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AthenaDAO, established as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization—a kind of cryptocurrency-based cooperative—in 2022, is born with the purpose of better tackling women's health as a global public health issue.
The project operates as a collaborative, women-led network of researchers, funders, and advocates, focusing on sourcing, funding, and incubating translational research in women's health, turning science into new therapies, medical procedures, or diagnostics that can be used in clinical practice.
The DAO employs novel funding and incentive mechanisms, using on-chain blockchain technology to fund these areas transparently, and it serves as a mediator between stakeholders in the medical field and the affected communities, ensuring that the research and developments are attuned to the actual needs of women.
The use of IP-NFTs for licensing research is one of the main advancements they are bringing forward in democratizing ownership and valorizations of scientific discoveries.
AthenaDAO is on CER as it combines for the first time many important issues in a well designed and successful project: advocating women’s health which is such a problem for billions worldwide, decentralizing scientific practices, in the context of the emerging DeSci movement, and tackling all this with democratic blockchain-based economics.
In our perspective this is a brilliant example of an effective post-capitalist approach: making the most affected by a problem also the receivers of the economic upsides of the solutions, and taking advantage of market speculation but allocating value fairly to the involved stakeholders and addressing important socio-political problems as the oppressed position of women in contemporary society.