DeSci DAO Architecture Design and Roadmapping - Tokyo 2024

we're getting to the end of our programming here this is our second to last talk um so happy to invite Mark Mel Movic uh from cerebrum Dow um to discuss dside da architecture design and Road mapping uh very happy to be here in Tokyo um so my name is Mark mikovich I come from the neurotechnology field and then came into the Neuroscience field so I have a background in building products and and then also really diving into different di projects and also uh investing in different di tokens so on to say that as a full disclosure before starting and I'm working with cerebrum da which is a DA which is focused on brain health and neurod degeneration as part of that process I've been working a lot in thinking about how to design decentralized science organizations what's really important to bring into these um organizations these decentralized entities what needs to be built at what time and then I tried to present this as a road map for other people to build out their own projects or to accelerate their own Ambitions so cereum da is one of what we call a biod DA so the bio XYZ platform uh which is a part of molecule is a way where we can launch decentralized projects for for science for many of the projects we're then working with IP nfts to essentially fund and accelerate scientific research and we want to build uh essentially Securus systems where investment then goes to exits which then goes back into the uh funding of new projects within the biod system and bio XYZ is also launching their bio protocol which brings together a lot of the biod Dows and their tokens so over the next year and next couple of years I think it'll be very interesting in the decentralized sence space such that we increase liquidity going into dii projects and Dows so that we can not not only launch and sort of autonoma tize the launching of new science projects but also to enhance the funding of them and we'll hear more about that later now many di organizations fall into a few different categories either funding of new science projects pulling together resources aggregating data in enhancing publishing or also looking at fractionalizing of Ip but the thing that I think is most important is that when we consider new di projects to consider first the the purpose of the Dow why why does this Dow need to exist for example the community which is coming together because the community is the thing which is really giving um structure and function and value to the to the organization and then how we Implement and so from my perspective uh as a product developer or product owner I'm really more interested then in how we build out the road maps to achieve the purposes that we want to achieve with our organizations and many people uh think about decentralized science as a way to quote unquote solve broken science I think that the scientific process is not fundamentally broken we still go through the same method when we want to investigate the world into create new solutions from questioning something in the universe to creating experiments publishing results and then sharing this knowledge with everyone and I think this basically embodies what we want to achieve with decentralized organizations we just want to do it at a much higher scale with more funding and more liquidity than is traditionally possible with centralized funding mechanisms so I've worked in Academia also startups also corporate entities and traditionally we start with some sort of basic science idea we go through a research phase which requires usually national funding centralized funding because we're really exploring what's possible and a lot of the dside Dows uh cereum included is then focusing on the translational stage how can we enhance the translation of scientific discoveries into products which are then ultimately realized as startups or new companies and this is also a way where we can help to drisk the the launching of products which might not be automatically taken over by large corporate entities so that's how we see ourselves sitting into the ecosystem of innovation and technology and really we're trying to answer the question of how can we allocate resources and funding to enhance the translation process so it's really what we're starting to build our Dow around now building a decentralized organization has I think some unique challenges as compared with corporate entities or startups or academic research groups many of the decentralized organizations follow or I think we're starting to follow a particular road map where first we Define our purpose we launch our organization which might include a Discord server or eventually launching our token through pre-sales public sales or private sales and now a lot of our Dows are at the point where we're either in the launching phase or starting to go into the building phase where we're starting to build out Solutions which are then coming to society and this will happen over the next couple of years and I would love to see the point where a lot of dows also get to the point where they've actually solved the problem that they're addressing because logically if you solve the problem which the Dow was created for you could then dissolve the Dow because it's already achieved what it needed to achieve in life but I think when we think about decentralized science we should not be thinking just on a onee or a two-year timeline but really thinking about a five to 10 year or maybe even a century timeline because we really want to create scientific organizations which are self-perpetuating self-fulfilling and then ultimately um self-regulating so these entities should be able to work even if people in the organization leave and that's really the type of um resilience that we we're trying to build into the Dio systems but number one is always defining the the focus and the purpose of the organization um many Dows I think especially as they're coming out of a crypto environment are first focusing on the technology but it's really important to I think first focus on what do you need to achieve why should this organization even exist in the first place so as a product developer I come at the Dows from more of a design perspective I think we first go through a design phase where we research what we want to solve we start to build out prototypes we Define the requirements that we want to Define for the products Solutions or interventions we want to bring to the world and then go through the process of product building and deploying often times and this is really I think the advantage of having a large Network Organization for scientific problems is that many people take over different personalities when they're in different team environments whether you're a person who is a researcher or coordinator or an implementer you might be the person who is talking about the problem working on solving the problem or executing and engineering and I think these are the the values that we're trying to bring together in the Dow ecosystem because we want large decentralized organizations where people can do the best work at the best time so that we can all have a great impact and I think this is one of the the the the most important things that we can do if we if we can achieve it correctly is to have the right person working on the right part of the problem at the right time this of course is I would say quite challenging to achieve but many organizations are building out new tools and processes to help facilitate this either way if you're creating your own network organization if you think you have a problem that makes sense to solve in this uh type of way be aware that it'll be a very challenging Journey going from the the the start of the organization forming teams going through a lot of discussions uh probably there'll be a lot of friction between you and co-workers or other team members but eventually you come to a cohesive way and a direction forward and that's where a lot of the design tools come into play to help facilitate this process process so for example with uh Dows I found the strategy Explorer canvas to be a very useful and effective Tool uh this isn't a very popular canvas there are many other around such as the business model canvas the reason I use a strategy Explorer is because it brings together many different directions in one two-dimensional plane and we can really understand how we are shifting from what's happening in society the trends that are occurring that we want to address the problems that we want to address and then we can chart a pathway through and this then can then turn into the the road map for the organization but at the heart of it I think is always important to focus on the the core mission and vision for the organization and then build out how this is going to have an impact and make a difference in society for yourself for the people you know and everybody else and if you can reduce your Dow concept to a few sentences very very similar to the way you have to reduce the complexity of a problem for a startup pitch if you can do this in one or two sentences and you can explain it to yourself and to everybody else in your team then you've probably achieved consensus so I use different uh methods such as taking a simple sentence structure and to say if one thing is happening then another thing will be possible and The Logical result will be the future and the future is essentially what we're building inside the decentralized autonomous organization so for example with for cerebrum Dao if the participants of The Da can measure their brain health and they can understand how their brain is changing much the same way that they can understand how their weight is changing by measuring themselves they have a metric to understand what interventions and what actions to take to affect their brain health right this is very simple to to say and therefore this is one of the very simple ways that we then build our product road map to try and answer this question we can also use things like a a canvas uh similar to a business model canvas where we can very clearly see our purpose our launch plan and really communicate to everyone what exactly is happening in the organization because this is usually one of the biggest problems there's many people maybe a thousand 2,000 or even more on a Discord server and people need direction to understand where the organization is going so when we're doing then the implementation understanding the product road map for the Dow I think is really important because it shows the vision for everybody and it's also something that everyone can participate in so first going from the research to defining requirements and then understanding when you're going to build what if you can understand how to do this and you can have an answer to this then it's going to be clear how the organization is going forward and you can go through the phases of design and development to shipping and a more systematic and easy to understand way and it really goes to the one of the big problems with Dows which is confusion and people not knowing what the next steps are going to be in the process so at cerebrum we defined our myself as an organization which is addressing brain health and also neurod degeneration and looking for ways to extend healthy brain lifespan as many of you are certainly aware and as many of us all are experiencing our brains go through huge changes from the time that we're born to the way we absorb information the way we learn the way we develop neurop Pathways up until we might go through degenerative processes or big traumas in in our brain due to injuries so first at cere we focus on the circus funding organization doing IP nfts to accelerate Brain Research in different areas such as interventions for the blood brain barrier drugs or for U metabolic uh Improvement so we did a token launch in the end of April we raised approximately 300 e and then from this we establish that treasury which we can then start to build our products from we also set up a governance framework so that as a Swiss organization we can have a legal foundation and then the Dow is a way to essentially provide um for governance of that organization and it's all it's been relatively straightforward to do in Switzerland and I think this is one of the challenges looking forward to doing Dows in other countries if the the government is accepting this as a as a way to build an organization alongside a company or another entity and I'm really interested to see how other company other countries will take over and hopefully legalize and make it easy to build outs we also did a lot of work on first setting up our deal flow process again looking for common language when we're evaluating new opportunities that we want to fund so if you understand that they are really inside the Dow Focus or not and then as a team the deal flow organization can really be aligned on evaluating these deals in a very similar way so our deal flow design process is also published on our website so it can be very clear for everyone who wants to submit a proposal what the process is going to be going forward and then this is really where a lot of um you know problems can come up when you're executing in the Dow organization you need to set up these prop processes so that everyone understands how to move forward because the confusion within a dow is probably one of the biggest problems you're going to encounter we then have uh set up and launched our product group the product group is essentially the way that we're now Building Solutions that are either going to be built directly inside the Dow or building Partnerships where we want to bring in new products to the organization a key part of this is defining a brain health road map whereby we can understand our current understanding our current knowledge based around how the brain ages and how lifestyle factors affect natural aging and what interventions can bring in in the early stage to affect it in a positive way based on that Foundation we then went to our first road map which is essentially going similar to the way that we described before use our research Define our requirements Define how we can build a Marketplace to enhance token staking so that people can get an exchange for the tokens that they're um buying and providing to the Dow and also a mobile application so they can really track how brain state is changing over time so in all these places we're looking at circuitous Loops we want people to get value back from the interaction that they have from the Dow whether it's from a token utility and sticking mechanism or sharing their data or participating in our our Dow processes now we also have ideas for long-term data app architectures building out road maps and architectures so that we can accelerate uh dii so large language models in AI are going to be a big part of this um one of the most important things to understand is the the knowledge base of the Dow or the knowledge graph so we also take time to build out the the connection points for neurot technology and Neuroscience where we see gaps which can then inform what we want to fund and also how we want to to build one of the things coming I believe at the end of this year or next year is including then AI agents so that we can take the knowledge that we have start to automate the research processes start to automate the prediction of like what discoveries need to be made to then understand how we need to build our our products and I believe it will also help people to understand how their brain health is changing and what interventions they can take and if this type of process happens with Dows and all these other different fields such as genetics or longevity or research Hub cryogenics if we can start as a movement to start to build all these automatic science systems bring it in together with the the funing mechanism provided by web Technologies and web 3 I believe we can start to have an acceleration of the whole D movement but it will take time um but I encourage you to think about how these different components such as knowledge knowledge access tokenomics and llms and agents can come together to build out the the future of centralized science so that's the basic road map that I would like to communicate for you if you want to build a new Dow or if you're already in a dow and you might feel confused launching building releasing creating value these are the key things that we're focusing on right now at cerebrum and I think right now everyone is trying to learn how to do decentralized science so it's important to have these types of gatherings exchange information and learn and Implement best practices thank you very much [Applause]