The artificial intelligence craze is one of the hottest trends in the tech industry right now. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, the internet has gone bonkers over the potential of generative AI, with its magical abilities to engage in humanlike conversations, perform mundane, work-related tasks, write essays and blog posts, create new code, generate stunning images and more.
The excitement around AI we’re seeing now is similar in some ways to the disruption caused by cryptocurrencies when the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum burst onto the scene. As stories emerged of the first Bitcoin millionaires, more people jumped into the market, buying their first Bitcoins, driving not one, not even two, but three stunning bull runs that added a significant number of names to the crypto rich list. Ultimately, crypto spawned an entire movement based on decentralized blockchain networks known as “Web3”, and big things are expected of related technologies in areas like DeFi, Real-World Assets, GameFi and more.
Given AI and crypto are two of the hottest technology trends to arise over the last decade or so, it’s no surprise to discover that the two concepts are now converging, and we’re seeing the emergence of various new crypto projects that aim to integrate AI with blockchain.
These crypto AI projects are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible when exciting new technologies come together, and it’s worth paying attention to what some of the more innovative movers and shakers are doing in this space.
As one of the oldest AI blockchain projects, launched in 2019, Fetch.ai actually precedes the days of ChatGPT, being founded several years ago as part of a new and transformative blockchain infrastructure for AI models. With Fetch.ai, it’s possible to transform legacy infrastructure and systems and make the more suitable for AI projects.
At the core of Fetch.ai’s project is its efforts to build a platform that enables developers to quickly and easily deploy secure AI applications. Fetch.ai says on its website that it believes “AI agents will reinvent the way we live and work”, with customers able to acces a library of crypto-powered AI applications sold via its third-party marketplace.
Its AI agents are able to connect, search and transact automatically and with full autonomy, creating a new mechanism for creating and deploying AI-infused applications. In other words, it has designed a more efficient computing infrastructure for AI, paving the way for digital twins of people, assets, objects and places.
The Fetch.ai protocol’s native token is FET, which has emerged as one of the top performing cryptocurrency tokens earlier this year, with its price gaining more than 800% between the end of January and mid-April, when it could claim the status of being one of the industry’s five, highest performing tokens of all.
The most recent gains around FET can be linked back to the startup’s launch of DeltaV, which is a new and open data economy platform that relies on AI algorithms to facilitate search-based chat analysis on platforms such as Binance and KuCoin.
Qubic, which stands for Quorum-based computation, is a new project that’s aiming to make blockchain networks far more efficient and less time-consuming too operate and maintain.
To deliver on this aim, it has created a pioneering “Useful Proof-of-Work) or uPoW consensus mechanism, through which the electrical energy used to “mine” Qubic tokens is passed onto miners who race to complete the next block and earn rewards. But because uPoW is hybrid, the energy it generates is also recycled and rented out to blockchain application developers who want to train AI models for their crypto applications. It offers dual functionality that both safeguards the Qubic network and contributes to the advancement of AI.
That’s different from traditional PoW consensus mechanisms such as Bitcoin, where the energy devoted to its mining activities is basically wasted.
One of Qubic’s key components is known as Aigrath, which is an AI program that’s embedded within the Qubic blockchain. It has the effect of getting miners to contribute their resources to AI training jobs rather than crunching pointless math like Bitcoin miners do. The challenges could involve tasks such as pattern recognition, data analysis, and complex problem-solving, and the outcomes of those tasks directly benefit Qubic’s AI models, which “learn” from the experience.
To date, the performance of Qubic leaves a lot to be desired. With the token only launching in February, its price rose from a low of $0.171 to more than $3.7 by the end of March. However, the QUBIC token price has steadily declined ever since that milestone, and now govers dangerously close to its all-time low.
That said, the Qubic project has grown a loyal following since its launch, with more than 42,000 followers on Discord, 9,000+ on Telegram and over 67,000 followers on X. It has also grown the Qubic network, which now spans to more than 500,000 miners scattered across the globe.
Qubic’s uPoW consensus mechanism is widely perceived as an improvement on traditional PoW algorithms, transforming the mourning process into something that provides a genuine, tangible resource for AI workloads.
As the first dedicated AI blockchain, The Graph is a decentralized network that claims to be the perfect platform for third-party AI dApps.
The Graph’s platform has a few novel use cases, leveraging what’s known as an “indexing protocol to enable AI-powered search capabilities to better understand the risks they take on when investing in crypto.
Besides its underlying platform, The Graph is focused on the deployment of tools that can ease AI-based decision making processes These tools are believed to be the key to driving AI crypto growth, and to date it has been very successful, helping experts and novices alike to get to grips with Web3 application development.
By integrating with The Graph, blockchain can potentially cater to hundreds of crypto projects, which can avoid building their own AI infrastructure or waste time or parsing through raw datasets.
Launching in early 2021, The Graph’s native token GRT rose rapidly and hit an all-time high price of close to $8, making its founders briefly emerge within a select group of the world’s top 10 or 20 blockchain investors
That said, The Graph’s fortunes have diminished in recent months, Crypto winter hit the project with repeated hammer blows, and though it has been able to pick itself up, there’s no way of knowing if it will ever reach those earlier heights.
The Ocean Protocol is building a kind of community-focused data exchange platform for AI training data. It’s powered by the OCEAN token, which provides services such as staking to become a validator, participate in governance and more.
OCEAN is also the medium for transactions between different parties on its data marketplace. The protocol is looking to build up a comprehensive marketplace for AI data, and it has created several applications too, including tools for predictive farming yields.
To date, the Ocean Protocol has delivered on a number of impressive achievements, with multiple data marketplaces already up and running, with various dApps for wearable devices and other AI projects taking advantage of its data services.
In addition, it has built up an impressively large following on X, which is the team’s main platform for sharing updates and progress reports. Its team also holds regular AMAs on Reddit, and it keeps its community highly engaged with a variety of task-related initiatives.
The OCEAN token has fared well, hitting an all-time high of $1.94 earlier this year, although like all cryptocurrency tokens, it has suffered losses in recent weeks that can be blamed on Bitcoin’s fluctuating fortunes.
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