The SENS Research Foundation has apparently already raised four times its annual income thanks to the PulseChain Airdrop.
The PulseChain airdrop supporting aging research
Richard Heart, the founder of HEX, is about to launch a new cryptocurrency called PulseChain. As part of that launch, he has also arranged an airdrop to give away some of the new cryptocurrency in order to support the SENS Research Foundation (SRF).
The SRF is one of the most important players in the context of organizations conducting aging research. Its goal is to combat age-related diseases through the development of therapies that can reverse the damage that aging does, thus keeping us biologically younger and healthier.
At the time of writing, the PulseChain airdrop has raised an amazing 20 million dollars for aging research at SRF. To put this into perspective, this is four times the annual revenue that the SRF normally receives and around half of the Buck Institute’s revenue for a year. If that was not incredible enough, this money was raised in just 2 days!
This kind of money will be transformative for the SRF, and with it, we could likely see an escalation of its key projects, such as MitoSENS to create backup copies of mitochondrial genes in the nucleus. The funds could allow them to increase the scope and pace of research at the foundation and potentially help to bring therapies to the clinical trial stage sooner.
The airdrop works by people making a “sacrifice”, or making a donation to SRF during this sacrifice phase. People who donate during this time will be placed into the airdrop and will get the chance to win some of the new cryptocurrency once it launches. SRF has asked people to read the instructions for donating through the airdrop before doing anything.
Growing support for life extension from the cryptocurrency community
The PulseChain airdrop is another example of how the worlds of cryptocurrency and healthy life extension technology have been moving closer together in the past year or two. There is a real intersection between cryptocurrency and aging research, and the interest and activity in this area has really started picking up pace recently.
Earlier this year, cryptocurrency mogul Vitalik Buterin donated significant funds to the Methuselah Foundation and has also donated to SRF and other aging research initiatives. Indeed, he is such an avid supporter of healthy life extension that he said that The Best Thing to Donate Money to Is the Fight Against Aging during a 2018 interview with us.
Under the guidance of Tyler Golato, VitaDAO also launched this year. The last few years have seen the rise of decentralized autonomous organizations, called DAOs, which is where the name VitaDAO is derived from. VitaDAO is built on blockchain technology, the same technology that Bitcoin uses. However, Bitcoin’s blockchain serves as a ledger to record transactions of Bitcoin between users. DAOs use other blockchains, most often Ethereum, to record things like voting records and membership, which are usually represented by a token specific to the DAO. DAOs have already enjoyed some success in the cryptocurrency space, with many DAOs currently valued at a billion dollars or more each.
PulseChain may be a great opportunity for the SRF
Cryptocurrency-based funding offers a great alternative to traditional sources of funding such as grants, which come with a host of issues, including risk aversion to fund moonshot research goals like healthy life extension. It isn’t hard to see how progress could be greatly sped up thanks to cryptocurrency, which is free from these restraints and so allows science to explore the directions it truly wishes to instead of having to appease grant givers or pander to conservative views within the establishment.
PulseChain is one such initiative that has the potential to help drive our field forward and make healthy life extension one step closer. If you do decide to donate make sure that you read these instructions for donating first.
7 Comments
Neil
July 17, 2021
This is incredibly exciting. $20M after just the first two days of the fundraiser and there is still another ~18 days to go. I still find cryptocurrency somewhat strange and confusing, but fascinating. Since I planned to donate to SENSRF anyway, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to do both. So, I am a proud (rather insignificant) donor. I hope you are too.
Part of the reason SENSRF is so important is that they research crucial topics that don’t get funding from traditional sources, such as allotropic expression of mtDNA (mentioned in this article) and the recently spun-out research towards cleavage of glucosepane, to give just two examples. This is probably where you get the most bang for your philanthropic buck.
Brent Nally
July 17, 2021
Well done Steve. Such exciting times!
GREGORY S SCHULTE
July 18, 2021
First off, this is amazing! Congrats to SENS.org. I hope they continue to use this crypto airdrop strategy to raise money. I have so many friends (and myself) who want to throw a little money at crypto, but don’t really know how to get in on the ground floor of a coin. This was the perfect opportunity.
Also, around the time that aubrey tweeted they were at “20million and counting”, the total money raised/sacrificed for pulsechain was around 160million… so that’s like 12%. At the time of me writing this (day 4 out of 18 of the sacrifice phase) total crypto sacrifice is at 260million. I think it could easily get to 1billion… which means 100million (+++?) for SENS if the ratio holds….. what would that mean? Maybe some new projects? Maybe clinical trials? Or if nothing else, fast progress on the many projects they already have going.
Either way, congrats SENS! and tell your friends this is the perfect time to potentially strike gold in crypto, and you do so by giving to an amazing charity!
Here is the video where I got those numbers from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsPExNnWfFw&t=527s
Here is the link to track how much has been sacrificed for the airdrop:
https://pulselead.xyz/
Neil
July 19, 2021
Thanks for those links Greg!
Neil
July 18, 2021
First, it looks like the window for donation is about 2 weeks. Apparently, I misread the chart on the PulseChain website.
Second, Aubrey de Grey gave a very insightful and absolutely fantastic interview with London Futurists where he talks more about this donation and what SENSRF plans to do with the money. Among the plans are to: 1) expand the incredibly successful and important education program; 2) continue the allotropic mtDNA program that has been seeing a lot of great progress lately; and 3) start testing combination treatments, beginning with senolytics combined with stem-cell therapies. The interview starts at around 4:00.
The tide is turning! Let’s spread the word!
Elliott
July 18, 2021
I donated and They ask for my eth wallet address to airdrop pulsechain token? It says only send eth to that address so how does that work?
Neil
July 19, 2021
Hey Elliot. Unfortunately, it is a bit complicated for us newbies. When I first set up my crypto wallet (when SENSRF announced it), I had some moderate anxiety. But, in the end, it turned out not to be too bad. I just helped a family member do it and it was his first donation to longevity research. He was also curious about crypto, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Anyway, I am happy to help if I can. Here are the basic steps that I followed:
1) Install the MetaMask app.
2) Create an account on it as usual.
3) Write down the passphrase it creates for you and store it somewhere safe. (If you ever lose your password, or your phone, or get a new phone, or whatever, you need this passphrase to access your account. Nothing and nobody else can help you if you don’t have your passphrase.)
4) Once you have it set up, tap on the blue hexadecimal number that looks something like 0x1237…8a53. That is your public wallet address. When you tap on it, it copies this address.
5) Go to the SENSRF form: https://forms.gle/H9aE5RoCiSKEhMVq5
6) Fill out the first 4 entries and the last entry. You can skip the entries that begin with “If you are donating via cryptocurrency”. The third entry should be something like $100 USD or whatever you are donating.
7) Go back to the SENSRF donation page and donate the same amount.
After you finish this, you are done. You will receive an email from SENSRF within a day stating the amount and your crypto wallet address that they are passing on to Richard Heart. The airdrop won’t happen for another couple of weeks at least. So, we wait.
I should mention that Richard is not contractually obligated to give us anything and that the PulseChain website states that the initial value of the PulseChain will be $0. We cannot expect any monetary value at all from this. It is a donation. If we do happen to benefit, that is just icing on the cake!
Good luck!
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