---
title: "Quantum Biology DAO"
url: "https://caper.network/wiki/desci/ecosystem/quantum-biology-dao"
updated: 2026-09-02
license: CC-BY-4.0
license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Quantum Biology DAO

| Name | Quantum Biology DAO |
| --- | --- |
| Type | Decentralized-science (DeSci) BioDAO — foundational research + scientific instrumentation |
| Focus | Quantum biology: the physics of weak magnetic-field effects on living cells (oxidation, repair, division rates) |
| Token | $QBIO (governance & funding — no equity or revenue rights). [Ethereum ERC-20](https://etherscan.io/token/0x3E6A1b21bd267677Fa49BE6425aEbe2fc0f89bDE), supply 404,611,730 (read 27 August 2026); plus [vQBIO](https://etherscan.io/token/0x637b118738CCF4146e6679ff620FdDF30a6f0868) (vesting), supply 150,000,000 |
| Chain | Ethereum (governance). [Bridged to Solana](https://solscan.io/token/qbioCGDnUBGX5qcK1Fc4zg19GaQEPmxHFMPMZQm4LZ8) since March 2025 — 25.8M QBIO wrapped, no vote attached |
| Governance | [Snapshot `qbio.eth`](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth) — 29 proposals, 34 followers, quorum 13,500,000 QBIO |
| DAO co-founders | Clarice Aiello (CSO) & Geoff Anders (CEO) |
| Institute officers (2026) | Todd Thaxton (CEO), Alessandro Lodesani (COO), Clarice Aiello (Chair of the Board & President of the Scientific Advisory Board) |
| Launchpad | [BIO Protocol](https://app.bio.xyz/launchpad/Quantum%20Biology%20DAO) (bio.xyz) — Incubator Cohort 2 |
| Notable | Building a quantum microscope with the Quantum Biology Institute; TGE January 2025; [$1.2M grant to the Institute](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-institute-receives-1-2-million-grant-to-advance-research-in-quantum-biology) announced April 2026; core-contributor budget DP-33 voted down 19 August 2026 |
| Status | 🟢 Active |
| Website | [quantumbiology.xyz](https://www.quantumbiology.xyz/) · [blog](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog) · [Institute](https://www.quantumbiology.org/) · [Incubator](https://quantumbiology.inc/) |

## Overview

Quantum Biology DAO is a [BioDAO](/wiki/desci/desci-daos) funding a corner of science most drug-focused DeSci projects never touch: **quantum biology**, the study of how quantum-mechanical effects — coherence, entanglement, spin — shape processes inside living cells. Where [VitaDAO](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/vitadao) (longevity), [CryoDAO](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/cryodao) (biostasis), and [Curetopia](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/curetopia) (rare disease) each organise around a _therapeutic_ goal, Quantum Biology DAO organises around a _physical_ question and the instrument needed to answer it. It [launched publicly in October 2024](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-dao-launches) out of research originally based at UCLA, and is part of the [BIO Protocol](https://docs.bio.xyz/bio/introduction/concepts/biodaos) (bio.xyz) network of decentralized-science DAOs.

The DAO was [admitted to the BIO Incubator's second cohort](https://www.bio.xyz/blog-posts/bio-incubator-cohort-2-early-admissions-long-covid-labs-quantum-biology-dao-curetopia) on 17 October 2024, alongside [Long COVID Labs](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/long-covid-labs) and [Curetopia](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/curetopia) — the three early admissions that seeded Cohort 2.

The organisation is really **three bodies under one brand**, and keeping them apart is necessary to read anything about it accurately: the **DAO** (token, treasury, votes) at quantumbiology.xyz; the **Quantum Biology Institute**, a US non-profit that employs the scientists and runs the labs, at quantumbiology.org; and the **Quantum Biology Incubator**, a Delaware C-corporation [chartered to spin quantum-biology research into companies](https://www.bio.xyz/blog-posts/bio-incubator-cohort-2-early-admissions-long-covid-labs-quantum-biology-dao-curetopia), at quantumbiology.inc. The DAO does not do science. It votes on money that the Institute spends, and the split shows up in the record below: the two halves have kept very different rhythms.

## The science: weak magnetic fields and living cells

Quantum biology asks whether biological systems exploit quantum effects that survive the warm, wet, noisy interior of a cell — long assumed too chaotic to preserve quantum states. The DAO's stated aim is to [understand the physics behind weak magnetic-field effects](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-dao-launches) so that cellular processes can be deliberately influenced: the team names **oxidation rates, cellular repair, and cell-division rates** as targets. If weak, precisely-tuned magnetic fields can nudge these processes, the applications span health and longevity, biomanufacturing, and drug discovery.

This is deliberately upstream, high-risk basic science — the kind that struggles for grant funding precisely because it questions a settled assumption. That funding gap is exactly the [problem DeSci exists to attack](/wiki/desci/what-is-desci).

## The inaugural result, and what it actually claims

Most BioDAO pages in this directory describe a research programme. This one has a published dataset to point at, which makes it unusually easy to check. The Institute's first result is a preprint posted to bioRxiv on 13 October 2024 and revised on 16 October: [_Weak magnetic field effects in biology are measurable — accelerated Xenopus embryogenesis in the absence of the geomagnetic field_](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.10.617626v2) (doi 10.1101/2024.10.10.617626), by A. Lodesani, G. Anders, L. Bougas, T. Lins, D. Budker, P. Fierlinger and C. D. Aiello, with Aiello corresponding for the Quantum Biology Institute. Two of the authors are the DAO's own principals: Anders is its CEO, Lodesani is now the Institute's COO.

The claim is narrower than the headline. The authors report that _Xenopus laevis_ embryos develop measurably faster inside an engineered hypomagnetic enclosure of **less than 1 nT** than in Earth's ambient field of roughly **50 µT**, with effects visible from one day post-fertilization, and they explicitly note that **no definitive biophysical mechanism** accounts for it — the quantum explanation is the one they favour, not the one they demonstrate. The stated purpose of the experiment is to settle the _reality_ of the effect, not its cause.

The open-science claim holds up on inspection. All data and analysis code sit in a public MIT-licensed repository, [Quantum-Biology-Institute/Weak-magnetic-field-effects-in-biology-are-measurable](https://github.com/Quantum-Biology-Institute/Weak-magnetic-field-effects-in-biology-are-measurable), created 18 September 2024 and last pushed 11 October 2024, and the preprint is CC-BY. What has _not_ happened is peer review: bioRxiv's own record still lists no journal publication for the preprint, roughly twenty-two months after v2. For a DAO whose pitch is that community capital can fund science conventional funders skip, the gap between a released dataset and a reviewed paper is the part of the thesis still outstanding — a general point taken up in [DeSci funding](/wiki/desci/desci-funding).

## The quantum microscope and the Institute's lab work

The DAO's flagship project is a **quantum microscope** — an instrument built [to observe quantum phenomena happening in real time](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-dao-launches) inside living cells, developed in partnership with the [Quantum Biology Institute](https://www.quantumbiology.org/), a US non-profit. Building the tool is the point: much of quantum biology has been stuck on the lack of instruments that can measure quantum states in a biological sample without destroying them. Funding an instrument rather than a molecule makes Quantum Biology DAO structurally distinct from every IP-NFT-based BioDAO in this directory, which fund a [research asset](/wiki/desci/ip-nfts) that resolves to intellectual property.

The underlying research raised roughly [$3M in its first three years](https://www.bio.xyz/blog-posts/bio-incubator-cohort-2-early-admissions-long-covid-labs-quantum-biology-dao-curetopia) from government and private sources at UCLA before moving into the DAO structure. The Institute now runs its own labs from a Los Angeles headquarters, and in April 2025 announced a research partnership with the [J. Craig Venter Institute](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/j-craig-venter-institute-x-quantum-biology-institute-collaboration) to study how microbial model organisms respond to weak magnetic fields, using JCVI's genomics and multiomics capability. Its funding case is that the shielded enclosures and spectroscopic tools it is building will be [shared experimental infrastructure available to researchers across institutions](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-institute-receives-1-2-million-grant-to-advance-research-in-quantum-biology) rather than a private asset — which is the specific reason a non-profit, not the Incubator, receives the DAO's grant money.

## People

Quantum Biology DAO is co-founded by [Clarice Aiello (Chief Scientific Officer) and Geoff Anders (Chief Executive Officer)](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-dao-launches). Aiello is a physicist who led the quantum-biology research group at UCLA; Anders founded the research organisation Leverage. Naming a credentialed principal investigator, rather than pseudonymous stewards, is characteristic of the [bio.xyz BioDAO model](https://docs.bio.xyz/bio/introduction/concepts/biodaos), where a real lab sits behind the token.

The Institute has since built out a separate officer team, and the two sets of titles are easy to conflate. As of the April 2026 grant announcement, the [Institute's CEO is Todd Thaxton and its COO is Alessandro Lodesani](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-institute-receives-1-2-million-grant-to-advance-research-in-quantum-biology), with **Aiello as Chair of the Board and President of the Scientific Advisory Board** rather than in an executive role; Brian Ross is named as a research scientist working in the Institute's molecular biology lab. Aiello remains the public face of the science — she is scheduled to speak on the evidence-based longevity panel at [SynBioBeta 2026 in San Jose](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/clarice-aiello-to-speak-at-synbiobeta-2026) on 7 May 2026.

## The $QBIO token

Quantum Biology DAO held its token generation event in [January 2025 on the BIO Protocol launchpad](https://app.bio.xyz/launchpad/Quantum%20Biology%20DAO) — the [QBIO/WETH auction (#560)](https://auctions.bio.xyz/auction/560). $QBIO is a **governance and funding token, not equity**: like other bio.xyz BioDAOs it carries the right to vote on research direction and grant allocation, curated by [$BIO holders](https://docs.bio.xyz/bio/introduction/concepts/biodaos) who stake into and co-own the BioDAO through the launchpad.

Read on-chain, the token is two contracts rather than one. [QBIO](https://etherscan.io/token/0x3E6A1b21bd267677Fa49BE6425aEbe2fc0f89bDE) (`0x3E6A…9bDE`, 18 decimals) reports a total supply of **404,611,730**, read at Ethereum block 25,844,510 on 27 August 2026 — the figure is not fixed, and stood at 404,185,232 when this page last read it. Alongside it sits [vQBIO, the “QBIO Vesting Token”](https://etherscan.io/token/0x637b118738CCF4146e6679ff620FdDF30a6f0868) (`0x637b…0868`), supply **150,000,000** — a separate, non-tradable claim representing locked allocations. Both are counted for governance, which matters enormously and is taken up in the next section.

**The Solana leg does not vote.** Following an on-chain vote in January 2025, QBIO was [bridged to Solana in March 2025](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/qbio-is-live-on-solana) via Portal Bridge, tradable on Raydium, with the DAO citing access and liquidity. The wrapped mint `qbioCGDn…m4LZ8` [currently holds 25,795,697 QBIO](https://solscan.io/token/qbioCGDnUBGX5qcK1Fc4zg19GaQEPmxHFMPMZQm4LZ8), about 6.4% of the Ethereum supply. But both of the DAO's Snapshot voting strategies are `erc20-balance-of` calls against **Ethereum** contracts, so a holder who bridges to Solana keeps the asset and silently loses the franchise. Nothing announces this at the bridge. It is a clean, checkable instance of a general problem catalogued under [DAO metrics and analytics](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/dao-metrics-and-analytics): a token's circulating supply and its _votable_ supply are not the same number, and multi-chain expansion widens the gap.

## The governance record

Quantum Biology DAO votes on [Snapshot, in the `qbio.eth` space](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth): 29 proposals, 34 followers, quorum 13,500,000 QBIO. The whole record is public, and read end to end it is one of the more legible small-DAO case studies available — a complete arc from launch enthusiasm to a working oligarchy, in twenty months.

**Turnout collapsed while voting power rose.** The first three proposals, in January 2025, drew **46, 44 and 37 voters** and decided 23.1, 25.7 and 16.6 million QBIO of voting power. Across the eleven proposals held in 2026, the median turnout is **11 voters** and the low is 6 — against 34 space followers — while voting power per proposal has typically run 50 to 210 million. Both movements have the same cause: the retail cohort stopped showing up, and the large holders did not. This is the standard shape described in [voter apathy](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/analysis/voter-apathy), visible here at a scale small enough to count wallet by wallet.

**Three wallets hold every vesting token, and all three run the space.** Reading `balanceOf` on the vQBIO contract: the entire 150,000,000 vQBIO supply sits in exactly three addresses at **50,000,000 each** — `0x47ed3d53…`, `0x25e34eff…` and `0x9f1d91ed…` — and all three appear in the [space's list of four administrators](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth). Their _liquid_ QBIO holdings are 200,001, 63,949 and 0 tokens respectively. Because Snapshot counts vQBIO at parity with QBIO, those three wallets carry **27.1%** of the 554,611,731-token voting base on the strength of tokens they cannot sell. That is the inverse of what a vesting schedule is normally sold as doing: rather than deferring influence until a lock-up proves commitment, it grants full influence immediately and defers only the ability to exit. The general mechanism is covered in [token unlocks and vesting schedules](/wiki/economics/token-unlocks-and-vesting).

**Both defeats have been budget votes, and the first budget passed anyway.** Of 29 proposals, two have failed to carry. The first: [DP-23, the Annual 2026 Budget](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x10d996fc8428d52a0419856d119909077795a660da860f48238acfb846ec4ead), on 20 February 2026, rejected 152,776,435 against to 56,771,107 for. It also drew the highest turnout since launch week — 17 voters — and split the administrators: `0x47ed3d53…` voted for, `0x25e34eff…` against. Every one of the ten smallest voters backed it, contributing 348,896 votes between them, or 0.17% of everything cast. Over the four months that followed, the DAO passed the same budget in pieces: a Media Director in April, an [Operations Budget in May](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth), a [Communications Budget in May](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x9f5d41129649b1c3b452919354a5774cf6601f685c3787f652d5d9d40d35f344), and a Comms/Events/Other Budget on 30 June — each unanimous, each on 6 to 11 voters. An omnibus that lost a contested vote became four line items that won uncontested ones.

**The second defeat came on 19 August 2026, and it is the sharper one.** [DP-33, “Core Contributors August 2026”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x881ad66d38bf128b3c30372479347b5807fa42f4e141559894d00c6b4322da3d) ran 16–19 August 2026 and was rejected 106,680,657 against to 641,985 for, with 50,289,061 abstaining, on 11 voters. Read wallet by wallet it is not a retail revolt. The largest ballot cast was **53,509,960 QBIO** from `0xd9c6ee15…` — a purely liquid holder, 13.2% of QBIO supply, no vQBIO, and _not_ one of the space's four administrators — voting against. The second largest was 50,063,949 from the administrator `0x25e34eff…`, also against. The proposal's own author, the administrator `0x47ed3d53…`, abstained with 50,200,001, and the third vesting wallet did not vote at all. A core-contributor budget was therefore defeated by one outside whale and one of the three insiders, with the insider who wrote it declining to back it. Quorum was never in question — 157,611,702 votes against a 13,500,000 floor — which makes the same point as the paragraph below from the other side: the threshold gates nothing, and the outcome turned entirely on which two large wallets showed up.

**Quorum is arithmetic, not a guarantee.** Proposals before late May 2025 carry a quorum of 1 (the first, 0); the 13,500,000 threshold appears from DP-19 onward. That threshold is 2.4% of the combined QBIO + vQBIO voting base — and it is not what actually gates outcomes, because any single one of the three vesting wallets clears it more than three times over on its own. When they sit out, the arithmetic is stark: [DP-29, the 2026 Communications Budget](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x9f5d41129649b1c3b452919354a5774cf6601f685c3787f652d5d9d40d35f344), closed on 6 voters and **404,104** votes, or **3.0% of the stated quorum** and 0.07% of the voting base, with a single wallet supplying 68.6% of it. A fixed-constant quorum set against a supply the constant does not track is a recurring design fault, not a local one.

**The DAO has started formalising the concentration.** On 11 June 2026 it passed [DP-30, “Establish Large Token Holder Council”](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x34f5c9932ee2140e9ee4a1f2e84b18a36d9761731a975127678071ca5856dc4b) — 8 voters, 100,629,242 for, 50,214 against — and, on the same day with the same 8 voters, a Transparency and Reporting Measures proposal. Read together, the two are an honest read of the situation by the people in it: with turnout in single digits and three admin wallets holding a quarter of the votable supply, the DAO chose to name its large-holder body rather than pretend the general vote was deciding things.

**Both halves paused, and both restarted.** No proposal was posted between 5 August 2025 and 20 February 2026, a gap of six and a half months, and the ecosystem newsroom ran silent over almost exactly the same window (23 June 2025 to 21 April 2026). Governance then resumed at a steady clip — ten proposals between February and June 2026 — and the funded science continued regardless: the vote on [DP-25, a six-month grant to the Institute](https://snapshot.box/#/s:qbio.eth/proposal/0x527d2b23b50c6fbdc0259e43b0e7b6eacbc1c686c4e38644df1f14bb0eb28fc4) carried on 16 April 2026 with 14 voters, and five days later the newsroom announced the [$1.2 million grant](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/quantum-biology-institute-receives-1-2-million-grant-to-advance-research-in-quantum-biology). On that vote, four wallets — the three vesting holders plus one 26.3-million-token address — supplied **99.8%** of the voting power; the other ten voters supplied 0.2%. Two numbers in the proposal sequence, DP-18 and DP-22, have no Snapshot proposal at all, and the [technical roadmap](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/roadmap) still reads “Version 1.0 | Latest update: 13 October 2024”.

## Working groups

Off-chain, the DAO organises through [three working groups](https://www.quantumbiology.eco/blog/meet-the-working-groups-of-the-quantum-biology-dao) announced in May 2025: **Science** (reading and interpreting quantum-biology research for the community), **Communications** (outreach and education), and **Operations** (tracking contributor involvement and coordinating projects), each led by a designated contributor. The structure has been amended by vote more than once — a Working Groups proposal in January 2025, an update in May 2025, and a Science Working Group restructure carried on 17 May 2026 with 12 voters. Working groups are the standard answer to the coordination problem described in [SubDAOs and working groups](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/subdaos-and-working-groups); here they carry more weight than usual, because they are where the contributors who cannot outvote the vesting holders actually do the work.

## Place in the DeSci landscape

Within the [Molecule / bio.xyz](/wiki/desci/ecosystem/molecule) lineage, Quantum Biology DAO occupies a rare niche. Most BioDAOs are _therapeutic-area_ DAOs that fund a pipeline toward a drug or intervention. Quantum Biology DAO is a _foundational-science-and-tooling_ DAO: its deliverable is knowledge and an instrument, and its bet is that discovery upstream of any single disease unlocks many downstream applications. That places it closer in spirit to a research-infrastructure play than to a [single-asset IP-NFT](/wiki/desci/ip-nfts) bet — a useful data point for anyone mapping how far the [DeSci funding model](/wiki/desci/desci-funding) can stretch beyond the drug-development template it was first built for.

It is also, on the evidence above, a useful data point about the _governance_ half of DeSci. The science kept moving: a public dataset, a JCVI partnership, a funded lab in Los Angeles, a grant approved on schedule. The decentralization did not. Whether that matters depends on what the token was sold as — a claim on a research agenda, or a ticket to decide it.

## How Caper approaches this

Quantum Biology DAO is a science-funding organisation, not a governance protocol, so [Caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) is not a competing tool. But its record is a clean illustration of two things Caper's design takes a different position on.

The first is what a token is worth in a vote. Caper computes a member's vote weight as `(held × votes) / (supply × circulation)` — holdings multiplied by the vote tokens actually earned. Because the two are multiplied, a holding that has earned no record contributes nothing at all — and the record is earned on either surface, 1 per ballot cast and 0.01 per XRD of gross trade value, so a first ballot from someone who has already bought is not a zero. What carries no weight is a position that arrived without either: a transfer in from another account. A block of tokens cannot, on its own, carry a decision. That is a deliberately different answer to the situation above, where a locked allocation counts at full strength from day one.

The second is what a disengaged holder can do instead of abstaining. In Caper the same weight that governs a vote also sets a member's share on [exit](/blog/the-exit-right), so leaving is a computed right rather than a sale into whatever liquidity exists. A holder who no longer agrees with the direction is not left choosing between a vote that cannot move the outcome and a market that may not be there. See [how Caper proposals work](/wiki/governance/proposals) and [how a caper raises funds](/wiki/markets/raising-funds).