#441: The BITCOIN Act Gains Momentum After Trump’s Victory, & More

In August, ARK Disrupt featured Senator Cynthia Lummis’ initiative¹ to introduce the BITCOIN Act²—also known as the "Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act of 2024"—which would establish³ a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR). To support the SBR, the US Treasury would safeguard the bitcoin with a decentralized network of secure storage facilities across the United States.

Donald Trump’s presidential election victory and the surge in bitcoin’s price to an all-time high have bolstered⁴ interest in the BITCOIN Act. President-elect Trump’s focus on the bold actions necessary to secure America’s economic and technology dominance includes adding bitcoin to the national reserve.

The BITCOIN Act includes a plan to acquire up to one million bitcoin over a five-year period, capping the purchases at 200,000 per year. At today’s price of ~$100,000, the program would cost ~$100 billion. The Treasury would hold the bitcoin for a minimum of 20 years and then sell them to help pay down the Federal debt. 

To fund the bitcoin purchases, the Act proposes reallocating the Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) surplus funds and adjusting the valuation of the Fed’s gold certificates ~60-fold from ~$42.2 in book value per ounce to its current ~$2,500 market price.⁵ Senator Lummis has suggested that the US consider selling a portion of its gold reserves to finance the SBR and diversify US reserves.

Other legislative moves are taking shape to support the diversification of reserves, increasing the odds that the US SBR will be approved. Pennsylvania, for example, has passed⁶ the Bitcoin Rights Bill that will create a state-level SBR, setting a bold example for other states to follow. As of November 22, Polymarket⁷ gave the Federal SBR a 33% chance of passing through the legislative process.

Shopping season is upon us, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday catalyzing the holiday gift-giving season. To assist consumers, Perplexity has launched a new shopping assistant—“Buy with Pro”⁸—that provides its pro subscribers with customized product recommendations, photos in response to visual search, and detailed information like pricing, seller information, and reviews, as illustrated in the example below. Shopping should get much easier with one-click checkout from any website, secure storage of billing and shipping details, and free shipping for every order.

Source: Perplexity.ai. 2024. Screenshots of a conversation with perplexity.ai in which the consumers asks for holiday gift ideas. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security.

To enhance its ecosystem for both businesses and consumers, Perplexity recently launched several initiatives, including a free Merchant Program enabling retailers to increase the visibility and timeliness of their product data and information. Perplexity presents unbiased, factual summaries of products through informative product cards, as shown below, highlighting key features along with pros and cons—without attempting to sway a consumer’s decisions, which should enhance transparency and trust.

Source: Perplexity.ai. 2024. Screenshot of a product card from perplexity.ai, showing a product review summary, pros and cons, and one click checkout in the form of the “buy with pro” button. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security.

It also displays AI-driven, unbiased product recommendations in intuitive product cards. While committed to objectivity, Perplexity also is exploring “sponsored questions”⁹ to increase the information flow about products and help monetize its services while enhancing consumer discovery and increasing merchant visibility without search-engine optimization (SEO). That said, AI shopping assistants will have to earn consumer trust without inundating them with sponsored content. 

Perplexity could challenge Google's business model by integrating search into the AI shopping assistant experience. Instead of sifting through link-heavy searches for products and services, Perplexity users will converse with their AI shopping assistants and receive concise, personalized answers, an important example of AI-driven productivity gains.

Autonomous science represents a transformative leap in research, enabled by the integration of AI agents and advanced robotics. A prime example is the Virtual Lab (VL). Developed by James Zou’s team at Stanford, VL employs AI agents to replicate human collaboration. In this system, a principal investigator agent directs computational biologists and immunologists to tackle complex challenges.¹⁰ Demonstrated through the rapid design of SARS-CoV-2 nanobody binders, this approach integrated tools like AlphaFold-Multimer, ESM, and Rosetta. The VL generated 92 candidates, with two showing improved binding to variants, underscoring AI’s potential to accelerate discovery.

Another illustration of autonomous science is Recursion Biosciences’ self-driving lab, powered by its proprietary LOWE LLM system.¹¹ This system automates the generation of hypotheses, the execution of experiments, and data analysis in a closed-loop framework, refining experiments dynamically based on real-time results.

Autonomous science relies on two pillars: AI agents for predictive modeling and decision-making,¹² and robotic automation for executing precise, scalable experiments. Robotic platforms enable high-throughput screening and continuous learning, creating an integrated ecosystem for innovation.

This paradigm is poised to revolutionize productivity across disciplines. By uniting computational power with experimental automation, autonomous science should unlock the potential for unprecedented discoveries, reshaping how we understand and interact with the natural world.

Decentralized Science (DeSci) combines the efficiency of autonomous science with the transformative potential of blockchain technology, unlocking new opportunities for collaboration, funding, and ownership. By integrating blockchain into systems like self-driving labs, science should become more transparent, equitable, and accessible.

A key example is Molecule, a pioneer applying DeSci principles to biotech and pharma. Molecule uses intellectual property non-fungible tokens (IP-NFTs) to decentralize the funding and ownership of research.¹³ Its community numbers 25,000 members, and it has funded 35 projects with ~$8 million.¹⁴ In its ecosystem, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) act as both the supply and demand for IP, enabling global collaboration. Molecule facilitated the creation of VitaDAO, a community-driven initiative funding longevity research. In 2021, VitaDAO issued its first IP-NFT, funding a $300,000 project on repurposing drugs for lifespan extension—marking the first on-chain coordination of research rights and intellectual property.¹⁵ VitaDAO received a $4.1 million investment from Pfizer Ventures and other institutions in January 2023.¹⁶

DeSci also is redefining collaboration. Platforms like LabDAO offer decentralized access to wet and dry labs, empowering independent scientists to perform experiments around the world.¹⁷ Contributors earn ownership stakes in DAOs, which align incentives and democratize innovation. This model bypasses traditional barriers like tech transfer offices, accelerating the translation of academic discoveries into real-world applications.

The implications are profound. Open marketplaces and programmable IP systems could foster sustainable, circular research economies. Royalties will flow back to DAO treasuries, funding future projects and creating a perpetual innovation cycle. DeSci’s decentralized infrastructure ensures that any project—not just those associated with well-funded institutions—will have access to and can leverage upon research breakthroughs.

By uniting blockchain and autonomous science, DeSci is paving the way for globally collaborative, community-driven health sciences, which could reshape the future of research and discovery.

A cornerstone of healthcare innovation, drug discovery is becoming financially unsustainable. With costs per drug now $1–2.5 billion,¹⁸ the odds of success remain staggeringly low: of the 20,000 to 30,000 compounds entering the drug discovery pipeline, only one receives FDA approval—a 99% failure rate.¹⁹ Even among medicines that reach clinical trials, only ~15% proceed to market.²⁰ To overcome these inefficiencies, we propose decentralized drug discovery—a transformative convergence of autonomous and decentralized science—unlocking a collaborative, efficient, and globally accessible framework for the future of healthcare.

A vision for decentralized drug discovery is emerging in an ecosystem much like the App Store, where researchers and organizations contribute to an open drug pipeline. Powered by AI agents and robotics, autonomous labs reduce experiment costs and timelines dramatically. Blockchain-based platforms provide transparent funding, data sharing, and IP ownership. Platforms like Molecule use intellectual property NFTs (IP-NFTs) and DAOs to connect researchers, funders, and patients in a shared innovation ecosystem.

Open-sourcing computational tools and foundation AI models is accelerating the feasibility of decentralized drug discovery. Increasingly, open-source models like Alphafold and BioNEmo by NVIDIA underscore the growing momentum for accessible innovation.²¹ This democratization of tools is lowering the barriers to participation, making decentralized drug development possible.

This model should disrupt the pharmaceutical business. Companies like Recursion could operate as cloud-based research and development (R&D) labs offering experimental platforms. Platforms like Molecule should enable decentralized collaboration through digital infrastructure and financial incentives, while clinical research organizations (CROs) focus on clinical trials in traditional frameworks.

By combining self-driving labs, open foundation models, and decentralized governance, this system would address translational research gaps. Long-neglected diseases and underfunded therapeutic areas could attract attention, thanks to global participation and shared incentives. Decentralized drug discovery could transform healthcare into a collaborative, equitable ecosystem, making this paradigm not a dream but a reality.

The British scientific journal Nature recently dedicated 40 papers to the inaugural issue of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), underscoring its significance as the most transformative biological project since the Human Genome Project began in 1990.²² The HCA’s goal is to map every cell type in the human body, providing a foundational understanding of how cells function in health and disease.

Powered by single-cell sequencing, the HCA has cataloged 62 million cells, with 10x Genomics leading the way. The vision goes far beyond millions, as the HCA aims to scale to billions and eventually trillions of the more than 30 trillion cells in the human body.²³

According to our research, single-cell genomics follows Wright’s Law, with costs decreasing predictably as scale increases. In September, we made a forecast that, when the price per experiment dropped from $0.05 to $0.01, demand for single cell sequencing would surge to trillions of cells, as shown in the chart below. Remarkably, just months after we made this projection, 10x Genomics announced a pricing structure that hit this threshold, signaling in our view the beginning of trillion-cell experiments.

What does this breakthrough mean for medicine? Mapping trillions of cells will unlock the ability to create a "virtual cell"²⁴—a predictive and foundational model for biology that will transform drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized therapies.²⁵ The HCA is not only a map of human biology, but also a transformative framework poised to reshape healthcare. As technology advances and costs drop, the era of trillion-cell profiling will redefine what is possible in understanding and improving human health.

Source: ARK Investment Management LLC, 2024. This ARK analysis draws on a range of external data sources as of November 22, 2024, which may be provided upon request. For informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any particular security.