For context, the Fellowship is a six-month programme where by the end we have an economically sustainable DeSci product.

It is broken into three Phases:

Phase 1: Teaching

Phase 2: Project Scoping/User Interviews

Phase 3: Project Buildout

Cohort 1 is currently in Phase 2

Phase 1 Recap

March

We went live with applications at the end of March. It was officially launched at the DeSci London conference on 23/24 March.

April

The majority of April was spent promoting the Fellowship and we are happy to report we received almost 100 applications, far more than we expected!

May

The last week of April and the beginning of May were spent interviewing potential applicants and the cohort officially kicked off at the end of May.

June/July

Cohort 1 began with 25 amazing fellows who have now been fully DeSci-pilled! The majority (80%) had not used a wallet before nor had any prior knowledge of blockchain, web3 or DeSci.

Half of the fellows participated in person weekly at a partner office in London, while the other half were remotely connected. We had frequent syncs where the in-person cohort met the remote cohort.

The weekly sessions involved peer-to-peer learning about science, blockchain, and DeSci subtopics. See here for the curriculum with links to the Fellows presentations.

We have also kicked off the Product and Marketing working groups, covering the basics of building out a product, doing validation before actually writing code and the basics of marketing. The marketing squad promoted an open call for ideas on Twitter which was the most-viewed episode of The DeSci Mic! We will be kicking off the Developer, Business and Article writing squads next week.

Phase 2

Fellows are moving into phase 2 (as of July 15th), where they will spend 2 to 3 weeks conducting user interviews (with scientists, universities, and biotech companies) to fully scope out our main project idea (Causality Network) which is a DePIN protocol to authenticate scientific data.

Additionally, we will productise the peer-to-peer learning element to make it easier to run further cohorts (this will be built on EAS). See here for details. This will be built out over August.

Two of the fellows were keen to work on an idea they came up with by themselves to which MuseMatrix will be giving support.