Why Your IRB Is Obsolete in a Web3 World

Traditional IRB approval takes 6-18 months, creating a massive drag on innovation. This centralized gatekeeping is incompatible with fast-paced, iterative science.

• Time-to-Experiment: Delayed by ~12 months on average
• Jurisdictional Friction: Multi-site studies require redundant, non-interoperable approvals
• Opaque Process: Rejection criteria are often subjective and non-auditable

Encode consent, data usage rules, and reward distribution into immutable, self-executing code on platforms like Molecule or VitaDAO. This creates a transparent, auditable, and automated compliance layer.

• Dynamic Consent: Participants can modify permissions in real-time via a wallet
• Automatic Payouts: Researchers and subjects are paid instantly upon milestone completion
• Transparent Audit Trail: Every governance decision is on-chain for public verification

Research data sits in private, centralized servers, making replication studies difficult and enabling fraud. The ~$10B+ annual cost of irreproducible research is a direct result of this opaque infrastructure.

• Data Integrity: No cryptographic proof of provenance or tamper-resistance
• Access Control: Data is locked away, hindering meta-analysis and collaboration
• Replication Crisis: An estimated 70% of studies cannot be reproduced

Store research data on decentralized storage networks like IPFS and Arweave, with access gated by NFTs or tokenized credentials. This creates a permanent, shared, and verifiable knowledge base.

• Immutable Provenance: Every data point has a cryptographic hash, proving it hasn't been altered
• Permissioned Access: Fine-grained control via Lit Protocol or similar for privacy-sensitive data
• Monetization Streams: Data contributors earn royalties via smart contracts when their data is used

Grant funding is political, slow, and biased toward safe, incremental work. Venture capital overlooks early-stage, high-risk basic science. This creates a "valley of death" for translational research.

• Grant Overhead: Universities take >50% of grants as indirect costs
• Short-Termism: VC demands ROI timelines incompatible with decade-long drug discovery
• Centralized Gatekeepers: A few foundation program officers decide what gets funded

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations like VitaDAO and PsyDAO pool capital to fund research, minting Intellectual Property NFTs that represent fractional ownership of the resulting assets.

• Global Capital Pool: Tap into a $200B+ crypto-native treasury ecosystem
• Aligned Incentives: Token holders profit directly from successful outcomes (e.g., drug royalties)
• Meritocratic Funding: Community governance replaces top-down decision-making

Legacy IRB approval is a sequential, manual process with ~30-90 day review cycles. It creates a single point of failure, lacks transparency, and cannot scale for global, decentralized clinical trials (dCTs).

• Key Benefit 1: On-chain proposals create an immutable, timestamped audit trail.
• Key Benefit 2: Automated compliance checks via smart contracts can slash administrative overhead by -70%.

MolochDAO pioneered ragequit and guildkick mechanisms, creating a template for permissionless, exit-based governance. This is the foundational model for a decentralized ethics committee.

• Key Benefit 1: Ragequit allows members to exit with their funds if a proposal passes, enforcing real-time accountability.
• Key Benefit 2: Guildkick provides a mechanism to remove malicious actors, protecting the committee's integrity.

Combining optimistic approval (assume good faith) with decentralized dispute resolution from Kleros creates a high-throughput, fraud-proof system. Proposals pass instantly but can be challenged and overturned by a jury of tokenholders.

• Key Benefit 1: Reduces decision latency from months to ~1-7 days (challenge period).
• Key Benefit 2: Leverages cryptoeconomic incentives to align jurors with truth, not institutional bias.

An IRB in the US has no authority over a trial participant in Singapore. Web3 governance is jurisdiction-agnostic, executing rules as code that apply uniformly to all participants, enabled by oracles like Chainlink for real-world data.

• Key Benefit 1: Enables truly global, compliant participant cohorts for rare disease studies.
• Key Benefit 2: Smart contract-based consent can be revoked or updated by the participant at any time, globally.

Delegated voting (like Compound Governor) allows tokenholders to delegate their voting power to domain experts (e.g., bioethicists). veToken models (inspired by Curve/balancer) align long-term incentives, preventing short-term exploitation.

• Key Benefit 1: Creates a professional class of delegated ethics stewards with skin in the game.
• Key Benefit 2: Time-locked voting power ensures decision-makers are committed to long-term protocol health.

The end-state is a permissionless, modular governance stack—combining Moloch frameworks, Kleros courts, and Optimism's retroactive funding—to create a self-sustaining, global ethics infrastructure funded by the protocols it serves.

• Key Benefit 1: Retroactive Public Goods Funding ensures the system evolves without centralized grants.
• Key Benefit 2: Modular design allows for forking and specialization (e.g., a dedicated IRB for genetic data trials).

IRBs are bound by national law, but on-chain research is inherently global. A protocol's validators and governance token holders are pseudonymous and geographically dispersed, making enforcement of human subjects protections legally impossible.

• Problem: No authority can compel a DAO in the Caymans to comply with a US IRB's suspension order.
• Consequence: Researchers bear sole liability for ungovernable, cross-border data collection.

IRBs require informed consent from identifiable persons. On-chain actors are wallet addresses. De-anonymization via chain analysis (e.g., Nansen, Arkham) is probabilistic, not definitive, and violates privacy norms.

• Problem: You cannot obtain consent from 0x742d.... Attempting to deanonymize for consent breaches the privacy expectation you're meant to protect.
• Consequence: All permissionless blockchain research is retroactively non-compliant, invalidating published work.

An IRB-approved study has a defined end. A live smart contract or governance proposal is immutable and perpetual. You cannot halt the 'experiment' if risks emerge, violating the core ethical principle of beneficence.

• Problem: A buggy DeFi pool or NFT airdrop mechanism continues to operate and affect users indefinitely after your paper is published.
• Consequence: Researchers are ethically responsible for perpetual, uncontrolled externalities of their deployed code.

IRB protocols assume data integrity. Public blockchains like Ethereum and Solana experience chain reorganizations, where transaction history is rewritten, invalidating 'observed' data.

• Problem: Your dataset of wallet interactions is not a static record; it can change post-hoc due to consensus mechanics.
• Consequence: Research findings based on a specific blockchain state are fundamentally non-reproducible, a cardinal sin in academia.

IRBs review stated research procedures. They cannot account for Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)—latent, profitable reordering of transactions by searchers and validators that alters experimental conditions.

• Problem: Your study of DEX arbitrage inadvertently creates a profitable MEV opportunity, distorting the very market behavior you're observing.
• Consequence: The research intervention is unknowingly and uncontrollably amplified by the protocol's economic layer, skewing all results.

Open-source Web3 code is forked constantly. Your research deployment on Ethereum Mainnet can be copied and deployed on Avalanche, Polygon, or Base by unknown parties, carrying your 'IRB-approved' branding into unregulated contexts.

• Problem: You are liable for the ethical conduct of research you did not authorize, on chains you did not target, with users you cannot identify.
• Consequence: Unlimited, recursive liability exposure that D&O insurance and university counsels are not equipped to model.