 Lifespan.io has released the recording of their CryptoMeets longevity panel from the most recent Ending Age-related diseases conference. We'll tell you what was said and how it relates to some exciting things happening right now in this episode of Lifespan News. Viewers of this show know about the longevity philanthropy of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Richard Hart's well-known support of the SENS Research Foundation, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's involvement in New Limit, the goals of Transhuman Coin, Vita Dao, and more. But why is there such a crossover between the longevity community and the crypto community? That was one of the topics addressed during the panel. Chao Wang, a core contributor of leading Web3 Accelerator and founder community DeFi Alliance, traces the roots of this back to the early days of crypto, with Hao Finney, who received the first ever Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, choosing to be cryopreserved in hopes of future reanimation upon his death in 2014. Here's what Chao had to say. Obviously, there is a historical reason. Hao Finney, alongside some other crypto OGs, or Bitcoin OGs, are just, I guess, being into this intersection of both fields for a long time. So that's the historical reason. But it's also because of the fact that both crypto and longevity are very much at that bleeding edge of human innovation and technology. Both have the potential to fundamentally change how the human society operates. Crypto decentralizes a lot of activities, removing the middleman, and that just has a tremendous amount of impact. And then longevity, assuming we can live maybe a few decades longer, it means that people would be able to plan for much longer, instead of planning for the next decade, you can plan for the next five decades. And that allows us to do much greater things, much higher riskier things. So these two fields fundamentally are at the bleeding edge, and that naturally just attract the same group of people. Almost every single crypto person I know is really deep in health and longevity and taking care of themselves. What is the most important thing for you after you've made reasonable amount of money and wealth and financial freedom? What is the next most important thing? It's time. It's your health, right? So a lot of crypto people are really into this. And I personally help seeded a couple of longevity or biotech companies. And I think, in general, longevity and biotech startups should really try to raise money from crypto people. There's just a natural fit in terms of funding capital and personal interest. Another panelist was Mark Berniger, a Swiss entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Maximon, a longevity company builder. He hinted that there are some wealthy and well-known members of the crypto community in the background of Maximon's work, and that this cross-community collaboration helps to provide mutual stability. But at this stage, I would say our main connection to the crypto space is mainly as also Jao elaborated some of these quite wealthy individuals, which are now dedicating far more time into health in general, but also longevity-related projects. And I think that's great for both industries because maybe it also makes part of the crypto industry a little bit more sustainable and having a little bit the broader vision. And I think that's why the two worlds have a natural match which will become far more visible in the future. What I can definitely already say without going too much into detail at this stage that we have a few very well-known, very successful people from the digital asset space which are involved in the background in our activities. So that's maybe another example, a very concrete one where we see these two worlds coming together. Another concrete example that was brought up was Vitalik Buterin's donation of a large percentage of all Dojalon Mars coins in existence to the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit medical charity focused on making 90 the new 50 by 2030. The foundation could have instantly tried to cash in by selling the coins, but instead they announced that they would seek to maximize the coin's long-term value. This provided inherent alignment between the Dojalon holders, the Methuselah Foundation, and by extension the larger longevity community. Here is Cao explaining it. The holders of this token, they have an incentive to create value for this token and therefore potentially attract other people who might be interested in helping with the Methuselah Foundation to participate in some endeavors of the foundation. It's still very early but I can see the start of a trend of longevity startups or foundations using crypto networks as a way to engage in the community and to attract more people into their mission. I personally feel like right now there's way too much money in crypto and there's not enough money in longevity. I agree with that sentiment and it's time that we change that and it's important to note that this panel wasn't entirely cryptocurrency focused. There's potential for blockchain in general to play a huge role as well. As an example, here's lifespan.io president Keith Camido explaining his plans for the organization. I think we can definitely benefit from almost like combinatorial style clinical trials that have cohorts of hundreds of thousands of people with crowdsourcing and I'm very interested to see what I would like to build over the next couple of years to sort of like a lifespan.io 2.0 or you know web 3.0 version that sort of integrates not just quadratic funding but this sort of ability to exchange data which could also really make people feel involved and have agencies. Just again spitballing I can imagine that you could come up with some system where by you know contributing biomarker data maybe you know you get a token or you you you mint an NFT by the process of doing that that then is redeemable for access to the therapy whenever it becomes available or something like that I'm sure we could brainstorm it but something can happen there I'm not sure what but something that's a that's a really good idea yeah let's we'll follow up after you can find the full video of this panel on the lifespan.io youtube channel linked in the video description the potential of this technology and the decentralized science movement in general is huge and if you share these goals and agree with chow that there's not enough money in longevity right now you have the opportunity to take advantage of quadratic funding and change that lifespan.io is currently participating in get coin grants round 13 which has a pool of funding specifically focused on decentralized projects sustaining longevity among them is the web 3 initiative that Keith explained in that clip you can learn more and find instructions on how to donate linked in the video description remember quadratic funding maximizes the impact of your donation you'll have to hurry though round 13 is only open until March 24th 2022 together we can help make this vision a reality as you can see the longevity and blockchain communities have considerable overlap and we're still at the very early stages we're not even yet beginning to realize the potential of these technologies I think it's a safe bet to see the future of health science investment and charitable giving lie in large part at the intersection of blockchain and longevity so I expect that we'll have a lot more on this soon make sure to subscribe and hit the bell icon if you want to be among the first to know I'm Ryan O'Shea and we'll see you next time on Lifespan news