean team to address some of the long-standing challenges we have in academia. While there is an abundance of knowledge production and relative disposable income in most parts of the West, this is not the case for Africa; a continent that accounts for about 17% of the global population but only produces less than 3% of the world’s research output. On the surface, it seems as though the continent isn’t producing knowledge. But again, this is not the case.

For instance, in Nigeria alone, over 700,000 students complete their undergraduate studies annually, each with a compulsory final year project leading to (at least) a research paper. Assuming 700k is constant across the 54 countries in Africa, that’s 378million worth of final year thesis annually! The challenge is that all of these remain siloed across the continent in drawers and shelves, poorly managed and yielding zero value.

To this end, we run the following initiatives at DeSci Nigeria:

• A discipline-agnostic, open-access decentralized infrastructure for Africans to share their knowledge. Our alpha version went live in early September and as of Oct 25, 2025, we have had 40 papers uploaded across West Africa, with the highest number of studies from Nigeria across 15 tertiary institutions. Some of the current fields include; Arts & Humanities, Clinical Sciences, Computing, Communication & Information, Pure & Applied Sciences, and Social Sciences; with the highest number of studies from Social Sciences. Explore papers [here]

• Funding grassroot research: We funnel seasonal grants from partnerships and donations to dig into local solutions for local challenges, enabling students/young researchers and giving them the autonomy of innovation. See success stories [here]

• Initiating community science and advocacy: bringing researchers, students, scholars, stakeholders to discuss inferences and take action on the solutions and frameworks developed by researchers in our community.

“If the current models described above have tokens, why avoid launching a token?”

We are not averse to launching a token but the African context demands more than a token. It demands trust, a careful dance with the socioeconomic terrain, and most importantly, proven utility. DeSci NG’s experiment is; Can we build a web of trust, improvisation and grassroots participation that can stand the test of speculative economics? We are setting the groundwork and watching the answer unfold in real time.

We invite everyone to directly support the work by donating on Giveth. Every fund is directed towards scaling the above initiatives.

If you would like to support/partner in any other way (knowledge co-creation & exchange, subject-matter insight, etc), write to us at info.descing@gmail.com.