DeSci DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations that fund, govern, and commercialize scientific research. Where traditional funders (NIH, ERC) concentrate decisions in review committees, a DeSci DAO lets its token holders decide which research gets funded — and, through IP-NFTs, gives the funding community a stake in the intellectual property it backs. In the DAO taxonomy they are a hybrid of grant DAO and investment DAO.
How a DeSci DAO works
The typical pipeline: researchers submit proposals; an expert working group screens and negotiates terms; the token-holder community votes; and funded projects transfer rights to the DAO as an IP-NFT — the structure pioneered by Molecule and proven by VitaDAO, which has deployed $4.7M across 31 research projects. Governance runs on the same machinery as any token-voting DAO (see DAO governance models), usually with off-chain signaling plus multisig execution.
Directory
Every organisation below has a full page in this wiki. Therapeutic and research DAOs first, then the platform layer they run on.
Therapeutic & research DAOs
- VitaDAO — longevity; the flagship, with $4.7M across 31 research projects
- AthenaBIO — women's health (renamed from AthenaDAO in March 2026)
- PsyDAO — psychedelics research
- CryoDAO — cryopreservation and biostasis
- HairDAO — androgenic alopecia and hair loss
- Cerebrum DAO — brain health and neurodegeneration
- ValleyDAO — climate biotech and synthetic biology
- Curetopia — rare disease
- UltraRare Bio — rare disease
- Long COVID Labs — long COVID and post-viral illness
- DermaLabs — dermatology, funded by a consumer skincare line
- Quantum Biology DAO — quantum biology
- GenomesDAO — genomics and personal genomic-data sovereignty
- AxonDAO — user-owned health data, wearables, and compute
- Rejuve.AI — AI-driven longevity research on contributed health data
- PeptAI — peptide discovery via scientific AI agents
- Pump.science — tokenised longevity experiments (RIF, URO)
- VitaRNA — a single tokenised gene-therapy IP-NFT, governed as its own space under VitaDAO
Platforms, infrastructure & funders
- Molecule — the IP-NFT infrastructure most of the above run on
- Bio Protocol — the launchpad that curates, funds, and lists new bioDAOs
- DeSci Labs — research objects and verifiable publishing
- ResearchHub — open publishing and peer review paid in ResearchCoin
- Gitcoin DeSci Grants — quadratic-funding rounds for open science
- LabDAO — open lab-compute tooling (plex); wound down, its Snapshot space never used
Scale and trajectory
As of early 2026 roughly 50 active DeSci initiatives span funding DAOs, publishing platforms, healthcare data, and IP management — and the 2025 wave of U.S. federal research-funding cuts — a JAMA Internal Medicine study (Patel, Liu & Jena, JAMA Intern Med. 2026;186(1):126–128) tied NIH grant terminations to 383 disrupted clinical trials and more than 74,000 affected participants — has pushed the model from curiosity toward credible alternative infrastructure. The bottleneck has shifted from capital to deal flow: the established DAOs report more funds than fundable, well-structured proposals.
From grant round to launchpad, and past it
The directory splits cleanly in two, and the split is chronological. The first BioDAOs were built one at a time around a single disease area, each running its own raise and its own IP-NFT pipeline. What followed was a platform layer that industrialised the pattern: Bio Protocol curates new bioDAOs, funds them through token launches, and lists them alongside the incumbents. As of 21 August 2026 it described itself as “DeSci's new financial layer, engineered to commercialize the best science, faster”, and its own published timeline, headed “A history of accelerating science onchain”, marked the turn — aggregate BioDAO token market cap crossing $200M in November 2023, then the BIO Genesis raise of over $33 million in November 2024. Both the wording and the timeline have since been taken off bio.xyz, so they are cited here from the Internet Archive’s capture of that date, the most recent one it holds. The self-description itself survives in Bio’s documentation, which still opens “Bio is a new financial layer for funding and developing early-stage biotech”.
The consequence for anyone reading this directory as a map: a new BioDAO in 2026 is far more likely to arrive as a curated token launch on a launchpad than as an independently bootstrapped collective, and its treasury is more likely to be denominated in its own token than in stablecoins. That is a real change in the risk a research programme carries — funding tied to a token price is continuous when the market is up and absent when it is not, which is the trade the older grant-round model did not make.
Bio stopped calling itself a financial layer some time between 22 August and 11 September 2026, and the change is wider than a tagline. Read on 11 September 2026, the homepage is titled “Bio / Science for the Network Age” and opens “Bio is where capital, science and intelligence compound”; the word “bioDAO” does not appear on it at all, and the about page sets out “one protocol, many surfaces” across three stages. Explore is BIOS, an AI that “reads the literature, designs the binder, and builds it in the lab”, plus OpenLabs for early results. Fund is Buildspace for raise-readiness, then the Launchpad. Monetize is Biofy, “a direct, integrated channel where you can list the end product of your work”, with usage data and revenue routed back into research. The token launch that this section treated as the end of the chronology is now the middle of it.
Two checkable reasons to read those five surfaces as announced rather than shipped. The repositioning carries no post on Bio’s own blog, whose newest entry on 11 September 2026 is a 4 September software directory. And Bio’s reference documentation has not followed its marketing site: the complete page index at docs.bio.xyz/llms.txt lists BioDAOs, BioAgents, IP-Tokens and Bio Protocol V2, and names none of BIOS, OpenLabs, Buildspace or Biofy. The pattern Biofy generalises is already in the directory above: DermaLabs funds dermatology research out of a consumer skincare line rather than out of a treasury.
How much of the cohort is still voting
A directory maps organisations, not activity, and in DeSci the two have come apart. Twelve of the pages above cite a Snapshot space as the venue where their votes are cast. Queried keylessly against hub.snapshot.org/graphql on 27 August 2026, again on 3 September 2026 and again on 11 September 2026, every one of the twelve had no open proposal on all three dates, and the median space’s last closed vote dates to November 2025. Nothing in the table below moved across the three readings: no space opened a proposal, closed one, or changed its proposal count. Followership is as at the 11 September reading.
| Snapshot space | Followers | Proposals | Last vote closed |
|---|---|---|---|
qbio.eth — Quantum Biology DAO | 34 | 29 | 19 Aug 2026 — DP-33 |
vote.cryodao.eth — CryoDAO | 115 | 30 | 31 Jul 2026 — CRYO-26 |
psydao.eth — PsyDAO | 51 | 29 | 14 Jul 2026 — PDP-29 |
researchhub.eth — ResearchHub | 89 | 29 | 22 Jan 2026 — RIP-24 |
cerebrumdao.eth — Cerebrum DAO | 91 | 20 | 31 Dec 2025 — CDP-20 |
bioxyz.eth — Bio Protocol | 1,128 | 32 | 3 Nov 2025 — BIOPSY-31 |
longcovidlabs.eth — Long COVID Labs | 12 | 6 | 7 Oct 2025 — LCL DP-6 |
vote.vitadao.eth — VitaDAO | 1,553 | 129 | 16 Sep 2025 — VDP-163 |
athenadao.eth — AthenaBIO | 56 | 18 | 3 Sep 2025 — ADP-013 |
vitarna.eth — VitaRNA | 11 | 5 | 19 May 2025 — VRNAP-5 |
genomesdao.eth — GenomesDAO | 123 | 21 | 18 Feb 2025 — $GENOME staking APY |
labdao.eth — LabDAO | 20 | 0 | never |
Three spaces closed a vote in the summer of 2026 — Quantum Biology DAO on 19 August, CryoDAO on 31 July and PsyDAO on 14 July. Of the remaining nine, ResearchHub last closed one in January 2026 and seven did so in 2025 or earlier; LabDAO registered a space in December 2021 and never used it at all.
What the directory cannot show is the inversion at the top of it. The two largest spaces by followership are VitaDAO (1,553 followers, 129 proposals) and Bio Protocol (1,128 followers, 32 proposals), and both sit among the quietest, their last closed votes dating to September and November 2025. The three most recently active spaces have 34, 115 and 51 followers. Across this cohort, audience size and governance activity run in opposite directions — the same relationship voter apathy describes inside one DAO, reproduced across a sector.
Silence has several causes here and none of them is automatically dissolution. Long COVID Labs stopped voting because its last proposal authorised the treasury multisig to act “without requiring new governance proposals”, so its research programme runs on while the governance record stands still. AthenaDAO stopped because it restructured and renamed itself AthenaBIO in March 2026. LabDAO stopped because it wound down — without ever holding the dissolution vote that would have dated the ending. And ten of the twelve spaces measured at proposal throttles and governance rate limits restrict who may open a proposal at all, so an ordinary token holder in most of this cohort could not break the silence even if they wanted to. Reading a quiet space correctly means reading its case, which is why each row above links to one.
Funding models
DeSci DAOs mix several funding mechanisms: token-curated grants (the IP-NFT pipeline above), quadratic-funding rounds for smaller open-science work, retroactive rewards for demonstrated impact, and — the newest layer — token launches that fund a treasury continuously from an open market.
How Caper approaches this
Caper gives a lab or research community that last option natively: launch a caper and its treasury fills from a bonding-curve token sale, then the member community directs funds by on-chain vote — PAYOUT proposals pay for experiments and equipment, INVEST proposals let one research caper back another, and every member who has cast a ballot keeps a participation-weighted exit right the whole time. See DeSci on Radix for why the platform fits research assets.