Decentralized Science Project LabDAO Raises $3.6M

LabDAO, a decentralized science project, reportedly raised $3.6 million on Tuesday in a funding round co-led by Inflection.xyz and Village Global. Other investors that took part in the fundraising include North Island Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, ID Theory, Road Capital, Curve Labs, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and others.

LabDAO Facilitates Resource-intensive Computations for Scientific Data

LabDAO, a decentralized science (DeSci) organization consisting of scientists and engineers who develop and share open tools for life science research, secured $3.6 million in a fresh funding round co-led by Inflection.xyz and Village Global, according to CoinDesk.

Alongside the fundraiser, LabDAO also announced the rollout of PLEX – a software platform designed to enable scientists to interact with the Lab exchange. The PLEX client will now offer only computational services, while physical laboratory features are expected to be added later.

LabDAO simplified the execution of resource-intensive computational services by containerizing them. This enables scientists to run data more efficiently and connect the resulting output to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to prove their ownership.

“Over the last couple of years, artists were able to go directly into the NFT movement. They were able to create artwork and share that with their followers. Scientists are also creators – you could say to some extent that scientists are the original creator class. They should also be able to create artwork and share that with their followers.”

– Niklas Rindtorff, co-founder and CEO of the Openlab Association told CoinDesk.

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What is DeSci?

LabDAO’s funding round underlines investors’ gradually-growing interest in DeSci – a niche market within the Web3 space that aims to decentralize and democratize the scientific process through blockchain technology and decentralized networks.

DeSci utilizes decentralized protocols and platforms to enable collaboration, data sharing, and peer review among scientists worldwide without relying on traditional centralized authorities or other middlemen. Doing this allows for greater transparency, openness, and inclusivity in scientific research to create a collaborative and verifiable scientific ecosystem.

Like LabDAO, most other DeSci projects are also DAOs – decentralized autonomous organizations. DAOs are people who gather together to address a particular issue. However, their objective is not to personally solve the problem but rather to provide the best support for other people to do it.

Do you think DeSci could take off as a blockchain application vertical? Let us know in the comments below.