Overview

UltraRare Bio is a decentralized-science media and research team that produced two of the field's foundational reference works: the DeSci Wiki – a directory of DeSci projects, DAOs and communities – and the UltraRare Podcast covering developments across the ecosystem.

The DeSci Wiki is curated by Jocelynn Pearl, Ph.D., with the Decentralized Science Landscape figure created by the UltraRare Bio team including Dani Bergey and Katie Koczera. For the movement's first years it was the map everyone used, and it is still the best single record of what DeSci looked like before the 2024 BioDAO wave. It is no longer current, and the section below sets out exactly where it stops.

The DeSci Wiki

The document catalogs the ecosystem across roughly fifteen categories: DeSci DAOs, decentralized science ecosystems, scientific publishing, IP-NFTs and IP tokens, decentralized biotech and biopharma, focused research organizations, science NFTs, decentralized financing of science, data storage and blockchain protocols, social communities, and a reading list. Entries carry links, core-team names, and in many cases a curator's note on what the project actually is.

The most useful part is the one most directories omit. An Archived Projects section holds fourteen wound-down efforts – OpenAccessDAO, Agora Labs, Framework Bio, Impact Finance, BioDAO, CRISPR DAO, DeSci Nerdery, DeBio Network, DeNature DAO, NeuraDAO, LYNX, Planck, OpenNMN and Moon Rabbit – each kept in place with a dated note explaining the call: "server now dead", "Twitter and Discord has been inactive for >1year", "Group has disassembled and is no longer active (contacted Sam Nehme who was a founder)". Deliberately preserving the dead alongside the living is what made the document a record of the ecosystem's evolution rather than a snapshot of its winners.

Where the record stops

The document's own Updates and General Info block states the intent to integrate missing projects "~once per week". The last update it logs is 19 January 2024, and the contents bear that out. All 46 social links in it point at twitter.com; not one points at x.com. The dated articles it collects cluster on 2022. And it contains no entry at all for the wave of BioDAOs that has defined the field since: CryoDAO, whose first proposal opened seven weeks before that last update, is absent, as are AxonDAO, Quantum Biology DAO, DermaLabs, Long COVID Labs and Pump.science. Bio Protocol appears only under its pre-rebrand name, Bio.xyz, as one ecosystem entry among ten.

Two entries show the freeze from the inside. GenomicDAO and Jocelyn DAO both carry unresolved reader comments in the margin – "has been sunset", "I believe also sunset" – and both still sit in the live directory rather than in the Archive section built for exactly that. Somebody did the work of flagging them; nobody was left to move them.

None of this makes the document worthless, and the wiki links it for what it is: an unusually careful primary record of DeSci from roughly 2021 to the end of 2023, including a curated account of which early projects died and why. It is not a current directory, and readers who treat it as one will conclude the field stopped growing in January 2024.

Place in the ecosystem

UltraRare Bio is not itself a DAO – it was the movement's discovery layer. A field of hundreds of small, fast-moving DAOs is only navigable if someone keeps a neutral, current map of who exists and who has shut down, and that map is what routed new funders, scientists and contributors to the right project. It complemented the funding-and-tokenization stack (Bio Protocol, Molecule): curation media answered "what is out there," while the launchpad and IP-NFT layers answered "how do you fund and own it."

Its stall leaves that job open, and the gap is not cosmetic. Deciding whether a DeSci project is still alive is genuinely hard work – it means checking domains, forums, vote records and social accounts one at a time, and being willing to write down that something has died. The DeSci Wiki's archive shows what that costs and what it is worth. This wiki's own DeSci DAO coverage tries to carry the same discipline forward, and the same maintenance burden is why so few directories survive their founders' attention.

External Links

• DeSci Wiki – full project directory – live, but last updated 19 January 2024
• UltraRare Bio on X (the former ultrarare.bio site is offline)