AI & DeSci: The Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narrative of Crossing Bulls and Bears

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has once again welcomed a wave of rising trends. Bitcoin prices have surged significantly, and Meme coins have also sparked a new wave of enthusiasm. However, behind this prosperous scene, doubts about the lack of practical application support for the cryptocurrency industry still exist. Subfields like cloud computing and other Depin areas are still in the development stage, and there is still some distance to go before true large-scale applications can be realized.

In this context, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly gained popularity. Although every new concept inevitably goes through a period of speculation and hype at its inception, the blockchain industry has developed for many years, and it is time to consider how to build practical applications that can benefit humanity.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new momentum into the cryptocurrency market. The viewpoint that "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 on the eve of the bull market. Driven by this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai rapidly emerged as leaders in this concept.

In September this year, as the crypto market gradually warmed up, AI concept Meme coins also stirred up a wave of excitement due to $Goat. Some small teams and even individual developers can launch AI Agents with specific functions within just a week, and profit by issuing Meme coins with the same name.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of "Science," it has not received much attention in the crypto industry. It wasn't until November 8 that a trading platform announced its investment in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the DeSci field, which truly garnered widespread attention. Less than a week later, the platform held a DeSci Day event in Bangkok, where senior executives discussed DeSci insights alongside the founder of Ethereum, expressing hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. This series of actions quickly sparked a wave of enthusiasm for DeSci concept Meme coins, with several popular tokens emerging in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub, which supports Sci-Hub, with the total market capitalization of related concepts exceeding $800 million.

However, high-quality narratives not only require short-term popularity but also need long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application scenarios. The core support of AI—computing power resources—through the Depin cloud computing scheduling of idle computing power is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale applications, and the cost, stability of the computing environment, and response speed have not yet been effectively validated in the market.

The core technology behind DeSci - decentralized storage, has proven to be more cost-effective and secure compared to traditional centralized storage solutions since the development of the IPFS protocol, and the current solutions are relatively mature. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci has basically been built, and now more people need to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

At the Hong Kong web3 carnival in April this year, several project parties in the DeSci field stated that this is a track that requires long-term preparation. Currently, DeSci has just entered users' sight, and there is still a long way to go before a complete system can be established.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the single control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding the risks of data leakage, loss, and malicious tampering that centralized storage may face. This model not only makes scientific research more open and transparent but also allows global researchers to freely share resources. In addition, DeSci uses 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 funding source structure for scientific research and greatly enhances the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, DeSci has achieved innovation in two aspects: 1. Fundraising through token issuance, with the currently popular $rif and $uro raising funds for the development of two drugs by issuing Meme coins. 2. Research data storage has shifted from centralized servers to decentralized and permanently stored blockchain.

A founder of a certain project stated on social media that DeSci has successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins into universities and laboratories around the world, supporting genuine scientific research. This reveals 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.

The current popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes, and the development of the industry is influenced by market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the characteristics of meme coins that are subject to short-term speculation and rapid liquidity depletion.

Therefore, in the short term, it may attract a large number of speculators to enter this track, using it as a gimmick to launch project financing, with "financing means profit" as the goal, rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief boom, DeSci will enter a phase of distinguishing truth from falsehood, gradually cultivating users' awareness of DeSci during the educational market process, only then may it truly achieve the goal of "using crypto finance to monetize scientific research results."

Currently, the demand for data storage and on-chain verification in DeSci is extremely high. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of Memes to break boundaries and 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 gone through multiple stages of development from early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the underlying IPFS protocol. 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. Moreover, decentralized storage has significant 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 system 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 not fully resolved.

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

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this project lie in its deep integration with the main chain, cross-chain support, the combination of decentralized storage and computing capabilities, as well as low cost and high efficiency. This makes the project more suitable for DeFi, smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios, possessing stronger scalability and ecological synergy effects. In the future, this project can be applied in various scenarios 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 the project relies on the support of its ecological projects. This year, the relevant ecological officials launched a community voting event for the most popular projects, dividing the ecosystem into 5 categories. In the infrastructure category, two projects serve as native infrastructures and are very important components.

One of the projects is the largest decentralized storage provider in the ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, the project offers strong storage resources in the ecosystem while supporting the main chain and other networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, the project provides a superior storage network integration solution, offering a more user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

The key advantages of this project include: dual roles of storage and verification, multi-chain support and compatibility, a combination of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, and DWeb hosting services. Currently, the project has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000, and it has stored 2000 TB on IPFS, 20 TB on Arweave, and has over 30,000 daily interactions in the ecosystem. In terms of financing, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

Recently, the project has collaborated with multiple DeSci projects to jointly promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. In DeSci data, some content that does not need to be modified is suitable for permanent storage using Arweave, while data that is continuously updated is suitable for IPFS and emerging storage solutions. The project establishes a decentralized storage solution suitable for DeSci by combining IPFS, Arweave, and emerging storage solutions, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access on emerging storage solutions.

Another project as an underlying data protocol standard aims to generate certification of verification information for bringing tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, particularly providing data support for AI. The project's features include decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, as well as ecosystem collaboration and applications. Currently, the project has established connections with over 3,000 independent certification entities, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecosystem partners, supporting more than 30M verifications.

The introduction of the project for emerging storage solutions provides data validation and management capabilities, further enhancing the platform's security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating with the project, emerging storage solutions can ensure data validation and compliance while offering efficient data management and access control features.

The emerging storage solution is an important strategic layout promoted personally by a certain trading platform and even its founder. Since its launch, it has also represented a significant innovation in the related ecosystem. Unlike other "frontline mainstays" that are directly aimed at C-end users, the emerging storage solution will more often work silently behind the scenes. Its high performance and high interoperability will also be more beneficial for the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the business model of DeSci is validated, coupled with the traffic support from large trading platforms, it will undoubtedly greatly promote the prosperity of the related ecosystem, and emerging storage solutions will achieve large-scale adoption. From a more macro perspective, what truly matters to millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve sustainable development.

The founder of a trading platform, officials, and the founder of Ethereum have recently emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested actual funds to support this field. Even the official account has specifically published research reports on DeSci to legitimize it. This is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt, rather than just hype around a concept. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision that blockchain finance can truly serve the market, realize value implementation, and promote blockchain technology to contribute to society.