# How it works #### 1. **Create a Lab** Mint a Lab NFT and receive a sovereign onchain wallet — your permanent research identity. The Lab belongs to you, not an institution. When you leave a university or change roles, it comes with you. There are no prerequisites: you don't need existing IP, datasets, or funding to get started. Just create a Lab. Unlike the traditional path — where researchers must first secure funding, then file patents, then negotiate licenses — the Onchain Lab inverts the sequence. You begin with an identity and build from there. Early-stage projects with just a hypothesis, a community, or preliminary data have the same entry point as established research programs. The Lab is gasless to create (transaction fees are sponsored), so there is no financial barrier to entry. From the moment it's minted, it can hold assets, store data, interact with DeFi protocols, and accumulate a verifiable track record. #### **2. Research & Store Data** Upload datasets, protocols, images, and results directly to your Lab. Files are encrypted and stored on decentralized infrastructure with content identifiers recorded onchain, creating an immutable provenance trail. Every version is tracked — negative results, intermediate datasets, and methodological notes all become part of the Lab's permanent history. Set access per file — public, token-gated, agent-only, or private. This means you can share raw data publicly to build credibility, gate premium datasets behind IP token ownership, or keep sensitive pre-publication results private until you're ready. Your Lab's data room is also accessible via the Labs API, so agents, partners, and integrations can read and write to it programmatically. This is a fundamental shift from how scientific data works today. Instead of data sitting in institutional silos, it becomes a live, queryable asset that appreciates in value as research progresses. Investors can evaluate a Lab's data footprint. Collaborators can build on prior work. AI agents can operate on it continuously. #### **3. Register your IP** When research is ready to formalize, mint an IP-NFT into your Lab. The IP-NFT represents ownership of intellectual property — anchored to a legal agreement that defines the rights included. It lives in your Lab's wallet. You own it. No technology transfer office taking a cut before you've started. This matters commercially because IP registration is traditionally slow, expensive, and controlled by institutions. On Molecule, it's a transaction. The IP-NFT can represent anything from a drug candidate to a dataset to a research methodology — and once minted, it becomes a composable onchain asset that can be licensed, fractionalized, sold, or used as collateral. AI agents can also initiate IP registration when they detect novel findings — with your approval or autonomously, depending on permissions. #### **4. Tokenize & Fundraising** Turn IP into liquid capital. Fractionalize your IP-NFT into tradeable IP Tokens (IPTs) and run a crowdsale. Communities, DAOs, and individuals fund research in exchange for ownership stakes. All funds flow directly into your Lab's treasury — tracked, transparent, and under your control. This is where the illiquid-to-liquid transformation happens. Traditional scientific IP sits locked in legal structures for years — unpriced, untradeable, and inaccessible to most investors. Tokenization creates immediate price discovery, secondary market liquidity, and shared ownership. An early-stage drug compound that would typically take years to reach any financial exit now has a live market from day one. IP Token holders don't just get financial exposure — they get access. Token-gated data rooms, governance rights over research direction, and priority access to licensing deals create a community of aligned stakeholders around every project. Alternative funding paths include licensing IP directly for upfront or royalty payments, selling the IP-NFT outright via OTC swap, or receiving streaming payments tied to milestones. Smart contracts automate royalty distributions, revenue sharing, and treasury management — removing intermediaries and reducing the cost of capital. #### **5.** Run Autonomous Research With an authorized agent and a funded treasury, your Lab can run research continuously. Molecule is integrating BioAgents — an AI scientist framework that runs specialized agents for literature search, data analysis, hypothesis generation, and reflection. The agent reads from your Lab's data room via the Labs API, performs analysis, and writes findings back as versioned records. Every output gets a CID and a permanent onchain reference. Agent outputs become new data in the Lab — feeding the next cycle of analysis. This creates a compounding research loop: data goes in, agents analyze it, new findings are recorded, IP is registered, funding flows in, agents run more experiments. The Lab continuously accumulates value whether the researcher is actively working or not. You steer direction. The agent handles execution. Labs support two modes — Fully Autonomous, where agents run independently within safety boundaries, and Human-Directed, where agents assist while you retain strategic control. The choice is recorded onchain and visible to all stakeholders. The treasury funds agent compute directly, so there is no separate billing layer. Research costs, data acquisition, and compute are all transparent line items in the Lab's onchain history. #### **6. Build a Track Record** Every action is recorded onchain: data uploads, funding events, agent operations, IP registrations, licensing deals. The Lab accumulates a verifiable history that follows it permanently. Reputation accrues to the Lab itself — not to a CV, not to an institution. This has direct commercial implications. Investors can perform due diligence by inspecting a Lab's onchain footprint — how much data has been generated, how many experiments run, what IP has been registered, how funding was deployed. It replaces the opaque, fragmented due diligence process in traditional biotech with a transparent, auditable record. Labs that demonstrate consistent research progress, growing data rooms, and responsible treasury management build credible track records that attract more funding, better collaborators, and licensing interest — creating a flywheel effect. #### **7. Transfer, Merge or Compose** Because the Lab is an NFT, everything it holds can be transferred in a single transaction — data, IP, tokens, treasury, history. This simplifies what would traditionally be a complex M\&A or technology transfer process into a single onchain action. Sell your Lab to a pharmaceutical company. Pass it to a successor researcher. Merge it into a DAO. Nest it under a parent Lab to model multi-phase research programs. Labs can own other Labs, creating hierarchical structures that map to how research actually works — umbrella programs with multiple investigation lines, each with their own data, IP, and funding. This composability extends to DeFi. A Lab's treasury can deploy funds into yield-generating protocols to self-fund ongoing research. IP Tokens can be used as collateral. Licensing revenue can be automatically split between stakeholders via programmable smart contracts. The Lab isn't just a research container — it's a programmable financial primitive for science. #### **8. User Journey** Researchers own Labs. Labs own IP. Agents accelerate the cycle. Capital flows in through tokenized ownership, findings compound through autonomous research, and value accrues to the people doing the work — not the institutions gatekeeping it. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.molecule.xyz/introduction/how-it-works.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.