Author: Frank, PANews
The bull market is permanent, but the public chains are changing. In each bull market, there are a number of public chains that "lead the trend", and at the same time, there are also a number of public chains that completely "disappear into the dust" with the end of a bull market. As the most important crypto infrastructure, the market share of public chains is undoubtedly the highest. It carries the expectations of a large number of investors and projects. For public chains that lack sticky users, it seems that only by constantly updating the narrative and maintaining their brand exposure can they try their best to stay on the main stage of the new bull market.
AI is the hottest track with the highest attention and the easiest to go viral. PANews observed that some of the star public chains in the first two bull markets did not shine again in this bull market, and AI has become a new narrative for the old public chains. In this article, PANews counted the narratives of 7 old public chains combined with AI, but overall, even when combined with AI, the old public chains seem to show less vitality and determination, wavering on the boundary between riding on the popularity and really doing things.
Qtum : Investing in 10,000 GPUs to support AI
On April 18, the Qtum Foundation announced the acquisition and launch of 10,000 Nvidia GPUs to support artificial intelligence projects.
In addition to launching the GPU support plan, Qtum also launched two AI products, Qtum Solstice and Qtum Qurator.
Qtum Solstice: A conversational chatbot similar to ChatGPT, based on an open source model. This Alpha deployment will enable users to engage in useful and intelligent conversations.
Qtum Qurator: A text-to-image generation model similar to Midjourney, also based on an open source model. This utility will allow users to generate images that would normally require tedious work in image processing software applications.
“We have ambitious goals for AI that require a three-phase rollout plan,” said Miguel Palencia, co-founder of Qtum. “Today, we unveiled the first phase, the chatbot and image generator. The next two phases will include the modeling layer, and finally the decentralized economy layer, which will bring everything together on the Qtum blockchain.”
The Qtum Foundation said it plans to offer up to 10 more AI-related products in the coming months to further utilize these 10,000 GPUs. Such abundant computing power will help the Qtum Foundation find partners for cooperation and joint development.
NEAR : A master AI expert returns to the AI race
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin himself may have made greater contributions to AI than blockchain. He joined Google Research in 2014 to develop models and tools that would eventually be integrated into artificial intelligence. He is also the main code contributor to the Google TensorFlow AI open source project, and eight researchers in the project co-authored the paper "Attention is All You Need", which introduced a new model architecture called Transformer, which later became the technology for popular artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT. It can be said that NEAR has the strongest connection with AI, and even when it was first founded, NEAR.AI was a company completely focused on artificial intelligence.
However, in the first few years of NEAR's founding, its main goal was to create a convenient, easy-to-use, and environmentally friendly blockchain. Until the end of 2023, NEAR announced the launch of NEAR Tasks, a smart contract for automatic payment through NEAR tokens, which can help artificial intelligence projects better distribute rewards through this platform. But in fact, this project looks more like using the advantages of blockchain to optimize the development of artificial intelligence, rather than improving blockchain through artificial intelligence.
At NEARCON 2023, Illia Polosukhin named AI as one of the core verticals of the NEAR ecosystem. Ahead of Nvidia GTC 2024, the price of NERA almost doubled in anticipation of Illia Polosukhin’s attendance as a speaker.
Currently, NEAR Tasks has not been officially launched, and there is no official classification of AI applications in the NEAR ecosystem.
Algorand : Some thoughts on AI but not much
In July 2021, Algorand announced a partnership with Fortior to create AI-driven governance mechanisms and financial assets on the Algorand blockchain. Since then, there has been little news about Algorand’s AI efforts.
A community member asked Algorand at the forum this year: Is there a plan to apply ALGO to artificial intelligence?
ALGO officials responded that they have been thinking about this issue. Decentralization is almost necessary for artificial intelligence models. They have open source models with decentralized data networks (allowing users or enterprises to sell/share data using specific models), processing networks (lending excess computing power, such as mining to allow more outputs), and immutable records (nfts) of outputs such as images. Algorand has been working hard to organize its ideas, but it is very surprising that more cryptocurrency projects have not turned to this concept, or at least have not discussed how decentralized networks and artificial intelligence can establish a symbiotic relationship.
DFINITY : Optimizing ICP to run large AI models
Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, said in a blog in March 2024 that artificial intelligence, smart contracts and blockchain are a "perfect partnership." He believes that centralized large models have the potential to do evil, so artificial intelligence must be tamper-proof.
Dominic Williams said that ICP will upgrade the memory capacity of smart contracts to 32GB and support 64 bits, so that some large language models can be run.
Polygon : Launches AI tools based on GPT-4
Polygon seems to be sensitive enough in the AI field, having launched Polygon Copilot as early as June 2023. However, according to PANews' test, the product does not seem to achieve the expected results and has failed to respond to multiple inquiries.
In addition to Polygon Copilot, Brain, an AI product built by Polygon, is also a similar tool with better functionality than Polygon Copilot. It can not only realize question-and-answer functions, but also provide functions such as deploying contracts and sending transactions through artificial intelligence.
In addition, on April 19, ORA, a popular AI project recently, announced a partnership with Polygon at Token2049 in Dubai to introduce its artificial intelligence oracle OAO on the Polygon chain.
Polkadot : Launch of PolkaBot AI Chatbot
In 2024, PolkaBot launched an artificial intelligence education platform, PolkaBot AI, which is a language model similar to ChatGpt and currently provides some content retrieval about PolkaBot.
So far, although Polkadot has not launched an official AI plan, it seems to attach great importance to the development of AI projects in the ecosystem. On April 16, Polkadot officially published an article on its blog, listing several ecosystem-related AI projects, including the popular AI project Bittensor.
At the same time, Polkadot stated that "Polkadot's powerful infrastructure has unique advantages to support the artificial intelligence revolution, providing the scalability, interoperability, and security required for the huge computing needs of artificial intelligence." It seems that Polkadot's goal is to provide infrastructure for projects that combine Web3 and AI.
Cardano : Using AI models and blockchain comparisons to defend Cardano
Although Cardano has not officially launched any AI plans, it is interesting that in response to the community's doubts about Cardano's inaction in April this year, its founder responded by comparing AI models with cryptocurrencies. Short-term narratives are not always effective. He said: "The problem in our industry is that short-term narratives and carnival sales dominate the conversation. Artificial intelligence has the same problem. A few months ago, Open AI dominated everything, but it also faces increasing competition from other language models. First, Claude 3, now we have Grok 1.5, and soon Llama 3."
Summarize
Judging from the above projects, all the old public chains seem to want to increase the popularity of AI, a social hot spot, but so far none of them have conducted in-depth exploration and efforts in this field. Among them, except for Qtum, NEAR, and Polygon, which have invested more in AI products, other public chains seem to remain in the stage of riding the heat. But at the same time, the Web3+AI track is actually not deserted. According to Coingecko, the current overall market value of AI projects has reached 23.2 billion US dollars, and most projects use Ethereum and Solana as the preferred technology. As an old public chain, if it wants to revitalize through the layout of AI, it may need to come up with some more powerful development strategies and products to be convincing.
