Research scientists, particularly those in academia, live and die professionally by the funding they can land — funding that typically comes from government and philanthropy. Unfortunately, this traditional grant structure can also put a damper on what might be considered ideal practices by scientists, and therefore on the progress of the science itself. One insider making that case is Patrick Joyce, cofounder of ResearchHub, a platform created to solve some of the problems inherent to traditional science grantmaking.
I spoke recently with Joyce about ResearchHub, which joins an emerging category of new efforts to support and fund scientists, efforts that seek either to address structural problems in funding or to find new ways to accelerate science and innovation. ResearchHub aims to cut through the zero-sum thinking induced by a system that often rewards scientists for being less transparent, even when approaching science as a cooperative enterprise would speed up progress. Central to ResearchHub’s approach is cryptocurrency, the digital monetary system that has enabled new ways to create value and exchange funds, even as it remains controversial due to its still-evolving regulatory status and potential use for unsavory purposes.
ResearchHub began in the imagination of Brian Armstrong, who, as CEO of the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, has amassed an estimated net worth of around $9 billion, as of this writing. In a 2019 Medium post, Armstrong sketched out his vision for improving the practice of science by supporting researchers to be more open and collaborative, rather than protective of their own findings, ideas and methods:
“My proposed solution is an app or website that brings together a community of researchers in a novel way. It attempts to improve the quality and speed at which research gets done, how it gets communicated to entrepreneurs and business people, and how scientists could get funding and upside.” The key was to enable interested funders to incentivize and reward behaviors that the pursuit of conventional science funding can discourage. (Keep in mind that Armstrong recently criticized the philanthropic sector, saying it not only hasn’t been particularly effective, but has actually been a “net negative” on the world — a bit more on that later in this article.)
In 2020, Armstrong and Joyce put the ideas Armstrong sketched out the previous year on their feet as ResearchHub. Given Armstrong’s crypto-fueled success, it is perhaps not such a surprise that he saw cryptocurrency as a potential solution. The ResearchHub platform uses its own ResearchCoin cryptocurrency to reward scientists for performing the kinds of activities that are valuable to science — such as publishing negative results and conducting peer reviews of articles — but that may not benefit the individual scientist working under the typical science funding model. Of course, even negative results are a necessary part of the scientific method, providing information that might point the way to a more successful direction.
Joyce has experience in research as a former medical student and Ph.D. candidate in microbiology and has witnessed the financial pressure that scientists face under traditional funding models. “Scientists want to collaborate, they want to share negative results,” he said, explaining that the fear of losing a competitive edge pushes them to be more self-protective, rather than collaborative.
Joyce and Armstrong say that these sorts of structural weaknesses in academic science should be understood as the expected outcomes of the existing, grant-based research funding system. ResearchHub is trying to change those incentives by rewarding the sort of collaboration and open-science practices that best advance science and technology.
I recently wrote about Catalyze, another emerging digital platform designed to help philanthropic funders discover and support scientists and advance research topics — and to do so easily and transparently. It’s one of a number of new platforms and approaches that seek to address longstanding problems in the often frustrating science grantseeking process — problems that can stifle progress and hamper scientists’ careers. Another relative newcomer in this area is Renaissance Philanthropy, a nonprofit advisory established by veterans of both philanthropy and government science policy, that seeks to drive support to ambitious science and technology goals that may otherwise not attract support from the traditional sources.
How cryptocurrency fits in at ResearchHub
The crypto connection is one distinctive aspect of ResearchHub. You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin and blockchain: Bitcoin is one of the better-known of a now wide array of cryptocurrencies, while blockchain is the digital accounting system, or ledger, that keeps a record of transactions and where the money resides.
Traditional banks perform all this accounting for us when we use regular money; a key characteristic of crypto is that the blockchain ledger operates independently of banks, running on many computers that connect through the internet to maintain identical copies of the ledger. Depending on whom you ask, this independence from the traditional banking system is either a benefit or a danger. And while crypto has hosted its share of criminality and scams — Sam Bankman-Fried may be the best-known crypto convict, and plenty of other bad actors continue to make illicit use of the technology — it is an accepted digital form of finance.
The cryptocurrency ResearchHub uses, ResearchCoin, is a digital asset — a token — built on the Ethereum blockchain, which is one of several blockchain networks, along with the well-known Bitcoin blockchain and others. Tokens can also be converted to U.S. dollars or other regular currencies.
ResearchCoin, Joyce said, begins with little intrinsic value, but ResearchHub is attempting to create uses for it — including research bounties, peer review and grant funding — that create demand for the token and strengthen its ability to reward scientific contributions. “It started out being basically Chuck E. Cheese points, and over time, value has accrued to it.” In other words, ResearchHub builds features that create objective financial value behind the ResearchCoin tokens.
“Can we compensate you for the risk that you’re taking by sharing those negative results?” Joyce asked. “Hopefully, you make the calculation that your career will be better if you share them versus not sharing them. Crypto is an incredible tool for creating financial incentives.”
ResearchHub is still definitely in an experimental phase. For example, it has previously tested its model with the peer-review process. It would pay scientists $150 in ResearchCoin for conducting a peer review; the scientists would then be able to spend that ResearchCoin to pay for other costs, like processing their own publication, or even supporting other research projects. That experiment didn’t fully work.
“It was pretty successful, but we couldn’t find anybody to pay for the peer reviews, so we’re shifting toward grant-giving,” said Joyce. “It’s the same bones, but hopefully the business model is more sustainable long term.”
While theoretically, as a platform, ResearchHub could function with regular money, Joyce said that cryptocurrency has important advantages. “[Cryptocurrency] allows you to create these incentives in a very modular fashion where you can experiment quickly,” he said. “If you wanted to raise money to pay people for negative results, for example, that’s challenging to do. You can experiment with incentives that initially are worthless, and then over time, value can accrue to these tokens.” The ResearchHub team believes that a blockchain and crypto-based approach — putting the funds and their control in the hands of the scientists doing the science — can push the research world to become more open and ultimately more democratic.
It must be noted that Armstrong has now become an avowed critic of philanthropy and charities in general, one of a number of mostly right-leaning tech billionaires who’ve moved in that direction, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and, to a lesser degree, Larry Ellison. On a recent episode of the Katie Miller Pod podcast (Miller is an alum of Elon Musk’s infamous Department of Government Efficiency), he said, “(A) lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” adding that most philanthropic organizations are “captured by ideology” and generate unintended, undesirable consequences. Having previously signed the Giving Pledge in 2018, Armstrong quietly exited the commitment in 2024.
If ResearchHub is, in part, an attempt to underline traditional philanthropy’s negative effects and show how science can be supported more effectively, it is nevertheless also an interesting, out-of-the-box idea that’s worth trying. After all, funders of science always tout philanthropy’s special ability to fund risky, cutting-edge ideas.
There is no guarantee that the ResearchHub platform will thrive in the longer term, although its stated goals of improving the practice and progress of science are desirable ones. But its founders are addressing recognized concerns; it may be that the ResearchHub model helps illuminate these concerns and suggest ways that traditional philanthropic funders could improve their methods of support.
Alternative science-funding models like Catalyze and ResearchHub are emerging in an era, as we’ve often written, when traditional funding — especially from the big-ticket government sources — has grown slower and more uncertain. The NIH, NSF and other federal funding agencies have enabled world-changing and lifesaving discovery, but they are increasingly imperfect. Why not explore new ways and new technologies to connect philanthropic funders and other private capital more directly to scientists?
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