Crypto treasury companies and blockchain technology are creating alternative pathways to fund early-stage scientific and medical research.
Biomedical and scientific companies are turning to blockchain technology and crypto treasury strategies to fund research, overhauling traditional capital formation and research funding structures that can delay life-saving cures by decades.
Portage Biotech, a biomedical technology company, pivoted to become a Toncoin (TON) treasury company in September, earning operating revenues from staking to secure the network and investing in Telegram ecosystem projects, including games and mini-apps.
The company will funnel some of the revenue generated from the operating business and the capital appreciation of TON to fund cancer research, AlphaTON CEO Brittany Kaiser told Cointelegraph.
She said the company is exploring real-world asset tokenization (RWA) as an alternative funding mechanism to decentralize scientific development and remove financial and access barriers to research funding inherent in the traditional system. She said:
“We’re doing research into the best case studies and what has worked and what hasn’t, from tokenization of the intellectual property, to tokenization of equity of the company that owns the research, to tokenizing future profits of the research.”
Kaiser and Anthony Scaramucci, strategic advisor to AlphaTON, said that biomedical research as an operating vertical sets the company apart from other digital asset treasuries, which often lack operating businesses.
“Most cryptocurrency treasury companies take over the shell and eliminate the primary aspects of the original business, but this is a new case because there are very valuable assets in the shell,” Scaramucci told Cointelegraph.
Related: BNB treasury race accelerates as Applied DNA, CEA Industries expand holdings
Ideosphere, a decentralized science startup, is exploring funding early-stage scientific research through prediction markets. Prediction market platforms act as crowdsourced intelligence and voting mechanisms.
“If you can create prediction markets around early stage research, you can make those markets a marketplace of ideas that will actually bring the money in,” Ideospehre co-founder and head of technology Rei Jarram told Cointelegraph.
“Researchers can put forward hypotheses that they are working on, and traders can speculate on it, and the spread goes to the researcher,” she added.
In September, Bio Protocol, a decentralized science platform combining artificial intelligence, blockchain, and community participation to research drug discovery, secured $6.9 million in funding from Web3 company Animoca Brands and the Maelstrom fund.
Maelstrom founder Arthur Hayes said the platform has the potential to become a full-fledged “AI-native research market” that can change the way scientific research is conducted.
