A personal tragedy led Andreas Melhede down a path that could forever change how science operates. The Elata Biosciences founder watched someone close to him face severe depression and anxiety in a foreign country, confronting language barriers and medical uncertainty.
Despite trying every medication, supplement, and lifestyle change available, nothing made a significant difference for that person. That experience exposed the reality that psychiatric treatment remains guesswork, with failure rates exceeding 70% for some conditions.
Melhede decided to do something about it.
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The Race To Control Your Mind: Why Decentralization Matters For Brain Tech
Melhede expects that by 2035, brain-computer interfaces could be integrated into daily life in ways people are just starting to explore. People will use BCI technology to boost focus, relax, improve sleep, and even take control of their dreams, he told Benzinga.
Melhede pointed out that BCIs could evolve from wellness tools into critical instruments for tackling neurological disease. “It will be like using your phone today, but far more personal and powerful,” Melhede said. “This tech will become a natural part of how we optimize our minds and health. The key will be making sure it’s open, decentralized, and with bulletproof privacy.”
Elata’s app store will serve users facing neurodegenerative diseases alongside those seeking to enhance cognitive performance through gaming, neurofeedback, meditation, and emerging BCI applications.
Beyond gaming, Elata’s electroencephalogram technology aims to create something far more ambitious: a fully decentralized, open-source infrastructure for brain-computer interfaces that operates on-chain. Melhede calls it the "Internet of Brains." The platform is designed to massively scale neurotechnology while delivering benefits across the entire ecosystem.
“Our ultimate goal is to democratize BCI technology, making it by the people, for the people,” Melhede told Benzinga. “When you’re working with something as powerful and personal as our brains, openness and transparency are absolutely essential.”
For Melhede, the stakes could not be higher. “This is about who controls the future of our minds,” he said. “Right now, we sit at a critical point in time. We can either be in control of our minds or hand it over to centralized powers that don’t have our best interests at heart.”
How A Personal Crisis Turned A Longevity Investor Into A Neuroscience Founder
Melhede’s journey into decentralized science began in 2019 after reading David Sinclair’s “Lifespan,” which ignited his passion for longevity research. He began backing longevity startups and joined VitaDAO’s early community before the project officially launched. The experience drew him further into the decentralized science movement, eventually inspiring him to create FutrDAO and CureDAO.
FutrDAO invested in Web3, climate, and longevity initiatives similar to VitaDAO. CureDAO addressed fragmented data, a critical challenge in health research since, according to Melhede, medical information sits trapped in disconnected systems, obstructing collaboration and decelerating scientific advancement.
“CureDAO’s goal was to incentivize data interoperability and maximize data sharing across patients, researchers, and other stakeholders,” Melhede told Benzinga. “This kind of scale would be able to cut research timelines as well as costs from years to months.”
Yet, watching someone struggle through trial-and-error psychiatry defined his mission with Elata: build infrastructure that delivers personalized treatments based on objective biomarkers, not symptoms alone.
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Personalizing Psychiatry Through Data
Elata's mission centers on bridging neuroscience and psychiatry using neuroimaging and psychometric data. Melhede said most treatments for brain disorders remain generalized, with decisions driven by symptoms rather than objective biomarkers.
"You can have two patients, both diagnosed with ‘depression,' but their realities are completely different," he told Benzinga. "One might suffer from severe sleep dysfunction, while another experiences depressive episodes triggered by specific life events. How can it possibly make sense for them to receive the same treatment?"
He explained that failure rates exceed 70% in some cases, leaving patients to spend years searching for solutions that only partially work. The missing element, according to Melhede, is individualized data that captures each patient's biology and lived experience. Current systems rely too heavily on surface-level observation and subjective reporting, a gap Elata calls "the last mile of innovation."
Why Traditional Biotech Fails
Conventional biotech research and development consume billions of dollars across timelines that span decades, according to data from McKinsey & Company. Melhede points to several interconnected problems explaining why over 90% of public tech spinouts collapse within five years: poor product-market alignment, insufficient market analysis, unstable business structures, inadequate marketing capabilities, technological roadblocks, and capital shortages.
Scientific teams often excel in research yet falter in bringing discoveries to market. "Most teams are built primarily by scientists who, while brilliant at science, often lack the business know-how needed to translate discoveries into successful products," Melhede told Benzinga. He added that success demands both scientific expertise and business acumen, but traditional institutions continue to reward publications and prestige over practical outcomes.
Funding decisions, he said, still favor reputation over results. "Institutional reputation, not true merit or market potential, often dictates who receives funding, and you see why so many efforts struggle," Melhede said.
Decentralized science seeks to reverse that structure, the founder added. Through tokenized funding, open collaboration, and transparent data validation, capital is directed toward projects with measurable impact, rather than those backed by elite universities. Patients and investors can directly govern and fund initiatives through blockchain-based systems, aligning incentives between creators, users, and markets.
Permissionless clinical trials are beginning to shorten research timelines and expand what gets tested. Melhede said Web3 infrastructure also weaves marketing and community engagement directly into scientific ecosystems, creating feedback loops that help researchers adjust in real time. Market signals will reach the lab immediately, no longer taking years to surface.
“It’s still early days in DeSci; we haven’t yet seen massive, multi-site trials run entirely through these frameworks,” Melhede told Benzinga. “But the signs are already clear. At Elata, we’re experiencing unprecedented benefits: faster timelines, reduced costs, transparent systems for data sharing, and a speed of execution that simply doesn’t exist in traditional institutions.”
Melhede highlights Vitarna.xyz as an example. The project focuses on gene therapy addressing multiple aging mechanisms. Conventional research institutions passed on the work, but DeSci channels provided efficient capital and community support. The project advances based on scientific rigor rather than institutional politics, operating at dramatically lower costs with transparency and open collaboration as foundational principles.
The Bitcoin Moment Coming For Scientific Research
Melhede draws a direct parallel between decentralized science and Bitcoin’s impact on traditional banking. Both represent fundamental power shifts away from centralized gatekeepers.
“Just like Bitcoin took power out of banks and gave it back to individuals, DeSci takes power out of entrenched institutions and hands it back to discovery itself,” Melhede said. “The winners are not the most prestigious labs or journals, but the best ideas that can now move forward at the speed science was always meant to operate.”
Over the next five to 10 years, he expects decentralized science to fundamentally restructure how research gets validated, financed, and distributed. Today’s academic system prioritizes institutional prestige, publication metrics, and bureaucratic gatekeeping over genuine scientific breakthroughs. The result is glacial progress, inflated costs, and misaligned incentives that cause entire research fields to grind to a halt.
“With DeSci, science flips to a permissionless framework,” Melhede told Benzinga. “Knowledge can be validated and advanced based on actual scientific merit, not solely based on the institution behind it or the journal.”
The transformation is already underway across multiple dimensions, he added, giving a few examples. Researchers are sidestepping traditional grant bureaucracies by raising funds directly from decentralized autonomous organizations and aligned communities, dramatically compressing research timelines. Academic papers are being replaced by transparent, real-time data streams where reproducibility can be verified immediately rather than languishing in peer review for years.
Scientific credibility is becoming decoupled from university pedigree, instead linking directly to verifiable contributions, Melhede told Benzinga. Token-based economic models enable researchers to monetize their discoveries while maintaining open access, aligning financial incentives with scientific advancement rather than publication politics.
Open Source As Competitive Advantage In Neurotechnology
Progress in brain-computer interface technology has long been slowed by a lack of interoperability across devices and ecosystems. Data formats, acquisition protocols, and processing pipelines often differ so widely that meaningful data sharing and model development become nearly impossible.
Melhede said Elata's open-source framework aims to remove those barriers by creating a unified ecosystem where any BCI device can both generate and access data seamlessly. "This interoperability is critical because neurotechnology needs scale," he told Benzinga. "Only with massive datasets can we build the accurate, personalized models necessary to massively increase accuracy and functionality."
Traditional neurotech, he explained, rarely connects with real-world user participation. Elata's model introduces open community engagement and transparent on-chain governance to fund high-impact experiments while rewarding contributors who invest their time and data in the ecosystem's long-term growth.
Melhede said Elata's decision to make its technology fully open source stems from a belief that transparency is the fastest path to progress. "When everything is open, anyone, from researchers to developers to entrepreneurs, can build on our project," he told Benzinga. "That way, we significantly break down barriers, avoid duplication of effort, and drive much faster innovation than any closed system could."
Elata licenses its projects under GPLv3, which ensures proper attribution and creates a shared foundation where contributors remain aligned with the company's long-term mission. "Open-source doesn't mean giving away everything for free without structure," Melhede said. "The protocol, governance, brand, and community that we build around the technology are still unique assets."
Through this layered model, $ELTA holders gain directly from the ecosystem's expansion and network effects, while open collaboration attracts top talent committed to advancing the platform.
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Inside Elata’s $ELTA Tokenomics Model
Melhede said Elata's tokenomics are built to align incentives among researchers, users, and investors so that every participant benefits as the ecosystem expands. "Researchers gain access to better, higher-quality datasets and more reliable funding streams to accelerate their work," he told Benzinga. "Patients and users benefit directly through personalized brain-computer interface experiences-whether through games, holistic health apps, or integrated Web3 apps."
The company expects demand for $ELTA to grow as platform adoption increases and new ecosystem milestones are achieved. Melhede described the token as "the lifeblood of the entire Elata ecosystem," governing core initiatives, determining project funding, and driving community participation. He said these mechanisms establish a self-sustaining loop where scientific progress, user engagement, and economic growth continuously strengthen one another.
When it comes to "owning a stake in discoveries" through tokenized science, Melhede told Benzinga that the concept is often misunderstood. He explained that many projects provide governance rights without granting participants ownership of the underlying data or research output.
"One of the things that sets us apart at Elata is that users who contribute data through our platform truly own their data, and by extension receive monetary incentives for sharing their health data," Melhede said.
He added that this approach aligns incentives in a way traditional research structures never achieved. Participants become stakeholders rather than passive subjects, sharing in the value they help create.
The distinction, Melhede said, is especially important for those skeptical of cryptocurrency. Tokenized science, in his view, represents real ownership and value-sharing from the ground up, built directly on the data users generate and the discoveries that follow.
Patient Privacy In The Age Of AI-Powered Neuroscience
Melhede told Benzinga that artificial intelligence agents could transform the research process by enabling autonomous, scalable discovery that goes far beyond human capacity. "With many more ‘minds' working in parallel and AI continuing to get smarter and more precise at complex tasks, progress will accelerate dramatically, at a fraction of the traditional cost and timeframe," he said.
Elata already employs an AI agent to manage Elata News, the platform's news site, and continues to explore automation across workflows to increase efficiency. The company plans to deepen AI integration as capabilities advance, particularly in neuroscience and psychiatry.
Melhede pointed to BioProtocol's first BioAgent, Aubrai, which raised more than $900,000 and minted over 1,000 hypotheses on-chain. He said it illustrates how autonomous agents can participate in the scientific process continuously, augmenting human creativity and rigor with machine-scale computational power.
Protecting patient privacy remains central to Elata's framework. The company stores neuroimaging and psychometric data off-chain on interplanetary file systems in a decentralized structure, Melhede told Benzinga. All data is encrypted with GNU Privacy Guard/Pretty Good Privacy key pairs before uploading to the Irys Network, allowing only authorized parties with decryption keys to access information.
Melhede said the decentralized model provides stronger safeguards against data misuse and unauthorized aggregation. Licensing flows back to individual participants through data trusts, ensuring contributors retain control and benefit directly from their health data.
Moving from open-source development to clinical trials remains challenging. The path might emerge through permissionless research experiments run on ZORP, Elata’s Onchain Research Platform. The company is also generating valuable data from users on its app ecosystem being built for BCI.
“Moving from open-source development to clinical testing is a very challenging process, which depends on scientific validation, regulatory bodies, and community involvement, so it will take time to get there,” Melhede said.
Why DeSci Chose Lisbon Over London And Berlin
Melhede organized a DeSci Sprint in Lisbon on Sept. 18 aimed at launching new projects within the decentralized science ecosystem. "Our goal was to bring together builders, scientists, and thinkers who are passionate about DeSci and provide an environment where collaboration and rapid progress can happen to drive the space forward," Melhede told Benzinga.
Lisbon has become a natural hub for this movement. The city's strong Web3 community and favorable cryptocurrency regulations have drawn global attention, especially compared with the tighter restrictions seen in other parts of Europe. Several DeSci organizations already operate from Lisbon, Melhede said, including BioProtocol, Cerebrum DAO, AthenaDAO, The Innovation Game, PsyDAO, AxonDAO, MicrobiomeDAO, and, of course, Elata.
Melhede concluded, saying that Elata's mission reaches far beyond science or technology, focusing on building the future together. "We’d love to have any aligned people join us in building this future," he said. "Whether you’re into data, engineering, research, business development, marketing, or something else, I’d love to hear from you."
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