VitaDAO: decentralize intellectual property to extend the human lifespan

Hello, welcome to the Library of Creations, where we simply share creations. Can be businesses, art, YouTube content, or anything that was created by the mind of a human.

In this article, we are going to be talking about VitaDAO.

If you prefer the video version, here is the link for that.

The home page of their website says:

VitaDAO is the world’s first decentralized intellectual property collective

Even as a computer scientist, when first reading that, it doesn’t seem super clear what that means. So, I’ll try to explain everything in a simple and clear way throughout this video because I am super passionate about the vision of this project. Also, note that this project is very new, so it is subject to change.

Okay, so back to the quote above. In order to even understand this, you have to know what some of these terms mean.

First off, what does decentralized mean?

A system that is decentralized is one that has distributed and dispersed power away from a central authority. This can be useful because oftentimes when a central authority has all the power, they can be greedy with that power at the detriment of other people or other causes.

Okay, so what is intellectual property?

Intellectual property or IP refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; names; symbols…you get it, anything created from the mind of a human that the law protects from unauthorized use by others.

So, in science organizations and pharma companies, IP allows them to monopolize ownership over valuable creations. It’s hard to say how deep that goes. Can a company take ownership of the process of creating some life-saving drug? If so, this could prevent other projects from innovating on top of these valuable ideas which in turn can prevent more life-saving innovations.

After learning about intellectual property, it is probably already obvious why it needs to be decentralized and I think exactly what is needed is:

VitaDAO, the world’s first decentralized intellectual property collective

However, I only went over the basic issue here. I think the best way to understand the value of an organization is to break it down into issues and solutions. What issues will this organization tackle and how will they solve them?

Asking why is very important too, but I think the why is obvious. Solving these issues will increase the health of humans, which in turn will increase lifespans and minimize suffering or pain. Okay, so lets dive deeper into these issues and the solutions.

There is really one big issue that breaks down into many sub-issues. Simply put, money. Money as the main incentive.

These pharma organizations seek to make money so they can continue research. It is good they want to do research for the betterment of humanity, but it is bad that they are forced to focus on making money. Their focus should be on the science, but since it is on money, there are various negative side effects. So, I’ll talk about a few of the main issues that come from this one big money issue:

1: Scientific progress is hindered due to monopolistic IP ownership

Currently, there are groups trying to create new and better ways of helping people with health issues. Pain and suffering sucks, so they want to help.

There are groups trying to learn everything about the human body to increase lifespan and eventually end aging. This is great.

However, because these groups need to focus on making money, they are forced to be driven by two core assets: IP and research and development data (R&D).

When these companies explore a use case for new therapeutics, they patent their discoveries to gain IP. In turn the IP enables them to secure future revenue and recoup the cost of R&D.

This type of monopoly ownership of IP disincentives collaboration and promising drug candidates often fall to the wayside for organizational, political, or competitive reasons.

I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the organization that owns the IP often owns all rights to the knowledge of how to create it. So, any other company making promising research may come to a roadblock if a patent is in their way.

Can you imagine, you’re about to cure blood cancer and then some company’s patent prevents you? Not only that, but if these companies would share this valuable information openly, scientific progress would drastically speed up. But they can’t because they have to make money somehow.

Solution:

Since VitaDAO is decentralized, this will make it so that these groups can no longer monopolize important information, which will greatly benefit scientific progress through collaboration and openness.

Also, these projects will be funded by regular people around the world, partners, and other third parties, so they will no longer have to focus on making money. We can now put full focus on better health for humans.

2: Scientific progress is hindered because data is not available to the public, even though it would be very valuable if it was

These pharma organizations seek to make money so they can continue research. It is good they want to research, but it is bad that they are forced to focus on making money. Due to this, they tend to only share positive R&D data which leads to other projects wasting enormous resources ignorantly repeating each other’s failures. Without complete data, clinical and preclinical studies are often not reproducible.

Solution:

Negative research data tells why certain experiments did not work. This is very very useful and should be shared openly. This would stop the issue of companies repeating the same mistakes over and over.

One way to make this happen is to make it so these organizations don’t need to focus on making money. They can focus on the research itself, which is what is truly important.

Making all this data decentralized and open to the public will solve this issue. In this system, datasets are open and accessible so that everyone can see them, including datasets that contain negative research data. Organizations no longer need to hold up some fake reputation by only providing positive data. Their negative and positive research data will be placed on the market and provide funds to the researchers when other people buy the data-tokens, incentivizing organizations to focus on quality research and not money.

3: It is hard for a typical person to discover what research is going on and even if they do know about the research, it is very hard to get involved. Currently there is only one main entity that can fund early-stage research

Which begs the question: who should have control of what research happens? Say some company has an amazing idea to cure a really bad disease. In the United States, generally only accredited investors can finance these early-stage ventures.

The most important stakeholders: patients and researchers are restricted access.

Also, there is no single place for average people to discover or access these opportunities, at least not before VitaDAO.

Solution:

VitaDAO offers a single location where people can discover all the amazing science going on.

Not only that, but an everyday Joe can help with funding life-changing research.

I could be wrong, but from what I understand, anyone can simply buy VITA tokens or insert money into specific liquidity pools to help out these important projects.

This is an area I plan to do a lot more research on and learn exactly how it works and exactly where the money is going. I trust everything I’ve read so far, it’s just that some of these concepts are quite complex. I plan to cover how funding works in the future once I learn more.

So…that was a good bit of information. Let me try to summarize.

VitaDAO is the first decentralized intellectual property collective.

Currently, organizations on the cutting edge of research are incentivized by money instead of by science and data itself. This causes a multitude of issues where valuable information, ideas, and inventions can be obstructed or lost.

There are other issues too, like the fact that it is hard for a regular person to find out what important research is going on AND it’s about impossible for them to get involved or support those ideas.

VitaDAO will fix these issues by decentralizing intellectual property and research data. This will make innovative ideas more available so the world can collaborate together in solving the biggest health issues that we humans face.

The VitaDAO platform will provide a single place for anyone to discover all the life-changing research going on and how to support it. DAO members are incentivized to fund projects they believe will bring value to the world and these projects are incentivized to provide the world with quality intellectual property and data.

Do remember that this is a very new project and an experiment since it has never been done before, so there is risk involved. Personally, I am super passionate about this idea and plan to send a lot of money into various projects that I think will change the world.

If you’d like to learn about more creations of the mind, feel free to follow us here on Medium or over on YouTube and we’ll see you next time!