It’s 2024, and no one has lived past 150 years. Methuselah lived close to 1,000 years in biblical times, and so did Noah.
Many people want to live life and age gracefully like these Biblical figures. The problem is, none has been successful.
For centuries, the human lifespan continues to hover around 100 years. In fact, in Europe, you will be lucky if you live past 83 years, according to data. It drops to 79 years in the United States.
While modern medicine has undoubtedly improved health outcomes and extended lifespans, the boundaries of human longevity remain largely unexplored.
The Age Of DeSci: Quest To Extend Lifespans
The question now remains: What if there was a way to push those boundaries further, unlocking the potential for humans to live longer, healthier lives?
If this can be enabled in traditional setups, it can be replicated in decentralized environments. This ambitious vision drives VitaDAO, a member of Bio.xyz, a network that supports BioDAOs.
VitaDAO is a project at the center of crypto and longevity science research. As a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), it operates as a Decentralized Science (DeSci) protocol and has links to Vitalik Buterin.
•VitaDao – created by the owner of Ethereum (Vitalik Buterin). They have reserved a whole city in Montenegro (Zuzalu) for the longevity research. pic.twitter.com/XhjUtA0UCK
— Dusan (@AlphaHunte19762) May 2, 2024
For those who are not familiar with DeSci, it is a new movement leveraging the power of blockchain to accelerate scientific research and improve funding. If DeFi exists to democratize traditional finance, then DeSci aims to make scientific research more fluid, global, and accessible.
It makes sense, though there could be thousands of worthy proposals, funding is incredibly finite. DeSci projects like VitaDAO aim to resolve these problems facing traditional scientific research, making it easier for early-stage researchers to secure funding, hindering ground-breaking discoveries – and accelerating scientists’ ability to reach their full potential.
When research is decentralized, it means centralized research institutions and multi-billion pharmaceutical companies won’t have a total grip on recent research findings. Their control is the very reason why accessing new findings is hard – and why there is such a high-cost barrier to entry for both researchers and consumers alike.
DeSci aims to disrupt this paradigm by creating permissionless, community-driven platforms for scientific research. Through VitaDAO, researchers will get quick funding directly from the community through tokenized offerings.
At the same time, all findings will be documented on-chain as NFTs, ensuring transparency. By tapping into the blockchain, there is better decentralized governance since DAO members can vote.
How VitaDAO Uses Crypto And NFTs To Fund Longevity Research
VitaDAO is one of the many projects emerging from DeSci. The DAO specifically focuses on funding early-stage longevity research. Researchers with ideas on how to extend lifespans receive funding.
Their ambitious mission has seen VitaDAO receiving backing from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer. Since launching in 2021, VitaDAO has raised over $10 million, dedicating over 40% of this to research initiatives.
At the core of VitaDAO is the native governance token, VITA, which grants holders voting rights. Then, there are IP-NFTs, which allow researchers to tokenize their intellectual property (IP).
Through these NFTs, they can sell these IP rights to investors within the DAO. All these NFTs are minted on Molecule, a biotech-centric protocol.
Interestingly, IP-NFT holders (buyers of research findings) can further fragment their ownership into IPTs. In this way, they have more control and can issue licensing rights, for instance, or even seek more funds enabled by VitaDAO.
So far, the DAO has supported over 20 projects, selected from the over 200 projects that expressed interest. VitaDAO has also distributed over $4.2 million in funding to these projects.
One such example in 2022, Jonathan An lab received $330,000 from VitaDAO. They are looking for new treatments for gum disease in older adults. The labs want to devise ways of reducing inflammation to improve overall health and lifespan.
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VITA Price Analysis: How Is VITA Token Shaping Up in the 2024 Crypto Bull Market?
Amid a wider market drawback, VITA token has remained at a relatively stable price – with year-on-year gains currently standing at +34.6% after a -12% retracement (triggered by the Bitcoin post-halving dip).
With a modest market cap at $60M, VITA token represents a highly alluring investment opportunity for retail traders – representing just a fraction of the market cap of a comparable science-linked coin such as Fetch.AI (which has a current market cap of $5.34Bn).
(VITAUSDT)
If VITA token is able to capture similar interest as the AI narrative (in a potential DeSCI narrative) it would not be unrealistic to expect VITA to reflect 10% of Fetch.AI’s market cap – leaving VITA targeting a market cap of around $534m (leaving VITA token price at $20.57 – a potential 8.9x return for investors).
Such a move could likely be triggered by future CEX listings, with VITA currently only available through Uniswap, Balancer, Bancor, CoinEx, and CoinW.
Part of the allure of VITA token is it’s low circulating supply; just a smidgen higher than Bitcoin’s at 25,957,397 VITA.
The Bottom Line: Could DeSci Supercharge Human Endeavor? Will VitaDAO Extend Human Life?
At its heart, decentralized science represents one of the most promising opportunities for cryptocurrency to make a genuinely impactful contribution to humanity – as blockchain developers continue to architect the future of the digital economy – it’s not unlikely that projects funded or contributed to via decentralized science initiatives could alter the world.
In the case of VitaDAO’s funding of early-stage longevity research, it’s not unlikely that ideas and discoveries linked to investor funding here could supercharge humanity’s ability to fight or potentially even cure ‘aging’ and extend human life.
However, longevity science is also a field dominated by major players like genomic research from CRISPR – which are firmly rooted in centralized science.
Needless to say, longevity science represents one of the most promising frontiers of bio-medical science (Vitalik Buterin agrees), and this positions VitaDAO as a mega-growth project for the emerging decentralized science industry.
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Disclaimer: Crypto is a high-risk asset class. This article is provided for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. You could lose all of your capital
