Pump.science and Hedgehog Markets have teamed up to promote science-focused decentralized staking contracts as the DeSci sector gains traction.

According to January 8 advertisementPump.science and Hedgehog Markets will enable punters to speculate on laboratory mice undergoing experiments aimed at increasing human life expectancy.

Pump.science is a blockchain research project focused on disrupting traditional academia by funding scientific initiatives and launching tokenized protocols. The project is supported by the Solana Foundation, which supports innovative projects in the field of blockchain.

A blog post from Pump.science revealed that Hedgehog Markets users can bet on mice each week, betting on how long each mouse can stay on a spinning rod. Stress tests will be conducted over a period of two months, with each mouse given a unique name.

Every week, the mice are treated with potential life-extending compounds and subjected to stress tests. Participants can access video footage of individual mice, raw data, and insights from previous experiments to inform their predictions about which mouse will stay on the rotarod the longest.

Pump.science blog post

Benji Leibovitz, founder of Pump.science, noted that live streaming of rat longevity tests would offer “a new and more attractive model for engaging in scientific discovery” through Hedgehog Markets.

Hedgehog Markets offers betting contracts to predict real-world events such as politics, sports, and cryptocurrency prices, just like the Polygon-based Polymarket.

Pump.science is a project associated with the growing DeSci sector valued at over $2 billion. Bands like BIO Protocol show off to support from Binance, with leaders like Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and Maelstrom head Arthur Hayes backing DeSci as a major crypto narrative in 2025.