“DevCon is like ETH Christmas,” exclaimed a fellow attendee I met in November 2024. His enthusiasm for the massive yearly gathering was obvious by his predictions: announcements from the Ethereum Foundation, excellent workshops, and new business opportunities.
What neither he nor anyone else predicted was Vitalik Buterin’s targeted interest in DeSci. Later that day, the creator of Ethereum visited the DeSci booth, spending a good deal of time asking questions and learning about the sector. He visited again the next day.
But what really tipped the scales was when Buterin made a surprise appearance at the DeSci side event hosted by Binance. He and CZ, Binance’s former CEO, both spent time with the thirty DeSci founders, hosting an ad hoc Q&A to engage with the founders and share their views of the future of this sector.
It took only 24 hours for the DeSci crypto market to take off.
What has the Ethereum Founder so interested in DeSci and how might it affect your business and investments for 2025? Let’s unpack.
Vitalik’s goals for Ethereum
Buterin had repeatedly called for scalability, democratization, and security developments in the crypto space. In January 2025, he published a blog reiterating these important points.
There, he highlighted the projects he feels are making such strides. The first mentioned: A DeSci project developing verifiable open-source vaccines received special attention at DevCon. His blog, in fact, links to the project’s DevCon page.
He goes on to highlight several other DeSci projects, many of which were part of the d/acc workshop at DevCon. D/acc, the crypto pioneer’s concept for a safe technological future, involves developments in ‘defense, decentralization, democracy, and differential acceleration.’
It is clear that DeSci, whose core values include decentralization and democracy alongside humanist ideals, aligns strongly with Buterin’s ideal techno future.
Vitalik’s past DeSci engagement
Though Buterin’s interest in DeSci events during DevCon hit the sector like a happy brick, it wasn’t out of the blue.
The blockchain leader has been historically vocal about public goods, supporting the open-source movement on Ethereum and donating to GitCoin, the popular Web3 grant program.
It seems Buterin likes to put his money where his mouth is. To that end, he has also backed longevity and biotech projects. He showed interest in space and bioengineering in interviews from his late teens and early twenties. All this built toward his DeSci engagement at DevCon.
Techno optimism and DeSci
DeSci started as a funding opportunity for researchers who struggle on the grant-publishing wheel. The first DeSci organizations leveraged the DAO structure as an opportunity to pool funds they could distribute faster and with great returns on IP.
Today, DeSci includes many business models, such as sending scientists from underrepresented countries to space, data acquisition, and rethinking bioengineering. Some projects are structured as DAOs, but many operate as conventional businesses leveraging the tools of blockchain to improve STEM.
At its root, the goal of all DeSci projects, whether or not they launch a coin, is to democratize the STEM fields by lowering the barrier to entry and increasing innovation success rates. This perfectly aligns with Buterin’s desire to see technology used for the good of humanity in the coming years. The more diversity involved in STEM, the more human-centric the innovations will be.
How to get involved
This brings us to the current state of DeSci and how you might get involved. After DevCon, the DeSci crypto market cooled its heels. Then came the release of the BIO token and the Vana mainnet, reinvigorating the hype around DeSci crypto projects.
Soon to come is the token launch of one of the BIO projects in partnership with Solana. Anticipation is already high on the hype scale. Imagine a racing horse tappy-tapping with the stall door about to open. That’s how the DeSci coin market looks as we hit mid-Q1.
If you are in STEM, now is the time to explore DeSci. We predict that, by the end of 2025, DeSci will be one of the hottest sectors in blockchain. Vitalik Buterin and CZ continue to air their support. Will you?
Get inside the DeSci world with our research report on DeSci and discover how it will make science great again (not only).