DeSci credibility, citations, and income

As Bitcoin is money without banks, Ideamarket is credibility without institutions.

This could solve several major problems for the Decentralized Science (DeSci) ecosystem, because it allows users to build credibility for discoveries without waiting for a centralized authority like the FDA or the The Lancet.

Ideamarket’s UI has 3 columns:

Here’s how these elements work together to get DeSci studies the credibility they deserve, a new income stream, and increased social impact.

The credibility layer of DeSci

DeSci produces research that is genuinely useful, but it often lacks the institutional channels needed to raise money to develop treatments, get published in journals, and reach the public.

Here’s how Ideamarket could help, using a study I found on CureDAO as an example:

These on-chain ratings generate a list of people who are confident in the results of the study — decentralized credibility.

Ratings by the most prominent users appear at a glance:

In the same way Substack is helping shift trust in journalism away from institutions and toward individuals, Ideamarket enables credibility on all topics to follow the same pattern.

It won’t be long until the opinion of 100 people you trust, outweighs the opinion of 1 institution you don’t.

DeSci is a fantastic use case to demonstrate this, given many DeSci discoveries are both rigorous and immediately useful to the public.

The citation layer of DeSci

When you rate a post on Ideamarket, you have the option of citing up to 10 other posts as evidence to support your rating:

This means posting a DeSci study on Ideamarket immediately puts it to use affirming or refuting other posts. These could be other studies, or casual talking points in mainstream discourse.

Here’s how our CureDAO example looks when cited as supporting evidence for another post: “Anti-anxiety medication should be a last resort.”

Citations link Ideamarket posts together in a public knowledge graph — a network of credible opinions on every topic. This is one of Ideamarket’s main features.

Where does DeSci fit in?

Everywhere.

The more important a DeSci study is, the more likely it will be cited by many other posts, and rated by many users.

Here’s why that’s useful:

A new income stream for DeSci

Rating a post costs 0.001 ETH, paid to the owner of the post being rated — the author by default, so CureDAO in our example.

That means:

• For every 1000 ratings on CureDAO’s post, CureDAO earns 1 ETH.

It’s that simple!

This means impactful research alone can generate income for DeSci DAOs, without any complex monetization scheme like intellectual property rights, research grants, drug development, or otherwise.

(“If rating posts costs money, why would people do it?” is addressed here.)