The problem Unbound Science solves

Scientific research funding is a horrendous process that excludes many of our brightest minds and best inventions for going against competing technologies. Unbound Science has deployed a parallel economy for everybody else who has been cut out from the traditional scientific community. For the first time ever, the donor's agenda is segregated from the research, and the general public has a say of what gets funding. Voting tokens are distributed to donors and the platform community, to up-vote their favorite proposals. A game-show like America's Got Talent is held multiple times a year to pick the funding winners.

Unbound Science starts with support for four categories of research:

Energy
Air, Water, & Soil Technology
Pollution./Waste Management
Quantum Research

The overall goal is to help regions of the world where technological advancements don't reach. By making new technologies open source, and accessible through distribution in our marketplace, billions of people will have an opportunity to reach middle class standards of living for the first time. In addition, we're using blockchain to save all research notes, CAD files, videos, materials lists, etc, so this critical information is never lost. Unbound Science also implements the use of ZKP to optionally hide the identities of scientists for their safety, while still displaying their expert credentials.

Unbound Science never takes ownership of any IP; inventors retain full credit and ownership for their work. Our marketplace allows scientists to create IP leases, licensing agreements, consulting agreements, and emergency engineering contracts in one-click, so rather than competing with international businesses looking to steal their technology, incentives can be aligned. Everyone wins.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into issues with the original tech stack we planned to build upon due to poor documentation and lack of response from developers (we were going to build on top of the NEST stack - docs.nes.tech). Instead, we have pivoted to use Story Protocol, Lukso, and Arbitrum for the hackathon. It was also difficult to finalize the hackathon team, even though we began recruiting weeks before the event on Discord. Everybody in the developer community has their own great ideas and wants to build their own team. As time drew on, eventually a lot of developers gave up on their own ideas and joined other teams who have made more progress. It would be nice if teams had to be formed and finalized earlier, to be the most productive, and have a more equal time for development. But perhaps the relaxed environment of ETHDenver is what makes it such a great event!