Exploring New Systems for Scientific Research
Revisiting ResearchHub
I was recently browsing Twitter when I noticed that there was some buzz around one of my favorite crypto-based projects, ResearchHub. ResearchHub is a platform dedicated to accelerating the pace of scientific research by increasing the accessibility of the scientific record and making it easier for researchers to efficiently collaborate.
The price of the platform’s native cryptoasset, ResearchCoin (RSC) had increased by a factor of ~9x since the last time I had checked it in the fall of 2023. This meant that the tokens I had accumulated for simply testing the platform back in 2022 were suddenly worth a significant amount of “real money.”1 Since I’m always eager to support crypto projects that are focused on providing real-world utility over pure speculation, I decided to start putting these funds to good use and created bounties, paid in RSC, in order to incentivize peer-reviews for a pair of scientific papers.
The first paper, Emergent Bioanalogous Properties Of Blockchain-Based Distributed Systems, is one that I recently read to support my research on measuring complexity in cryptoeconomic systems.2 So far I’ve gotten one review from a Brazilian computer science master’s student who did a great job of concisely breaking down the strengths and weaknesses of the paper.
The second paper is A synaptic memristor based on natural organic honey with neural facilitation.3 I found this one as the result of my newfound curiosity with neuromorphic computing, memristors, and the idea that we may start to see a shift away from a dependency on the von Neumann computing architecture which has defined essentially all of historical and modern electronic computing.
Last night I received an excellent review from a Canadian PhD neurobiologist who expertly broke down the key concepts, enabling me to critically evaluate the paper for myself.
It is incredibly refreshing to experience a community of peers using crypto in a way that incentivizes novel forms of collaboration and problem solving. While I suspect that as the platform continues growing, speculative dynamics around RSC may become problematic, everything I’ve seen so far indicates that the leadership team at ResearchHub is very dedicated to maintaining the platform’s integrity.
I’ll have plenty more thoughts on ResearchHub and my experiments with using RSC in the future.
Disclosure: I hold 2,446 RSC acquired entirely through usage of the platform at time of publishing. This is not financial or investment advice.
https://shingai.xyz/researchhub/
https://www.researchhub.com/paper/6328676/emergent-bioanalogous-properties-of-blockchain-based-distributed-systems
https://www.researchhub.com/paper/6336436/an-electrical-component-for-computing-made-with-honey
This post is crazy interesting from so many directions. Investing in research with cryptoassets?!
Memristors and neuromorphic computing?! Made with honey?! Explained beautifully by a neuroscientist?! Geez, Shingai. Reading this was a fun stretch!