Building the Infrastructure for Decentralized Science

A Conversation with Ella McCarthy-Page of Molecule

June 20, 2025

This interview is the third in a series exploring questions of research and innovation, in Denmark and abroad. The series is linked to my ongoing effort to map two emerging fields, Decentralized Science (DeSci) and Metascience. While these fields differ in emphasis and origins, both seek to reimagine how we organize, fund, and govern scientific work — not just through critique, but through the creation of new models and tools.

In this edition, I spoke with Ella McCarthy-Page, Scientific Communications Lead at Molecule — one of the most visible organizations in the emerging DeSci landscape. Molecule is building infrastructure to connect researchers, funders, and patient communities through blockchain-based governance models, intellectual property primitives, and decentralized research collectives known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). In this conversation, we discuss Ella’s journey into DeSci, the role of communication, and the growing ecosystem of projects emerging around Molecule — from IP tokens and project management tools to experimental platforms like Pump.science.

Introduction

David Hilmer Rex
Could you introduce yourself and your journey into the world of Decentralized Science (DeSci)?

Ella McCarthy-Page

My name is Ella McCarthy-Page. I am currently with Molecule, where I work as a scientific communications lead. I have a background in biochemistry and material science from the University of Cape Town, where I’m from.

I really love science so much, but after a year of working in the lab, it was breaking my soul slowly. So I wondered, “What else am I very good at?” And I’m good at communications, and so I branched out into that. I had a friend who was involved in DeSci already. I think a lot of people come to DeSci by word of mouth. I was talking with my friend, Tyler Golato, co-founder of Molecule, about the issues I was having and wanting to move into science communication. And he was like, you know what? Come write a blog for us. I later got hired, and I’ve now been in the DeSci space for just over two years. In DeSci, two years is a pretty long time, in terms of the pace of change in the space.

The DeSci movement is still pretty young. The term DeSci was only coined maybe six or seven years ago by Sarah Hamburg. She did a call to action that got published in Nature, December 7th, 2021, which is where we often draw the starting point of DeSci. The ideas have been bounced around the internet—how Web3 technology can help science—from as early as, I think, about 2013, as Bitcoin started to hit.

I was with Molecule through the advent of Bio Protocol, many of the BioDAOs, and the intellectual property token (IPT) model. I started off with science communication, but now I view myself more as an ecosystem manager, very involved in the communications and interactions between various DAOs, Molecule and Bio.xyz.

Molecule

David Hilmer Rex
Who founded Molecule and when?

Ella McCarthy-Page

Back in 2020, Molecule was started by two people: Paul Kohlhaas, who has a background in economics, Web3, and biohacking; and Tyler Golato, who had been in research, working on longevity and cancer biology. They got together, and Paul had this idea to use Web3 technology to fix science.

They launched their first experiment, which was called Catalyst, where they tried to raise $50,000 for psychedelic research in the U.S. They managed to raise $2,000, and the whole thing just didn’t work at all. They realized it doesn’t work to just throw an idea out into the world and expect people to fund it. You need to build a community and present ideas people are excited to support.

So they started building VitaDAO, which focused on longevity, along with a few other early DeSci contributors. That was essentially the first-ever BioDAO. VitaDAO raised $6 million, and Pfizer invested in the project.

Following that, Tyler and Paul started Bio.xyz as a program within Molecule to train up other BioDAOs. The idea was that these DAOs would become users of our product. It was like teaching people how to use Molecule. Eventually, Bio.xyz spun out and became its own company and its own protocol with a governance token, and it’s now launching a lot of DAOs.

David Hilmer Rex
In terms of Molecule, your aim is to “connect researchers, investors, patient communities.” Can you elaborate on this mission and why it’s important, in contrast to how traditional biotech research is usually structured?

Ella McCarthy-Page
As a small footnote, we can’t call them investors, because the tokens that we produce are governance tokens, so they’re not investment vehicles. But that is just the technical terminology.

I think what Molecule is aiming to do—like, I mean, I am very biased of course—but I think Molecule is in a really interesting space, because I don’t think there are any companies currently doing what we’re doing. For example, the IP-NFT,—where we attach intellectual property contracts and licensing rights to an NFT—we were the first to do it with any sort of degree of success and adaptability.

Molecule’s mission is creating really accessible and functional tooling that is going to help speed up science. We’ve always focused on intellectual property and biotech science, because there is a layer to be commercialized there. The precursors to DeSci are Open Science and Metascience, and DeSci takes principles from both of them. The biggest difference is a) the usage of Web3 technology, and b) the attention to the commercial element of science and the financing of science. DeSci asks: how do we create sustainable but also functional mechanisms—making sure money goes into science, and that science can make money, as it needs to do in the reality of this world.

David Hilmer Rex
If not investors, what are they then functionally?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Right, the governance tokens—they’re called intellectual property tokens (IPTs)—they are freely tradable on an open market. First off, we have a genesis sale where people can get in and buy the token if they’re passionate about the project, and then later on, people can get involved how they will.

The governance tokens generally are concerned with decisions. For example: “We’d like to hire a medicinal chemist. We found this person—what do you guys think?” Or for example: “We need to do an additional fundraise—yes or no?” Those are the sort of governance decisions you’ll see coming up.

One of the misunderstandings about governance, is when you explain this idea of governance tokens and that everyone gets a vote on decisions, people assume it’s open-ended voting on what steps we should take next. Whereas what is actually the case, is that we have an advisory board that gathers information, presents, for example, two routes that we could take, and then those two options are presented to the token holders who vote yes or no. So it’s not really, “What do you think we should do next?” It’s not like a town hall where everyone puts their hand up and says, “I think we should do this.” It’s a lot more structured than that. It’s more like stop/go decisions that token holders get to participate in.

To bring it back to your question: you have your researchers who are performing the research, and they are able to, with the support of a DAO, receive funding and do the research. You have the token holders, who support that research financially by purchasing the token, but also by contributing—for example doing some science communication, providing Web3 expertise or figuring out tokenomics. Finally, your patients can either be token holders, or they are contributors to the project. Token holders and patients are often the same phenotype.

David Hilmer Rex
Molecule the company—how is it funded, and what does its business model look like?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Molecule is a VC-funded company. We did our first round of financing a few years ago. We’ve got a couple of different business models that we’ve explored, for example, taking a fee from token sales. We also have looked at consultancy agreements with the DAOs as well, because we support them a lot.

David Hilmer Rex
From a communications perspective, what are some of the challenges you’ve had to deal with in how Molecule is perceived?

Ella McCarthy-Page

We are communicating to Web3-native folks who are trading every day and we want those people to be interested in our projects. And then of course, we need respectable scientists and institutions who we want to partner with to be able to google us, come onto our page, and see something that feels familiar to them—which is why we’ve ended up keeping two different interfaces. You can visually separate them: anything that’s dark is built for our Web3 audience, and anything light is built for our science audience.

We’ve recently launched a new product, Molecule Labs, which is built for researchers. It’s a project management and communication layer. Anyone who has an IPT project already could log on to this interface, upload their project updates or their data, and it’s free on-chain data storage that also funnels directly to the token holders. So we are hoping to close this loop of keeping people aware of what’s going on in a project.

Those are definitely our two different audiences in broad strokes. I come from a traditional science background. My first week at Molecule, I made a wallet for the first time. Everything I’ve learned about Web3 has come by virtue of my job at Molecule, so I personally find it much easier to communicate with scientists.

David Hilmer Rex
Do you actively reach out to universities and researchers?

Ella McCarthy-Page

We have done direct outreach and approached universities and researchers. Interestingly enough, we’ve moved past that stage and are now at the point where people come to us.

I think the biggest issue we see from the scientist standpoint is just a level of skepticism around crypto, cryptocurrencies, and Web3—which I think is totally fair, given what’s out there. Seeing things like Trump launching a coin and scamming people out of their money isn’t very helpful.

The way I like to describe DeSci is as a scientific movement using the most powerful technology we have at the moment, and that is blockchain. It’s a powerful piece of tooling that we would be remiss not to use. That’s how I explain it to scientists, and I think that resonates.

Another thing that resonates with scientists is describing DeSci as an experiment. It’s a young movement—we’re still figuring out which way is up, which way is forward and it’s an iterative process. When we ask scientists or people to be involved in this process, we ask them to come experiment with us. See what works. See what doesn’t work. It’s not like we have the perfect suite of tools. It’s more like, “Let’s collaborate around this.”

What always helps is positive use cases. Through our platform, more than $12 million in science has been funded. There are upwards of 10 projects happening in the world because of our protocol. Once you highlight those things, scientists and academics tend to feel more comfortable.

As for the crypto degens—that’s a completely different audience, completely different goals, completely different desires. But one thing I’ve seen resonate with them is the narrative. DeSci as a narrative took off last year, and people began asking, “Is this the next big thing?” In crypto, people are always chasing the next wave. And sometimes, we have people who come to DeSci from crypto who are a bit burned out or exhausted, and then they find DeSci and go, “Okay, cool—this is a positive use case. This is something that might actually make the world better.”

David Hilmer Rex
And what about government officials? Have you had any dialogue with them, in Germany for example?

Ella McCarthy-Page
A third of us are based in Germany, so we are definitely an international-first company. But yes, we’ve begun dialogue with government officials.

We’ve recently hired a new Chief Commercial Officer, Aaron Weaver, and part of his job is speaking to regulators, government officials, and bringing our work more into that sphere. On that note, Aaron and our CEO, Paul, recently had a meeting in Abu Dhabi with their health ministry because VitaDAO — one of the longevity DAOs — has some compounds that are ready to go to clinical trial testing, and it looks like those trials will be done in Abu Dhabi. So those conversations have started, but I’d say they’re still quite early compared to other parts of our work.

Molecule Products

David Hilmer Rex
Let’s talk a bit about your products. I have this diagram where you go from intellectual property, proof of invention, IP-NFTs to IPT tokens. And you just mentioned Molecule Labs, which I imagine is upstream from most of this. Can you elaborate on what products you have and how they work together?

Ella McCarthy-Page

We are ultimately building a protocol. Our vision is to build a set of primitives that all plug into our greater vision of bringing science on-chain — making it more liquid and tradable. And by virtue of that, accelerating it and making it easier to get involved in and make progress.

The individual products that we have, start with Proof-of-Invention (PoI). PoI is aimed at anyone who has an idea. The first step is putting your scientific project or your idea on-chain, and that creates an immutable record of the idea. So PoI is a way to timestamp your idea, and it stays entirely private to you. We can’t see it. No one can see it. My colleague Kevin always uses the example of a bread recipe. Say I’ve got this amazing bread recipe, and I timestamp it. I can timestamp a thousand different bread recipes, sit on them, and later decide to develop one. Proof-of-Invention is top of the funnel. It costs literally a fraction of a cent to register one of these ideas. I once calculated that for the price of one coffee in Berlin, you can register two million ideas.

Once you’re ready to develop the idea, you can register it as an Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Tokens (IP-NFTs) — where you take the documentation or contract around it and register that on-chain. The IP-NFT is where you go from thousands of ideas to maybe one to three that you really want to work on.

Then, if you want to build a community around your idea and raise funding, you can tokenize your IP-NFT into IP Tokens (IPTs). Our tech team would kill me for this, but essentially it’s like taking your IP-NFT, breaking it into little pieces, and handing everyone a little piece. That’s not technically accurate, but it helps explain that everyone gets a part of governance over the parent IP-NFT.

Once you have an IPT, you’ve got a community, you’ve got a project, and you’re ready to go.

What’s interesting is that you can also do follow-on fundraising. VitaRNA, run by Dr. Michael Torres, did an initial raise of $100,000, and then a follow-on raise of $300,000 using the same IPT mechanism.

David Hilmer Rex
So VitaRNA is a DAO?

Ella McCarthy-Page
It’s an IPT project under the banner of VitaDAO. Sorry — the nomenclature is like… yeah, we really do work ourselves into a circle sometimes.

David Hilmer Rex
So when you have the IP token, funding, and a community — you need to build a DAO around it?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Theoretically, anyone can have an IP token. However, what we’ve seen is that trying to run a fundraise via IPTs when you don’t have a pre-existing community is very hard. It’s like me coming out of my window and suddenly saying, “I need $2,000 to research my bread recipe.” Everyone’s going to say, “Cool — don’t know you, don’t know your background, not putting money in.”

So what we’ve seen historically is that the projects that are able to succeed are the ones that already are part of a pre-existing community. There’s a level of trust there, a level of interest. So yeah, in theory, anyone could do it. But my recommendation is that it goes through a DAO.

David Hilmer Rex
Could you imagine a tech transfer office (TTO) or a group of researchers at a university trying to experiment with this?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Yes, you’ve hit something quite on the nose. That’s something we’re actively working on — especially now with Molecule Labs. Towards the end of this year, what we’d really love to do is partner with some TTOs and have them upload their potential deal flow — detailing who the researcher is, what they want to study, the amount of money needed — and hopefully we can actually connect TTOs directly to our funding protocol.

Generally, TTOs prefer to go through a DAO or an organization. It’s tricky, because different TTOs are super variable. In one of our projects, the TTO was super amenable to our model — they were one of the first who really took it on board. That was because one of the people in the TTO was a degen who loved trading crypto. He understood the terminology and layering of it. But of course, we’ve also had TTOs who’ve seen our model and gone, “No thanks.”

David Hilmer Rex
You have a project called Pump.science. Can you explain that?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Yes — it’s currently a Molecule project. Toward the end of last year, my colleague Benji Leibowitz said: “IP tokens are cool, but they’re not entertaining. People want to be entertained.” He proposed the idea: what if we could turn science into a live, gamified experience?

He got a Solana grant, built it, launched it — and interestingly enough, it resonated with people. It got a huge amount of traction. I think it was a perfect storm — big names in crypto like Changpeng Zhao and Vitalik Buterin attended a DeSci event — and it created this wave. Pump.science just took off, in a way we haven’t seen in DeSci yet.

The idea behind it is wild but simple: it’s a crypto-native platform where researchers can propose interventions — like longevity compounds — and if the community supports it, that project gets turned into a tradable token. Trading fees from that token then go directly toward funding actual experiments. Once the token hits certain milestones, like a threshold market cap, the experiment kicks off — starting with small models like worms, then potentially moving up to flies, mice, and so on.

All of this is live, transparent, and on-chain — people can literally watch the science unfold in real time. So it’s this interesting mash-up of research, markets, and storytelling. It’s still early, and the team is small, but it’s been one of the most rapid adoptions of any DeSci tool we’ve seen. It may eventually spin out of Molecule, like Bio.xyz did. All of the tokens launched on Pump.science are IP Tokens.

David Hilmer Rex
Catalyst looks similar to Pump.science, but is it different?

Ella McCarthy-Page
Catalyst was the name of an interface we had. It used the same tech — it was still an IP Token fundraise using bonding curves, which is essentially what Pump.science is — but Catalyst came before.

Catalyst was used to fundraise and create IP Token projects. But a lot of the projects wanted to tailor their tokenomics, their length of sale, that sort of thing — and that wasn’t built into the Catalyst system. That’s why we’ve gone back to the drawing board.

We’re now creating a more modifiable and modular set of IP Token mechanics. I think what’s quite interesting is that Molecule Labs also came out of that function.

Historically, Molecule focused deeply on how to make sure science gets funded. At the moment, we want to move further, because we’ve somewhat succeeded in doing that. The role of Molecule Labs, now that these projects are funded, is to update all the IPT holders and make sure they can participate in governance.

We’re stepping slightly away from having funding as our big focus, and moving more toward data and project management.

David Hilmer Rex
I think we’re five minutes short of the hour, so it’s probably a good time to wrap up unless you have more you want to cover.

Ella McCarthy-Page
Actually, I’ve got one final statement.

One of the things I always grapple with is that the real ethos — the lovely thing — about DeSci is the broad openness, decentralization, and focus on smaller players. While Molecule, Bio.xyz, and Pump.science have been very prolific and successful within the DeSci space, we’re definitely not exhaustive. You know what I mean? There are a lot of really great DeSci projects that exist outside of our sphere. We are part of the DeSci ecosystem — but we don’t represent the whole.