A new recent trend has been heating up as of late called DeSCI which stands for Decentralized Science. Many of you who have been around for a while might know this best by the once popular Gridcoin which personally I'm currently sad to see how little activity and projects that project gets these days and how stupidly hard it still is to start mining on that platform.
A recent illustration of the DeSci landscape is provided in the DeSci Wiki (UltraRare Bio):
DeSCI has been around for a very long time but it's never gotten the traction it deservers in my opinion but perhaps that might be shifting here soon. It is growing, the ecosystem is getting larger and faster.
DeSCI feels like a new branding for the ecosystem to try and bring attention to it and get it into mainstream where honestly it belongs. The blockchain doing a lot of good calculating and building real world cases that help everyone.
As many of you might be well aware a lot of science funding comes from large corps that skew and alter these "test" and science outcomes to benefit their products. But over the years we have found out just how harmful this is in both the health of people and the trust in companies many used to place that was clearly misplaced.
One of the primary goals it to decentralize this funding for projects so they are not skewed or have to watch out what they say or what their projects findings turn out. This is one key area where I feel true decentralization needs to happen.
The way these tokens work are normally different and of course will change between each of the projects. In most cases like Gridcoin for example there are two main factors.
The first is simply being an investor where you buy and hold the token. In holding the token you can also partake in the POS (Proof of Stake) of that blockchain earning tokens on each block you process. This adds to security and overall flow of the blockchain to keep it running. For girdcoin it has one of the lowest payouts but it's still a payout that's there.
The other comes as active commutative via BIONIC for example. In which you use your CPU and on some projects your GPU to crunch data for science projects in which you are then rewarded from a rewards pool which is about 3x the size of the "investor" "staking" pool each day for submitting results.
The token value of this should come from science projects that are paying the native token to have people calculate these things for them. However in the case of Gridcoin we can see that it hasn't been working out the greatest in terms of a value aspect.
With just a 1.5 million dollar market cap and $92 in 24 hour trading volume we can see this project has sadly pretty much died. But I'm curious if it could be brought back to live as DeSCI starts to gather more attention.
I think it's an interesting field and one I would love to see truly expand. To take all of that processing power and instead of build mining blocks it goes to real world cases that can be used and then uses a POS system to secure the blockchain. This combination is one I hope to see take root here over the next few years and continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
What are you thoughts on DeSCI?
