Eleanor Davies, the Global DeSci Lead at Sei Development Foundation, highlights how DeSci V2 aims to revolutionize funding for aging research, which is critically underfunded and vulnerable to economic and political pressures.

She emphasizes that DeSci V2 is about transforming the entire research ecosystem to foster innovation, inclusivity, and long-term progress toward extending human healthspan and longevity.

Aging research faces severe challenges, receiving less than 1% of NIH funding and struggling with the 'timeline problem,' where long development cycles clash with short-term investment horizons, risking premature exits and underperformance.

Federal agencies like NSF and NIH are experiencing significant funding cuts—up to 66% for NSF and 40% for NIH—leading to layoffs, reduced grants, and fewer opportunities, especially impacting early-career scientists.

Current macroeconomic conditions threaten promising longevity fields such as gerophysics and reprogramming, which require long-term funding that traditional venture capital cannot sustain due to high risks and extended timelines.

DeSci V2 proposes creating a parallel onchain financial infrastructure to enable faster capital deployment, milestone-based funding, and reduced overhead, making longevity research more sustainable and inclusive.

Integrating AI with DeSci (DeSci X AI) can enhance drug discovery, improve research efficiency through federated learning, and address quality control by identifying promising studies and reproducibility issues early.

This approach includes prediction markets for scientific reproducibility, which could improve reliability by forecasting study success and facilitate global collaboration free from bureaucratic barriers.

Future models for DeSci X include a digital School of Athens for open, onchain collaboration; a community-supported prediction marketplace; and a venture studio model that funds promising ideas directly from the community, creating value for participants.

The Sapien Open Science Fund exemplifies this new model, emphasizing incentives, community engagement, and open discourse to accelerate scientific progress and democratize access to knowledge.