Case study · Cerebrum DAO · Head content strategist
Making decentralised science comprehensible.
Cerebrum DAO funds early-stage neuroscience that institutional investors avoid, the stage the industry calls the Valley of Death, through tokenised intellectual property and community votes. I was head content strategist. The job was to explain a new funding model to three audiences at once: researchers, token holders and the public.
The problem
Each part of Cerebrum is difficult to explain. The science is translational neuroscience, mostly Alzheimer's, mostly at the hypothesis stage. The funding model is tokenised intellectual property, where a community buys a stake in a discovery before it is made and votes on what is funded next. The audience is three audiences: researchers who need to trust the due diligence, token holders who need to understand what they own, and consumers who have never heard of a DAO.
Most crypto writing fails those readers by relying on jargon. Most science writing fails them by assuming they will not care. Cerebrum needed writing that did neither.
What I did
- Content strategy. A single editorial voice across the website, newsletter, X and Discord, with a plain-English rule: every mechanism explained the first time it's used, every claim sourced.
- Launch copy for the raises. Explainers, announcements and community updates for the tokenised IP projects, including NEURON-Percepta, the first and largest, as it moved from hypothesis to an IRB-approved, decentralised, IP-token-funded human trial.
- Long-form science. Readable pieces on neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, lipid biology and AI-assisted drug discovery, written with the science team so the specifics were right.
- Product and consumer content. Copy and positioning for Percepta, a plant-based supplement developed over fifteen years at the University of Washington, and for Cerebrum Cortex, a brain-health assessment built on Harvard's McCance Brain Care Score. Neither requires a crypto wallet, and the copy had to make that plain.
- Community. Contributor newsletters and governance explainers, so that 115 DAO members and more than 5,000 subscribers could follow votes, milestones and results without a biology degree.
What happened
Four years in, Cerebrum's pipeline is delivering. $1.86M raised across four IPT projects. More than 45 research proposals reviewed. 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. Percepta is in a clinical trial that's actively recruiting. Two consumer products launched in a single quarter. Membership of the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium.
The science team and the community produced those results. Content made them possible to understand, and that part was mine.
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."
- Sitecerebrumdao.comDAO
- ProductCerebrum CortexBrain Health Score
- ProductCerebrum CognitionPercepta
- NewsletterContributor newsletterSubstack
What it taught me
Where plain English is worth most
Crypto, DeSci and tokenised assets are full of good ideas explained badly. The projects that raise money, keep their communities and ship products are the ones a newcomer can understand in a paragraph. That is a writing problem, and it is the one I most enjoy.