Author: Zen, PANews
With the rapid development of AI technology, data has become the core driving force for its growth, no less important than the role of oil in modern industry. Obtaining, annotating and processing high-quality data is the foundation of AI model training, but the problems of heavy reliance on manual processing, low efficiency, high costs and uneven quality in this process still pose huge challenges in the existing industry chain.
As CZ, the founder of Binance, said, AI data annotation tasks are very suitable to be completed through blockchain, which can leverage global low-cost labor and instant payment through cryptocurrencies, breaking geographical restrictions. CZ also mentioned that more tools need to be built, and he called on developers to jointly build a decentralized AI data processing ecosystem.
In fact, since the rise of the artificial intelligence boom, there have been many projects that have started to focus on decentralized AI data business, but few projects have been able to realize a commercial model, and DIN, which has performed outstandingly in the BNB ecosystem, is one of them. DIN currently has over 30 million registered users and over 1 million daily active users, and has topped the BNB Chain AI Dapp ranking several times. More importantly, DIN not only drives the decentralized AI data economy, but also begins to truly empower the development of the traditional Web2 industry.
DIN: The employment certificate for data pipeline workers in the AI era
DIN is the first modular AI-native data pre-processing layer, aiming to establish a data intelligence network based on the synergistic effect of people, data and AI, allowing everyone to process data for AI and get paid. To date, DIN has raised a total of $8 million, completing a $4 million seed round led by Binance Labs last July, and another $4 million pre-listing round in August this year, with investments from Manta, Moonbeam, Ankr, Maxx Capital and others.
In the interview, DIN founder Harold said that if DIN is to be introduced in the most straightforward way, it can be called the "employment certificate for data pipeline workers in the AI era", allowing every ordinary person around the world to participate without threshold at any time, enjoy the borderless and flexible payment brought by crypto, and share the endless stream of cash flow dividends brought by the development of AI. "AI needs massive data to promote its own development, so everyone should be able to benefit from the data it produces. DIN hopes to act as a bridge in the middle, so that the data produced by everyone can be recorded, and everyone can profit."
The name DIN comes from the abbreviation of Data Intelligence Network. Over the past three years, DIN has focused on providing products and services around "data", covering on-chain data, social media content and other off-chain data, with its predecessor being the Web3 data intelligence company Web3Go. Prior to the establishment of this project, Harold has been engaged in the artificial intelligence industry, and the AI applications developed by the team he led, such as steel surface defect detection, have also been implemented. Benefiting from the team's years of accumulation and experience in big data, artificial intelligence and communication fields, and its deep cultivation in the data track, DIN has formed a mature service delivery system and has been profitable every year.
Blockchain realizes the data crowdsourcing revolution
It is well known that algorithms, computing power and data are the three core elements of artificial intelligence, among which data is the foundation for the development of artificial intelligence. Without sufficient data support, any advanced algorithms and computing power will be out of the question. Therefore, the "data factory" of AI models has become increasingly important in the artificial intelligence wave, and the industry leader Scale AI even completed the latest round of $1 billion financing with a valuation of $13.8 billion in May this year, led by the top Silicon Valley fund Accel, with investments from YC, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta, AMD and other tech giants.
Scale AI's customer base covers multiple fields such as healthcare, defense, e-commerce, and government services, and it achieves profitability by providing high-quality data to customers, while shifting most of the quality assurance responsibility and costs to individual task performers. Scale AI's crowdsourcing platform Remotasks has set up dozens of institutions in regions such as Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela, employing thousands of data annotators.
However, this profit-centric model concentrated in the hands of centralized companies cannot better motivate participants, and thus cannot fully liberate the labor force. According to The Washington Post, Scale AI pays workers extremely low wages, often withholds or deducts wages, and provides almost no channels for workers to seek redress. Human rights organizations and labor researchers have stated that Scale AI is one of the many American AI companies that do not comply with basic labor standards for overseas workers. It can be seen that behind the booming artificial intelligence industry dominated by centralized and monopolized enterprises, there is a large army of overseas laborers in the "digital sweatshop", who support the prosperity of the AI industry, but are often exploited in labor-intensive work and do not receive the due rewards.
"The mode of data production and collection is completely centralized, and we believe this is not conducive to the long-term development of AI technology, because everyone is a data producer, but they do not benefit from it," Harold said regarding the issue of data monopoly and high centralization.
Harold stated that based on the decentralized and transparent nature of blockchain, by combining AI data with it, blockchain can be used to manage data, record the production process of each person's data, and ultimately use blockchain for settlement, allowing data providers to continuously benefit.
Flagship products xData and Chipper Node connect B and C ends
"DIN provides a full-stack solution covering data collection, annotation, verification and vectorization," Harold introduced. Its core product xData focuses on the collection and annotation of Twitter content data, able to collect content in a targeted manner around specific projects or topics, and consolidate the scattered materials into a complete database. Through xData, on the one hand, users can participate in the collection and annotation of AI data at low cost and low threshold, and obtain rewards; on the other hand, customers can also gain more exposure opportunities, while meeting their data collection and processing needs. To date, xData has successfully collected and annotated over 100 million tweets.
AI models require not only a large amount of data after multiple iterations, but also ensure the high quality of the data. "High-quality data is the key to improving the accuracy and reliability of the model, while low-quality data may lead to biases and even erroneous results," Harold said. AI models need a large amount of cleaned, verified and qualified data during training and fine-tuning.
In the DIN ecosystem, Chipper Node plays an important role in "quality inspection" and optimization of data. Harold pointed out that Chipper Node uses the idle computing power of user edge devices to verify, classify, clean and vectorize the raw data collected by xData. In addition, Chipper Node not only realizes the conversion of network rewards, but also promotes the efficient operation of the economic system, allowing users to earn rewards anytime and anywhere through mining, ultimately realizing the payment closed loop for AI data contributors.
Through the synergistic effect of Chipper Node and xData, DIN, as a bridge, has connected the B-end enterprises and C-end users. The enterprise end can obtain verified high-quality data more efficiently and at a lower cost through the DIN ecosystem, while the user end can participate in the contribution of data content in a low-threshold manner and obtain rewards. This model not only realizes the efficient matching of data supply and demand, but also significantly enhances the participation and revenue experience of users, injecting strong momentum into the rapid development of the DIN ecosystem. Harold said that the total number of DIN users has exceeded 30 million, with 700,000 daily active users, and DIN processes 1 million on-chain transactions per day, demonstrating a highly active and scalable blockchain ecosystem.
It is worth mentioning that DIN's data is stored on the decentralized storage infrastructure BNB Greenfield, which significantly reduces storage costs and improves storage efficiency by sharding data and storing it on multiple nodes. In addition, thanks to the optimized distributed storage architecture, Greenfield can provide access speeds close to traditional Web2 cloud storage, while ensuring the decentralized security and reliability. This ensures that DIN not only provides incentives for users, but also takes into account the security and privacy protection of data transmission in the network.
Empowering Web2 traditional industries, DIN has truly realized product landing
Unlike most AI+Web3 projects that remain in the stage of imagining large-scale adoption, the AI data provided by DIN has begun to empower the development of Web2 traditional industries. Harold revealed that a few months ago, DIN had cooperated with Shuibo Juhui, a data annotation company under AISpeech, to annotate and collect speech data for AISpeech's low-resource languages through the BNB Chain.
As a unicorn in the field of speech technology in China, AISpeech is on par with iFlytek, focusing on core technologies such as speech recognition, speech synthesis and natural language processing. Its technologies are widely used in products such as car navigation and in-vehicle voice assistants, providing efficient and convenient intelligent interaction experiences for drivers. In the context of globalization, in-vehicle systems must be able to support multi-language interaction, especially in cross-border sales and multicultural integration environments. This requires a large amount of high-quality speech data for low-resource languages and dialects to train speech recognition and synthesis models. Traditional data annotation methods are often costly, time-consuming, and unable to meet the needs of rapid iteration.
However, by leveraging DIN's blockchain network, the annotation and collection tasks of low-resource language speech data can be distributed to the global distributed labor network, which will significantly improve efficiency and data coverage. On the one hand, DIN's platform ensures the high quality and consistency of the annotation data through multi-layer verification and review mechanisms, and the coverage of multiple languages allows AISpeech to quickly build and optimize its low-resource language speech models; on the other hand, the entire data processing workflow is recorded on-chain, ensuring transparency and traceability, which is crucial for speech technology companies under increasingly strict privacy protection and data compliance requirements.
DIN's technology and business model not only prove the feasibility of decentralized data networks, but also inject new growth momentum into traditional industries, becoming an important driving force for the integration of Web2 and Web3. Looking ahead, DIN hopes to extend the capabilities of its data intelligence network to industries such as healthcare, education, and retail, helping traditional enterprises achieve intelligent transformation through the application of AI data processing.
Persevering in the bear market, and giving back to promote the development of the BNB Chain ecosystem
In the just-passed bear market environment, problems such as poor market liquidity, low user activity, and lack of user-verified products were prominent, and constant internal competition has significantly increased the cost of acquiring users. These challenges have undoubtedly put tremendous pressure on the operation and development of the project. Harold admitted that while many projects were "making quick money" through short-term opportunities, it also made them a little envious, but in the end DIN still chose to focus on long-term value creation rather than chasing short-term interests, cashing out quickly, or catering to short-term market fluctuations.
"We are a relatively pragmatic and down-to-earth team," Harold added, DIN has always wanted to persist in doing the right thing, and this process may sometimes be slow and painful, but this is the norm for startups in frontier technology fields, and only by gritting their teeth and persisting can they go further.
From promoting on-chain data analysis to realizing a user-friendly AI agent platform, and then creating decentralized AI data pre-processing tools, in addition to positioning as an AI data infrastructure, the DIN team has always insisted on deep cultivation in the BNB ecosystem in recent years, and after obtaining its funding and resources, it has also promoted the development of the ecosystem. For example, DIN's Chipper node pre-mining and xDIN transactions not only brought significant transaction volume and on-chain activity, but also brought more than 40,000 running nodes and more than 50,000 high-quality node holders. This further activated the on-chain data ecosystem of the BNB Chain and improved user participation.
In addition, recently, DIN has brought nearly 7.5 million transactions and 400,000 exposures to the BNB Chain in just one week through node pre-mining, Binance Web3 wallet airdrops, and the Binance Square essay contest. Not only that, DIN also helped Binance attract more than 260,000 new users to register in just 10 days.
The upcoming TGE and the L2 blockchain based on the BNB chain
Coinciding with the bull market, DIN is about to reach a key milestone in its project development. Harold said that DIN will build a dedicated L2 data chain on the BNB chain to further promote the realization of the decentralized AI data network vision. The DIN token to be launched soon will serve as the core fuel of this L2 chain, used to pay for on-chain operations such as data storage, node operation, and AI agent creation and trading, becoming the hard currency of this decentralized network.
In addition, the DIN token adopts a deflationary model, with each token consumption burning DIN, thereby continuously reducing the market supply and bringing scarcity value. At the same time, the DIN team plans to regularly use the profits generated by its Web2 business to repurchase tokens, further strengthening its value support. Harold revealed that DIN has been profitable for two years, and its mature Web2 data business provides stable and sustainable support for its Web3 development.
In this bull market, with the significant increase in BNB's liquidity and the price reaching a new high, market confidence in the development of its ecosystem is at an all-time high. Many practitioners believe that BNB Chain is likely to announce major moves in the short term. The launch of the DIN L2 data chain is timely, and combined with its performance in the past few months, it may fully benefit from the ecosystem dividends of BNB Chain, and jointly promote the development of the Web3 data economy.
In general, relying on its strong performance in the BNB ecosystem and its mature business model, DIN is gradually realizing the vision of the decentralized AI data economy. With the upcoming L2 data chain and token economic system, DIN not only injects new vitality into the cryptocurrency industry, but also provides more possibilities for the AI and traditional data industries.
