Sahara AI Reconstructs the Production and Distribution Order of AI.
Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
Interviewee: Sean, Co-founder of Sahara AI
Since the establishment of smart contracts on Ethereum, numerous project protocols have emerged, giving birth to various tracks, narratives, and exaggerated wealth effects. However, in this current cycle, we seem to be facing significant challenges. With innovation lacking in the crypto industry, widespread confusion and anxiety have become the norm. From concept-driven to cash-burning expansion, from business verification stages to structural sedimentation periods, the development history of blockchain seems to be completely replicating the past trajectory of the internet. Where is the future blockchain world heading? What applications or protocols will ultimately stand out?
Some entrepreneurs have set their sights on AI. In recent years, the AI explosion has triggered deep transformations across global industries, becoming one of the most trendy technological waves. Meanwhile, the potential chemical reaction between AI and Crypto has become a common topic among entrepreneurs. Can this "chemical reaction" compensate for each other's shortcomings or generate revolutionary new application scenarios and business models for the industry?
In this wave, Sahara AI, as the world's first AI-native blockchain platform, is attempting to promote further integration through technological innovation. Sahara AI is not only committed to building an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem but also aims to solve the registration, licensing, and monetization challenges of AI assets through transparent, verifiable on-chain protocols. It establishes a new paradigm of "confirmation + attribution + revenue" for AI contributors. In April 2025, Sahara AI was rated by CB, a top global market research institution, as one of the 100 most promising AI startups globally, which is rare among Web3 and AI fusion startup projects.
This time, we invited Sean, co-founder of Sahara AI, for an exclusive interview to elaborate on his thoughts about AI, Crypto, and Sahara AI. Sean holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, and was a research contributor at the Allen Institute for AI (one of the most influential non-profit AI research institutions globally). His research and achievements have won multiple international awards and honors, including the WSDM Test of Time Paper Award, Samsung AI Research Award, MIT Technology Review's Global 35 Under 35 Innovator, and Forbes 30 Under 30 Elite. Here is the full interview:
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional and accurate approach, maintaining the original meaning and tone while translating to English.]To achieve this goal, there are two core technical and systemic challenges:
How can AI "run off-chain" while protecting privacy? We hope that most AI computations can be completed safely and efficiently offline, but its results and important information can still be stored on-chain for verification, achieving the best combination of "off-chain computation + on-chain trust". How to establish a complete "economic closed loop"? Currently, many AI projects' income comes from the application layer, but upstream model developers, data contributors, and computing power providers find it difficult to receive reasonable profit sharing. We hope to use smart contracts to automatically and transparently allocate these revenues to all participants, rather than relying on human decision-making. This is the true meaning of "decentralized production relations".
We believe that only in this way can the combination of AI and blockchain be more than just "stacking", but truly bring an AI future driven by users, where everyone can participate and has incentives. Using AI to improve efficiency is just the beginning. We want to redefine how AI is produced and how everyone can participate through blockchain's characteristics of "transparency, fairness, and incentivization". We hope to create a new AI ecosystem that is not controlled by big companies, but collaboratively built, governed, and participated in by developers and the community. This way, AI's development will no longer be the exclusive stage of Web2 giants, but a new, more open and fair path.
Foresight News: What role does Sahara AI play in today's blockchain world in your mind? As a founder, what do you envision Sahara will look like in the next 5 years?
Sean: The AI future I imagine should be open, democratic, inclusive, and where everyone can participate. In this world, people can use AI to create content, develop their own applications, express creativity, spread ideas, and even turn their knowledge and creativity into income.
What Sahara wants to do is provide everyone with a "golden shovel" - tools and infrastructure that allow each person to build their own AI content and applications, and continuously earn revenue in a transparent and open manner.
In the next five years, Sahara will focus on two things:
- Propose a new technical architecture to make AI development and collaboration more efficient.
- Redesign the "production relations" and "value distribution mechanism" in the AI ecosystem.
- Simply put, we're not just helping everyone create AI applications faster, but more importantly, ensuring that every participant is seen, recognized, and fairly compensated.
For example, the birth of an AI agent might involve three types of people: data providers, computing power providers, and agent designers. How can these three parties reasonably divide work and profits? This can't be decided arbitrarily; it requires technical support and mechanism design.
So in the future AI world, Sahara is not just a tool provider, but we want to become a "rule builder" that helps the entire ecosystem establish a truly fair, transparent, and collaborative operating method.
(Note: The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text, maintaining the specified translations for specific terms.)Sean: You can imagine that if you are an AI project developer, you might initially use the underlying infrastructure provided by Sahara, such as deploying agents and calling models, which is like paying gas on other public chains to drive the system. You would definitely want your model to perform better, right? At this point, you might access Sahara's data annotation market to obtain higher-quality data that is closer to your scenario from global annotators, helping you optimize the model's performance. More interestingly, these annotating users are not just helping you train the model; often, they become early users of your product, and an entire ecosystem naturally connects.
For users, each of their participations is actually creating value - annotating data, providing feedback, or helping test models. These will be automatically recorded by the system, and they will receive on-chain rewards based on their contributions, which is truly "earn while using". Unlike before, where once data was used, it had nothing to do with you afterwards.
What I just described is a typical use case. From a broader perspective, we believe that a healthy economic system must be based on real needs and usage behaviors. What Sahara wants to do is not just be a tool provider, but to participate in rebuilding rules: to build a truly fair, verifiable AI new order that everyone can participate in and benefit from. The "positive-cycle AI economy" we've been promoting is ultimately about making everyone's contributions meaningful and rewarded.
Foresight News: What is the biggest insight (experience or lesson) during the entrepreneurial process?
Sean: In the past few years of doing Sahara, my biggest feeling is that the blockchain community's power is truly strong and completely boundless. People from all over the world, whether developers, users, or even critics, provide us with feedback and suggestions, which have become important driving forces for our continuous progress.
From the beginning, we positioned ourselves as "listeners". Whether it's technical suggestions or user experiences and complaints after actually using the product, we listen carefully and improve. We always maintain a "state of learning" - even now that Sahara is rated as one of the top 100 most promising AI startups globally, we know that AI and Web3 are still in very early stages, and many things don't have standard answers yet.
So we don't think we've succeeded, but we're certain that continuous learning and improvement are the most important things. Our team often studies the successes and failures of other projects, continuously adjusting product directions and optimizing business strategies. Whenever we encounter key decision points, our attitude is: stay open and iterate continuously.
This is why we've been able to persist until now and continue moving forward.
Foresight News: Some investors in the crypto seem to have significant grievances about professor tokens, with some believing that many professor tokens are just for show or that their product technology is far from users, only boasting about how advanced their technology is. How do you evaluate this view? What makes Sahara AI's token different?
Sean: I manage nearly 10 different product lines at Sahara every day, knowing who's doing what and their progress. I also constantly interface and coordinate with different departments, with dozens of meetings being the norm, and I often test products on weekends. If you talk about "just showing up", I might be the hardest-working one, haha. Although I'm a professor, I'm also a post-90s generation, just like most entrepreneurs, spending over ten hours daily on my startup project.
Besides being Sahara's co-founder, I'm also the CEO. Basically, I'm involved in everything from product design, technical development, and scientific research to business cooperation and ecosystem building. Especially in product positioning and development roadmap, I've spent the most effort. We've been constantly thinking about how to find a truly valuable position for Sahara in the Web2 AI ecosystem and Web3 crypto world - finding suitable users and solving their real pain points are things I ponder every day.
As for Sahara's Token, my understanding is that it's the "gold shovel" of the AI world. We hope that everyone can use Sahara to create their own AI applications and content, turning their creativity into reality and together building a richer AI future.
Sahara Token's main functions are:
- User incentives: Encourage everyone to create truly valuable content and tools with AI.
- Platform settlement: For example, paying fees when creating AI agents, buying/selling datasets, or trading models.
- Ecosystem participation: In the future, Token can be "staked" to AI projects you like, becoming a "co-owner" of these AI assets and sharing profits proportionally.
- Simply put, we hope Sahara Token truly becomes everyone's "gold shovel" to the AI world, not just a bunch of concepts floating in the sky.
