Three months in and the ecosystem is moving. A product launched, a rebrand shipped, a new initiative took its first applications, and a platform that’s been years in the making is now free to try. Here’s everything that happened across the ValleyDAO portfolio in Q1 2026.
We started 2026 with a clear goal: stop talking about what DeSci could do and keep showing what it already does. That meant shipping things, funding things, and opening up tools that had been locked behind waitlists. Q1 delivered on all of that.
This is the one we have been building toward since the Hempy project first launched. In March 2026, the limited edition Hempy hoodie went live. What makes this more than a product drop is what it represents. The research that made this hoodie possible started in a lab at the Austrian Centre for Industrial Biotechnology with Prof. Georg Gübitz. Years of enzyme work to break down lignin, the compound that makes raw hemp fiber stiff and unwearable, produced a fiber that is genuinely soft, breathable, and durable.
The hoodie is also the first proof that ValleyDAO’s model can move from science to product. Every purchase comes with 10,000 $HEMPY tokens, so buyers hold a stake in what the project does next.
❗ We have prepared discounts for our community. $GROW token holders get 15% off and $HEMPY token holders get 20% off by verifying their holdings. These discounts cannot be combined.
The Hempy hoodie is available now at https://hoodie.hempy.science
On the research side, work is continuing at full pace. The enzyme treatment process is being scaled up, the first spinning trial is being prepared, and the first patent is in progress. The science behind the hoodie is not a finished chapter. It is the beginning of a much bigger commercial story for hemp textiles.
The project formerly known as $FORGE has a new name, a new identity, and a new website. Biomined launched at https://biomined.xyz this quarter, and it is a significant step forward for how this research reaches the world.
The mission has not changed. Biomined uses microbial processes to extract critical metals from electronic waste. The world generates around 62 million tonnes of e-waste every year, and sitting inside that waste is an estimated $91 billion worth of recoverable metals including copper, zinc, nickel, and cobalt. Traditional mining is increasingly energy-intensive as ore grades decline globally. Biomined is building the biological alternative.
The research is being conducted with CSIRO, led by Dr. Anna Kaksonen and Dr. Ka Yu Cheng, who bring over 30 years of combined expertise in biomining and biohydrometallurgy. The total raise facilitated by ValleyDAO is $210,000. Early tests have shown high extraction efficiencies under mild conditions with encouraging early economics.
The $FORGE token ticker stays as the onchain participation token for the project. The new Biomined brand is what you will see facing the world going forward, with a website, communications, and identity that reflects how far the project has come.
CA: 0xfbaD5BE3A505889df2Aa189580E3bD36118Bf4D8
We kicked off 2026 with a visit to the TATTVA lab in January, filming fresh content and getting a firsthand look at where the project stands. What we found was a team doing something genuinely rare.
Tattva’s core challenge this year is scaling a solid-state cyanobacterial process for producing Stromate, their carbon-negative biomineral. Almost no prior research exists on this at scale, which means the team is not adapting someone else’s playbook. They are inventing new equipment, new parameters, and new methods as they go. That is what frontier DeSci looks like in practice: not a clean execution of known science, but figuring out something that has never been done before.
Stromate locks in roughly one tonne of CO2 for every 4m3 produced, it is fire-safe to Euroclass A1 standard, and it has the potential to replace or work alongside concrete, foam insulation, glass, and bricks in construction. Tattva is already working with Tata Steel and has secured over 1.3 million euros in grants and venture funding.
Phlo is now available for free. If you have been watching the platform develop and wondering when you can get in, that time is now. You can try it out at phlo.bio with no cost for the next few months before we move to paid subscriptions.
Phlo is built for researchers and biotech founders who are trying to move their work toward commercialisation. It helps you identify funding opportunities, run AI-powered literature reviews, build business cases, and de-risk your technology through tools like ARI, our AI research assistant that remembers every decision and analysis you have made on a project. The goal is to cut the time between idea and investable plan from months to hours.
Alongside the free access, we launched fortnightly webinars starting January 2026. Every other Thursday at 6:30pm CET, the team runs a live session demonstrating what Phlo can do and walking users through how to get the most out of it. If you are a researcher, founder, or builder working on anything in biotech or climate science, these sessions are worth showing up to.
Phlo webinars run every other Thursday at 6:30pm CET. Free to join. Register at https://luma.com/k3d9nkw2. Try Phlo free at https://phlo.valleydao.bio.
Our co-founder Morgan was in the infamous Bay Area in March for the OpenAI Founder’s Day. Whilst there, he stayed in the Biopunk Hacker House (big thank you to Elliot Roth) which ensured his schedule was always full mingling with fellow founders, investors and his very first Shabbat!
The biggest takeaway for Phlo was that trust in AI is increasing and the primitives are rapidly improving which means firstly, that we’ve got our work cut out for us to ensure we’re always integrating the state-of-the-art, but also that the capabilities reach far beyond what we ever imagined when we started building the platform. This means Phlo is about to get turbocharged with autonomous agents, and more custom workflows to move from ‘insightful sparring partner’ to ‘high-value AI founding member’.
Keep your eyes peeled for significant updates in the coming weeks as we start to ship version 2!
One of the things we are most excited about from Q1 is something that did not come from inside the portfolio. It came from a question: what happens before a project is ready for ValleyDAO-scale funding? Who backs the experiment that is still just a hypothesis in a community lab?
Primordia is our answer to that. Launched in Q1 2026 as a collaboration between ValleyDAO and Biopunk Labs, Primordia is a microgrants programme for early-stage biology experiments run in community labs and other compliant spaces. Grants go up to $3,000 per project. No institutional affiliation required. Anyone with a concrete experiment and a safe place to run it can apply.
The name comes from biology itself. A primordium is an organ or tissue in its earliest stage of development. That is exactly what this programme funds: the very beginning of something. Real Vegan Cheese started in a community lab in San Francisco. Opentrons was prototyped at Genspace in New York. The Open Insulin Project came out of Counter Culture Labs in Oakland. Primordia exists to seed the next wave of projects like those.
The first cohort deadline closed on March 31, 2026. Applications for future cohorts will open on a rolling basis. Learn more and apply at primordiagrants.com. Primordia is a collaboration between ValleyDAO and Biopunk Labs.
Grantees commit to sharing lab notes and results publicly throughout the project, and each cohort closes with a public showcase. If you want to support the programme and help fund more experiments, you can do that at primordiagrants.com/fund-experiments starting from $1 a month.
The podcast crossed 1,000 active listeners across all major platforms by the end of 2025, with Apple Podcasts and Spotify leading the numbers. Q1 2026 continues with new episodes covering the DeSci ecosystem, the projects in our portfolio, and the builders and researchers working at the frontier of climate biotech.
If you have not listened yet, search Proof of DeSci wherever you get your podcasts and start with any episode that catches your eye. Every one of them makes the case that DeSci is not a concept. It is a working model.
Proof of DeSci by ValleyDAO is now streaming live across all major platforms:
👉 Spotify
👉 Apple Music
👉 Podcast Index
👉 Podcast Addict
👉 Podchaser
👉 Pocket Casts
👉 Deezer
👉 Player FM
👉 Castbox
Three months in and the portfolio is moving in every direction at once. A product is in people’s hands. A rebrand is live. A new programme is funding the next generation of experiments. A platform that the team has spent years building is now free for anyone to try.
This is what the model looks like when it works. Not a single big bet but a whole ecosystem of bets, each one at a different stage, each one building toward the same thing: a world where climate-positive biotech gets funded, built, and deployed faster than the traditional system ever allowed.
If you hold $GROW tokens, you are already part of this. If you want to get involved, whether as a researcher, a builder, or a supporter, there is a place for you. Reach out, join the Discord, try Phlo, or just follow along as Q2 gets underway.
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