DeSci on Steem might be better than traditional funding models for scientific research

In case you aren't familiar with the US political landscape, Nicole Shanahan is a tech entrepreneur in the United States, former wife of Google's Sergey Brinn, and the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr.) in the 2024 presidential election.

As a member of RFK Jr.'s campaign, it seems that one of her main interests was in so-called MAHA advocacy (Make America Healthy Again).

Thus, it was not too surprising when she announced $3.5 million in research grant funding on X (Twitter) the other day.

My foundation is allocating $3.5M in grants for qualified researchers to publish a series of review papers summarizing the published evidence linking vaccines to: Toxin-Induced Gut-Brain Inflammation Syndrome (TIGRIS); Enterotoxigenic Motor Neuron Inflammation (EMNI); Gut-Brain Axis Inflammatory Syndrome (GBAIS); Brain-Inflammatory Motor Disorder of Enteric Origin (BIMODE), and other ASD Co-Occurring Conditions. Funds will be distributed on a rolling basis and available immediately.

Please submit proposals to: [Nicole Shanahan's email]

This got me to wondering, though, what could she do with that $3.5 million in funding if she used the Steem blockchain to establish DeSci funding for the same purpose, instead?

DeSci, or decentralized science, is a growing movement to democratize science by decentralizing the funding and integrating scientific research with so-called web3 social media - social media that's integrated with blockchain.

This morning, just for fun, I stepped through some numbers.

1. At today's price of $0.17, let's add 30% and assume she can purchase the STEEM she needs via an OTC trade with one of the exchanges or with one or more large account holders. Let's call it 16 million STEEM.
2. If we go to steemyy.com, we find that a similarly sized account is steemcurator01, with effective SP of 13 ¹/₂ million.
3. If we go to SteemWorld, we see that steemcurator01 can give out $160 in votes about ten times per day.
4. If we multiply $160 by 10 and divide by 2 to get the author rewards, that works out to about $800 per day.
5. If we divide $3.5 million by $800, we get back 4,375 days - not quite 12 years.

So (back of the envelope and oversimplified), by purchasing $3.5 million in STEEM and allocating that curation stake in a way that supports scientific research, Shanahan's foundation could give out $3.5 million in votes to researchers over a twelve year period. In that time, her foundation's STEEM account would continue to hold its entire stake; plus it would earn interest; plus it would earn curation rewards.

Let's say rewards and interest work out to 6% per year. In that case, at the end of 12 years, the 16 million staked STEEM (SP) would have turned into 28.6 million. If we assume no change in the price of STEEM, that's a value of $4.87 million.

In short, Shanahan's foundation could grow its stake by $1.37M (~39%) in the process of distributing $3 ¹/₂ million in research funding.

But wait, there's more. By powering up 16 million STEEM, Shanahan's foundation would gain somewhere around 8 or 9% voting control over the Steem Proposal System, which currently holds about 5 million SBDs. The SPS could, conceivably, be used to fund proposals that make the Steem ecosystem friendlier for DeSci use cases.

Finally, other science supporters and voting accounts chasing curation rewards would almost certainly use their own stake and add to the $800 daily vote amount that gets distributed to the researchers.

OK, so what's the downside?

We all know there's no such thing as a free lunch, so what are the downsides? Here are some:

1. The value of the SP holdings could go down (even as far as $0).
2. If the price of STEEM falls, the daily upvote capability would also fall.
3. 8-9% control over the SPS means that consensus-building would be necessary in order to fund any DeSci-related proposals.
4. Researchers would have to learn how to modularize their work in order to align the work effort with the funding mechanism.
5. Nobody has done this before, so there would also be a learning curve for the funders.
6. I tried to be conservative with numbers, but these are estimates, and they could be wildly wrong. There's no way to know what the values and percentages will really be in the future.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. Under the TradSci funding method, a funding organization parts with $3.5 million in grants, and researchers get $3.5 million in funding. Under the DeSci method and using the Steem blockchain, the funding organization could potentially grow their stake from $3.5 million to $4.87 million while still providing $3.5 million in funding to scientific researchers.

Addendum

Just out of curiosity, and loosely related - does anyone know if Fundition is really operational on the Steem blockchain? I had thought that it was long gone, but I recently noticed that the web site is running (again?).

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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