Opinion by: Sasha Shilina, founder of Episteme and researcher at Paradigm Research Institute
In 2024, Nature reported a record number of scientific paper retractions: over 10,000 papers withdrawn from journals due to fraud, duplication, or flawed methodology. The peer review process, once the foundation of academic legitimacy, is being challenged. It is perceived as too slow, opaque, and easy to manipulate.
At the same time, AI models trained on this flawed data produce confident yet nonsensical outputs. Papers reference non-existent studies. Research decisions are influenced by factors other than inference. The internet, once celebrated as a democratizing force for knowledge, has become a battleground for misinformation, clickbait, and manipulated metrics.
We are experiencing an epistemic crisis.
Yet, in the unlikely corners of Crypto X and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) forums, a new framework is emerging. Not for transferring value, but for verifying truth.
A layer 2 for knowledge
In the cryptocurrency realm, layer 2s tackle scalability issues, helping Ethereum to process more transactions quickly and cheaply. But what if the real scalability problem is not financial but epistemological?
Science isn’t scaling. Reputation hierarchies, legacy journals, and funding gatekeepers create bottlenecks. Brilliant theories languish in grant purgatory. Replications go unrewarded. Errors take years, if they are corrected at all.
What would a “layer 2 for truth” look like? This system would transform scientific hypotheses into on-chain objects, public, permanent, and open to scrutiny. Instead of spreading beliefs on social media, participants would stake them, exposing their convictions to actual risk. Resolution would become a hybrid process: AI models would assess and score evidence, human validators would contest or confirm outcomes, and decentralized oracles would record results transparently. Importantly, incentives would shift from prestige to precision, rewarding those who are correct, not just those who are well-positioned.
This isn’t decentralized finance (DeFi). It’s not even decentralized science (DeSci). It’s agentic, decentralized science (DeScAI). More radically, it represents epistemic finance: markets constructed around claims rather than coins.
Betting on reality
This isn’t mere science gambling. It’s a structural reversal. Currently, the academic economy rewards being interesting rather than correct. Flashy papers gain media attention and grant renewals, regardless of whether their findings can be replicated. Meanwhile, replication studies, null results, and quiet work often fade away.
Prediction markets can flip this narrative. They reward correctness, not visibility, fame, or institutional support. If a biotech researcher anticipates that a specific compound will decrease tumor growth by 20% in mice and they are right, they win. If they are wrong, they lose. Simple. Transparent. Brutally honest.
In this model, belief turns into a measurable asset. Knowledge becomes liquid. The marketplace doesn’t just trade tokens; it trades epistemic confidence.
The oracle problem reimagined
In the crypto world, the “oracle problem” concerns the trustless transfer of real-world data onto the blockchain. In this epistemic framework, the oracle is not merely a price feed; it mediates what is recognized as truth.
Related: Crypto policy trends to watch in 2025: Privacy, development and adoption
This raises difficult questions: Who determines what is true? Can AI function as a reliable resolver? What occurs when markets are mistaken?
The answer is that there is no single oracle; there is a protocol. Resolution becomes a process: part-automated, part-contested, and part-historical. Participants challenge, update, and refine claims. Truth evolves to be iterative, open-source, and adversarial, much like code.
Indeed, this introduces the potential for epistemic volatility. In a world where even Nobel laureates can be wrong, isn’t volatility preferable to stagnation?
From publishing to protocols
The internet disrupted publishing. Blockchains disrupted finance. Now, a third disruption is underway: the protocolization of knowledge.
In this new paradigm, the very structure of knowledge is being rethought. Papers are no longer static PDFs; they are dynamic contracts embedded with predictive weight, designed to inform and be tested. Citations become more than scholarly gestures; they transform into on-chain links annotated with confidence scores and traceable influence. Once a closed gatekeeping ritual, peer review evolves into an open, adversarial verification market where claims can be challenged, revised, and resolved publicly.
In this model, science transitions from being a static archive to an economic, dynamic, and plural living system.
Truth is the next asset class
We have assigned value to money, time, and attention. We have never genuinely assigned value to belief. Not until now.
A new type of market is emerging, one that does not reward speculation but verification — a civic tool for aligning incentives around truth in a noisy age. The question is not whether these markets involve risk. All markets do. The question is: Can we afford not to explore?
If crypto represents a new internet, we require more than memes, memecoins, and monkey JPEGs. We need the infrastructure for the next epistemic era: for validating what matters, when it matters, publicly.
The next significant layer will not be for money. It will be for the truth.
Opinion by: Sasha Shilina, founder of Episteme and researcher at Paradigm Research Institute.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
