It should take only a few minutes to create a project. Submit a few details about you and your project, and your Project Home will be created immediately.

LabDAO is a community of scientists from inside and outside of universities. We’ve just started out, but projects have already secured more than 100k USD in grant funding. Most of the funding comes from Gitcoin and the Filecoin foundation. Existing project topics include metagenomic sequencing, LLMs and transformer learning, and applied research on collaborative literature review with discourse graphs.

LabDAO support and expertise is tailored towards computational life science research. However, the project launch service can be used for any type of scientific research project, so feel free to use it regardless of your field. Check out the range of science projects from the last Gitcoin round here.

There are no eligibility requirements to join us and create a project. You can be an independent researcher, or affiliated with a university, company or other organization. We do expect you to respect our code of conduct and community guidelines when engaging with other community members.

There are two stages you can choose to go through. Launching a project, and applying for support.

       1. To launch a project, there is no approval process. We don’t believe in gatekeeping. Once your project is set up, you can join our community and use our funding management tools.

Once you’ve set up your project, you have the option to apply for LabDAO support. Support options include help with funding applications, access to tools, and scientific or legal advice.

      2. For support, there is a short form where we’ll ask more about what you need. We’ll also talk with you to understand your project better. We will prioritize more hands-on support based on the quality of the research project.

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The LabDAO steward team and members of the LabDAO community will be able to see your research project. You should consider that what you write about your project is public within the community. We do not recommend that you include confidential information in your project description. 

If you have questions about what to write in your project description, or how to manage confidential information, please get in touch here.

You stay in control of your project and the IP it generates (as long as the IP does not belong to another organization). We can help you with legal frameworks to share IP ownership with your team members.

Remember: Generally, any IP from projects you work on within your day job, be it as a graduate student or industry scientist, belongs to your employer. Please be advised that nothing here represents legal advice. Please consult with an IP lawyer inside or outside our community if you have any questions.

We welcome individual projects and team projects equally.

Yes! Setting up a LabDAO project is just your first step in performing your research. You can use the results of your research to develop your career as you wish. For example, you can:

• Publish the results in a journal of your choice
• Present your research at academic conferences
• Create a biotech company
• Launch an open source tool
• Get a job at a top company
• Become an advisor to other projects

The difference is, unlike a university, we don’t require you to publish, teach or hit funding targets.

We are a community of life scientists, engineers and designers. As part of our community you have access to a set of resources including:

• A JupyterHub with pre-loaded environments to run tools for small-molecule docking, RNA-Seq analysis, protein design, etc.
• One petabyte of cloud storage and distributed compute infrastructure
• Over 3000 contract labs for wet-lab experiments
• Access to datasets and applications we are curating
• Support around deploying your scientific compute for free in a cloud native system
• Help applying for grants from non-traditional funders in our network
• Support setting up and designing your project website

Looking for something that is not on the list - please get in touch! 

Decentralized Science (DeSci) is a new way to do research, built from the ground up on principles of openness, collaboration, empowerment, and equitable distribution. It aims to provide an alternative to the problems of the current scientific system e.g. the fact it is hard for talented early career researchers to drive forward their own projects within labs run by established academics. These systemic challenges limit innovation and people’s careers. 

Many DeSci projects use blockchain technology, because it enables new incentive mechanisms, shared ownership, and transparency. But not all DeSci projects use blockchains. Some projects are based on non-technological approaches to reforming science e.g. new ways to organize people and collaborate.

There are DeSci projects tackling specific aspects of the scientific system, such as funding, publishing, intellectual property, university spinouts, incentives, access and more. 

LabDAO aims to pull together many of these threads to create a better way to do research. Anyone can put forward a research idea, find collaborators, and lead a project. LabDAO provides tools and introductions to funders, so researchers can perform world class research from wherever they are in the world.

In a LabDAO project, if you’ve got a Decentralized Science grant paid in a cryptocurrency, then you can store your research funding within your project using Safe.

Safe allows one or more people to manage the funds in your LabDAO account. This is ideal for research projects, where several people might need to access your funding. 

Importantly, Safe allows you to specify the minimum number of people required to approve a transaction before it can occur. For example, if you have 3 main stakeholders in your project, you can set up your account to require approval from 2 out of 3 (2/3), or 3 out of 3 (3/3) people before the transaction is sent. This assures that no single person can accidentally spend or compromise the funds.

The easiest comparison is with a personal vs business bank account. 

A personal bank account belongs to 1 person. Only that 1 person can view, spend or withdraw funds. However, an organization needs a shared account, so that multiple people can view, spend, or withdraw funds. Moreover, you might want to have controls on that account - for example, you need 2 of out 3 people to approve a transaction.

Please note: The Beta version of a LabDAO project only allows one team member to be on the account. A LabDAO bot has a seat on the account too, so that we can help you manage the funds. We will not access your funds and only use this seat to simplify your experience and recover your account in case you loose access to your personal account.

Metamask is a single-user wallet. This means only one person is required to spend or withdraw funds. Given research funds can be of high value, we wanted to offer additional security measures, such as the ability to require 2+ people to approve a transaction.