Interest in biotechnology and biohacking is a logical next step for cryptocurrency business owners. Hyperfusion CIO Alex Petrov spoke to ForkLog about promising avenues in these fields, as well as climbing Everest, microdosing, ayahuasca and the military uses of biotech.<\/p>\n
ForkLog (FL): Alex, hello. Why is the crypto community turning to biotech, and why did you take an interest in it personally?<\/strong><\/p>\n Alex Petrov (A.P.): <\/strong>I became interested in biotech, development practices and yoga because they are the necessary foundation for a fairly active lifestyle. When you run a business, you focus more on how you eat and how you structure your routine. <\/p>\n I think for the crypto community this is a perfectly normal evolution, because those who started with small projects now run fairly large companies. Brian Armstrong, for example, has significantly changed his lifestyle as Coinbase has grown. <\/p>\n You cannot separate mind from body: if the body feels bad, the head will not work well.<\/p>\n FL: What do you think of using the <\/strong>DAO<\/strong> model to fund research?<\/strong><\/p>\n A.P.: <\/strong>On the one hand, this format makes it possible to raise money and carry out research that few would otherwise take on. <\/p>\n For pharmaceutical companies, vitamins alone can bring in several times more, and more easily, without doing research for 20\u201330 years. People want simple things: to organise their lives better, get sick less, solve day-to-day problems. In this case, a DAO, as a distributed community, can help pool money for such research and incentivise it. <\/p>\n The challenges for DAOs, as I see them, are that many studies can take decades, and people are impatient by nature. Many do not become investors precisely because they do not think long term. For most people, the planning horizon is five years at most. <\/p>\n Serious research takes decades and is painstaking day-to-day work. Most DAOs are quite young, and investors are impatient: they want quick results and soon lose interest. <\/p>\n FL: Are crypto projects in biohacking viable \u2014 like <\/strong>STEPN<\/strong>, which monetised walking, or <\/strong>Rejuve.ai<\/strong>, which pays users to research their health?<\/strong><\/p>\n A.P.: <\/strong>I consider STEPN pretty decent because it has a connective idea, a certain logic \u2014 unlike many ICOs, hype projects or memes where, essentially, there is nothing beyond a picture. In principle, many fitness trackers try to create a similar community, where people run and post their results. In such an environment you can ask questions, improve your technique and expand your domain knowledge.<\/p>\n I have not studied the second project in detail, but I can say that collecting large health datasets will help us understand better what is happening with our bodies. Without statistical data it is very hard to take the next step and understand how certain mechanisms work \u2014 including protein research.<\/p>\n FL: Is it possible to implement decentralised collection of large volumes of data, or is dependence on big pharmaceutical companies insurmountable?<\/strong><\/p>\n A.P.: <\/strong>This is precisely where a DAO can help, because for large pharmaceutical companies this is not an end in itself. They can collect data as needed by running studies on focus groups.<\/p>\n But to move science forward we need very large volumes of granular data on bodily indicators throughout the entire life cycle. At the same time, we cannot collect these data just like that; Apple or Fitbit, for example, cannot collect them.<\/p>\n