Case study · Cerebrum DAO · Head content strategist
Making decentralised science comprehensible.
Cerebrum DAO sources, funds and translates early-stage neuroscience that institutions won't touch: the research the industry calls the Valley of Death. It funds that work through tokenised IP and lets the community vote on what gets backed. My job was to make a new model make sense to scientists, token holders and ordinary people with a brain they'd like to keep.
The problem
Everything about Cerebrum is hard 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's made and votes on what gets funded next. The audience is three audiences at once: researchers who need to trust the due diligence, token holders who need to understand what they own, and consumers who want a better brain and have never heard the word "DAO".
Most crypto writing fails those readers by hiding behind jargon. Most science writing fails them by assuming nobody cares. Cerebrum needed both to be wrong.
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 fifteen years in development at the University of Washington, and for Cerebrum Cortex, a brain-health assessment built on Harvard's McCance Brain Care Score. No crypto wallet required, which the copy had to make obvious.
- Community. Contributor newsletters and governance explainers so that 115 DAO members and 5,000-plus subscribers could follow votes, milestones and science without a biology degree or a block explorer.
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.
Content didn't do that on its own; the science team and the community did. But none of it works if people can't understand what they're being asked to back, 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 brilliant ideas explained badly. The projects that raise, retain and ship are the ones a stranger can understand in a paragraph. That's a writing problem, and it's the one I like most.