Grant Application - Crowd Funded Cures

[DaoDeCyrus]

Radicle Grant Application WIP - Crowd Funded Cures

Radicle Grant Application

• Project Name: Crowd Funded Cures - Radicle Drips Integration

• Team Name: Crowd Funded Cures

• Payment Address: 0x1Ab75FEA1f27A6dfAfF81b0371AB6d57E112906B

• Level: -Seed

Overview

Crowdfunding medical prizes to prove off-patent therapies work, so we can have affordable medicine for everybody

Crowd Funded Cures is a DeSci project that intends to launch an Impact DAO / Medical Prize platform validating the safety and efficacy of unmonopolisable therapies that are unprofitable under the traditional patent system because they are non-rivalrous and non-excludable public goods (e.g. optimising treatment protocols for repurposed generic drugs, plant medicines, psychedelics, nutraceuticals, and lifestyle interventions). Prospective funders purchase IP-NFTs in order to generate clinical trial data, and in the event of a successful treatment protocol, the IP-NFT owners are issued with a Hypercert / Impact Certificate entitling them to receive retroactive funding via a crowdfunded Medical Prize fund, which serves as an Advance Market Commitment for successful clinical trial data.

• An indication of how your project relates to / integrates into Radicle.

The protocol implements an impact splitter which streams outcome payments from specific medical prize pools to IP-NFT owners in real-time proportional to outcome payments assigned by an independent evaluator.

• An indication of why your team is interested in creating this project.

Savva has been working full time on this project to implement the ideas in his 2014 thesis since 2020. Cyrus is one of the leading blockchain architects in the ReFi space and joined the project in mid-2022. By creating an impact market / medical prize fund we can create a scalable business model for open source medicine by capturing future cost savings (e.g. repurposing ketamine to treat depression at $2 a dose would reduce reliance on patented esketamine at $850 a dose which may be less effective and create billions in cost savings) and incentivising prospective investors to maximise impact points per amount invested. This prize fund protocol for splitting and streaming outcome payments to investors that fund validated impact, can be used to automatically determine the market price and maximise impact / public goods capable of being measured. Finding a means to measure and assign value to impact is one of the leading problems in the ReFi / impact market space and this mechanism will help solve it.

Team

Team members

Founder & CEO, Savva Kerdemelidis, savva@crowdfundedcures.org, https://www.linkedin.com/in/savvak/

System Architect, Cyrus of Eden

Legal Structure

• Medical Prize Charitable Trust, a registered NZ charity (Charity No. CC49977), having its registered address at 7 Cockle Lane, Waimari Beach, Christchurch 8083, New Zealand.

Team’s experience

Cyrus of Eden has led 0–1 efforts at pre-seed to Series A startups over the last 10 years using his talents in systems design & software engineering. When he jumped into Web3 in September of 2021, he co-architected the V1 of Syndicate.io’s Clubs (https://syndicate.io), whose architecture went on to become Syndicate’s Modular Standard. In the Web3 Impact Ecosystem, Cyrus of Eden has been a core contributor at Spirals, where he invented and developed the first prototype for green liquid staking, which wraps tokens like ETH or USDC and commits the staking yield to regenerative impact. He’s also building Omniprotocol to unlock permissionless EVM bridging for the long tail of ERC20 and ERC721 assets.

Savva Kerdemelidis is a Commercial/IP Consultant Legal Counsel and a NZ and Australian Patent and Trade Mark Attorney with 20+ years experience advising in relation to IP, commercial law and crypto. He conducted his LLM thesis on alternatives to the patent system for developing medicines. He is the author of the idea for a flexible “de-risking” medical prize / retroactive impact funding funding mechanism that streams outcome payments for successful clinical trials of open source therapies (e.g. developing new treatment protocols for diseases involving off-patent drugs, supplements or diets)

Team Code Repos

• GitHub - edendao/love-cures for a Proof of Concept Streaming Prize Fund Protocol integrating Radicle V1 and mocking Hypercerts

Team Code Profiles

• https://github.com/DaoDeCyrus, latest work at The Eden Dao · GitHub

Project Description

Crowd Funded Cures is implementing a pilot of our retroactive impact funding mechanism for Longevity Prize with partners VitaDAO, Molecule.to, Foresight Institute, Methuselah Foundation, among others.

We would like to invite Radicle Drips to become an integral part of our streaming outcome payments system.

Deliverables

At the end of the day, the deliverable is a decentralized web application that helps the Longevity Prize Committee to evaluate and reward impact using ERC20 streams.

User Stories:

1. As a Researcher, I can register a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — NFTDriver)

2. As a Researcher I can update my treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — NFTDriver)

3. As the Evaluation Committee I can create an evaluation of a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — setSplits)

4. As the Evaluation Committee I can update an evaluation of a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — setSplits)

5. As a Researcher I can claim my streamed funds (integrated with Radicle Drips — squeezeDrips)

Our proof of concept protocol used a home-grown version of Hypercerts (as it has not currently reached V1) and integrated with Radicle Drips V1 for streams of DAI.

The deliverable for this grant is a Minimum Viable Product consisting of a protocol and a decentralized web application for the Longevity Prize to evaluate and reward impact that uses Radicle Drips V2 as its underlying streaming rails.

• Total Estimated Duration: 16 weeks starting January 1st

• Full-time equivalent (FTE): 60

• Total Costs: $49,250

Milestones

| # | FTE | Grant | Milestone |

| - | — | ----- | --------- |

| 1 | 7 | 5000 | Project Setup |

| 2 | 28 | 22250 | Registering & updating treatment protocols |

| 3 | 17 | 14750 | Creating & updating evaluations |

| 4 | 8 | 7250 | Researchers claiming funds |

Wireframe Sketch Miro | Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration

Milestone 1: Frontend, Protocol, & Graph Repos

0. Project Setup

Installing & configuring libraries, error handling, logging.

Milestone 2: dApp can be used for registering, viewing, and updating treatment protocols.

1. As a Researcher, I can register a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — NFTDriver)

2. As a Researcher I can update my treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — NFTDriver)

Subroutine:

1. Determine Treatment Protocol metadata format

2. Develop UX / Scaffold UI

3. List

4. Create

5. View

6. Edit

7. Develop protocol using NFTDriver

8. Develop indexer

9. Integrate protocol w/ UI

10. Design & develop polished UI

Milestone 3: dApp can be used for viewing, creating, and updating evaluations.

3. As the Evaluation Committee I can create an evaluation of a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — setSplits)

4. As the Evaluation Committee I can update an evaluation of a treatment protocol (integrated with Radicle Drips — setSplits)

Subroutine:

1. Determine Evaluation metadata format

2. Develop UX / Scaffold UI

3. List

4. Create

5. View

6. Edit

7. Develop protocol using setSplits

8. Develop indexer

9. Integrate protocol w/ UI

10. Design & develop polished UI

Milestone 4: Researchers can claim funds in-app.

5. As a Researcher I can claim my streamed funds (integrated with Radicle Drips — squeezeDrips)

Subroutine:

1. Frontend with claimable ERC20 token list from Drips
2. Claiming & success modal
3. Design & develop polished UI

Future Plans

CFC works with impact funds to help them allocate their money using a streaming pay-for-success prize fund model.

As Molecule.to develops and launches V1 of their IP NFT smart contracts we will integrate our Retroactive Medical Prize Fund system into their IP-NFT framework.

We plan on iterating on the Longevity Prize Fund MVP for future collaborations with impact funds. We’re currently in discussions to establish a Prize Fund for Depression with Challenge Works, with prize criteria design starting in 2023.

Simultaneously, insights developed by working directly with impact funders like Longevity Prize and Challenge Works will inform our development of a decentralized streaming prize fund protocol and web application to allow the permissionless creation and operation of streaming prize funds tied to meaningful advances in finding open source treatments to improve human health.

Additional Information

How did you hear about the Grants Program?

Cyrus did a deep dive on streaming protocols and found Drips, and through the Discord found out about your grants program.

[yorgos]

Hello there!

While this sounds like an interesting project, it is not very clear to me what this particular grant has to offer to Radicle Drips itself or to the Radicle ecosystem in general.

Could an additional section perhaps be added with some more backing info on why Radicle itself should be funding this effort (as opposed to the other way around) ?

Please do feel free to let me know if there’s something I’ve missed !

[savva007]

Hi Yorgos,

Thanks for your interest in our DeSci project for creating a business model to fund open source medicines. Our open source streaming “prize / bounty” protocol can also be used by other public goods projects in the Radicle ecosystem to efficiently allocate funding to maximise the impact relative to the funds spent.

In particular, from our discussions with Radicle’s core team (Andrew, Ele, Bordumb, Lucas), we think there are a lot of synergies between Radicle and our DeSci project Crowd Funded Cures (CFC), which is partnered with major DeSci projects VitaDAO (funding longevity) and Molecule (IP-NFT platform to improve liquidity for early stage financing of biotech projects), and also working on a pilot Generic Drug Repurposing Longevity Prize with Protocol Labs and Hypercerts.xyz. Our goal is to generate a market to fund clinical trials showing that low cost off-patent therapies are safe and effective (e.g. ketogenic diet to treat cancer, generic drugs to improve longevity, off-patent psychedelics like ketamine to treat depression). We believe this is one of the highest impact use cases for DeSci and ReFi. For example, repurposing one off-patent drug like ketamine to treat depression can create a multibillion dollar impact for relatively low cost (e.g. Phase 2 clinical trials can cost around $1m and de-risk the treatment protocol for funding larger clinical trials). It is an example of how we can use web3 to fix misaligned incentives under our current system for funding public goods and maximise social impact. We would love to provide more details here (and we can also add this into a new section as to why this benefits Radicle and your ecosystem if you thought this would be helpful).

This CFC grant application primarily about leveraging the Radicle tech stack to create the “plumbing” to allow realtime streaming of funding create an impact market via a prize fund mechanism that leverages the superintelligence of the markets to optimally maximise impact through the development of new open source technologies. The diagram below shows how this would work in the context of issuing Medical Impact NFTs to raise retroactive funding for a medical prize fund, where 20% of the prize fund is streamed annually in realtime to prospective funders (i.e. impact investors having fractionalised ownership of an IP-NFT) proportional to impact points allocated to an IP-NFT (which is converted into a Hypercert upon assigning of impact points such as funding a clinical trial resulting in certain number of % improvement in clinical outcomes). I provide Figure 1 below of our Gitcoin Grant which shows these money flows and our sys architect Cyrus immediately thought that Radicle Drips would be the most logical lego block to apply to this protocol.

From Figure 1 of CFC’s GR15 Gitcoin Grant

If you or any other community members have any thoughts or concerns as to why this would not be a good use case for Radicle and DeSci / Web3 generally to help fund public goods, please let me know and me or Cyrus would be happy to answer them.

[bordumb]

Thanks for this application.

@savva007 : lots of details below, but please focus on the Q(uestions) in bold.

I’m generally in agreement with @yorgos here, but with some nuance outlined below.

Concerns

On the call and on this application, the 2 examples that stand out for me are:

• Ketamine
• Psilocybin Mushrooms

Neither of these are federally legal and to my knowledge, have stringent controls for research. If we play the thought experiment of putting all of our eggs in this basket, there seems to be a good amount of risk. We could have this protocol built, but end up with 2 (Ketamine + Psilocybin Mushrooms) use-cases that flop.

On top of that, we’re talking about drug trials/experiments. So it’s like experiments^2: running experiments on drugs that are themselves nebulously legal (experimental).

FWIW: I’ve loved seeing this explosion in interest in this category of medicine. I’m just well aware that this adds a lot of risk - i.e. having this POC/MVP not actually going anywhere. I think myself and many others would be curious to know what sort of other follow-up studies you might look at, given these specific examples are very much an up-hill battle, both on the science as well as legal/legislative front.

Milestone Feedback

Overall:
We’re generally evaluating by first determining what category a grant falls under:

1. Adds to the core code base to improve Radicle infrastructure or 3rd party integrations with popular development tools. These sorts of grants address a very important problem: improving the underlying infrastructure to improve new user acquisition.
2. Simply “adopt” Radicle as infrastructure to build other tools. These sorts of grants do not necessarily add to the underlying infrastructure; they’re analogous to marketing campaigns where a company gives out free money (e.g. Spotify giving new users - “adopters” - their first 3 months for free).

This grant falls under the category #2. Keep this in mind below.

Milestone 1

I am against funding initial setup for a project that falls under category #2.
I’d see this as your own investment in the work.

Note: this is a grant, not an investment. So we’re generally hyper-focused on funding specific parts of the work (e.g. the “adoption” of Radicle), and not the entire project.

Milestone 2

Looks good to me.

But the Radicle component makes up 1/10 of the tasks.

Q: Given the points above, can you please estimate what % of the cost of this milestone should be covered by Radicle? (I don’t think it should be 100% of 22,250)

Milestone 3

Looks good to me.

But the Radicle component makes up 1/10 of the tasks.

Q: Given the points above, can you please estimate what % of the cost of this milestone should be covered by Radicle? (I don’t think it should be 100% of 14,750)

Milestone 4

“Researchers claiming funds” is not work that makes sense for us to fund. Assuming we’ve used Radicle for this work, this functionality of squeezing drips should come “for free”, insofar as adopting the infrastructure + exposing the squeezing in your UI, researchers should simply be able to collect their Drip balance.

Similar to above, I’m not keen on using Grant funds to fund simply “adoption” of the infrastructure.

Conclusion

This grant sounds awesome.

But this grant - and others - are bringing up an important policy we need to hash out a bit more:

Q: Should we be paying 100% of an external team’s development work to simply adopt the infrastructure that we’re building?

Intuitively, the answer is “no.” We fund a core team of developer, technical writers, and have a very open community across Discord, Discourse, GitHub (issues, etc.), which should make it easy for anyone to “adopt” the infrastructure.

But some ideas that come to mind:

• Short-term: we allocate some % of our overall budget for “Adoption Grants”. Something like, we’ll allocate 100,000 USDC (10% of budget) for “Adoption Grants” and set the bar pretty high.
• Longer-term: create 4 month long quadratic funding rounds, whereby we can allocate x% of our 1,000,000 USDC budget to a pool and allow community members and outside . This would take some of the voting/governance load off of us, maintain funding for important teams adopting Radicle infrastructure, and grow the pie through quadratic funding.