From Vitalik Buterin to Balaji Srinivasan, Brian Armstrong and Roger Ver, it seems that no sooner have you become a crypto billionaire than you’re off trying to discover the secret to immortality.
In early 2020, when the pandemic made everyone obsessed with mortality, Buterin wrote: “Can I suggest anti-aging research? Aging is a humanitarian disaster that kills as many people as WW2 every two years… Let’s end it.”
He put his money where his mouth is. Buterin donated 46 trillion SHIB the following year to the Future of Life Institute — worth $665.8 million — and has also donated many millions more to SENS Research Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation.
Bitcoin OG Roger Ver intends to undergo cryogenic preservation when he dies; Tron founder Justin Sun donated $51 million to the Longevity Prize; and Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson invested $100 million in a clinic in Wyoming that plans to launch a trial evaluating a combined stem cell and hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy.
Roger Ver spoke to Magazine about cryogenics in 2021.
Hoskinson has volunteered to be the first test subject.
“If my hypothesis is right, we can reverse ageing by over 10 years,” Hoskinson told DL News. “I’m going to be the first guy, the very first guy. I’m getting fat and old and it would be nice to live a little longer and be healthier.”
But what exactly is the link between magic-internet-money enthusiasts and the war on aging? The truth turns out to be deeper and weirder than you might expect.
Longevity is one problem the crypto-rich can’t yet solve
Benji Leibowitz, founder of the longevity research token platform Pump.science, tells Magazine it’s only natural for crypto millionaires to set their sights on one problem their wealth can’t yet buy a solution to.
“A lot of us start off trying to solve the money problem, and then when people solve that and resources are no longer a scarcity, then they realize that time is now their scarce resource, and so they want to try to trade their financial resources for time,” he says.
“Crypto is fairly audacious. And so, I think it takes an audacious phenotype to think that you can beat death… And to just like [think], you can engineer your way out of anything.”
“I think it’s some combination of this Wild West attitude combined with infinite resources and scarce time,” he concludes.
Vitalik Buterin, Bryan Johnson and Balaji Srinivasan at the Network School. (X)
Former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan certainly resembles that remark and has made longevity an essential strand of his audacious Network School program, with help from Don’t Die multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson.
Johnson told Magazine late last year that if he hadn’t become obsessed with eliminating aging, he would have been all in on crypto. “There’s a reality where my entire life is crypto,” he said, although even he wasn’t sure why the two fields were linked.
“I’m not sure I entirely understand either,” he said. “I mean, the connection seems like they’re parallel tracks that if you’re into one, you’re kind of into the other.
“Bitcoin fundamentally rejects inflation, and I fundamentally reject aging. We basically accept these slow boil deaths, and we both reject the slow boil death.”
Bryan Johnson told Magazine he loved crypto and longevity.
Brian Armstrong allocates 2% of Coinbase shares to longevity
Back in 2022, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced plans to spend 2% of his stake in the listed exchange to fund longevity research. He co-founded New Limit the following year, which aims to radically extend lifespan.
“Longevity feels like it’s tractable,” he said in January this year. “Someone could really make a breakthrough here, or many people, in the next ten years. It’s not like ‘oh we want to do time travel,’ pie in the sky, too far in the future. This is something hard but tractable. And that’s in the sweet spot of something that’s worth working on. You want to be early but right.”
He also made a sizable donation to the Dog Aging Project, which is running clinical trials to see if Rapamycin can slow aging in dogs. Co-director Matt Kaeberlein says he spoke with Armstrong many times in the lead-up to the donation.
“Brian is obviously a brilliant guy but also very thoughtful,” he says. New Limit is “focused on epigenetic reprogramming … so I know it’s something that he’s deeply interested in and has put a significant portion of his own resources towards.”
Kaeberlein is a highly respected longevity researcher who has published more than 200 scientific papers. He’s also the founder of health optimization tech company Optispan and the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington.
Source: @NiklasAnzinger
Over the past five years, he says he’s noticed more funds flowing into longevity research from the crypto community but notes tech billionaire Jeff Bezos also invested in regenerative medicine company Altos in 2021, and Google spent $1.5 billion setting up the California Life Company (Calico).
“I think there is a natural sort of connection between the tech community, crypto community and the longevity community,” he says, describing them all as “big thinkers, people who tend to think outside the box and maybe even rebel a little bit against traditional approaches.”
Leibowitz suggested that some tech people see aging as just another engineering problem that can be fixed. But while Kaeberlein says aging is probably “the unsolved problem” in human health — it’s a lot trickier than many expect.
“You do see people with an engineering mindset come into aging biology with that sort of perspective, and then they get into the science, and they realize it’s way more complicated than it seems like from the outside, and it’s tough to engineer your way around aging,” he says.
“But who knows, maybe if we learn enough, we can get there.”
Crypto to the rescue as longevity research is poorly funded
Dr. Max Unfried, research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Center for Healthy Longevity, tells Magazine Big Tech and crypto donations give the misleading impression that longevity research is well-funded. But, in fact, most funding is allocated toward curing diseases rather than attempting to extend lifespan.
For example, in the US, the National Cancer Institute’s budget is around 20 times higher than the funding directed to Aging Biology research at the National Institute of Aging.
“There’s a perspective of aging (research) by a lot of people, (that) a lot of money should be there,” he says, adding that’s far from the reality. “And I think that’s why crypto comes in, where you actually can get some money from crypto for research that would not get money by traditional routes.”
Numerous DAOs have stepped in to help fund experimental research, often with the promise of tokenizing the resulting intellectual property. Unfried is a former member of VitaDAO, which has 10,000 members and helps fund longevity research and tokenize treatments.
Grants by VitaDAO. (VitaDAO)
Srinivasan and Armstrong both donated to VitaDAO, which also has links to the longevity token trading platforms Molecule and Pump.science.
There are also more narrowly focused groups like HydraDAO (research into biological replacement parts), CryoDAO (cryogenics), BiohackerDAO (life extension hacking) and Rejuve.ai (which uses crypto to incentivize crowdsourced health data.)
None of these projects splash around big money in crypto terms, with VitaDAO’s treasury holding around $6 million in liquid assets. It has funded around 24 research projects to date with $4.2 million.
But in the underfunded longevity research space, where half of scientists spend 25%–50% of their time chasing grants, that’s a meaningful amount of money, says Unfried.
“The few millions in crypto money terms is actually a comparatively large percentage, right? Especially if you want to do more moonshot research.”
And developing a new longevity drug really is a moonshot. As of early 2025, there are no drugs approved by the FDA to specifically treat aging, though some existing FDA-approved treatments have shown promise in trials. They include Metformin, Rapamycin and the weight loss drug Semaglutide (also known as Ozempic, Wegovy).
Read also
Features
What do crypto market makers actually do? Liquidity, or manipulation
Features
State of Play: India’s Cryptocurrency Industry Prepares For A Billion Users
Crypto’s hacker mindset leads to longevity biohacking
Co-lead of the Web3 pod at VitaDAO, Alex Miloski believes the hacker mindset can lead some crypto people to become interested in accelerating biotech.
“The longevity space is right in the middle of that because it is actually trying to almost hack biology right? Because you are not supposed to not age. So, I think that hacker mindset might play a role,” he says.
“It’s an area that has been underfunded or under-appreciated, and it’s essentially trying to disrupt the entire healthcare system as well. If we solve aging, then the entire healthcare system will look a lot different. So, I think there is some intersection between what crypto is trying to do for finance and what [we’re] trying to do for healthcare.”
One DAO that takes the longevity hacking approach literally is BiohackerDAO. It was founded early last year after a group of biohackers met at the Vitalia longevity pop-up city in Honduras.
Founding steward Mgoes says the community ranges in age from early 20s to late 60s, with many working in crypto, tech or health startups.
BiohackerDAO’s Mgoes spent a week learning from Bryan Johnson. (Mgoes/X)
They’re “enthusiasts about Biohacking, cell enhancement and just kind of like spending time and money and resources in their free time to self-experiment and measure their own biomarkers — kind of like Bryan Johnson is doing, but at a less [high] spending scale.”
In November, the DAO raised $1.3 million on Juicebox, with members discussing and voting on what experiments and projects they wished to support. Research on the site so far has looked at whether intranasal insulin can improve cognitive ability and how EMF radiation impacts sleep. In December, the DAO launched Intra, which it calls the “world’s first tokenized biomarker data marketplace” to trade fitness tracker data.
The recently launched Intra platform. (Intra.so)
Biohacking your way to longevity or immortality
Mgoes says he’s thought a lot about the reasons for the crossover between crypto and longevity communities.
“Crypto people are very tech savvy, and longevity or biohacking is basically just technology applied to biology, to the human body. It’s probably one of the biggest untapped, or undertapped, frontiers of technology that we have,” he says.
The biohacker believes crypto’s libertarian ethos extends to “self-autonomy over your own body so you can decide what substances you take” as well as rethinking problems from a fresh perspective.
“These people also have a mindset that often goes against established systems,” he says.
“Like, let’s forget about our conception of healthcare and also our conception of human limitations, such as our lifespans. And let’s just tackle this idea of mortality and decay of our bodies from first principles.”
Some of these ideas stray into the arena of “transhumanism,” which is a philosophical and intellectual movement that seeks to use tech to help humanity transcend its current biological limitations. Mgoes says that “guiding, shaping, directing, even accelerating human evolution … Those are very key fields particularly in transhumanism, and that’s something that we, inside BiohackerDAO, vibe with very, very much.”
Read also
Features
You Say You Want a Revolution: What Blockchain Can Learn from One Man’s Attempt to Save the World
Features
Get your money back: The weird world of crypto litigation
Transhumanists, crypto and longevity
One of the best-known transhumanists in crypto is SingularityNet founder Ben Goertzel, who popularized the term “artificial general intelligence.” The project’s Beneficial AGI conference in Panama last year featured a range of other famous transhumanists, including Venezuelan futurist José Cordeiro.
He believes AI will help bring about Longevity Escape Velocity by 2030 — that’s a hypothetical point at which medical science is able to extend lifespan by more than one year, for every year we age. (It was also one of the most popular Magazine stories of 2024.)
Cordeiro, bottom right, believes in longevity escape velocity. (LongevityNow, X)
Cordeiro tells Magazine the link between the crypto and longevity communities seems pretty simple to him. “I believe that crypto people are very futuristic minded, and so they get interested over time in all subjects about the future, and that includes longevity and obviously living forever… young,” he says.
Transhumanism can often make a lot of ordinary people quite uncomfortable — especially with its more speculative, science-fiction-like ideas.
The more traditional longevity academic Kaeberlein says he doesn’t have any objection to transhumanism or “what most people would consider fringe elements of the longevity space.” However, he warns against overstating progress in the field.
“I think it can be detrimental when it is talked about in a non-scientific way,” he says. “There’s nothing about biology that tells us it’s impossible to stop aging or even reverse aging. It’s just we haven’t done it yet. And I think anybody who really understands the science, and is being honest about it, would have to agree we seem like we’re pretty far away from that.”
From his perspective, talking about extending the human lifespan by 500 years as if it were an imminent possibility downplays the significance of the much more realistic achievements we’re likely to see.
“We’re not close to 500 years. I think we’re pretty close to 20 years. And so that’s my concern — that it can diminish the impact,” he says.
Subscribe
The most engaging reads in blockchain. Delivered once a
week.
Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.
Follow the author @andrewfenton
