Why a FIA 2 Race in Monaco Became Crypto’s Best “Real-World Asset” Demo
- Johnston Chen
- May 29
- 3 min read
Updated: May 29
PRESS RELEASE
Monte Carlo, Monaco – 29th May 2025
Monaco already feels like something out of a dream: giant yachts instead of grandstands, shiny race cars reflecting in luxury shop windows, and a racetrack that’s more like a maze of chances than a normal road. Last weekend the scene doubled as a live-fire experiment for the partnership between OpenDeSci and FIA Formula 2 rookie Max Esterson.
It was the first time our open-science builders walked straight out of the machine room and into a pit-lane garage—and the results turned a race weekend into a crypto use-case you could smell, hear, and put on-chain.
A Partnership Forged in Data, Not Decals
Max is no ordinary sponsorship target. He owns pre-seed token rights in the OpenDeSci network, meaning his personal performance and our protocol growth move the same price graph. He also happens to be one of the grid’s most analytics-driven drivers, having climbed from iRacing leaderboards in sim-racing to the real-world F2 circus with Milan-based Trident Motorsport. On our side, OpenDeSci exists to make research data open, verifiable, and rewardable.
Motorsport offers an abundance of data—G-forces, throttle and brake traces, steering inputs—all captured at up to 300 Hz and ready to be analysed. The overlap with our work was obvious, so we put it to the test on the most challenging track in Europe: Monaco.
Qualifying: Hypotheses Under Pressure
Friday’s split-group qualifying ended in a photo finish: Alexander Dunne grabbed pole by just 0.003 seconds over Victor Martins. Max was mired in traffic and wound up midfield, but the session did exactly what we needed—it verified a new brake-release model we had trained on sim data.
Sprint Race: Points May Be Scarce, Data Is Plentiful
Saturday’s sprint on Monaco’s narrow streets offered little room for overtaking, but Kush Maini’s lights-to-flag victory proved the reverse-grid format can still produce drama. Max launched cleanly, picked off a couple of rivals before ending the lap at La Rascasse, and finished up four spots in P13—still outside the points but with a clear data stream. Every lap we logged live data such as steering torque and other vehicle telemetry, then mirrored the raw files to IPFS with a blockchain time-stamp. Anyone in our community can now replay his stint as if it were a video game replay, except the numbers are real human physiology.
Feature Race: Chaos, Red Flags, and a Natural Experiment
Sunday’s feature race turned into an unplanned laboratory session. A first-corner pile-up between Dunne and Martins triggered an eleven-car crash and an immediate red flag, eliminating more than half the field and forcing a restart under a 30-minute time cap . Max, caught in the accordion effect at Sainte-Dévote, returned to the pits with a damaged front wing and a cockpit full of valuable telemetry—heart-rate spikes, radio comms, and sector times under pressure. Jak Crawford eventually emerged as the winner in a twice-stopped thriller, but our main takeaway was the richness of “edge-case” data: how a driver responds when a 42-lap race suddenly turns into crisis management.
Why It Matters Beyond Racing
Traditional sponsorships are one-way cash transfers followed by logo placement. Our model creates circular incentives. Because Max holds tokens, he benefits when OpenDeSci’s credibility and treasury value increase. Because our DAO receives richer datasets, we write better research software, which in turn attracts new scientists and liquidity. Every side is both contributor and shareholder—the textbook definition of aligned incentives.
For the wider crypto world, the lesson is that “real-world asset” does not have to mean mortgages or container ships. It can be the nanosecond-level telemetry of a racing car, the hormone fluctuation of its driver, or the minute-by-minute pressure telemetry of a C4 compound Pirelli tyre. If you can hash it, you can own it, and if you can own it, you can build markets and grants around it.
Next Stop: Barcelona, 30 May – 1 June
We leave Monaco with no championship points for Max but an extraordinary trove of open data and a proof-of-concept that a DAO and a driver can push each other forward. In Barcelona we’ll add ultrasonic tyre-wear sensors and open a public bounty board: decode the data, publish your findings, and you’ll earn tokens straight from the race weekend’s revenue pool.
Crypto often struggles to tell stories that feel tangible. A 280 km/h single-seater scraping past the harbour wall is about as tangible as it gets. See you in Catalunya—on track, on chain, and out in the open.
For inquiries, please contact:
OpenDeSci Communications
About OpenDeSci:
OpenDeSci is building the decentralized stack for science—combining blockchain, AI, and Web3 tools to make research faster, fairer, and more accessible. From peer review to funding and publishing, OpenDeSci is reimagining how knowledge is created and shared. Learn more at opendesci.org.
Beta Testing for Selected Users – Join the Waitlist Now: app.opendesci.org
Comments