AI and DeSci: The Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narrative of Bull and Bear Markets

Recently, with the sharp rise in Bitcoin prices and the renewed frenzy of Meme coins, the cryptocurrency market has become active again. In this wave of excitement, the DeSci( decentralized science) concept unexpectedly became the focus. Although speculation and hype are inevitable in the early stages of every new concept's birth, the blockchain industry has developed to the point where it is time to consider how to build practical applications that benefit humanity.

The Rise of AI and DeSci

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new narrative momentum into this bull market. The new paradigm of "AI represents advanced productive forces, and blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" sparked heated discussions and became one of the important narratives before the onset of the bull market. Driven by this, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai rose rapidly.

In September this year, with the recovery of the crypto market, AI concept Meme coins also welcomed a wave of popularity. Some small teams and even individuals can simply develop an AI Agent with specific functions and cultivate their own community to "profit" by issuing a Meme coin with the same name.

The concept of DeSci really exploded on November 8th. A certain trading platform announced its investment in BIO Protocol, marking the platform's first foray into the DeSci field. Less than a week later, the platform's executives attended the DeSci Day event held in Bangkok and discussed DeSci insights with Vitalik Buterin, expressing hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, the platform and its executives repeatedly mentioned DeSci on social media. These actions sparked a wave of DeSci-themed meme coins, with several popular tokens emerging within just a few days, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub for donating to Sci-Hub, with the total market capitalization of related concepts surpassing $800 million.

However, a good narrative not only requires short-term popularity but also needs long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application scenarios. The core foundational support for AI—computing power resources, is still in the development stage through Depin cloud computing for idle computing power scheduling, with limited large-scale adoption. The cost and stability of the computing environment have yet to be effectively validated by the market.

In contrast, the core technology behind DeSci—decentralized storage—has been proven to be more cost-effective and secure than traditional centralized storage solutions since its development from the IPFS protocol, and the current solutions are relatively mature. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci has been established, and what is now needed is for more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

The Essence of the DeSci Concept

DeSci, or Decentralized Science (, refers to decentralized science ). It utilizes distributed storage technology to facilitate global open access to research data, reducing the singular control of data by governments or institutions, and avoiding the risks of leakage, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes scientific research activities more open and transparent, allowing global researchers to freely share resources. Additionally, DeSci employs smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise the necessary funds for their research. This fundamentally changes the traditional structure of research funding sources and significantly enhances the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, the DeSci model has achieved innovation in two areas: 1. Fundraising through token issuance, such as the currently popular $rif and $uro, which are raising funds for the development of two drugs by issuing Meme coins. 2. The storage of research data has shifted from centralized servers to a decentralized blockchain that is permanently secure and cannot be lost.

The comments from the founder of a certain project also reveal the essence of DeSci: leveraging the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote and accelerate the monetization of value in the research field and more practical applications.

Currently, the popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes, and the industry's development is swept along by market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial funding, while also facing high risks and high failure rates, which contrasts with the characteristics of memes such as short-term speculation and rapid liquidity depletion.

Therefore, in the short term, a large number of speculators will enter this field, releasing project financing with the aim of "financing equals profit," rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of distinguishing the genuine from the false, gradually cultivating users' awareness of DeSci in the educational market process, before it may truly achieve the goal of "utilizing crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research outcomes."

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

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

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple stages of development, from early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the IPFS protocol behind them. An analysis in May 2023 pointed out that decentralized storage is on average about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with this difference reaching up to 121 times in enterprise-level data storage. Furthermore, decentralized storage has clear advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage with a more intuitive user experience and mature product systems still dominates the market. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and permanent data storage, along with the relatively high costs associated with Arweave's focus on "permanent storage," remain pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a certain trading platform announced the launch of a new decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. The biggest feature of this infrastructure is to provide a decentralized storage framework for the entire ecosystem, allowing users and DApps to create, store, and exchange fully owned data. Through a native cross-chain bridge between the smart chain and this infrastructure, users can freely transfer tokens between the smart chain and the infrastructure, thus conveniently interacting with the DApps built on it.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this infrastructure lie in its deep integration with public chains, cross-chain support, the combination of decentralized storage and computing capabilities, as well as its low cost and high efficiency. This makes it more suitable for DeFi, smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios, with stronger scalability and ecological synergy effects. In the future, this infrastructure can be used in the following scenarios, including but not limited to:

• Website Hosting: Users can quickly deploy and host websites through the API, simplifying the registration and payment process.
• Personal Cloud Storage: Create secure personal cloud storage using private keys, easily upload and download encrypted files.
• Blockchain Data Storage: Store smart chain and other ecological data, reduce latency, and improve availability.
• Content Publishing: Creators store and mirror their works on the smart chain, and after the transaction is completed, the buyer can access it.
• Social Media: Social media influencers can fully control content data and publish and profit through decentralized platforms.
• Personal Data Market: Provides decentralized data storage and management solutions to ensure the security of personal data.

The development of this infrastructure is inseparable from the support of its ecological projects. Recently, the official public chain ecosystem launched a community voting event for the most popular projects, dividing the ecosystem into 5 categories. In the infrastructure category, two projects serve as the native infrastructure of this ecosystem and are very important components of it.

Project A

Project A is the largest storage provider in the decentralized storage infrastructure ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider (SP) and validator, Project A provides robust storage resources on the infrastructure while supporting multiple networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. On top of the infrastructure, Project A offers a superior storage network integration solution by integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, providing a more user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

Its key advantage lies in:

• Dual Role of Storage and Validation: As a storage provider and validator, Project A not only offers storage solutions for users but also participates in the proof-of-stake mechanism to ensure the security of the blockchain.
• Multi-chain support and compatibility: In addition to the aforementioned infrastructure, Project A supports multiple networks.
• Decentralized storage and computing resource integration: Project A provides storage services while utilizing idle hardware from its own nodes to offer users instant access to stored data and computing, achieving more efficient data usage scenarios.
• Flexible storage solutions: Project A offers a hybrid solution suitable for hot and cold storage, combining IPFS + Arweave/infrastructure storage models to meet different storage needs and is compatible with Web2.
• Decentralized AI Services: Through the AI RPC(API standard), Project A provides an aggregation solution of 100+ models, offering users efficient AI model invocation services.
• Project A's DWeb hosting service occupies an important position in the ecosystem, providing developers with one-click deployment functionality, allowing the dApp frontend to be quickly deployed to infrastructure storage, and in conjunction with the ecosystem's future plan of RAAS( Rollup as a service ), achieving the one-click chain initiation function.

Currently, project A has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It has stored 2000 TB in the IPFS ecosystem, and 20 TB in the Arweave ecosystem. The daily interaction count for infrastructure is over 30k. In terms of funding, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

Recently, Project A collaborated with multiple parties in DeSci to jointly promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. In DeSci's data, some unmodifiable content is suitable for permanent storage on Arweave, while data that is constantly being updated is suitable for IPFS and infrastructure. Project A has established a decentralized storage solution for DeSci by combining IPFS, Arweave, and infrastructure, placing cold backup data on Arweave and hot data access on the infrastructure.

Project B

Project B, as the underlying data protocol standard for public chains, aims to generate authentication of verification information, used to bring hundreds of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, especially to provide data support for AI. The characteristics of Project B are:

• Decentralized Verification Service: By bringing Web2 and Web3 data on-chain, it provides cross-platform verification services, supporting data from mainstream exchanges and mainstream social platforms. The research data verification services involved in DeSci can also directly use project B for verification and put the results on-chain.
• User Sovereignty and Data Privacy: Users can actively upload data through the dApp project party using the data set created by Project B and the defined data format standards; this reduces the steps of third-party data labeling and cleaning, achieving proactive classification and standardization of data, and returning the sovereignty of processing their own data to the users.
• AI Training and Dataset Services: Through decentralized data verification, Project B will directly provide the most reliable and usable data for AI training and dataset needs.
• Ecosystem Cooperation and Applications: Project B has established connections with over 3000 independent certifiers, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecosystem partners, supporting over 30M certifications.

For infrastructure, the introduction of Project B provides data verification and management capabilities, further enhancing the platform's security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating with Project B, the infrastructure can ensure data verification and compliance, while also providing efficient data management and access control features.

Attempts at Sustainable Development in the Cryptocurrency Industry

The aforementioned infrastructure is an extremely important strategic layout, and since its launch, it has also been a significant innovation in the ecosystem. Unlike the "frontline players" that directly face end users, this infrastructure will work silently behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will be more beneficial to.