🌐About DecentraLabs
Decentralizing access to science, one lab at a time.
Welcome to DecentraLabs: an open-source, community-driven initiative working to reshape how online laboratories are accessed, shared, and sustained across the globe. We leverage blockchain, smart contracts, and open protocols to build the future of remote experimentation for education, research, and innovation.
🧪 "Imagine a world where anyone, anywhere, can access a real lab in seconds. We're building that world."
🚀 What We’re Building
DecentraLabs is more than just code; it's an ecosystem.
⚙️ Smart Contracts — For decentralized lab registration, reservation, and payment.
🧠 $LAB Token — A fungible token that fuels incentives and sustainability.
🖥️ Marketplace dApp — A decentralized web application to discover and book online labs.
🔐 Hybrid Authentication — Support for both crypto wallets and federated institutional SSO (e.g., eduGAIN).
🌍 Access Control Integration Service — Seamlessly connect smart lab platforms to the decentralized protocol.
📖 Specifications, Docs & Guides — So anyone can contribute, replicate, or extend.
All under a fully open-source license, free to use, build upon, and remix.
🌱 Why It Matters
For 20+ years, online laboratories (OLs) have existed but few have survived. Why?
❌ Lack of incentives ❌ Reduced visibility ❌ Lack of interoperability ❌ Limited discoverability ❌ Centralized gatekeepers ❌ No reliability track records ❌ Sustainability problems
We're solving this by building a trustless, transparent, and tokenized ecosystem where:
✔️ Institutions get rewarded for sharing their labs 🎓 ✔️ Labs have a verifiable performance and reliability track record 🔎 ✔️ Students and researchers get global, verifiable access 🌐 ✔️ Everyone benefits from a fair, open, and decentralized model 🔁
Not convinced yet? See what students, researchers, teachers, lab technicians and lab equipment manufacturers and sellers all over the world have to say about the topic:
Would you like your voice to be heard too? You are welcome to fill the surveys yourself:
📂 Key Repositories
🔗 Explore our work:
Smart Contracts— Solidity contracts (ERC-2535 proxy, ERC-721 NFTs, EIP-809 Reservations, ERC-20 $LAB).Smart Contract Specifications— Formal definitions and workflows.Lab Metadata— Specification for the tokenized labs metadata.Tokenomics— $LAB tokenomics to fuel our ecosystem.Marketplace dApp— The front-end to access, book, list and manage labs.Blockchain Services— Dockerized Java Spring service for authentication/authorization and smart contract interactions.Lab Gateway— Docker container that lab providers can deploy in seconds on any computer to function as a gateway / access system to their lab resources. Comes in two versions: lite and full (which includes the blockchain services).Lab App Control— A Windows-based daemon service for managing the open/close state of the desktop applications that provide the interface for controlling a lab setup.
Want to contribute? Check our issues or open a discussion!
🤝 Join the Movement
🛡 License
All our work is released under the GPL 3.0 License because we believe in freedom, transparency, and collaboration.
DecentraLabs is proudly led by Nebulous Systems, UNED and Blockchain@UBC with support from the NGI Sargasso Programme and an international network of educators, researchers, and technologists.
🌍 Let’s decentralize the world of science experimentation. Together. 💫
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