Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s ResearchHub Startup Raises $5M in Funding

ResearchHub, the startup co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to accelerate the pace of scientific research using cryptocurrency, has raised $5 million in a funding round.

The Series A fundraising was led by Open Source Software Capital with participation from Boost VC, RedHat's Bob Young, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Replit's Amjad Masad and others.

Funders of science projects rely on citation-based metrics to judge the quality of an academic researcher, so many scientists optimize their research to generate the most citations possible. That, say Armstrong and co-founder Patrick Joyce, is a broken, wasteful model. Science should operate more like open-source software, they argue.

ResearchHub is building a platform that allows anyone to earn crypto rewards for contributing new knowledge to the global scientific community. Users earn ResearchCoin (RSC) for publishing content to ResearchHub, and the amount of RSC received is in proportion to how valuable other members of the community perceive content to be.

“Our web application hosts a suite of publishing and collaboration tools that help researchers draft new manuscripts and share them with the world,” a ResearchHub blog post said. “Over time, we hope to iterate towards a ResearchCoin reward structure that channels resources to the best and the brightest minds on ResearchHub in a reliable, evidence-based fashion.”