Harvard geneticist George Church Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

Cryptocurrency in exchange for your genetic data! Sounds a bit like a scam, but it’s the premise behind a new company founded by a leading geneticist. Nebula Genomics says it plans to sequence your genome for under $1,000, give you insights about it, secure it using a blockchain, and allow you to do whatever you want with the data.

Nebula is the brainchild of geneticist George Church, PhD student Dennis Grishin, and graduate Kamal Obbad, all from Harvard. Mirza Cifric, CEO of Veritas Genetics, which offers a genome-sequencing service for $999, is a founding advisor.

When you pay to take a DNA test—through 23andMe, Helix, or Ancestry.com, for example—the company that does the testing can sell your genetic data to third parties with your consent. But you don't get a cut of that profit. Nebula wants to sequence people’s entire genomes and let them own it, allowing them to earn digital money by sharing it.

In a white paper released today, Church and his colleagues reason that pharma and biotech companies need large genomic data sets to develop new drugs. Companies typically buy this data from academic institutions or genetic testing companies like 23andMe, often for millions of dollars.

Nebula says it aims to eliminate the middleman so that people can sell their genomic data straight to drug companies and other data buyers.