The hottest new betting market is mice motor skills

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Market watchers have cast doubt on prediction markets’ ability to draw meaningful volumes after the presidential election. Enter: Livestreams of drugged-up mice trying to balance on a rotating rod. 

The so-called DeSci platform pump.science announced a partnership with Solana-based prediction market Hedgehog Markets whereby users can place bets on the outcomes of longevity experiments on mice. It’s arguably a move in a more reputable direction for the speculative DeSci trend, which has drawn criticism for creating misaligned incentives. 

Decentralized science, or DeSci, has been around for some time in crypto, generally in the form of DAOs crowdfunding scientific experiments that otherwise wouldn’t get funded. Pump.science emerged in the past few months, borrowing its name and funding mechanism from the popular memecoin launchpad pump.fun. 

Researchers submit experiments focused on longevity, or the increasing of lifespans, to pump.science, and a corresponding token is listed on pump.fun. As the memecoin’s market cap increases, pump.science will run experiments testing the compound on increasingly-larger animals, ending with humans. The experiments are livestreamed, so investors can see whether the compound appears to be working. The project’s docs say chemical suppliers could eventually purchase the rights to the chemical interventions from the token holders, though it’s unclear how that would work, and obviously no experiments have gotten that far yet.

This is a wonky way to fund science by any standard, and pump.science has drawn its fair share of critics.

Gauntlet CEO and Robot Ventures partner Tarun Chitra, one of speculative DeSci’s loudest critics, called projects like pump.science “at best naive and at worst a predatory scam.”

With the Hedgehog Markets partnership, the rules of the pump.science game at least make a bit more sense. Mice will be injected with longevity compounds and then tested versus a control group on a rotarod, which is a rotating cylinder that can test mice motor skills. Users — brandishing data including how the compound performed in flies and what the mice’s names are, among other things — bet on which mice will perform best prior to the trials, which are then livestreamed. For Chitra at least, this could be a better road for DeSci.

Chitra said in a direct message that the lower potential returns offered by prediction markets compared to memecoins could limit the pool of bettors on DeSci prediction markets. “But philosophically, there’s nothing that is scam-like about this — it just might be very hard to bootstrap, especially if you look at how long it took Polymarket.”

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