Overview

CryoDAO is a decentralized science (DeSci) organization that funds research in cryopreservation, biostasis, and cryobiology – the science of preserving cells, tissues, organs, and whole organisms at very low temperatures so they can be revived, or restored, once the medicine to treat them exists. It operates as a BioDAO within the Bio Protocol ecosystem, and states its objective plainly: to contribute to cryopreservation research projects that have a high potential to increase the quality and capabilities of cryopreservation.

Cryopreservation is chronically under-funded – the field sits between clinical medicine, longevity, and cryonics, and rarely fits a conventional grant or venture mandate. CryoDAO pools community capital to back the high-risk, high-upside experiments that de-risk the underlying technology, a bet organised through a founding cohort that includes Kai Micah Mills, a Thiel Fellow who also founded Cryopets and the American Biostasis Foundation. Its first governance proposal opened on 27 November 2023.

Governance and the CRYO token

CryoDAO follows the VitaDAO model: the community votes on which research proposals to fund using the CRYO token, and intellectual property emerging from the work it backs is funded, governed, and developed through Molecule's IP-NFT framework rather than assigned to a single lab or company.

Those votes run in CryoDAO's own Snapshot space, vote.cryodao.eth, which has carried 30 proposals numbered CRYO-1 through CRYO-26 and has 115 followers. This is a distinct body from Bio Protocol's bioxyz.eth space, which decides BIO's own treasury and ecosystem questions under a BIOPSY prefix and has never carried a CryoDAO funding vote. Weight is a plain token balance: four erc20-balance-of strategies summing CRYO across three contract addresses plus vCRYO, with no delegation strategy, so influence cannot be lent to an active voter by a passive holder.

The space sets no quorum, no voting period, no delay and no default voting type, leaving each of those to the individual proposal – and every one of the 30 proposals has been posted with a quorum of zero. There is therefore no participation floor a funding decision has to clear, which matters because participation has collapsed.

CRYO trades as a listed token on Ethereum; as with any freely-traded governance token, its market price moves independently of the DAO's on-chain treasury, which the project reports at roughly $5M+. This is the same token-versus-treasury tension that runs through DAO tokenomics generally – the traded price of a governance chip and the value of the work it funds are two different things.

Turnout, and what a zero quorum means in practice

The full vote record is public, and read end to end it describes a DAO that deliberates less each year:

The high-water mark was the CryoDAO Liquidity and Treasury Proposal of 15 January 2024, which drew 79 voters. Nothing since has come close. Two of the three proposals put to the DAO in 2026 passed on a single voter: CRYO-24, which funded the rescue of NASA's Rodent Research-20 samples after the experiment was defunded, closed on 5 January 2026 with one ballot carrying 447 CRYO; and CRYO-25, the CryoPig study – a €50,000 grant for multi-organ cryopreservation with HIFU rewarming in a pig model, led by Diego Monzón Díaz MD at Hospital Gregorio Marañón with Prof. Ramon Risco of the University of Seville – closed on 20 February 2026 with one ballot carrying 256,608 CRYO. Both ran three-day voting windows. Both passed unanimously, because there was nobody to disagree.

The most recent vote is the healthiest of the three. CRYO-26, open 28 to 31 July 2026, elected Dr Emil Kendziorra – CEO and co-founder of Tomorrow Bio – as a Research Steward to supply scientific review capacity for the proposal pipeline, and drew 7 voters casting 275,737 CRYO For, none Against and none abstaining. The proposal was submitted by CryoCore, the DAO's core team, which also authored the two single-voter proposals before it.

That is the honest reading of this governance model: proposals are written by a core team and ratified by a handful of large holders, with no quorum that could stop a proposal nobody turns up for. It is the voter apathy pattern in an unusually pure form – not a contested vote with low turnout, but an uncontested one, which is a weaker check than the mechanism looks like on paper. The science being funded is real and the reviewers being appointed are credible; what the ballot is doing is recording a decision, not testing it.

Funded research

CryoDAO's funded portfolio spans the concrete engineering problems that stand between today's cryobiology and reversible whole-organ or whole-organism preservation. Representative projects, each traceable to the proposal that authorised it:

• CryoPig – multi-organ cryopreservation with HIFU rewarming (CRYO-25, February 2026) – cooling and then reviving organs in a pig model using high-intensity focused ultrasound to rewarm tissue evenly and avoid the cracking and ice damage that fast rewarming causes.
• CRYORAT (CRYO-21 and CRYO-21.1, November 2024; CRYO-23, April 2025) – high sub-zero preservation and revival of a small mammal, a milestone experiment toward reversible whole-body biostasis.
• Cryoprotective Agent (CPA) Repository (CRYO-19, August 2024; expanded under CRYO-19.1, April 2025) – an open reference of cryoprotectants for researchers and medicinal chemists, aimed at developing new agents that reduce the toxicity current protocols impose.
• American Biostasis Foundation (STASIS) (CRYO-22, May 2025) – a purpose-built long-term cryopreservation facility and research lab.
• Saving NASA's Space Mice (CRYO-24, January 2026) – preserving the samples from NASA's Rodent Research-20 ISS experiment, which studied spaceflight's effect on ovarian function and bone loss, after budget cuts ended the programme.
• Gaia Life (CRYO-20, August 2024) and the DAO's Molecule Catalyst and Fast Grants Fellowship funding routes (CRYO-16 and CRYO-14, June 2024).

Each is chosen and paid out by member vote, and the results – protocols, data, and reference material like the CPA repository – are pushed toward an open commons rather than enclosed behind a single owner.

How Caper approaches this

CryoDAO's loop – raise a community treasury, then let token holders vote research grants out of it – is the shape a caper runs natively. On Caper the raise happens on a bonding curve into the caper's own treasury, so contributed capital accrues to the treasury itself rather than to a free-floating token whose price detaches from the work – the exact token-versus-value gap a grants DAO usually has to manage by hand. Each grant is then a governance-approved PAYOUT proposal that moves a chosen currency and amount from the treasury to a lab once members vote it through.

The turnout problem above is the one Caper's weighting is aimed at. Voting weight is stake weighted by earned participation – the canonical (t·v)/(V·T), where held tokens are one multiplicative factor alongside a non-transferable record of how you have voted – so a member who keeps showing up carries more of the decision than a comparable balance that does not, and a balance that has never voted carries none of it. That does not manufacture turnout, and nothing in a protocol can. What it changes is who a thin vote belongs to: the weight sits with the members who have been participating rather than with whoever happens to hold the most tokens on the day.

Members also keep a participation-weighted exit claim on the undeployed treasury, computed from that same weight – a built-in accountability lever for capital funding long-horizon, high-uncertainty science, and the recourse a holder has when a decision goes through on one ballot. Caper does not supply the cryobiology itself, which is the hard domain-specific part; what it supplies is the treasury, spending, and exit rails a research DAO would otherwise assemble from scratch.

External links

• CryoDAO – official website
• CryoDAO on Snapshot (vote.cryodao.eth) – the full CRYO-1 to CRYO-26 vote record
• CryoDAO – funded projects
• Cryopreservation and the Future of Life – Bio Protocol on CryoDAO
• CryoDAO newsletter