My friends, decentralized science is a huge field that we collectively really need, and it is emerging on Internet Computer Protocol with NobleBlocks. This is very exciting to me, because most of our science right now is extremely centralized, and most of the science you know about is funded by people who want to further their own interests and get you to think a certain way. One of the biggest areas of expansion I see for humanity right now is if we can get some true decentralized science going, and the blockchain, the tokenization, and the ownership available on only Internet Computer Protocol are making a future where we can get scientific research that's not just funded by companies that want to sell you their products or governments that want to regulate and control you in a certain direction.
So I want to tell you about NobleBlocks, which is the first decentralized, fully on-chain science protocol that we've had anywhere in the world. This has massive potential, although it has a lot of growth and a lot of work to do to realize that potential. To me, this is just another sign of things that are possible on Internet Computer that aren't possible anywhere else, because if you want real decentralized science, you need it all to be done fully on chain. So let's learn about NobleBlocks.
What is DeSci?
If you're wondering what DeSci is, DeSci is decentralized science, which represents a paradigm shift in scientific methodology. One of the biggest places we need decentralization is science. Let me give you a concrete example. Let's say I'm a drug company, and I want to make a new drug to sell. A lot of the drug companies that want to have drugs to sell will produce the drug and then give out a bunch of studies, and if a few studies come back showing it works, then what they can do, and what they often do from what I've seen, is they just discard all the other studies that showed it didn't work, come out with the studies that say it did work, and then you think the science says one thing, but really you didn't see all the other stuff the science said. All the other stuff the science said was silenced.
Being in a master's degree program, I also saw that peer review was one of the worst things, because when you had centralized power and thinking, peer review meant that you couldn't publish opinions that the other people in existing institutions didn't want to go out. It didn't matter what you discovered; if what you discovered was not something the peer reviewers wanted to publish, and was not along the lines of mainstream thinking, which generally is along the lines of what will get paid for, it didn't go anywhere. Basically, if you don't do what you're told, think how you're supposed to think, and please the people you want to please, your scientific research will not be funded. And that means almost all of our science says the same thing, because that's what is funded.
That means, as humans, we need much more scientific research and exploration, and it needs to be done in a way that's funded by the community and that allows more innovation. So DeSci is a field that, in my belief, we really need collectively to succeed. Let's talk about how NobleBlocks is aiming to be the leader in DeSci and to bring this vision into reality.
Making scientific information actually accessible
NobleBlocks wants to make it easier to access scientific info via decentralization. Did you realize that you actually can't get a hold of real scientific information very well? I don't know if you've ever tried to do that, but a lot of the scientific information done by research is locked up in research papers, and many of these you have to have a paid subscription to even look through, which keeps the general public from even being able to see it. And then even if you can access it, you have to understand the formatting, the citations, and what this 30-page research paper actually means.
You'd be amazed how ignorance keeps us vulnerable and keeps us in a place where we have to just do what we're told. I was reading this Ken Follett book, and I'm thinking, wow, the people 100, 200 years ago were so ignorant. They didn't know about basic stuff. Well, if we can get more access to science in a way that everybody can participate in, then all of us can collectively get smarter, less ignorant, less easy to control, and less easy to trick and lie to. So I'm really excited about decentralized science, and I hope NobleBlocks can get publications out at a faster rate.
Right now, it takes forever. Even just doing the research I did in graduate school, sometimes it would take years just to go from starting a simple study to getting it published. We need that stuff faster, because there are kids out there who could do great scientific research, but right now they're mostly prevented from actually presenting it. We also need stuff that's tamper-proof and irrefutable, because you wouldn't believe how much censorship happens until you try to put something out there that goes against, not even the laws or the rules, but what people are used to thinking. Even if it is fully within the terms and conditions, if people get pissed off, it's very easy for things to just get taken down, even though they don't break any of the rules, as I've seen personally.
So we really need a scientific publishing platform where we can put things out there that go against what a lot of us think is possible. You'd be amazed how many people are out there saying things like faster-than-light travel is possible, or anti-gravity is possible, and decentralized science could help us get that out there, where it looks to me like things like that have been kept from us intentionally. This is the same theme I keep coming back to in my belief that forbidden tech and secret science can finally thrive on ICP.
How NobleBlocks plans to execute
The big question is how NobleBlocks is going to execute decentralized science, because, as we've seen in crypto a lot, having an idea doesn't mean that it's actually going to get out there in a way that works. Here is how NobleBlocks is planning and working on doing this now, and you can sign up for it on nobleblocks.com if you want to check it out.
NobleBlocks is aiming to have one central location for all publications, and it connects scientists around the world with each other, and you don't have to have all these restrictive credentials. If you've never been to graduate school, I was shocked when I went. I just went for criminology, which is a field based on scientific research of things like crime and criminal justice. I went to graduate school thinking it was going to open my mind, and I dropped out after I got my master's. I quit doing my PhD because I could see they were trying to get me to think and act a certain way. I went there to have my mind opened, but everything was getting me to try to close my mind. Many people who are willing to go through and get a PhD have been through a process that's designed to close their minds and make them think a certain way.
So we need something that's less restrictive with credentials, so that regular people can just get out there and study something and publish it. We also need a true peer-to-peer review system that's not just based on this hierarchy of money and seniority, but where someone who's really researching and making breakthroughs can review someone else, not just because they've gone to school and done what they've been told for 30 years, but because they actually have ability and are willing to give their time and energy.
So they're setting up a true peer-to-peer system where reviewers and editors get paid after completing their job. That way it makes the publication process much cheaper and much faster, and the reviewers and editors have the opportunity to be much more objective, because they don't rely on institutional funding. You can't believe how toxic it is when you rely on big institutional centralized funding and you have to give them the results they want, or they don't fund further research. And if they don't fund further research, you end up being out of a job. People won't hire you. You can struggle to put all this education to work and even to make a living.
Each bit of data on the NobleBlocks blockchain is immutable, and it has a chronological record that's almost impossible to tamper with. This is all possible because it's created on Internet Computer, where you can build the entire application, website and all, on chain, which cannot be done on any other blockchain. So you absolutely cannot have decentralized science on anything besides Internet Computer Protocol, because if you can't actually build the whole thing on chain, then there's going to be a centralized developer with backdoor admin keys, and the DAO can't actually control it. This is why I'm all in on Internet Computer. If you want to go deeper on why I keep coming back to this chain, I keep these conversations going in my ICP Crypto playlist.
Who reviews, and how a paper gets published
So who are the reviewers in this setup? Us. Anyone that is on the platform can assist with reviewing, based on the reviews you've done in the past. Then you've got editors who are granted editor status and get to edit the finest publications. In theory, this would at least produce a different result than what we've got going now, if not something far superior.
Here's the basic publication process. The author submits an article, and especially in the age of AI-generated content, one of the big things you need to review for is whether somebody submitted an article that's actually original or just copied or plagiarized another article. Especially with decentralized science, this is much more likely to be an issue, particularly if people are looking to get paid and they get attention based on submitting the articles. At least our existing system does make it more difficult to copy and plagiarize, and with decentralized science, screening for copied and plagiarized research would be one of the biggest things you need to do.
If it's original, then you have it screened for the requirements and sent to the field editor. Then you've got an editor who accepts the invitation, previews the article, and once they get all of this done, it is out there and accepted for publication. Because this is done fully on chain and in a way that's transparent, this could go much, much faster than the way things work now. Right now, you could submit a paper and wait weeks, if not months, just to get a reply that it was rejected. I watched my peers when I was in grad school go through this process. They write these papers and submit them, they get rejected, and they spend months sometimes just submitting papers before they'd even really get anywhere. So this publication process looks like it could go a lot faster than our existing system. And what we need is positive reinforcement loops.
The tokenization that makes it work
In a lot of ways, our science looks like we haven't advanced that much in most of my lifetime, except in things like cell phones and computers. In a lot of other areas, we need faster innovation. A big key to how all of this works is NobleBlocks' tokenization, and this is what you can't really build without Internet Computer, because having the tokenization built in for the actual DAO governance is what allows this to really be what it can be. If you're new to how decentralized governance works, I think it's worth understanding how DAOs work in crypto first, because that's the engine underneath all of this.
Here's the utility of the token. In order to submit a paper, an author needs to either buy or earn tokens. They can earn tokens from submitting a paper, and this way they're paying for people's time to do the work of going through and validating their work. The author deposits tokens into the editor pool, into the reviewer pool, and into the copy-editing pool. If it gets rejected, then they need to deposit tokens to go into another one. Through all that, that's how the reviewers and editors get paid, and then they can sell the tokens back for authors to buy.
This is a nice incentive: if you're an author, you could participate in the editing and review process so that you could earn some tokens, and then you could submit your own papers, or you could buy tokens and submit them yourself. The authors also have the chance to get paid via their publications if they make an amazing publication. I'm not sure exactly, based on what I've seen, how they'll actually get paid for it, but it would be ideal for the NobleBlocks ecosystem if you publish a scientific paper that gets lots of attention, because that would be good for the whole ecosystem, and you would think the author would be rewarded for it. So when authors complete their tasks, and when editors and reviewers are giving value to NobleBlocks, then they get paid tokens, and when they're asking for NobleBlocks to do things for them, then they pay, which is pretty logical.
When you engage with content and sell the tokens, you're contributing to the science by ensuring scientific advancement. When you're publishing articles on the blockchain, the platform ensures that the research findings are publicly available, transparent, and immutable. That's what we really need in research, because you'd be amazed how much science you haven't seen. Research that's been done, and because it didn't have the narrative or the findings that were desired, was simply thrown out. Studies proving things completely wrong, or going completely against things you think are true, have been done and thrown out. This is why, in my belief, we really need ICP and the blockchain to do this, because if somebody publishes a study that blatantly says something is inaccurate or proves it's wrong, that study should be out there, and it should not just be censored or hidden from us. We should have access to come up with our own ideas. Even if there are two studies that say the exact opposite thing, we should be able to see that.
Future developments and the real risks
Here are the future developments NobleBlocks is planning: an AI integration to speed up publication processing, which I imagine would especially screen for copyrighted and plagiarized content; plans to host virtual conferences, workshops, and online networking; and constantly maintaining accounting and transparency.
Now, what are some of the potential risks? Well, the quality and integrity of the research published on the platform is, to me, one of the bigger risks, along with regulatory issues. If you've got governments and other organizations trying to push one narrative and say that nothing else is acceptable or right, and then you have science published saying the exact opposite on the blockchain, that could place people under attack when governments are trying to force people to do certain things based on their goals. This could come under regulatory attack, because when you get huge amounts of money and people being controlled and forced to do things they don't want to do, and then you come out with science that goes against that, that could come under attack. That's why we need it to be on ICP, so that the entire chain itself is set up in a way that's difficult to attack where it's actually hosted.
That could still be an issue for NobleBlocks, though, because imagine somebody puts out a paper on NobleBlocks that shows you exactly how to build an anti-gravity vehicle. Just look at what's happened to people who've put those out already. Somebody put out a car that was on the news that ran on water. It ran on water in the 70s. They disappeared along with the car shortly after that. These are some of the things we could get a better world with on chain, but these are also things that could stir up very serious levels of resistance.
And is this model sustainable tokenomically? If somebody comes out with a brilliant innovation and then mysteriously disappears or mysteriously harms themselves right after, which seems unlikely on its own, that tells you something. I've heard a story of a guy who was building an anti-gravity vehicle for the public to use, and his research was suddenly confiscated the day before his public presentation. This is why we really need decentralized science. We need it badly, because you can see what kind of world we could build if this could get out there.
But this does bring up some other things. What if somebody puts out a scientific paper that shows how to make some really destructive technology that's not that difficult to make? Then NobleBlocks could have a lot of challenges. And on a simpler level, there's the challenge of building a sustainable business model. If the tokenomics aren't just right, then you've got the price to deal with. This could be difficult to execute, especially getting it started.
Is NobleBlocks an AI play?
There are AI features we mentioned earlier — some of the things they're looking at having the AI do. So if this could actually work, this could be a good AI play. However, I think it's a bit early to be fully considered an AI play. But if you're into looking way ahead at what's coming, and I want what's coming, this could be a further-ahead-looking AI play.
They've begun marketing it to academia and researchers alike, because people in academia are really frustrated with the publication process. There are a lot of amazing scientists and researchers out there who are disgusted with the publishing process, and literally all you need to do is show them an alternative, and they're going to use it.
The tokenomics in detail
Here's a look at the tokenomics. The main utility is that the token will be used in the ecosystem, and this is the biggest problem with most projects: the lack of real utility. NobleBlocks has the main thing it does as the utility for all the transactions, for authors that want to publish, the editors that want to edit, and so on. Then there's the incentive structure to have staking, liquidity, and contributing to the platform, plus governance and participation. Because this is 100% on ICP, you actually can control all the real resources without the developers having a backdoor, which then could give some very real value to the token. This kind of built-in utility is exactly why I believe ICP has the best tokenomics in crypto, by far.
There are a lot of slides about the token supply. Basically, the total supply is 1 billion. You'll have 18% for public sale at 5 cents, which is the current plan. Now, be aware that these projects often change what they say they're going to do; these things could be edited or changed in theory at any time. So this is just a rough estimate, but you can get an idea of where they're going to execute. There's 20% for the core team, 3% for advisors, 4% for partnerships, and 15% for operational and community incentives like marketing and legal costs. You have the grants program and academic grants. Then there's about 20% for liquidity and the reserve fund. Then there's a pre-sale token supply for investors, so the private sale and strategic sale will be way less than the IDO price, which will be less than the public sale. The pre-sale supply looks like it's about 130 million for the pre-sale and the IDO, which would be about 13% of the total.
What you can take away from all of this is that this might be something to DCA into over time that could have some wild ups and downs. That's something I'll be keeping an eye on. I'm very hesitant to actually buy into tokens besides ICP because of the utility, but this is one I'm definitely keeping an eye on. The plan for the amount released is 130 million in the first year and then 100 million per year after that. You'd have to have some really strong growth to offset all the token releases. However, if the token releases are used well, they could fund explosive growth of the platform and bring in a bunch of scientists, researchers, PhDs, master's degrees, and people without degrees who are excited to get their research out there.
What's so amazing about ICP is that if you even have one application that really just takes off, it blows the whole ICP platform up huge, and there are so many of them. I can't tell exactly which one it's going to be, but it's going to be one of them. Is it NobleBlocks? I hope so, because we really need it.
The founder and the roadmap
If you want to meet the founder, that's Delroy Frazier, who has roots in web development dating back to 2002, which is when I graduated high school. Delroy has nurtured talents who occupy high-ranking positions at Google, and his insightful leadership steers NobleBlocks, pioneering a new era in scientific publishing. I'm really grateful that he's created NobleBlocks. We really need this, and I'll do what I can to support the growth and development of it. I made this in collaboration with DFINITY as a community grant, but it is not sponsored in any way by NobleBlocks. I'm just putting this out there because it's information that I believe you should know about.
Here's their roadmap. They're making a newsfeed for user-generated posts, which they've already done. I have not actually signed up for this yet myself. This is research to help me and you know what's out there. I had this presentation made for me, and I'm interested to try it out myself. They've got a member directory and an event feature, so this is intended to be set up like a social network for publishing science, which is awesome. The review feature development has the backend completed and the front end mostly completed. So this looks like a really good time to know about this, because you're still really early in knowing about it right now. There's also going to be an initial DEX offering. I don't know if I'll participate in that or not. We'll see, but I am definitely watching, keeping an eye on it, and doing what I can to spread awareness for the project's existence.
So that has been NobleBlocks, which is decentralized science, a term that I hope is new to you. If you want to try it for yourself, you can go to nobleblocks.com and sign up. This is the kind of project, and the kind of community, that I love going deep on, and if you want to be part of those conversations with me directly, I'd love for you to join the Jerry Banfield Family.