Base hosts decentralized science projects

A useful way to read this story is as a claim about infrastructure, not a claim that science itself has moved on-chain overnight. The post circulating on X on September 7 said Base was becoming a home for decentralized science, or DeSci, with funding, data-sharing and discovery happening in public. That matches the broader definition of DeSci used by ethereum.org, which describes it as an effort to build public infrastructure for funding, reviewing, storing and distributing scientific knowledge with blockchain tools. (ethereum.org) What makes Base relevant here is cost and speed. Base says its network is built for sub-second transactions that cost less than one cent, and describes itself as an open, low-cost blockchain with hundreds of third-party projects in its ecosystem. For DeSci builders, that matters because putting grants, attestations, data references or governance actions on-chain only works if those transactions are cheap enough to do repeatedly. (docs.base.org) The strongest part of the original claim is the logic behind it. DeSci projects generally argue that blockchain rails can make research funding and coordination more transparent: who funded what, when money moved, what rules governed it, and which contributors were credited. Ethereum.org says DeSci aims to let scientists share work openly, receive credit, and make research easier to access and contribute to. (ethereum.org) That helps explain the language in the X discussion about a “knowledge commons.” In practice, that usually does not mean every raw dataset lives directly on-chain. More often, the chain is used as a public ledger for funding decisions, ownership records, governance votes, provenance, and links to data or methods stored elsewhere. That is an inference from how DeSci infrastructure is described in primary documentation, not a direct quote from Base. (ethereum.org) There is also some evidence that actual DeSci teams are building in Base’s orbit. Base’s ecosystem page says it hosts 700-plus companies, though it does not break out a DeSci category in the material reviewed. Separately, BIO’s documentation describes decentralized science as open, permissionless infrastructure with on-chain verification and DAO governance, while BIO’s app pages show live science-focused agents and markets tied to DeSci projects. (base.org) One concrete example is Aubrai. CoinDesk reported in 2025 that the decentralized science project launched on Base to fund experiments and tokenize discoveries, using BIO Protocol’s launch tools. That does not prove Base is the dominant DeSci chain, but it does show at least one named DeSci project choosing Base for launch. (coindesk.com) The caution is that “gaining traction” is still mostly being asserted socially here, not measured cleanly. Base provides ecosystem scale figures and BIO provides DeSci product descriptions, but neither source reviewed here gives a current count of DeSci projects on Base, funding volume, or published research outputs attributable to Base-based DeSci activity. (base.org) So the cleanest standalone takeaway is this: the X post from kianosh1001 on September 7 points to a real overlap between Base’s cheap on-chain infrastructure and DeSci’s push for transparent funding, open coordination and public credit. What is verified today is the fit between the model and the tooling, plus at least some named DeSci activity on Base. What remains harder to verify is the scale.