A barrier to scientific progress in academia is having to seek funding through centralized grant agencies. Furthermore, there is a large gap of time between when data is collected and when it is disseminated to the public. This bottleneck is caused by centralized scientific publications. I am creating a dApp that would be a space for academic scientists to propose individual experiments (ie an ethereum wallet) in a searchable environment that then investors can seek topics of interest to donate funds.
In short, each experiment would be an ethereum wallet with a smart contract containing the experimental details (ie personnel, cost breakdown, plans for data dissemination). Once the ‘goal’ of the ethereum wallet is met, the scientist converts this into USD (or whatever) and conducts the experiment. Then, this lab group, as bound by the smart contract, loads the results of the study back into the wallet that funded the study, thus disseminating the data to all those involved in the transaction. I am using truffle + ganache to develop this application, however I am a postdoc researcher at hopkins with limited coding experience.
Funding from this community would go towards hiring developers trained in decentralized app development to help deploy the DeFund app. I look forward to feedback!
-Matt