Life surveys cross with crypto through Aubrai, a decentral science (Desci) And AI agent launched this week at the base as part of the Bio Protocol.
Decentralized science or Desci uses blockchain and DAOs to finance experiments directly, attribute credit transparent and transform research results into tokenized assets that allow laboratories to maintain beyond philanthropy and traditional capital markets.
The Aubrai -Tokenet, launched at Bio Protocol’s Launchpad, makes the proprietors permanent stakeholders in the agent’s research output, with government rights over financing decisions and a share in income from commercialized discoveries
Built by Vitadao and Bio Protocol with Aubrey de Gray’s LEV Foundation, Aubrai aims to bridge the “Death Valley”, where Langhorison discoveries stop as the capital markets withdraw and laboratories depend on philanthropy.
De Gray is a biomedical gerontologist best known for pioneering life research through his strategies for constructed insignificant senescence (Sens) frames and to advocate that aging can be treated as a hardenable condition.
“The consequences of traditional funding are a chronic financing gap, over-addiction of philanthropy and a” valley of death “between the discovery and the clinic,” they told Coindesk in an interview.
“That’s why we chase alternative mechanisms-daos, lifetime-focused venture funds and Desci-platforms-can tolerate long horizons, adapt incentives around societal benefits and crowd-source risk,” they said Gray.
Aubrai’s approach combines the Gray’s unpublished laboratory data with onchain incentives. By drawing on the Gray’s unpublished laboratory data, Aubrai gain access to exclusive insights over public literature, giving the agent a first-mover benefit by generating new, commercially relevant hypotheses within long life.
The agent consumes experiments in a knowledge graph, generates hypotheses and directs them to token-holder votes for financing.
“We already see the agent formulate exciting new hypotheses and recommend the next step,” they said Gray. “It is the combination of agentic AI intelligence and expert human intelligence that has the potential to dramatically accelerate breakthroughs in the fight against aging.”
When experiments are validated, discoveries are characterized in IP-tokens that can be licensed to pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies, with revenue cycling back to researchers and contributors.
The system is already in use in The Grey’s robust mouse rejuvenation (RMR2) studyOne of the greatest mouse -won experiments ever tried. Aubrai has suggested methodological adjustments and marked dosage of warnings that researchers had only discovered after weeks of manual review.
“Having the agent available has been transformative to our planning pipeline,” De Gray said, noting that RMR2 involves almost a dozen overlapping studies. “The identified points that we had not yet encountered through literature, and it was proactive to suggest ways of circumventing prior restrictions.”
For Paul Kohlhaas, Bio Protocol’s founder, Aubrai represents a turning point in how science can be organized and funded.
“Like Substack, writers gave writers the opportunity to make money outside older media, BIO’s infrastructure can make researchers the next big creation economy,” he said.
Desci will face challenges
While projects such as Aubrai and Bio Protocol demonstrate the potential of crypto capital beyond Memecoins, tokenized intellectual property is likely to attract regulatory control, and established pharmaceutical companies may hesitate to adopt discoveries born of decentralized collectives.
For a field such as a long life where breakthroughs often die in space between early results and human trials due to an uninterested capital market, Aubrai offers an alternative path.
If it succeeds, it can demonstrate the blockchain’s potential to do more than just pumping the next Memecoin. It could provide the infrastructure to speed up research itself and push the field with a long life closer to therapies that expand human health tensions.
It would also signal that decentralized science can act as a viable market alternative to the anchored financing structures that have long limited biomedical innovation.
