AI and DeSci: The narrative behind the bull and bear cycles hides the potential of infrastructure

Recently, the price of Bitcoin has surged over 20%, and Meme coins are experiencing a frenzy once again. However, during the past six months of sluggishness, there has been a prevailing view in the market that "the crypto industry lacks real-world support." For example, in the cloud computing subfield of the Depin industry, there is still a considerable distance to true large-scale application. Amid the speculative craze for Meme coins, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly gained popularity again.

Every new concept inevitably goes through a phase of speculation and hype, and DeSci is no exception. However, after many years of development in the blockchain industry, it is time to consider how to build practical applications that can benefit humanity.

AI and DeSci

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new narrative power into this bull market. The new paradigm of "AI represents advanced productivity, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" quickly sparked heated discussions, becoming one of the important narratives before the arrival of the bull market. In this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai have rapidly emerged, becoming representatives of this concept.

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually regains vitality, meme coins centered around the AI concept have also surged due to $Goat. A small team or even an individual only needs to develop an AI Agent with a specific function, cultivate a community and fan base, and then issue a meme coin with the same name to "profit".

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of "Science" in Crypto+Science, it has not attracted attention. Its true breakout began on November 8 when a trading platform invested in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the decentralized science (DeSci) field. Less than a week after the announcement, executives from the platform attended the DeSci Day event in Bangkok, discussing DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum and expressing hopes to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. This statement sparked a meme coin frenzy around the DeSci concept, with several popular coins emerging in just a few days, such as $uro, $rif, and $SciHub, and the total market value of related concepts surpassing $800 million.

However, a good narrative not only requires short-term popularity but also needs long-term infrastructure development to be truly realized. The most basic resource scheduling for AI computing power is still in the development stage, with few large-scale applications, and its cost and stability have not been fully validated by the market.

In contrast, the decentralized storage technology behind DeSci has become relatively mature. Since the development of the IPFS protocol, decentralized storage has lower costs and higher security compared to traditional centralized storage solutions. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci is basically in place, and now it needs more people to recognize and adopt this concept.

DeSci Concept Traceability: Is Speculation Still Greater Than Practicality?

At the Hong Kong web3 event in April this year, several DeSci project parties stated that this is a field that requires a "long-termism" mindset. Currently, DeSci has just entered the users' sight, and there is still a long way to go before it is truly built.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the control of a single institution over data and avoiding the risks of leakage, loss, and tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes research activities more open and transparent, allowing researchers worldwide to freely share resources. Additionally, DeSci uses smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise research funds and fundamentally changing the traditional funding source structure in scientific research, significantly enhancing the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, DeSci has achieved innovation in two aspects: 1. Raising funds through token issuance; 2. Transferring research data storage from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently preserved blockchain.

The founder of a certain project pointed out that DeSci has successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins into universities and laboratories around the world, supporting actual scientific research. This reveals the essence of DeSci: utilizing the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote the monetization of value and practical application in the field of scientific research.

Currently, the popularity of DeSci is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes, and the development of the industry is influenced by market sentiment. However, scientific research requires continuous and substantial funding, and faces high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the characteristics of short-term speculation and rapid liquidity depletion associated with memes.

Therefore, in the short term, there may be a large number of speculators entering the field to launch projects for financing purposes rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief boom, DeSci will enter a phase of eliminating falsehoods and retaining truths, cultivating user awareness in the educational market process, and ultimately achieving the goal of "utilizing crypto finance to monetize scientific research outcomes."

Currently, there is a huge demand for data storage and on-chain proof in DeSci. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of Memes to break boundaries and establish a mature business model, decentralized storage will become its infrastructure, and this stable and enormous demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has matured, and the infrastructure potential behind DeSci is immense.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple development stages from the early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the underlying IPFS protocol. Analysis in May 2023 showed that decentralized storage is on average about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Moreover, decentralized storage has obvious advantages in terms of data security, privacy, and reliability. However, although some Web2 clients have started using solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage, which offers a more intuitive user experience and a more mature product system, still dominates the mainstream. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and data permanence, as well as the high costs associated with Arweave's 'permanent storage,' remain pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a trading platform launched a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height in the field. This infrastructure provides a decentralized storage architecture for the entire ecosystem, enabling users and DApps to create, store, and exchange fully self-owned data. Through a native cross-chain bridge with the smart chain, users can freely transfer assets between the smart chain and the infrastructure, facilitating interaction with DApps built on it.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this infrastructure has advantages in terms of deep integration with the ecosystem, cross-chain support, the combination of storage and computing capabilities, as well as low cost and high efficiency. This makes it more suitable for DeFi, smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios, with stronger scalability and ecological synergy. In the future, this infrastructure can be applied in various fields such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

At the same time, the development of this infrastructure relies on support from ecological projects. This year, the ecological officials launched a community voting event for the most popular projects, dividing them into 5 categories. In the infrastructure category, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as native infrastructures, are important components.

4EVERLAND

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in this ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, 4EVERLAND offers robust storage resources, supports multiple networks, and is committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features of IPFS and Arweave, 4EVERLAND provides superior storage solutions, improving user experience and reducing usage difficulty.

Its key advantages include:

• Dual role of storage and verification
• Multi-chain support and compatibility
• Combination of decentralized storage and computing resources
• Flexible Storage Solution
• Decentralized AI Services
• DWeb Hosting Service

Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It has 2000 TB of storage on IPFS, 20 TB on Arweave, and over 30,000 daily interactions. It has received support from multiple well-known public chains and investment institutions.

4EVERLAND has partnered with multiple DeSci projects to promote decentralized storage of scientific literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and this infrastructure, a storage solution suitable for DeSci is established, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data accessed on this infrastructure.

BAS

BAS, as a foundational data protocol standard, aims to generate verification information authentication, bringing tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, providing data support for AI. Its features include:

• Decentralized Verification Service
• User Sovereignty and Data Privacy
• AI Training and Dataset Services
• Ecosystem Cooperation and Application

BAS has established connections with over 3,000 independent certifiers, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecological partners, supporting more than 30 million certifications.

For this infrastructure, BAS introduces capabilities for data validation and management, enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By combining these, the infrastructure ensures data validation and compliance while providing efficient data management and permission control features.

Attempts at Sustainable Development in the Cryptocurrency Industry

This infrastructure is an important strategic layout and has become a significant innovation in the ecosystem since its launch. Unlike the "frontline forces" that are directly aimed at C-end users, this infrastructure works quietly behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability are conducive to the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the DeSci business model is validated, along with support from trading platform traffic, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and this infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption. From a macro perspective, what truly matters to millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can develop sustainably in the long term.

Recently, multiple parties have emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested real money to support it. This is a significant innovation attempt, rather than simple concept hype. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision of advancing the blockchain financial service market, realizing value implementation, and promoting blockchain technology to contribute to society.