The Next Big Layer Isn’t For Money, It’s For Truth

Opinion by: Sasha Shilina, founder of Episteme and researcher at Paradigm Research Institute

In 2024, Nature reported a record-breaking number of scientific paper retractions: over 10,000 papers pulled from journals due to fraud, duplication or flawed methodology. Peer review, the long-revered backbone of academic legitimacy, is under siege. It’s too slow, too opaque and too easily gamed.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence models trained on this flawed data set generate confident but nonsensical output. Papers cite nonexistent studies. Research decisions are guided by influence, not inference. The internet, once hailed as a democratizing force for knowledge, is now a battleground of misinformation, clickbait and manipulated metrics.

We are living in an epistemic crisis.

And yet, buried in the unlikely corners of Crypto X and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) forums, a new architecture is forming. Not for transferring value, but for verifying truth.

A layer 2 for knowledge

In the crypto world, layer 2s address the scalability issue. They help Ethereum process more transactions faster and cheaper. But what if the real scalability bottleneck isn’t financial — it’s epistemological?

Science isn’t scaling. Reputation hierarchies, legacy journals and funding gatekeepers bottleneck it. Brilliant hypotheses die in grant purgatory. Replications go unrewarded. Errors take years to correct, if ever.

What does a “layer 2 for truth” actually look like? This system transforms scientific hypotheses into onchain objects, public, persistent and open to scrutiny. Instead of broadcasting belief on social media, participants stake it, putting skin in the game and exposing their convictions to real risk. Resolution becomes a hybrid process: AI models parse and score evidence, human validators contest or affirm outcomes, and decentralized oracles record the result transparently. Crucially, incentives shift away from prestige and toward precision, rewarding those who are right, not just well-positioned.

This is not decentralized finance (DeFi). It’s not even decentralized science (DeSci). It’s agentic, decentralized science (DeScAI). More radically, however, it’s epistemic finance: Markets built not around coins but claims.

Betting on reality

This isn’t just science gambling. It’s a structural inversion. Today, the academic economy rewards being interesting, not correct. Flashy papers get media attention and grant renewals, whether or not their…