The SENS Research Foundation has apparently already raised four times its annual income thanks to the PulseChain Airdrop.
The PulseChain airdrop supporting aging research
Richard Heart, the founder of HEX, is about to launch a new cryptocurrency called PulseChain. As part of that launch, he has also arranged an airdrop to give away some of the new cryptocurrency in order to support the SENS Research Foundation (SRF).
The SRF is one of the most important players in the context of organizations conducting aging research. Its goal is to combat age-related diseases through the development of therapies that can reverse the damage that aging does, thus keeping us biologically younger and healthier.
At the time of writing, the PulseChain airdrop has raised an amazing 20 million dollars for aging research at SRF. To put this into perspective, this is four times the annual revenue that the SRF normally receives and around half of the Buck Institute’s revenue for a year. If that was not incredible enough, this money was raised in just 2 days!
This kind of money will be transformative for the SRF, and with it, we could likely see an escalation of its key projects, such as MitoSENS to create backup copies of mitochondrial genes in the nucleus. The funds could allow them to increase the scope and pace of research at the foundation and potentially help to bring therapies to the clinical trial stage sooner.
The airdrop works by people making a “sacrifice”, or making a donation to SRF during this sacrifice phase. People who donate during this time will be placed into the airdrop and will get the chance to win some of the new cryptocurrency once it launches. SRF has asked people to read the instructions for donating through the airdrop before doing anything.
Growing support for life extension from the cryptocurrency community
The PulseChain airdrop is another example of how the worlds of cryptocurrency and healthy life extension technology have been moving closer together in the past year or two. There is a real intersection between cryptocurrency and aging research, and the interest and activity in this area has really started picking up pace recently.
Earlier this year, cryptocurrency mogul Vitalik Buterin donated significant funds to the Methuselah Foundation and has also donated to SRF and other aging research initiatives. Indeed, he is such an avid supporter of healthy life extension that he said that The Best Thing to Donate Money to Is the Fight Against Aging during a 2018 interview with us.
Under the guidance of Tyler Golato, VitaDAO also launched this year. The last few years have seen the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations, called DAOs, which is where the name VitaDAO is derived from. VitaDAO is built on blockchain technology, the same technology that Bitcoin uses. However, Bitcoin’s blockchain serves as a ledger to record transactions of Bitcoin between users. DAOs use other blockchains, most often Ethereum, to record things like voting records and membership, which are usually represented by a token specific to the DAO. DAOs have already enjoyed some success in the cryptocurrency space, with many DAOs currently valued at a billion dollars or more each.
PulseChain may be a great opportunity for the SRF
Cryptocurrency-based funding offers a great alternative to traditional sources of funding such as grants, which come with a host of issues, including risk aversion to fund moonshot research goals like healthy life extension. It isn’t hard to see how progress could be greatly sped up thanks to cryptocurrency, which is free from these restraints and so allows science to explore the directions it truly wishes to instead of having to appease grant givers or pander to conservative views within the establishment.
PulseChain is one such initiative that has the potential to help drive our field forward and make healthy life extension one step closer. If you do decide to donate make sure that you read these instructions for donating first.
