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Market watchers have delivered Doubt about the predictability of markets To extract meaningful volumes after the presidential election. Enter: a live broadcast of anesthetized mice trying to balance on a rotating bar.

A DeSci platform called Pump.science announced a partnership with Solana's Hedgehog Markets prediction market, where users can bet on the results of longevity experiments on mice. It's arguably a step in the direction of the more well-known DeSci speculation trend, which has drawn criticism for creating unbalanced incentives.

Decentralized Science, or DeSci, has It has been around for some time In cryptocurrencies, generally in the form of crowdfunding scientific experiments carried out by DAOs that would otherwise not be funded. Pump.science has emerged in the past few months, borrowing its name and funding mechanism from the popular memecoin launch platform Pump.fun.

Researchers submit experiments focused on longevity, or increasing average lifespan, to Pump.science, and the corresponding token is listed on Pump.fun. As the memecoin's market value increases, Pump.science will conduct experiments to test the compound in increasingly large numbers of animals, including humans. The trials are broadcast live, so investors can see if the compound works. Project documents say that chemical suppliers could eventually purchase the rights to chemical interventions from token holders, though it is unclear how this would work, and clearly no experiments have gotten that far yet.

This is a shaky way to fund science by any standard, and Pump.science has had its fair share of critics.

Gauntlet CEO and Robot Ventures partner Tarun Chitra, one of DeSci's biggest speculative critics, Named Projects like Pump.science are “at best naive, and at worst a predatory scam.”

With the Hedgehog Markets partnership, the Pump.science playbook at least makes a little more sense. The mice will be injected with life-extending compounds and then tested against a control group on a rotator, a rotating cylinder that can test the mice's motor skills. Users — brandishing data, including how the compound performed in flies, and the names of the mice, among other things — bet on which mice would perform better before the experiments, which are then live-streamed. For Chitra at least, this might be a better path for DeSci.

The lower potential returns offered by prediction markets compared to memcoins could limit the pool of bettors on DeSci prediction markets, Chitra said in a direct message. “But philosophically, there's nothing like a scam about it – it can be very difficult to get going, especially if you look at how long Polymarket has been around.”

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