How Can Artificial Intelligence & Crypto Work Together?

ChangeHero
6 min readFeb 14, 2023
How Can AI and Crypto Work Together?

From Midjourney to ChatGPT, AI models and products are swiftly becoming household names. It also feels as if the technology that develops at breakneck speed is finding mass adoption sooner than crypto. Or, the two can come together to fuel a new generation of tech.

Let’s see which five crypto projects try to answer the titular question with their AI cryptocurrency.

Join our Telegram channel https://t.me/CHCryptoNews for more crypto insights!

SingularityNET

Have you heard of technological singularity? It’s a theory that speculates there will be a point in time in the future when the human civilization will be irreversibly changed by the technological progress. This concept is quoted in the SingularityNET’s whitepaper. Their part in the upcoming revolution is to be “the leading protocol for networking AI and machine learning tools to form highly effective applications across vertical markets and ultimately generate coordinated artificial general intelligence”.

dashboard of the AI publisher of SingularityNET
SingularityNET’s AI publisher. Source: singularitynet.io

SingularityNET takes a problem of today’s AI services — concentration in the hands of mega-corporations — and proposes a solution. In their vision, independent AI developers will have an opportunity to monetize their creations on the marketplace powered by the protocol. In addition to being a commercial launchpad for AIs, they also intend to build an infrastructure for different providers to operate with each other.

Artificial intelligence may have found hype in late 2022 but SingularityNET has been around since at least 2017. It launched on Ethereum but later migrated to Cardano, and its other partners include Ocean Protocol and Hanson Robotics. Since the 2017 ICO, the team’s vested balances have already been unlocked, and 86% of AGIX is already in circulation. If you really want to hold an AI token, this may be your first choice.

Fetch

Illustration of the Fetch network architecture
Illustration of the Fetch network architecture. Source: fetch.ai

Fetch Network is an ecosystem of autonomous machine-to-machine nodes. The blockchain comes into play to connect them. Why is it considered to be an AI crypto, then? The autonomy comes from Multi-Agent System (MAS), used in the artificial intelligence sphere. The developers claim these agents can handle search, negotiations and settlement without any human input. The native token FET is directly used in these transactions to record the deals in the Fetch.ai ledger.

What kind of use cases would require a network powered by both MAS and blockchain?

  • CoLearn, a collective learning system for building shared ML models;
  • Axim, a privacy-preserving data and insights service for businesses;
  • Move-to-earn app catered to eco-friendly mobility MOBIX;
  • Automotive trustworthy, collaborative, open and secure data ecosystem Catena-X.

Fetch’s network activity is on the rise, with thousands of unique senders and receivers. Its AI token FET is listed on Binance and Crypto.com, which are some of the largest holders — it means plenty of people keep and trade FET there. Fetch.ai works on the Cosmos blockchain and ranks 107th by market cap.

Numeraire

Another blockchain project that sets out to solve a problem exclusive to AI is Numeraire. The researchers behind it look at data overfitting, when the artificial intelligence hits a spot when it works better with known data but makes more mistakes when working with new data sets. Numeraire was made for data scientists to incentivize competition of their data sets and stake NMR on their predictions.

In practice, the Numerai project invites data scientists to give predictions of the stock market and compare signals. The better the performance, the higher the rewards. Numerai sets out for nothing short of building “the world’s last hedge fund”. The implication is, artificial intelligence will make human-run ones obsolete.

It won’t be a surprise given the narrow use case that NMR is not registering huge network growth or activity. At the same time, Numeraire has a clearly defined use case, which is a positive fundamental trait. NMR is best used as a utility token for Numerai tournaments rather than an investment vehicle, with its value proposition in mind.

Alethea.AI

Next up in the ratings by market capitalization is the ALI token that powers Alethea.ai’s Noah’s Ark project. Let’s get the terms sorted out first.

  • Alethea.ai is the studio building AI-powered solutions;
  • iNFT, which stands for Intelligent NFT, is one of their products. It is a digital item that consists of several interlinked NFTs;
  • Noah’s Ark is their Metaverse dApp that uses the iNFT protocol;
  • The ALI token is a utility token of the dApp and the iNFT protocol.
Source: Alethea AI Whitepaper

The Noah’s Ark’s mission is none lesser than “preserve and evolve the culture and collective intelligence of the human species”. Alethea AI suggest to do it with digital identities called iNFT, with different personalities and intelligence levels. Personality pods let users turn their own NFTs into an iNFT to use in the dApp, and intelligence levels determine which AI services the user’s avatar can avail.

The smart contract has decent network activity for a project of this size. However, upon closer inspection, you will notice that aside from the chunk concentrated in the team’s addresses, the rest is spread in DeFi. It also has a lower market cap to holders ratio than the rest of these AI tokens. If you really believe the team is able to achieve their lofty goal, then why not hold and use ALI?

OxAI.com

This budding project proposes a solution for access to AI computation. According to their whitepaper, there is virtually no problem AI can’t solve, be it carbon emissions or unemployment. The technology with this kind of power cannot remain in limited access, so they propose an “essential infrastructure to bridge decentralized AI-Generated data on-chain to Ethereum in the form of NFTs and a decentralized AI Operator Network”.

In practice, OxAI.com intends to operate as a chat interface that tokenizes queries. These queries are sent to a marketplace of AI operators, depending on who can fulfill it. The query sorting is done by a sorting bot and the response sorting is performed by a reputation mechanism. The idea is to have the user verify the AI-produced results themselves. Upon verification, an NFT with the response is minted to let the user decide if they want to keep it public.

OxAI.com uses a tried and true approach to decentralized governance in the form of a DAO. As it usually is, it consists of self-described meme token OXAI stakers. The blockchain protocol is employed on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche and Fantom.

Is the token delivering on its grand promises? Judging by the main site, it is pretty much under construction. The token is present only on Uniswap and has six-figure trading volume. The contract at its peak had 588 unique receivers and senders, so it is a quite obscure one. It has existed for less than a week but for the whole time it has been trending on CoinMarketCap. Out of the five AI cryptocurrencies we reviewed, this one probably carries the highest risk.

Conclusion

These five projects paint a future in which crypto and artificial intelligence work together. However, with the hype surrounding AI these days, we are bound to see more projects that use it as a buzzword rather than add value to the technology. Think twice before FOMO’ing in and put some time into understanding this breakthrough tech.

If you found this review helpful, visit our social media for a stream of engaging content, or subscribe to our Medium for more deep dives like this one. And join our Telegram channel https://t.me/CHCryptoNews for more crypto updates!

Twitter | Reddit | Facebook | Telegram | YouTube

--

--