Intellart’s OpenScience NFT Marketplace Receives Outstanding Support from the Cardano Community during Fund 7

For the second consecutive time, our OpenScience NFT project receives funding from Cardano’s Project Catalyst, this time winning first place in the arguably most competitive challenge section: dApps and Integrations.

1322 wallets voted for us with a combined total of 229,711,277 ADA. At the time of voting, this amount was valued at more than 230 million USD worth of trust in the value our proposal is promising to provide to the Cardano community, and by extension, to the world.

But what exactly is this OpenScience NFT Marketplace?

Scientific results and documents are perceived by scientists as tools used to communicate new discoveries. However, they have an additional value for society. Compared to how a biography is a means for an individual to share their thoughts and experiences to the public, a scientific article is a tool scientists use to communicate with other scientists, almost exclusively, unfortunately due to the very nature of the medium itself. In fact, articles contain opinions, notably in the discussion section of a paper. Thus, scientific knowledge has intrinsic value beyond its logical conclusions, meaning a manuscript can be conceptualized as a literary document (such as a novel, journal, opinion article or poetry) or even a piece of art (such as photography, paintings) crafted to present results in the most honest and unbiased fashion. Like a vintage piece of literature or an art collectible, it could be acquired and traded.

Just as the first X-ray crystallography of DNA by Rosalind Franklin (https://i.stack.imgur.com/8XHZX.jpg) is viewed by many as a highly valued collectible, right now, digital content of this sort cannot enjoy the same properties. NFT technology is the missing link that would make this possible. How fascinating would it have been if the first paper that coined the name ‘CRISPR’ (dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1365–2958.2002.02839.x) was minted as an NFT ?

Manuscripts and other science collectibles can be minted into open science NFTs (osNFTs) and made available to society.

More on that can be found at our website: https://intellart.ca/#/about.

Where do we go from there?

If you are interested in what we plan to build in the future, have a look at our most recent proposals in Project Catalyst, Fund 8, especially PubWeave: A truly decentralized, censorship-resistent and permissionless peer-review ecosystem armed with a treasury to fund open access scientific articles.

This project is part of a broader ecosystem which was kickstarted with the success of our Fund 6 ‘Open Science NFT’ proposal, and is hopefully continuing in the current Fund 8 as well (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400474).

It also build upon very crucial infrastructure which is being undertaken by our ‘PanDAO’ suite of tools, also successful in Fund 7. Two more PanDAO proposals are submitted during Fund 8 (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400494 and https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400498) that aim to build the rest of the infrastructure needed for PubWeave.

And here is the list of all our previously funded proposals:

[Fund 6] osNFTs for science popularization: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369965.

[Fund 7] OpenScienceNFT Marketplace: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384826.

[Fund 7] PanDAO: Focus on interoperability: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384816.