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.
Governance & 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. Funding decisions run on-chain through Bio Protocol's shared BIO governance on Snapshot, so treasury allocation is a matter of member votes, not a closed committee.
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.
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 include:
- Multi-organ cryopreservation with HIFU rewarming — 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 — high sub-zero preservation and revival of a small mammal, a milestone experiment toward reversible whole-body biostasis.
- Cryoprotective Agent (CPA) Repository — 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) — a purpose-built long-term cryopreservation facility and research lab.
- Space-mouse embryo cryopreservation and a neuroscience of learning and memory study paired with a survey of doctors on biostasis.
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, and 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.
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. 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.