Case study · Cerebrum DAO · Head content strategist
Making decentralised science comprehensible.
Cerebrum DAO funds early-stage neuroscience that institutional investors tend to avoid, a stage the industry calls the Valley of Death, through tokenised intellectual property and community votes. As head content strategist, my job was to explain a brand-new funding model to researchers, token holders and the public, all at once.
Image: ZEISS Microscopy, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The problem
Cerebrum is a tricky organisation to explain. It combines early-stage neuroscience, tokenised intellectual property and a community that votes on what gets funded, and each of its three audiences needs something different from the same page. Researchers need to trust the due diligence, token holders need to know what they own, and most consumers have never heard of a DAO.
The work
- Content strategy. I set one voice across the website, newsletter, X and Discord, with a simple rule that every mechanism is explained the first time it appears and every claim is sourced.
- Launch copy. I wrote the explainers, announcements and updates for the tokenised IP projects, including NEURON-Percepta as it progressed from hypothesis to an IRB-approved human trial.
- Long-form science. I worked with the science team on readable pieces about neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, lipid biology and AI-assisted drug discovery.
- Product copy. I wrote for Percepta, a supplement fifteen years in development at the University of Washington, and Cerebrum Cortex, a brain-health assessment based on Harvard's McCance Brain Care Score. Neither needs a crypto wallet, and the copy had to make that obvious.
- Community. Newsletters and governance explainers helped 115 members and more than 5,000 subscribers follow along without a biology degree.
Impact and results
Four years in, Cerebrum has plenty to show for it. It has raised $1.86M and tokenised five research projects. Fission Bio has produced 15 high-affinity drug candidates from a screen of over a billion virtual compounds, Transfidelity has identified lead compounds that improve ribosomal accuracy in ageing cells, and Percepta is now in a clinical trial that's actively recruiting. Cerebrum also launched two consumer products in a single quarter and joined the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium.
My part was making those results clear enough for researchers, investors and the public to understand and support.
We operate in what the industry calls the Valley of Death. Most organizations avoid it. We think it's where we can add the most value.
Cerebrum DAO, "Four Years In. Here's What We've Built."
Lessons learned
Clear writing matters most where the ideas are new
Crypto, DeSci and tokenised assets are full of brilliant ideas explained badly. The projects that raise money, keep their communities and release products tend to be the ones a newcomer can understand in a paragraph. That's a writing challenge, and it's the one I enjoy most.