Written by: TechFlow
Whether attending industry events in Hong Kong or Dubai, one conclusion can be drawn: AI is the biggest consensus between the East and the West in this bull market .
We make no secret of our optimism about the AI narrative, but most current AI concepts focus on infrastructure and are too far away from users, like castles in the air. So are there any applications that can truly make users aware of the existence of AI?
The answer is YES, AI Arena, a blockchain game that integrates AI and whose seed round was led by Paradigm .
As a post-90s generation, my happy childhood was spent playing classic fighting games such as "The King of Fighters" and "Street Fighter". Whether it was a man-machine battle or a two-player battle, the core of the operation was still humans.
In the AI era, let us open up our imagination. If the machine in the man-machine battle is a thinking intelligent entity, we can inject our thoughts into the game character to give it a digital soul and make it a digital reflection of someone. Isn’t this a cool thing? This is what AI Arena will do.
AI Arena is a PVP fighting game where players can learn through AI and continuously evolve their game characters. Through the training platform provided by AI Arena and combined with artificial intelligence, we can store our operations, consciousness and thoughts in the AI model, so that the characters in the game can fight in the way we set. In other words, in AI Arena, the real participants in the fight are the game characters with our digital souls, you in another world.
The AI Arena battle mode is similar to Nintendo's Super Smash Brothers.
Currently, there are two game modes for players to choose from: Research Competition and Gaming Competition.
The competition is about the best machine learning (ML) model created by researchers. Researchers will use code to train their own AI models in the Python environment created by AI Arena, and then upload them to the chain to compete with AI models from other researchers. Researchers who perform well will be rewarded with AI Arena's native tokens.
It is the players who compete in the game competition. Players from all over the world compete to develop the best training strategies to maximize the performance of their NFTs in the arena. As mentioned above, each NFT game character contains an AI model that can imitate your actions to learn how to fight and drive your NFT game character to fight. As players climb the AI Arena global leaderboard (qualifying), they can also get the game's native token rewards.
If AI Arena is defined as a Web3.0 game that simply applies AI, I think the pattern is a bit small. AI Arena is more like an AI model training camp in the shell of a game. Through the game scenario, more users can contact, understand and experience AI, and artificial intelligence engineers can provide various AI algorithms based on AI Arena.
If you regard AI Aren as just a game, then the token economy is the traditional "Play to earn". If you regard AI Aren as an AI model training project, then the token economy is "Train to earn".
AI Arena’s native token is called N, which incentivizes researchers and players to participate in this AI competition and is the foundation of AI Arena’s economic flywheel.
Player
Players train AI characters to participate in game ranking competitions. Participants need to bet $N and have the opportunity to receive more $N rewards;
Game props: Players can use $N to buy batteries, charge NFTs and then fight in ranking matches;
Put $N into the fusion pool to get more powerful NFTs (more on this below).
researcher
Researchers can stake $N to participate in research competitions (AI algorithm models) and have the opportunity to receive more $N rewards
The merging pool is a unique mechanism of AI Arena, the main purpose of which is to control NFT The inflation rate , which consumes $N, also gives players a chance to obtain more powerful NFT characters.
Before entering a round of ranking battles, players can choose to invest a certain percentage of the $N prize money they won in that round into the fusion pool. The more prize money transferred to the fusion pool, the higher the probability of winning NFT, and all $N placed in the fusion pool by the player will be destroyed.
The fusion pool, as the name suggests, selects all the NFTs staked in a particular round of the ranking game and lets them compete with each other. Through competition, the system can select which NFTs to merge to create a more powerful NFT.
Once the fusion is completed, a new batch of enhanced NFTs will be obtained, which will inherit the skills of the original NFTs, and then compete again. In this way, the cycle will continue, and NFTs will continue to evolve and become more and more powerful.
Therefore, in general, the main scenarios of $N are betting in ranking battles, consumption of fusion pools, and consumption of in-game items.
AI Arena's parent company ArenaX Labs announced in October 2021 that it had completed a $5 million seed round of financing, led by Paradigm and participated by Framework Ventures.
On January 9, 2024, ArenaX Labs completed a $6 million financing round, led by Framework Ventures, with participation from SevenX Ventures, FunPlus/Xterio and Moore Strategic Ventures.
Compared to the AI Arena on the stage, the developer behind it, ArenaX Labs, may be more worthy of attention.
AI Arena is the first flagship AI game launched by ArenaX Labs. As an AI company, ArenaX Labs has launched two underlying AI platforms:
The ARC- platform allows other game developers to use its core technology to create AI games. Human players can give AI-like skills through imitation learning. AI Arena is a typical game case.
SAI- platform gamifies complex machine learning learning/competitions to solve real-world problems through an engaging gaming environment and AI community.
Through these two platforms, other traditional game studios can also use their underlying technologies to quickly build their own AI game models.
Games are the best scenario to reach users, but ultimately, ArenaX Labs hopes to change games through AI and use games to change AI, so I call it an AI company in the guise of games.
According to the information previously announced by the official, its token $N may be TGE in May, and 0.8% of its total amount will be allocated to the participants of the airdrop "TGE Points" event. They only need to complete relevant social tasks to obtain points and exchange them for tokens in the future.
For example, if you write a tweet on X with the theme "Why $N is AI Gaming" and tag it with #Nisaigaming, you will get points to earn TGE points. This is not limited to KOLs, everyone can participate.
Participation link:
https://hub.aiarena.io/ref/2A66MW9N
The three co-founders of ArenaX Labs are Brandon Da Silva, Wei Xie and Dylan Pereira. Brandon Da Silva and Wei Xie have both worked for OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds, for many years. Dylan Pereira is an art director who has worked in design at Titmouse, an independent animation production company in the United States, and has in-depth cooperation with NETFLIX.
Among the currently issued tokens, the AI game-related asset with the largest market value should be $PRIME. It is worth looking forward to whether AI Arena can take over $PRIME and become the new AI game star.
