The Founders
From Ideation to Revolution
Two scientists who saw the future of research — and spent a decade building it. From the first brainstorms in 2015 to the current state of the art.
PD Dr. med. Sönke Bartling
Founder, Blockchain for Science
A radiologist, full-stack developer, and open science pioneer. Sönke bridged medical imaging research with blockchain technology years before anyone thought to combine them. As a German board-certified radiologist with experience across 25 clinical setups in Germany, Switzerland, and the USA, he brings deep domain expertise to the science reform movement.
He co-edited “Opening Science” with Sascha Friesike (Springer Nature's most downloaded open access book), published the first academic paper on blockchain for science in 2016, and founded the Blockchain for Science think tank in Berlin. His work at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and as Section Head of Translational Medicine at Mannheim University Hospital grounds his vision in real-world research practice.
Now he's combining a decade of DeSci experience with AI to build the next generation of scientific infrastructure.
Dr. Martin Etzrodt
Co-Founder, Blockchain for Science
An immunologist and chemist trained in Munich, Heidelberg, Lausanne, and Boston. Martin's postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich on stem cell differentiation and single-cell signaling gave him firsthand experience with the limitations of scientific communication and incentive structures.
In late 2016, he began exploring the decentralized web as a means to fix what's broken in science. As principal researcher at the AKASHA Foundation, he builds Web3 social networks and researches how blockchain principles — staking, crowdsourcing, prediction markets — can fundamentally reorganize how science operates.
A companion from the very first ideation through every conference, publication, and pivot. Martin co-authored key papers on unchaining collective intelligence for science and co-organized every major BFS event from 2017 to present.