Background

The Longevity Prize is a series of prizes designed to incentivize researchers to develop innovative approaches to address age-related diseases and accelerate progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.
The first three prizes are: The Hypothesis Prize, The Biomarker Assessment Prize, & The Generic Drug Repurposing Prize.

The Longevity Prize is unlike traditional funding models. It aims to create a rising tide of research proposals, experiments, and collaborations by providing a series of prizes. The initiative helps to support undervalued or overlooked projects and combat risk aversion in normal funding. The first round of prizes totals $180k and was fundraised through Gitcoin, with the first prize to be announced being the Hypothesis Prize. The Hypothesis Prize aims to resurface forgotten discoveries and research areas to focus attention on the most promising directions. The first round will give out prizes based on hypothesis generation to shape the second and subsequent prize rounds that follow. Novel web3 mechanisms and incentives such as retroactive funding and hypercerts will be employed to address bottlenecks in current funding systems and make funding as impactful as possible.

Aims, Hypothesis & Results

The hypothesis for this program is that aging is a complex process that is not fully understood, and solving the problem of aging is the most challenging task that humanity has ever faced. While there has been some progress in our understanding of aging, there is still much work to be done to bring aging under medical control, thus providing people with longer, healthier lives. The Longevity Prize aims to incentivize researchers to find under-explored and develop novel approaches to address the problem of aging and bring us closer to achieving this goal.

A successful first round of funding amounts to an initial prize pool of $180K. This was raised through Gitcoin via community donations, which were then matched by VitaDAO, Vitalik Buterin, and Stefan George.