Overview
PsyDAO is a decentralized collective advancing psychedelic science through community-funded research and open intellectual property. It promotes progress via distributed coordination, crowdfunding, and collective ownership of IP so psychedelic medicine and knowledge stay accessible rather than enclosed. It sits within the broader DeSci movement as one of the field's culture-and-science hybrids.
Governance uses an Ostrom-inspired dual-token system: $PSYC holders steer research direction while $PSY functions as the wider ecosystem and membership token. The $PSY sale raised roughly $2 million for psychedelic science.
Research & grants
PsyDAO has awarded six grants totalling about $280k across science, technology, and culture — spanning next-gen empathogen (MDMA-prodrug) optimization, endogenous-DMT research commons, a psychedelics-and-longevity comparison study, dissociative-drug development, a multi-agent AI research-discovery system, and token-incentivized open-science tooling. Alongside the larger grants it runs an Alchemist micro-grant track offering awards up to ~$2k to researchers, artists, and community builders.
Grant direction and treasury allocation are decided on-chain by token holders, and funded work is released toward an open-IP commons rather than locked behind patents.
How Caper approaches this
PsyDAO's core loop — raise a community treasury, then let members vote grants out of it toward open science — is the exact shape a caper runs natively. On Caper, the raise happens on a bonding curve into the caper's own treasury, each grant is a governance-approved PAYOUT proposal that moves a chosen amount to the grantee, and voting weight is stake weighted by participation rather than split across two token classes. Members also keep a pro-rata exit claim on the undeployed treasury — a built-in accountability lever a dual-token grants DAO usually has to design separately.