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

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has seen a surge again, with Bitcoin rising over 20%, and Meme coins going crazy once more. However, during the low period of the past six months, there has been a prevailing sentiment in the market that "the crypto industry lacks real-world support." For subfields like cloud computing in the Depin industry, there is still a distance to true large-scale adoption. Nevertheless, amidst the Meme speculation frenzy, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly become hot again.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new momentum into this bull market. "AI represents advanced productive forces, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" has become a new consensus, sparking heated discussions. Projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai have rapidly risen to prominence, becoming representatives of this concept.

In September this year, with the market regaining vitality, AI concept Meme coins are also experiencing a launch boom. A small team or even an individual only needs to develop an AI Agent and cultivate a community and fan base to "earn profits" by launching a Meme coin of the same name.

The DeSci concept can be traced back to the last bull market, but it has not received much attention until recently. On November 8, a trading platform announced its investment in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the DeSci field. Less than a week later, the platform held a DeSci Day event in Bangkok to discuss insights on DeSci. Relevant individuals expressed hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. This has sparked a craze for DeSci concept Meme coins, with several popular coins emerging in just a few days, such as $uro, $rif, and $SciHub, with the total market capitalization of related concepts exceeding $800 million.

However, good narratives not only require short-term popularity but also long-term infrastructure construction to achieve real implementation. The core support of AI—computing power resources, is still in the developmental stage for idle computing power scheduling through Depin cloud computing, with limited large-scale adoption, and costs and stability still need market validation.

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

The DeSci model achieves innovation in two areas: 1. fundraising through token launches; 2. transferring research data storage from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently secure blockchain.

Currently, the popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by Memes, and the industry's development is entangled with market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial financial investment, while also facing high risks and high failure rates, which stands in contrast to the short-term speculative characteristics of Memes.

In the short term, there may be a large number of speculators entering this field, aiming for "financing is profit" rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. Therefore, after experiencing a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a stage of discerning authenticity, gradually cultivating user awareness in the educational market process, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "using crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research results."

At present, the demand for data storage and on-chain verification behind DeSci is extremely huge. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of memes to break boundaries and establish a mature business model, decentralized storage will become the infrastructure of the DeSci field, and this stable and enormous demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple developmental stages 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 differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Decentralized storage has significant advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients beginning to adopt 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 unresolved pain points in the industry.

In April last year, a certain trading platform launched a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. Its biggest feature is to provide a decentralized storage architecture 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 infrastructure, users can freely transfer tokens between the smart chain and the infrastructure, thereby conveniently interacting with DApps built on that infrastructure.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this infrastructure has advantages in deep integration with the chain, cross-chain support, a combination of decentralized 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 effects. In the future, this infrastructure can be used 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 this infrastructure cannot do without support from ecological projects. This year, the ecological authorities launched a community voting activity for the most favored projects, which is divided into five categories. In the infrastructure category, two projects serve as native infrastructures and are 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 powerful storage resources while supporting multiple networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave on its infrastructure, it provides a better storage network integration solution, offering a friendly user experience and reducing usage difficulty.

Its key advantages include: dual roles of storage and verification, multi-chain support and compatibility, integration of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, etc. The project currently has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000, IPFS storage of 2000 TB, Arweave storage of 20 TB, and over 30k daily interactions. In terms of financing, it has received support from multiple well-known institutions.

Recently, the project has collaborated with multiple DeSci project parties to promote decentralized storage of scientific literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and new infrastructure, a DeSci decentralized storage solution has been established, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access on the new infrastructure.

Another project serves as the underlying data protocol standard, aimed at generating verification information authentication, bringing tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, and providing data support for AI. Its features include decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, ecosystem collaboration and applications, etc. The project has established connections with over 3,000 independent certifiers, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecosystem partners, supporting over 30 million authentications.

For the new infrastructure, the introduction of this project provides data validation and management capabilities, enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By combining, the new infrastructure can ensure data validation and compliance while providing efficient data management and permission control functions.

The new infrastructure is an extremely important strategic layout, and its launch will also be a significant innovation for the ecosystem. Unlike the "front-line players" that directly face C-end users, the new infrastructure works silently behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will be more beneficial for the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the DeSci business model is validated and supported by traffic, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and new infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption. From a more macro perspective, what truly concerns millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can remain evergreen and achieve sustainable development.

Relevant parties have recently emphasized the importance of DeSci and have invested real money to support this field, with even official accounts specifically publishing research reports on DeSci to give it legitimacy. This is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt, rather than just a hype of concepts. Behind the industry dynamics lies the vision that blockchain finance can truly serve the market, realize value landing, and promote blockchain technology to contribute to society.