The integration of AI and cryptocurrency technology brings innovative opportunities to all walks of life.
Cover: Photo by Martin Martz on Unsplash
Summary
AI applications combined with blockchain technology are increasingly attracting market attention. ChatGPT has gained hundreds of millions of users in a very short period of time. Nvidia's stock price has increased 8 times in 2023, with a market value of over one trillion US dollars. AI has become the absolute mainstream of human beings, and its narrative and capital have also begun to spill over into related fields. AI applications combined with blockchain technology are increasingly attracting market attention.
Crypto is an important complement to AI, and its combination is very extensive and has great development potential. It is currently in the early stages. At this stage, many institutions and practitioners are still trying to combine AI with web3, mainly starting from the most direct use case of Crypto, namely "assetization": computing power assetization (computing power cloud, computing power market), model assetization (AI Agent), and data assetization (storage).
At present, the decentralized attributes unique to Crypto technology cannot improve efficiency and reduce costs in the AI training process, and a lot of construction is still required, but assetization reduces the friction of market transactions and introduces more previously untapped computing power, which is profitable in the context of scarce computing power; the assetization of the model allows the community to own or use AI in a decentralized manner. The technology in this field is relatively simple to implement and has a low threshold, but the narrative of democratized AI corresponds to the anxiety of AI centralization; decentralized data can indeed reduce costs to a certain extent, but even in the crypto context, its assetization is difficult and still requires a lot of business exploration.
Although the market has not reached a complete consensus on AI + Crypto, its track distribution is already clear. Trustless Labs has traversed more than 60 projects in the primary and secondary markets. This article will expand horizontally from seven modules, including computing power cloud, computing power market, model assetization and training, AI Agent, data assetization, ZKML, and AI applications, to explore the future development of AI and cryptocurrency and tap investment opportunities.
Computing Cloud
With the overall growth of the artificial intelligence market represented by companies such as NVIDIA and the trend of GPU supply shortage, computing cloud and related computing market projects have become one of the first areas to benefit from the growth of the AI industry. Computing cloud attempts to solve the shortage of GPU computing power by integrating the idle computing power of existing cloud service providers into a centralized computing network, which reduces the computing power cost compared to traditional cloud services. These projects have different focuses, most of which are concentrated on GPU computing power, but each project focuses on different areas and technical implementation methods. Some are based on container technology such as Akash Network, and some provide virtual machine level implementation.
For computing cloud projects, the growth of users and business is the basis for their value growth. These projects are often regarded as AI computing companies with higher PE because they do not rely on the narrative of decentralization. As the scarcity of GPU resources may be a long-term phenomenon, it is particularly important for primary market participants to examine the commercial capabilities of these projects.
Akash Network
Akash Network is a decentralized cloud computing marketplace based on Cosmos SDK and Tendermint technology, dedicated to utilizing underutilized resources in data centers. Since its creation in 2015, Akash Network has become one of the earliest projects in this field, initially supporting only CPU computing resources. In September 2020, Akash launched the mainnet supporting CPU computing, and successfully launched the mainnet supporting GPU computing in September 2023, further expanding its service scope and performance. Akash was originally designed to open up and occupy the huge market of underutilized resources in data centers.
Akash Network uses a unique reverse auction mechanism, allowing users to choose the supplier with the lowest bid, thereby reducing cloud computing costs. Its average price is only about one-third of that of mainstream cloud service providers such as AWS and Azure. This pricing strategy not only saves users a lot of costs, but also increases market competitiveness and attractiveness.
The underlying architecture of the project uses the Akash container platform built on k8s to orchestrate and manage containers to meet users' various cloud computing needs. This design allows users to flexibly deploy and manage containers, further improving resource utilization efficiency and flexibility.
Akash Network successfully raised $2 million in 2020, led by Cypher Capital, demonstrating the market's recognition of its technology and business model. The project's founder, Greg Osuri, has extensive experience in serial entrepreneurship and cloud architecture since 2008, and Adam Bozanich serves as Co-founder & CTO.
Currently, $AKT has a market cap of $130 million and a future diluted value (FDV) of $220 million.
Ritual
Ritual is a cutting-edge project dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with smart contract technology, and it has established an open AI infrastructure network. The project is driven by an experienced team, including Eva Zhang, who has worked at top companies such as Socket, Apple, and Google and conducted machine learning research at Stanford University, and co-founders Niraj Pant and Akilesh Potti, who have a background in Polychain. Ritual's vision is to support developers to seamlessly integrate AI into any on-chain application or protocol, including the ability to fine-tune, monetize, and perform reasoning, aiming to promote the development of fully transparent DeFi, self-improving blockchains, autonomous agents, and generated content, etc.
Although the Ritual project is in its early stages, it has achieved a series of results, including the launch of its first-phase product, Infernet. Infernet is a lightweight library that can introduce computations to the chain, supports any EVM-compatible chain, and allows smart contracts to natively access AI models for various on-chain use cases and tasks. Infernet can not only optimize the decentralized oracle network, but also enable DApps to implement functions such as DAO proposal risk detection and NFT image generation through its SDK. Ritual also plans to launch its second-phase product, Ritual Chain, in the coming months. This will be a sovereign chain with a custom virtual machine dedicated to serving more advanced AI-native applications.
Although Ritual has not yet launched a testnet and does not have an economic model, coin issuance, or staking mechanism, the project's open source code, team background, technical route, strategic direction, and community-shared philosophy all demonstrate its huge potential and industry attention. In addition, Ritual has successfully completed a $25 million financing round led by Archetype, with participation from Accomplice and Robot Ventures, demonstrating the investment community's recognition and support for its technology and vision.
Render Network
Render Network is a decentralized GPU rendering platform that aims to leverage globally distributed high-performance GPU nodes to provide artists and developers with on-demand scalable rendering capabilities. This platform not only focuses on the rendering field, but also supports AI computing to promote the development of next-generation rendering and AI technologies. Jules Urbach, founder of Render Network, is a pioneer in computer graphics, streaming, and 3D rendering with more than 25 years of industry experience as OTOY's strategic visionary and chief architect of the technology roadmap. Since its establishment in 2002, OTOY has completed four rounds of financing by 2020, and made a $50 million Series B investment in Light Field Labs in February 2023.
Render Network has grown into an early but promising project since its first ICO in October 2017. The project conducted a private sale period from January to May 2018. Currently, Render Network's native token $RNDR has a market capitalization of $4.3 billion and a FDV of $6.1 billion, and has been listed on the world's leading cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and OKX.
On November 2, 2023, the Render Foundation announced that Render Network has successfully completed the core infrastructure upgrade from Ethereum to Solana. This transfer aims to take advantage of Solana's high performance and low cost to further promote the development of the platform. In the process, Render Network launched a new token RENDER, which will be minted on Solana at the same time, and the old token RNDR will still exist. During the upgrade process, 1 RNDR can be exchanged for 1 RENDER. In the future, the Render Foundation will focus on and fully support the RENDER token, marking an important milestone for Render Network to enter a new stage.
NetMind.AI
NetMind.AI is a huge artificial intelligence ecosystem consisting of four core modules: computing power market, ChatBot, Agent, and life assistant. Its core, NetMind.Power, is an Ethereum-based computing power market module that provides a GPU inference and training platform. NetMind.AI's training/inference load management platform has entered the testnet stage since September 2023. NetMind.Power supports a wide range of GPU models, integrates Google Colab's one-click import function, has a good user experience, and is currently in a free beta test stage.
NetMind Chain is fully compatible with EVM, and its token $NMT has a market value of 444M and a FDV of approximately 13B.
CUDOS
CUDOS is similar to Akash, a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) blockchain using Tendermint Core on Cosmos SDK, with cross-chain capabilities of Ethereum and L2. Cudos Blockchain Compute aims to provide multi-chain EVM support and provide GPU computing power.
$CUDOS has a market value of 161M and a FDV of 275M.
Nuco.cloud
Nuco.cloud is a decentralized computing cloud service based on blockchain technology, which aims to provide diversified cloud computing solutions, including use cases such as artificial intelligence training, data analysis, scientific research, and efficient rendering. The project runs on two major blockchain platforms, Ethereum and Telos, and takes advantage of decentralization to provide users with flexible and efficient computing resources. By participating in Nuco.cloud, users can contribute their computing resources in exchange for computing power, and miners who provide computing power can receive NUCO tokens as rewards. The generation of this token is based on proof of stake (POS) and proof of research mechanisms, and is supported by Eagle Capital GmbH. It is worth mentioning that Nuco.cloud has established a cooperative relationship with CUDOS to jointly promote the development and application of blockchain technology.
To meet the needs of different users, Nuco.cloud has launched a variety of product lines, including nuco.cloud SKYNET, nuco.cloud GO, nuco.cloud PRO and CUSTOM, each of which targets specific user needs and usage scenarios. These products use advanced blockchain technology and smart pricing mechanisms to provide users with a unique, efficient and decentralized cloud computing service platform.
Since the project was launched in 2017, Nuco.cloud launched its testnet in August 2023 and is still in the testing phase. In the 2024 roadmap, Nuco.cloud plans to rebrand and release a PRO version of the product for the B-side, while seeking to be listed on the CEX exchange to further expand its market influence.
In terms of compliance, Nuco.cloud complies with the EU's GDPR standards and relevant German standards, which makes it stand out from many competitors, including centralized computing cloud services such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and decentralized computing projects such as GLM, Akash, RNDR, and IExec RLC. According to the project information (Deck), Nuco.cloud's cost is lower than that of several other decentralized computing clouds. Compared with AWS of the same specifications, its price is only about 30%, showing its extremely competitive price advantage.
Currently, the market value of Nuco.cloud's token $NCDT has reached 44M and the FDV is 68M.
Dynex
Dynex is a neuromorphic supercomputing blockchain based on the DynexSolve chip algorithm. It proposes the Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) method to improve the speed and efficiency of decentralized networks. Dynex hopes to provide computing power for artificial intelligence, machine learning, financial technology, biomedicine, etc. on this basis. The main computing power used is GPU.
Dynex was launched in 2020. It was originally a project to design neuromorphic chips, and then evolved into a blockchain. The mainnet was launched in Q4 of 2022, and Gate.io was launched in Q1 of 2024.
$DNX was fairly launched in August 2022, using a deflationary model, with a market cap of approximately 86M and FDV 110M.
OctaSpace
OctaSpace is an open source scalable distributed computing cloud node infrastructure that allows access to distributed computing, data storage, services, VPN, etc. OctaSpace includes CPU and GPU computing power, disk space for ML tasks, AI tools, image processing, and rendering scenes using Blender.
OctaSpace will be launched in 2022 and will run on its own Layer 1 EVM-compatible blockchain. The blockchain uses a dual-chain system that combines the Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanisms. $OCTA FDV is about 73M, fair launch
AIOZ Network
AIOZ Network is a Layer 1 decentralized computing platform for AI, storage and streaming, which is interoperable with Ethereum and Cosmos. AIOZ is supported by a decentralized content delivery network (dCDN), AI computing and thousands of individual nodes running around the world. Users can share computing resources for storage, transcoding and streaming of digital media content, and support decentralized AI computing.
The project was launched more than 6 years ago, and the mainnet was launched in December 2021. The infrastructure built includes AIOZ dCDN, AIOZ IPFS, AIOZ W3S, AIOZ W3AI, and AIOZ Web3 Streaming, which provide support for web3 storage, decentralized artificial intelligence computing, live broadcasting, and video on demand (VOD).
According to its Roadmap, the project will implement AIOZ Transfer dApp, AIOZ multi-chain wallet browser extension, AlOZ Node V3, and AIOZ W3IPFS infrastructure in Q1; AIOZ W3AI in Q2; AIOZ W3Stream and various AIOZ token standards in Q3; and AIOZ DEX in Q4.
Phoenix
Phoenix is a blockchain infrastructure platform for decentralized AI, computing expansion and data-driven networks. Its products include AlphaNet, an AI platform for the cryptocurrency trading market, and NYBL, an AIGC metaverse project. Phoenix's AI computing layer is a Web3-based infrastructure designed for scaling AI computing tasks and easily deploying AI-enabled applications, including deep learning, predictive analytics, LLM, federated learning, and AI edge computing. Phoenix's AI vertical solutions cover multiple fields.
Recently, Phoenix has cooperated with Helium to launch the AI computing mining machine PhoenixNode, and its PhoenixLLM large language model service has been launched on Telegram. In addition, Phoenix will also be integrated with the entire Telegram ecosystem.
Aethir
Aethir is focused on building scalable decentralized cloud infrastructure for games and artificial intelligence, based on Arbitrum. The project was launched in 2023 and is currently in the testnet stage. The user experience is close to the web2 cloud gaming platform, and it cuts into the testing, cross-platform, and distribution needs of AI and games. The main use cases in artificial intelligence include delay-free reasoning, language interaction, and visual interaction. Checker node licenses will be available for sale on the whitelist from 10:00 am (UTC) on March 18 to 19, and the public sale will start at 10:00 am (UTC) on March 20. The starting price for each node is 0.1259ETH, which increases step by step. It can also be purchased as ERC721 at the secondary level. Checker nodes can be installed and run in Q2 2024, and it is expected that Q2 will issue coins and launch the mainnet. 15% of $ATH will be used to reward Checker nodes.
Iagon
Iagon is a decentralized storage and computing power market based on Cardano. The testnet was released in 2023 and the project is open source.
OpFlow
OpFlow is a decentralized computing cloud platform that focuses on AI and rendering. OpFlow Hosting is a decentralized deployment cloud service that is compatible with TG Bot. Its rendering service exclusively uses NVIDIA L40 GPU. According to its Roadmap, the first phase of the plan is to: issue tokens on Uniswap; launch OpFlow hosting (Telegram Bot); launch network nodes such as ETH, Linea, and Eigen Layer.
$OpFlow is an ERC20 Token, and further details have not yet been announced.
OpSec
OpSec is a set of decentralized cloud computing solutions. Aiming to build the next generation of supercomputers, the solutions include Cloudverse, Cloudsec, OpSec network, one-click node setup, DePIN hardware, hosting services, etc.
The project is relatively new and the testnet has not yet been released. Currently $OPSEC is online on DEX.
Hash power market
The computing power market relies on a decentralized mechanism, allowing users to provide their own GPU and CPU resources to participate in computing power leasing or network training projects. Although the emergence of this market has not significantly reduced the cost of AI training or improved efficiency in theory, its openness and barrier-free characteristics enable a large number of GPU resources to be mobilized in a short period of time to provide strong computing power support for the network. This approach not only leverages huge asset endorsements, but also realizes the leveraged tokenization of GPU assets, bringing new value and significance to the computing power market.
However, such projects are often seen as “more virtual than real”, with their core not being the actual utility of the technology or service, but relying more on their decentralized attributes and the creation of related narratives (for example, the process from traditional AI to decentralized reasoning and then to decentralized training). In fact, the business model of these projects mainly revolves around this narrative.
In terms of technical support, computing power market projects that can achieve decentralized GPU operation are usually combined with the DePin concept. The combination of computing power markets represented by io.net and nosana plus DePin, combined with Solana, a high-performance chain, has shown significant growth potential. Therefore, we recommend that investors pay long-term attention to early projects that combine Solana and AI. These projects are not only expected to bring technological innovation, but may also become a hot spot for investment.
From an investment perspective, early participation in the GPU computing market, especially when the market is experiencing a FOMO effect, may bring higher returns. This type of participation not only provides incentives, but also has the potential to achieve a high input-output ratio, bringing considerable economic benefits to investors.
Clore.ai
Clore.ai is a platform that provides GPU computing power rental services based on PoW. Users can rent their own GPUs for tasks such as AI training, rendering, and mining. Using the optional Proof of Holding (PoH) mechanism, the more tokens a supplier holds, the more CLORE they receive.
$CLORE market value is 90M, FDV is 110M. 50% of each block belongs to miners, 40% to custodians, and 10% to the team, with a maximum limit of 1.3 billion tokens.
Nosana
Nosana is a cloud computing service provider focusing on GPU on Solana, and the project is open source. Nosana was founded in 2021 and currently has no financing information. Co-founder Sjoerd Dijkstra has relatively rich DevOps experience, Jesse Eisses has a good technical/ML background, and Laurens Verspeek also has a technical background and rich development experience. In mid-October 2023, Nosana announced its shift from CI/CD use cases to AI reasoning. Its platform is currently in the early stages of development. There is very little data on the nosana explorer. Current statistics show that there are 94 GPU nodes and 160,000 completed reasonings. Further research is needed to verify the project.
The AI inference workloads of Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion will be integrated into the network. The testnet is divided into three phases. Currently in the first phase, according to the official Twitter data, more than 1,000 devices have signed up for the second phase. The data and revenue model are not disclosed. It is planned to launch the mainnet in the first half of the year and improve consumer-level node support; in the second half of the year, the community connector library and official connectors for PyTorch, HuggingFace, TensorFlow, etc. will be implemented.
The token was launched in January 2022, and the current market value of $NOS is 510M, and the FDV is 608M.
io.net
io.net is an innovative AI decentralized computing power market based on Solana blockchain technology, currently in the testnet stage. The platform aims to provide users with access to cloud computing resources at a lower cost than traditional centralized services, and its valuation has reached $500 million. The core appeal of io.net is that it can support a variety of AI computing needs, such as batch inference, parallel training, hyperparameter tuning, and reinforcement learning, while its backend infrastructure is composed of a series of modular layers that enable efficient management of resources and automated pricing. Currently, it provides computing resources for NVIDIA RTX 3090 at a price of $0.2 per hour.
In terms of project background, io.net was founded by Ahmad Shadid, who built a GPU computing network for Dark Tick, a machine learning quantitative trading company, in 2020. As for financing, io.net has been led by Hack VC, and has also received support from many well-known investment institutions and individuals, including Multicoin Capital, Solana Labs, Aptos Labs, etc., as well as some well-known industry figures such as Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana.
In terms of participation opportunities, io.net provides a variety of ways for users to participate in its network, including mining income and staking income. From March 1 to April 28, 2023, the platform launched the first round of the points incentive plan and expects to issue its token $IO in April. In terms of mining income, the platform calculates points by detecting the node's Internet bandwidth, memory, CPU clock speed, and floating-point computing power to provide rewards to users. In addition, users can also earn income by staking IO Coin, and the staker will receive 1-3% of all rewards received by participants.
It is worth mentioning that the io.net team borrowed RNDR's airdrop rules to design its own points calculation method, emphasizing the importance of bandwidth in calculating rewards. Analysis shows that high-bandwidth devices have a clear advantage in the final reward distribution, which suggests that users should pay special attention to improving the bandwidth performance of their devices when participating in the io.net network.
Gensyn
Gensyn is an L1 protocol focused on training deep learning models. Its main goal is to improve the efficiency and accessibility of deep learning model training through innovative design and technical solutions. Since the launch of the project, Gensyn has completed two rounds of financing, including a $6.5 million seed round led by EdenBlock in March 2022 and a $43 million Series A round led by a16z in June 2023.
The technical core of Gensyn lies in its verification system and computing power supply scheme, as well as a set of efficient solutions. Its verification system consists of four main roles: submitter, solver, verifier and whistleblower, which together ensure the trustless nature of the system, that is, a distributed verification mechanism without trust. In addition, Gensyn is committed to making it easy for various devices to access its computing power network, including everyday gaming-grade GPUs and GPUs used for ETH PoW mining. Its efficient machine learning training scheme is based on probabilistic learning proofs, graph-based precision positioning protocols, and Truebit-style incentive games, aiming to significantly reduce training costs and improve training efficiency.
In terms of cost, Gensyn has shown significant competitiveness. The average hourly cost of its machine learning training is about $0.4, which is not only lower than the $1.5 per hour GPU call cost provided by Akash, but also within the $0.1-1 cost range provided by io.net, reflecting Gensyn's advantage in cost control.
Gensyn's code is not yet open source, and there are currently no plans to issue a token. Gensyn's development will be divided into three phases: testnet, canarynet on the Kusama relay chain, and mainnet on the Polkadot relay chain. Currently, the project is still in the testnet stage. In the next 3-6 months, Gensyn plans to continue to optimize its technology and prepare for the next stage of development. Its vision is to become the base layer for machine learning computing, similar to Ethereum for smart contract execution, which shows Gensyn's long-term plan for the future development of deep learning and blockchain integrated applications.
Nimble
The core vision of the Nimble project is to create a decentralized AI ecosystem that covers three major markets: data, computing power, and builder. Through this design, Nimble aims to lower the threshold for training AI models and enable more participants to contribute to the innovation and development of AI. This project is positioned as a Composable AI Project, which means that it emphasizes the composability of various AI resources and components under a decentralized framework.
Nimble's mainnet was launched on March 21, 2024, and was selected into the seventh season of BinanceLabs' Most Valuable Builder (MVB) incubator program on March 1. A complete security audit report has not yet been seen. Nimble is valued at $30 million and has raised $6 million.
The mainnet was launched last weekend. Users can mine by contributing GPUs. Currently, 1,500 GPUs are connected to the network.
Morpheus AI
Morpheus AI is a decentralized computing power market. The project is built on Arbitrum and aims to help users build proxy AI based on large language models, and then call smart contracts through proxy AI. This design not only broadens the potential functions of decentralized applications (DApps), but also creates an incentive mechanism for multiple participants such as computing power providers, stETH stakers, protocol development contributors, and community API operators. In the process of participating in the Morpheus AI ecosystem, users can obtain MOR tokens by staking or submitting code.
Kuzco
Kuzco is a distributed GPU cluster for LLM reasoning on Solana. Although the project is a new one, it is progressing rapidly. It has launched a public beta version for Mac and Linux users, and the number of online working nodes has reached 1,400. Kuzco provides an efficient environment and code support, allowing users to pre-install the required models and environments on their local machines and complete tasks only through network transmission. Compared with ionet, it performs better in resource utilization, and the single card utilization rate can reach 90%.
Currently, participants who contribute computing power can receive $KZO points in return. Although its expected returns, development roadmap and token economic model have not been clearly announced, it has received official attention from Solana. No financing has been carried out yet, but the issuance of tokens may be carried out in the near future.
Golem
Golem is a decentralized computing power market based on Ethereum. Since its launch in 2015, it has been focusing on providing CPU computing power sharing services based on Ethereum. Golem is one of the earliest peer-to-peer computing power network protocols and has established a network node system including providers and requesters. Starting in 2022, Golem has laid out the GPU market, launched the first phase of the GPU Beta testing program, and launched the second phase in March 2024.
The total supply of $GLM is 1 billion, all of which are currently in circulation, with a market value of $561 million and open source code.
Node AI
Node AI is a decentralized GPU computing market, whose parent company is EyePerformance. Rental fee reference: A100 is about $0.85/h, A10 is about $0.22/h. $GPU current market value is 121M.
GPU.Net
GPU.Net is a decentralized GPU resource network that aims to meet the computing power needs of new technologies such as generative AI, Web3 metaverse, cryptocurrency mining, and high-end graphics rendering by providing decentralized GPU infrastructure. In August 2023, GPU.Net completed a $500,000 financing round, with Momentum 6 and Alphablockz participating, and also received support from NVIDIA and Taanga Studios. Early network pre-registration is now online.
GamerHash
GamerHash uses the remaining computing power of a player's computer when playing high-configuration games to mine cryptocurrencies. For example, a player may only use 15% of his computing power when playing a game, and GamerHash allows the remaining unused power to be automatically used to mine cryptocurrencies without the user having to do any additional work or monitoring. To serve users with lower-configuration computers, GamerHash launched the Play&Earn feature. Users can choose to complete specific tasks, such as playing specific games or downloading apps, to earn GUSD, an internal currency pegged to the US dollar, bringing new revenue channels to users with limited hardware capabilities.
NodeSynapse
NodeSynapse is a GPU computing power marketplace that provides server hosting, Web3 infrastructure, and GPU computing to token holders with a unique revenue sharing model.
Model assetization and model training
In the trend of combining blockchain technology with AI, an important development direction is to assetize AI models or run the business model itself through tokenization. This approach has gradually shown its value in many specific application scenarios, such as security audits, chatbots, AI consultants, etc. Since the technical threshold of such projects is relatively low and the implementation is not difficult, there are both top projects with strong resources and many small projects that are just starting in the market. Therefore, in projects combining blockchain and AI, it becomes particularly important to identify the quality and investment value of the projects.
The key is to identify whether a project has real innovation and technological barriers. Simply trading the ownership or use rights of AI models does not constitute real technological innovation. Real technological breakthroughs should focus on how to effectively verify the output of the model and how to ensure that the model is run in a decentralized environment.
Saharalabs
SaharaLabs aims to solve data sharing and privacy issues in AI model training through its two core products: Knowledge Agent and Data. The project promotes data sharing and decision-making while ensuring privacy security by providing semi-automated autonomous agents and data operation tools for individuals and enterprises. Currently, SaharaLabs has successfully attracted 30 corporate customers and achieved positive cash flow, demonstrating the market feasibility and practical value of its solutions. SaharaLabs is led by Professors Sean and Tyler, with a team of more than 30 people. Professor Sean is a professor at the University of Southern California and has won many honors, including Samsung's AI Researcher of the Year. Tyler has extensive experience in the blockchain industry and has served as the investment director of Binance Labs.
Its product Knowledge Agent provides users with customized semi-automatic agents that support sharing and processing of external or internal data for decision making. These agents can be fine-tuned for private data, while providing privacy protection and data source verification tools, as well as a development toolkit that supports multi-agent collaboration. Sahara Data Marketplace provides a comprehensive set of data operation tools including data collection, labeling, quality control (QA) and project management, which solves data privacy issues and has been adopted by well-known institutions such as MIT and Microsoft.
SaharaLabs has raised $600M in funding and received $6M in seed round funding, led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, etc. The project's development roadmap includes: launching the Sahara Data data market in Q2 2024; launching the testnet and Sahara ID in Q3; and officially launching the mainnet and Sahara Agent in Q4.
Bittensor
The Bittensor project is a decentralized open source project that aims to create a neural network protocol on the blockchain. This protocol allows the creation of AI-driven decentralized applications (dApps) and enables peer-to-peer value exchange between AI models. Bittensor was co-founded by former Google software engineer Jacob Robert Steeves and former University of Toronto assistant professor and University of Waterloo postdoctoral fellow Ala Shaabana, with James Woodman as chief operating officer. The project had a "fair launch" in 2021, without any pre-mining of tokens, VC rounds, private placement rounds, etc. The token TAO is generated by miners. Known investors and market makers include DCG, GSR, Polychain Capital and Firstmask.
The core of the Bittensor network consists of miners and validators. Miners are responsible for submitting pre-trained models to receive rewards, while validators ensure that the outputs of these models are valid and accurate, and select the best outputs to return to users. For example, when a user asks an AI chatbot to answer a question, the question can be answered no matter how many nodes the Bittensor network is running. Queries are sent by users to validators, who then pass the queries to miners, rank the miners' outputs, and finally return the highest-ranked outputs to users.
The development priorities of the Bittensor project include:
- Subnet: All of Bittensor's AI applications actually run on its subnets, and there are currently 32 subnets, each with a dedicated use case. The threshold for participating in the subnet is 6,000 $TAO, which is more than $4 million in fees. Miners and validators can receive 7,200 $TAO rewards per day. If the subnet runs well, the daily income can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars; otherwise, the subnet may be eliminated.
- Miners/Validators: The threshold to become a miner or validator is high. Miners need to undergo machine performance testing, and becoming a validator node requires staking a large amount of $TAO and ensuring that the equipment is continuously online. For miners, if they cannot provide optimized models or unique large LLM models, they will be kicked out of the network soon.
The total supply of TAO tokens is 21,000,000, all of which have entered circulation, with a market value of $4,474,463,212. It has been listed on exchanges such as MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin, and Bitget. Retail investors can choose to stake $TAO to existing verification nodes and enjoy the current annualized rate of return of about 15.85%.
iExec RLC
iExec RLC is a decentralized cloud resource platform based on Ethereum, aiming to change the current cloud computing model through integrated DApps, computing power markets, and data markets. The platform uses the original iExec Proof-of-Contribution (PoCo) consensus mechanism to ensure the validity and security of off-chain computing while protecting the platform from interference by dishonest participants. iExec was co-founded by Dr. Gilles Fedak and Dr. Haiwu He, with Dr. Fedak as CEO. Prior to his blockchain entrepreneurship, he had made groundbreaking achievements in software and algorithm development for cloud computing and massively parallel systems, and won several best paper awards. Dr. Haiwu He, as the head of the APAC region, was a "Hundred Professor" at the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, leading research in high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing. In 2017, iExec completed a $12 million financing through an ICO.
The core functionality of the iExec platform allows users to run containerized applications, mainly for short-running jobs and one-off tasks. Although it does not currently support a wide range of use cases such as web- or API-based applications, iExec has successfully powered DApps on its sidechain and established work pools to sort by task size. The platform's computing resource bidding system enables users and applications to post work orders based on preset criteria, and cloud providers (workers) provide computing power based on the price they are willing to accept. In addition, iExec also introduces the concept of pools to organize workers (work nodes), which can be either public or private, similar to traditional cloud service providers.
The PoCo consensus algorithm serves as a defense mechanism for the iExec market, guaranteeing trust execution on the decentralized network and preventing possible adverse outcomes and unreasonable opposition. As of now, $RLC has a market cap of $322M USD, while its fully diluted value (FDV) is $387M USD. Since its launch in 2016, iExec has made significant achievements in the field of decentralized cloud computing and became an important member of the Intel AI ecosystem in 2020.
iExec is continuously developing its technology and service scope, and future plans include: research and development (R&S) in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs); research and development in Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET); development of the iExec Oracle IDE; Privacy Pass campaign; second round of Worker Pass issuance; release of the Dapp Store web interface; third season of Questbook bounty tasks; third and fourth seasons of Exec Web3 Incubator; and upgrade of the PoCo consensus algorithm.
Allora
Allora is a self-improving, decentralized AI network that builds a probabilistic market for more accurate inferences. AI/ML agents in the Allora network use their data and algorithms to broadcast their predictions on a peer-to-peer network, and each references these predictions to evaluate the predictions of all other agents. The network consensus mechanism combines these predictions and evaluations and assigns rewards to agents based on the quality of their predictions and evaluations. This carefully designed incentive mechanism enables Allora to continuously learn and improve, adjusting as the market evolves.
Allora built its independent chain based on Cosmos and implemented POS, rewarding validators and AI working nodes. While conducting reasoning, the nodes verify the accuracy of each other's reasoning, predict the reasoning quality of each agent by directly evaluating each other, and distribute rewards based on the evaluation results.
Allora's internal testnet Edgenet was released on March 5. It is currently working with multiple project parties and institutions to run test nodes and plans to launch the mainnet in Q2. Its investment institutions are also quite luxurious, including Polychain, Framework, Blockchain Capital, CoinFund, Delphi Ventures, dao5, and Distributed Global.
PAAL AI
PAAL AI is an AI ecosystem built with custom data sources and LLM. Users can create personalized AI, conduct professional strategy trading, obtain market intelligence, etc., and deploy it to multiple platforms such as Telegram and Discord. PAAL AI tools include MyPaal, AutoPaal, and AutoPaal X. Invested by Google Cloud, Coingecko, OKX, etc. PAAL has a total supply of 1 billion, a circulating supply of approximately 650 million, and a market value of approximately US$100 million.
MyShell
MyShell is an AI platform based on opBNB that allows users to create chatbots, allows creators to call different models and external APIs in the same way, and allows third-party model providers and API providers to integrate their services into the platform for developers to use. Creators and users are incentivized to be active through Shell points and Shell Coin (Shell Coin is an airdrop voucher, and points can be exchanged for coins). In October 23, it raised $5.6 million in seed round financing, led by INCE Capital, with participation from Folius Ventures, Hashkey Capital, SevenX Ventures, TSVC, OP Crypto, etc. Binance Labs also officially announced that MyShell has entered the sixth incubation camp. The valuation is approximately US$57 million. It is currently in the testnet development stage.
Qubic
Qubic is an L1 PoW platform that uses PoW computing power for AI training. The mainnet will be launched in April 2022. Founded by Sergey Ivano (also known as Come From Beyond or CFB). CFB is the third person in history to mine Bitcoin, and his NXT was once one of the most successful ICOs. He is also the founder of Iota.
- Quorum Protocol: This protocol uses 676 computers (validators) to process transactions and execute smart contracts, ensuring the finality and reliability of the results.
- AI Aigarth: This is an AI software that runs on top of Qubic and draws information from tens of thousands of Qubic-AI miners who use their computing power to create billions of artificial neural networks.
AI Agent
AI agents can be understood as intelligent entities that have the ability to autonomously understand, remember, make decisions, use tools, and perform complex tasks. This type of intelligent entity can not only guide users on "what to do", but also actually help users complete tasks. The AI agents specifically referred to here are those projects that use AI models to interact with blockchain technology, such as conducting transactions, providing investment advice, operating bots, enhancing decentralized finance (DeFi) functions, and conducting on-chain data analysis.
This type of AI agent has a specific and direct application scenario, namely, trading. They are particularly closely integrated with blockchain technology, and can directly generate income, introduce new trading scenarios, and optimize the blockchain user experience. This combination is actually an advanced narrative of decentralized finance (DeFi), which creates profits through trading activities, attracts capital investment, and creates hype opportunities, thereby driving the operation of the Ponzi flywheel effect.
AI trading agents are usually launched from the community with a low market value, with low participation costs and therefore good return on investment potential.
Morpheus
Morpheus is an AI decentralized computing power market, built on Arbitrum, which helps users build proxy AI based on large language models, and the proxy AI calls smart contracts. Incentives are provided to miners who provide computing power, stETH staking, protocol development contributors, and community API operators. The project team uses the names of characters in the movie "The Matrix" (Morpheus, Neo, Trinity) as pseudonyms on the website.
The core developer is David Johnston, who has many years of experience in investment and as a CEO. He has been involved in the Bitcoin Foundation since 2013, and later joined Multicoin Capital and Space Fund. He has worked at DLTx since 2021. In 2023, he created the "intelligent agent" framework and began to invest in the development of Morpheus.
Morpheus has a high level of community attention and is distributed in the form of fair launch. The first phase of the pledge code is well completed and has passed security audits. The community also has bug bounties and the code security is relatively strong, but the code updates for AI Agents are slow and the progress of the core modules is unclear. The main ways to participate include: staking stETH to participate in the distribution of capital; providing code support for Morpheus; participating in mining after the computing network is launched on May 8; making some network boards and tools to become a community contributor.
QnA3.AI
QnA3.AI provides full-lifecycle, full-scenario services such as information management, asset management, and rights management. Technically, QnA3 uses RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) technology, combined with LLM understanding, pre-training, scalability, and reasoning capabilities, to optimize information retrieval and generation, and improve timeliness and accuracy. At the same time, the team emphasizes the concepts of AI+Trading and AI+DePIN in asset management and rights management, and promotes the practice of decentralized machine learning. QnA3.AI was incubated by Binance Labs and received investment from the Solana Foundation on February 25, 2024.
The QnA3.AI project started in January 2023 and has experienced rapid development in just one year. The project launched the Q&A function in June, and the number of users increased rapidly; in September, the intent-centric Telegram robot was launched, and the number of users surged to 300,000; by December, the number of daily active users reached the first place on BNB Chain, and the total number of users exceeded 2 million. To date, the number of users has exceeded 10 million.
Autonolas
Autonolas is an open marketplace for creating and using decentralized AI agents. Autonolas also provides developers with a set of tools for building AI agents that are hosted off-chain and can connect to multiple chains including Polygon, Ethereum, Gnosis Chain, and Solana. They currently have some active agent proof-of-concept products, including those for prediction markets and DAO governance.
David Minarsch is the CEO and co-founder of Valory, the parent company of Autonolas. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge, specializing in multi-agent services. Previously, he served as the head of multi-agent services at Fetch.ai. Investors include Signature Ventures, Semantic Ventures, True Ventures, Proof Group, etc.
SingularityNet
SingularityNET is an open, decentralized AI service network with a mission to build a decentralized, democratized, inclusive, and beneficial general AI. Developers can publish their services to the SingularityNET network, and anyone with internet access can use them. Developers can charge for the use of their services using native AGIX tokens.
The founders are Dr. Ben Goertzel and Dr. David Hanson, one of the core developers of the famous intelligent humanoid robot Sophia. SingularityNET's investors include Fundamental Labs. In May 2022, SingularityNET and Singularity DAO received a $25 million investment commitment from investment group LDA Capital.
SingularityNET's services can provide inference or model training across multiple domains, such as image, video, speech, text, time series, bio-inspired AI, and network analysis. These services can be as simple as encapsulating well-known algorithms, or they can be complete end-to-end solutions for industry problems, or they can be standalone AI applications. Developers can also deploy autonomous AI agents that interoperate with other services on the network. For example, promote trust and automate transactions through multi-party escrow, publish new AI services and organizations on the blockchain, track successful API calls, and define pricing strategies.
Fetch.AI
Fetch.AI is one of the earliest deployed AI agent protocols and has developed an ecosystem for building, deploying and using agents on-chain using its FET token and the Fetch.AI wallet. The protocol provides a comprehensive set of tools and applications for using agents, including in-wallet capabilities for interacting with agents and issuing commands.
Most of the Fetch development team graduated from prestigious universities or Fortune 500 companies, and are experts in AI or algorithm-related fields. It is worth mentioning that the CEO and CTO are both related to Deepmind, an AI company under Google. Its signature product Alphago has defeated Korean Go champion Lee Sedol and professional players in StarCraft 2. The advisory team is mostly professors from prestigious universities with a strong overall academic background. In terms of financing, in March 2021, Toronto digital asset company GDA Group invested US$5 million; in March 2022, Fetch launched a US$150 million development fund to encourage developers to develop projects on its ecosystem. The fund is led by MEXC Global, with participation from Huobi and Bybit.
Humans.ai
Humans.ai is an AI blockchain platform that brings together an ecosystem of stakeholders around the use of AI for large-scale creation, integrating a library of artificial intelligence tools into a creative studio suite where users can pick and choose their own ideas and realize them. Individuals have the right to create and own their own digital portraits, which can be used by themselves and others to create any number of digital assets. Synthetic media, AI applications, and other digital assets can generate NFTs using blockchain technology. The total supply of Humans.ai token HEART is 7.8 billion, the circulating supply is approximately 5.12 billion, and the market value is approximately US$85.96 million.
Metatrust
Metatrust is a Crypto-enabled AI Agent network. MetaTrust has built the world's first comprehensive Web3 security solution covering the entire software development life cycle (SDLC), and was founded by a world-renowned research team from Nanyang Technological University. The seed round of financing was $10 million, led by M23 Fund, with participation from Redpoint, ABCDE, LongHash Ventures, and Hash Capital.
AgentLayer
AgentLayer is a decentralized agent network built by the Metatrust team based on the core chain structure of OP Stack + EigenDA. EigenDA can take into account the efficient availability of data and greatly improve the overall performance and security of AgentNetwork. As a complete set of layer2 toolboxes, OP Stack supports Optimism and other Rollup implementations, and provides key components such as sequencer, nodes, contracts, etc., which can be independently applied to different expansion implementation plans.
DAIN
DAIN is building an agent2agent economy on Solana. DAIN's goal is to enable agents from different companies to interact with each other seamlessly through a common API, thereby greatly opening up the design space of AI agents, with a focus on implementing agents that can interact with web2 and web3 products. In January 2024, DAIN announced its first collaboration with Asset Shield, enabling users to add "agent signers" to their multi-signatures, who are able to interpret transactions and approve/reject based on the rules set by the user. DAIN is developing an Agent that can obtain on-chain information and conduct transactions, analyze and process on-chain data, and make purchase and other recommendations in the form of chat.
ChainGPT
ChainGPT is an AI model designed for blockchain and encryption. Its products include AI NFT generator, AI generated news, AI trading assistant, smart contract generator, smart contract auditor, etc. ChainGPT won the BNB Ecosystem Catalyst Award in September 2023. The market value of the token CGPT is approximately US$40.63 million.
Data assetization
The data track combines AI and encryption technology and is seen as a field with great potential. Its core value lies in data and computing power as the basic means of production of AI. Unlike the decentralization of computing power, which may reduce efficiency, the decentralized processing of data to a certain extent is reasonable because the production of data itself is decentralized. Therefore, in theory, the data track has great development potential in the field of combining AI and encryption technology.
However, the core challenge facing this field is the lack of a mature data trading market in the traditional market, which makes it extremely difficult to effectively value and standardize data. It is difficult for project parties to attract a large amount of capital through token incentives because the value of data is difficult to reflect in the token price in the absence of an effective evaluation mechanism. This situation has led to a potential "flywheel effect" break, and even projects with great potential within the data track have difficulty leveraging large-scale capital through low-cost token incentives.
Despite the challenges, some projects are trying to enter the data track from different angles and explore new models and solutions. For example, projects such as Sapien focus on providing a market for labeled data required by AI, trying to solve the problem of obtaining AI training data. In addition, considering the high demand for bandwidth in decentralized AI training, bandwidth providers have become a new entry point in the data track. Traffic is an easily quantifiable asset, and projects such as grass.io are trying to build a decentralized bandwidth ecosystem to indirectly provide data for AI training, which shows an attempt to find new opportunities and solutions in the data track.
Synesis One
Synesis One is a data crowdsourcing platform on Solana, where anyone can earn $SNS by completing microtasks to train AI. The off-chain annotation is passed to the on-chain validator for verification and then the reward is issued.
The Korean development team was reorganized on October 11, 2023. Isaac Bang is the CEO, who is the former head of growth at Synesis One. Currently, Synesis One is working with Mind AI, which will use the data collected by Synesis One to train AI and is expected to support audio, video and image data as well as RPA (robotic process automation) in the future. Mind AI has signed cooperation agreements with General Motors and the Indian government. The financing amount is US$9.5 million.
Grass.io
Grass.io is a decentralized bandwidth market. Users can sell their excess bandwidth to artificial intelligence companies that use it to scrape data from the Internet. There are currently more than 2 million personal IP network addresses, and only users who are online in real time can get Grass points.
It has received $3.5M in seed round financing, led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital, with participation from Bitscale Capital, Typhonv, etc. Tokenomics has not been announced, but according to team members, it is expected to issue tokens by the end of the year.
GagaNode
GagaNode is the next generation decentralized residential bandwidth market, aiming to alleviate the global IPv4 address shortage through Web3.0 technology. Currently, it has good support for major system (including mobile) clients. The code has been open sourced.
Ocean
Ocean Protocol allows anyone with a sought-after dataset to tokenize their data and make it available on Ocean Market. Users can create data NFTs representing their data and purchase them using data tokens. Participants can participate by building AI trading bots, staking tokens, and participating in data challenges.
Founder Bruce Pon worked at Mercedes-Benz for more than 5 years, gave guest lectures at MIT, Oxford University, New York University and European School of Management (ESMT), and made more than 200 public speeches on blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentralized technology. He has more than 35 consultants worldwide.
ZKML
By introducing ZK into the field of machine learning, it allows the computational correctness of the model to be quickly verified without revealing any information. The trustless verification of the model allows ZKML to be used as a trustless agent or in some privacy scenarios, such as the application layer represented by Worldcoin.
At the same time, machine learning may be run in smart contracts through ZK, allowing smart contracts to achieve more powerful automation and flexibility; at the same time, as a "black box", the trust problem of the ML model can also be solved through ZK verification.
As mentioned above, the infrastructure of ZkML is divided into on-chain ML represented by Modulus Labs, and trusted inference proof services represented by Giza and EZKL, in addition to coprocessors represented by Risc Zero and Axiom. This track is still in its early stages, and its technical capabilities and team background need to be considered.
WorldCoin
WorldCoin was launched by OpenAI and requires users to scan their irises to generate a unique ID. In the future, biometric IDs can be stored on personal devices using encryption for self-custody, and the required models are used to locally verify these biometric information. Users can provide proof of their biometric information without revealing their identity, thereby resisting Sybil attacks while ensuring privacy. It is currently the leader in the field of AI. Worldcoin has raised more than $250 million in multiple rounds of financing from investors such as a16z, Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital and Tiger Global.
There are currently over 1 million active users. Authenticate on DRiP using your device-verified World ID or Orb-verified World ID and instantly unlock your bonus Droplet.
ZL
EZKL is open source and generates zero-knowledge proofs to prove that a model has produced certain results without revealing the model itself. In the past few months, EZKL has made significant progress in enhancing zkML solutions, focusing mainly on reducing costs, improving security, and speeding up proof generation. For example, in November 2023, EZKL integrated a new open source GPU library that reduces aggregate proof time by 35%; in January of this year, EZKL released Lilith, a software solution for integrating high-performance computing clusters and orchestrating concurrent job systems when using EZKL proofs. The official announcement of cooperation with OP has been made.
Jason Morton is the CEO of EZKL and holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Economics from the University of Michigan.
Giza
Giza is a machine learning platform built on StarkNet. In addition to providing tools for creating verifiable machine learning models, Giza also plans to implement the web3 equivalent of Hugging Face, open a user market for zkML collaboration and model sharing, and eventually integrate decentralized computing products. Recently, Giza Datasets is a Web3 dataset framework optimized for ML workflows and structured for model training purposes.
Giza was founded by Cem Dagdelen, Fran Algaba and Renç Korzay in October 2022. It has completed a $3 million Pre-Seed round of financing led
