Sentient unveils its token economics; how will the market price it?

On January 16, the open-source AI platform Sentient announced the SENT token economics. The total supply of SENT tokens is approximately 34.3 billion, of which 44% will be used for community incentives and airdrops, 19.55% will be used for the ecosystem and R&D, 2% will be used for public sales, 22% will be allocated to the team, and 12.45% will be allocated to investors.

According to Polymarket data, the probability of Sentient's FDV exceeding $200 million on the day after its launch has risen to 99%, exceeding $400 million to 87%, and exceeding $600 million to 83%. Currently, the trading volume in this prediction market is approximately $330,000.

Allocation Rules Details

Throughout the ecosystem, SENT is used for agents, models, data services, and other artifacts-driven products. SENT can also be used for payments between artifacts, enabling composable on-chain value flows between services. The official total supply of SENT is set at 34,359,738,368, exactly 2³⁵. The official statement says they will share the full story of how this number was chosen in the future; however, tech-savvy readers may be able to deduce the reasons.

SENT allocations are divided into five categories: community initiatives and airdrops, ecosystem and R&D, team, investors, and public offerings.

Community events and airdrops – 44.00%

This portion of tokens, representing 44% of the total supply, is dedicated to airdrops, community grants, bounties, and incentive programs to reward users and developers for their verifiable work on GRID. To ensure broad ownership, 30% of this portion of tokens (approximately 13% of the total supply) will unlock at TGE, with the remaining 70% unlocking linearly over four years. By design, those who build, test, and share open-source intelligence and products will be eligible for the largest share of tokens. The airdrop will be fully unlocked at TGE.

Ecosystems and R&D – 19.55%

This portion of the tokens, representing 19.55% of the total supply, will be used to promote ecosystem development, research and development, growth, infrastructure construction, and the operation of the Sentient Foundation. To ensure a stable long-term supply, 30% will be unlocked on TGE (token issuance date), and the remaining 70% will be unlocked linearly over four years.

Team — 22.00%

This portion of the funding pool, representing 22% of the total supply, is dedicated to the Sentient Foundation and Sentient Labs team members, including employees, founders, and key contractors. At TGE, the team funding pool is locked for one year, after which the funds will be released linearly over six years, with a one-year freeze period.

Investors – 12.45%

This portion of the tokens, representing 12.45% of the total supply, is allocated to investors who supported Sentient in the private placement round. These investor tokens will be locked for one year and will unlock linearly over four years. This structure is designed to reward the confidence of early investors.

Public sale – 2.00%

This public offering represents 2% of the total supply and is designed to encourage broader community participation at project launch. This allocation will be fully unlocked on TGE. Specific public offering structure will be announced soon.

In late November 2025, Sentient launched an airdrop registration portal, targeting four groups: community contributors, active Sentient Chat users, Top Voices social platform users, and external open-source researchers.

The second season of the event will feature new characters based on contributions, a clearer upgrade path, and various reward mechanisms. Rewards will include SENT tokens, NFTs, and merchandise. Specific airdrop details have not yet been announced.

AI upstart raises $85 million

Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building an open general artificial intelligence (AGI) economy. It is developing a platform and protocol that allows open-source AI developers to monetize or commercialize their models, data, and other innovations. Here, developers can collaborate to build powerful AI tools and become key stakeholders driving AI transformation and prosperity in the new open AGI economy.

Sentient proposed the "OML" (Open, Monetized, Loyal) model concept, hoping to promote a shared and open AGI economy through the OML model, and build a shared and open AGI economic system with the participation of millions of AI agents and billions of users, providing inexhaustible power for the innovation and development of downstream applications.

At the product and architecture level, Sentient's core is its intelligent network called GRID (Global Research and Intelligence Directory). Officially, it's described as a collaborative system comprised of specialized agents, models, data, tools, and computing power: when a user initiates a query, the task is broken down, routed to the appropriate agent/tool/data source, and then the multiple results are aggregated into a consistent output.

For ordinary users, Sentient Chat is positioned as a unified entry point and distribution channel for GRID, emphasizing that users can see which capabilities are invoked and their sources during the interaction process; for developers and ecosystem partners, GRID provides a channel for being used, distributed, and generating future revenue, and uses the SENT token economy to encourage contributors to connect various artifacts to the network, directing incentives to more valuable modules through staking and usage signals.

To support the platform capability of multi-agent collaboration, Sentient launched and open-sourced the ROMA (Recursive Open Meta-Agent) framework in 2025. This framework abstracts complex tasks into a recursive hierarchical task tree: parent nodes are responsible for decomposing the objective, distributing context to child nodes, and aggregating results after collection. This makes the context flow of medium- to long-chain tasks more transparent, traceable, and debuggable, and also facilitates the replacement of different models, tools, or manual verification steps at the node level. In its product updates, Sentient describes ROMA as the skeleton for building high-performance multi-agent systems and has synchronized it to GitHub as an open-source foundation for secondary development by the community.

A powerful alliance between academia and the crypto community

In July 2024, Sentient announced the completion of an $85 million seed funding round, setting a record in the AI ​​crypto space. The round was co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, with participation from Ethereal Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, and Canonical Crypto.

One of Sentient's key contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, and Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer, serves as an advisor to the project.

In addition, regarding the team composition, Sentient Labs' public personnel page shows that the other two co-founders are Pramod Viswanath (Professor of Engineering at Princeton University) and Himanshu Tyagi (Professor of Engineering at the Indian Academy of Sciences). Pramod Viswanath has long been engaged in research on information theory and communication systems and leads Sentient's AI security and theoretical foundation construction; Himanshu Tyagi is skilled in privacy protection and decentralized learning algorithms and provides academic support for model training and privacy collaboration.

The core engineering and development team mainly consists of university professors and researchers, with functions including AI research and platform engineering, blockchain R&D, product and operation. The team structure is a mix of academic research, engineering implementation and crypto-economic mechanisms.

Ecological cooperation and application scenarios

The officially disclosed ecosystem has reached 60+ partners/accessors, covering model partners, agents, data providers, models and verifiable inference, and other types.

In summary, Sentient differentiates itself by defining the implementation path of AGI as a composable open network. It attempts to address the long-standing funding, distribution, and sustainability issues facing open-source AI through SENT's incentive and staking mechanisms. Therefore, its key variables are more about systems engineering and mechanism design than single-point model capabilities, including whether the quality of ecosystem integration can be continuously improved, whether incentives will lead to real-world value, and whether multi-agent systems can form replicable models in terms of reliability and security.