Inspiration
People are very excited about the potential that NFTs have in disrupting the creator economy. However when people think about creators, most only focus on digital artists, musicians, gamers, and sometimes writers. As a PhD student, I view researchers as creators of new knowledge, and I want to use blockchain/NFT technologies to build a stronger research community.
What it does
Scriptus (latin for "manuscript") is a combination of a traditional preprint service (e.g. arxiv.org) and a web3 marketplace (e.g. opensea). We allow researchers to turn their papers into NFTs so that they can openly share ideas, while retaining digital ownership. Collectors can purchase research-NFTs to support the research they care about, and to speculate on the future impact of different papers.
The use of NFT is crucial here, because the output of modern researchers are digital. As such, the concept of "research collection" would not make much sense without a well defined concept of digital ownership. Through the use of NFTs, we are creating this whole new market of research collection, this has the potential of generating more public interest and (financial) support for the research community, which can lead to increased scientific progress. We are very excited to see what impact Scriptus can potentially have on scientific research.
(It's also important to note that "research collection" is not a new concept: people pay millions of dollars for physical manuscripts of older generations of scientists. However this concept has become obsolete because most researchers don't produce physical manuscripts anymore. )
Who are Our Sellers Market?
- Researchers who have a need to host papers online (i.e. basically every researcher)
Who are Our Buyers Market?
- People who have intrinsic value for certain areas of research (e.g. someone whose family member went through lung cancer treatment might want to simply support lung cancer researchers and expect nothing in return)
- People who like to "show off" to their friends that they are supporters of science. The psychology here is the same as people who buy luxury goods: the value is in the ability to express their personal identity (in our case, digitally), not in its' physical utility.
- Arbitragers who want to make money by spotting undervalued ideas, buying those NFTs at low prices and sell them at higher prices.
Problems that Scriptus Solves
Aligning Researcher Incentives with the General Public
Currently, a lot of researchers' focus is influenced by the funding they can get. Since big tech companies tend to have a lot of financial resources to provide grants and fellowships, a lot of researchers are wokring on problems that either directly or indirectly help the big tech companies' products.
However, the problems that tech companies care about are not necessarily the most important questions that the general public cares about. Having a research collector market where the general public can directly support the research they care about can incentivize researchers to work on the most important and meaningful problems of our generation.
Making Good Ideas Easier to Discover
Another problem with the current research infrastructure is that as the number of papers that come out each year increases, it becomes harder for researchers to keep track all the progress, and filter through the noise to find the truly good ideas. The current research publishing process does not incentivize reviewers to spend significant amount of effort in evaluating ideas.
Scriptus solves this problem by acting as a prediction market, where it is financially rewarding to find undervalued ideas. This will make good ideas easier to discover through market forces.
How we built it
The NFT contract is based on the ERC1155 standard, with a number of tweaks to serve the specific case of the research NFT. By using the OpenZeppelin contract library, we were able to quickly prototype a version of the NFT on the Rinkeby testnet.
The NFT metadata is stored on IPFS.
Querying is done on Subgraph / The Graph.
The frontend was built using basic react/next.js/materialUI.
Challenges we ran into
The most interesting technical challenges we ran into are 1) gas-free-minting, and 2) upgradeable contract. We want to implement a gas-free-mintng feature so that when researchers onboard the platform, they do not need to have prior experience with web3, other than having installed MetaMask.
The upgradeable contract concept is also a relatively new idea in the smart contract world. We are not a hundred percent sure that such a feature is appropriate in every scenario, especially in cases like NFTs.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I'm very proud to have been able to implement a basic version of the gas-free-minting feature. Learning about how forwarders, payment-masters, meta-transactions work was quite interesting.
I'm also genuinely very proud/hyped about our vision. I think there's a lot that blockchain technologies can do to improve the research community, and we are just getting started.
What we learned
The most concrete learning was defining in terms of getting familiar things like hardhat, etherjs, openzeppelin, meta-tx etc.
Other than getting more familiar with all the developer ecosystems, I now have a deeper understanding of the potentials of web3, through the various talks that LionHack organized (Prof Roughgarden's talk, the talk on DAO ecosystems, ZK presentations, etc).
I also learned a ton from just chatting with other teams working on various DeFi, AMM related projects. Definitely a space that I want to explore more afterwards.
What's next for Scriptus
If we are able to win funding from LionHack, that money will directly go towards paying for the gas-free-minting feature when we launch on main-net. For the following couple of weeks, we will continue with polishing the front-end, and building out a basic marketplace contract with royalty features. In the mean time I hope to also start advertising the platform to my peers (PhD students at Columbia and other schools).
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