The next big layer isn’t for money, it’s for truth

Crypto is building a new layer, not for money, but for truth. Markets, AI and protocols must fix the broken systems of science and verification.

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.