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

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has experienced a wave of upward momentum, with Bitcoin rising over 20% and Meme coins going crazy again. However, during the sluggish period of the past six months, the market generally believes that the cryptocurrency industry lacks practical applications. Emerging fields such as Depin are still in the construction stage, and it will take some time before large-scale adoption. Nevertheless, amidst the speculation frenzy of Meme coins, the voices of some well-known figures in the industry have unexpectedly brought attention to the DeSci concept. Although every new concept inevitably faces hype in its early stages, the blockchain industry has developed for many years, and it is time to consider how to achieve applications that truly benefit humanity.

AI and DeSci

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"—this new paradigm sparked heated discussions and became one of the important narratives on the eve of the bull market. Driven by this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai quickly rose to prominence, becoming representatives of this concept.

In September this year, as the crypto market gradually recovers, AI concept Meme coins have also stirred up a wave due to $Goat. A small team or even an individual only needs to develop an AI Agent with a specific function, and then cultivate a community and fans, in order to "profit" by issuing a Meme coin of the same name.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but it did not attract much attention due to the long cycle of "Science." It truly gained traction on November 8, when 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 event in Bangkok, where several industry experts discussed their insights on DeSci and expressed hopes to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, the DeSci concept meme coins experienced a surge, with multiple popular tokens emerging in just a few days, such as $uro for single drug research, $rif, and $SciHub for donating to the world's largest open-source paper platform, among others. The total market value of related concepts has surpassed 800 million dollars.

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

The core technology behind DeSci - decentralized storage, has been proven to be lower cost and more secure than traditional centralized storage since the development of the IPFS protocol. The current solutions are relatively mature, and the infrastructure for DeSci has been basically built, the key lies in more people recognizing and adopting the concept of decentralized storage.

DeSci Concept Traceability: Speculation Greater than Practicality?

In April this year at the Hong Kong web3 event, some DeSci project representatives stated that this is a field that requires preparation for "long-termism." Currently, DeSci has just entered users' sight, and there is still a long way to go before it is truly 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 leakage, loss, and tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes research more transparent and open, allowing global researchers to freely share resources. DeSci also utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise research funds and fundamentally changing the traditional structure of research funding sources, significantly enhancing the efficiency of fund usage.

Overall, DeSci achieves innovation in two aspects: 1. Raising funds through token issuance, such as $rif and $uro, which use Meme coins to fund drug development. 2. Transitioning research data storage from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently preserved blockchain.

A certain project founder stated that DeSci has successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins to universities and laboratories around the world, supporting real scientific research. This reveals the essence of DeSci: leveraging the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote the realization of value in the scientific research field and more practical applications.

The current popularity of DeSci is mainly supported by the wealth effect brought about by memes, and the industry's development is entangled with market sentiment. However, scientific research requires continuous large-scale funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which is contrary to the characteristics of short-term speculation and rapid liquidity depletion of memes.

Therefore, in the short term, there may be a large number of speculators using this as a gimmick to launch project financing, with the aim of "financing means profit," rather than genuinely investing in research. After a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a stage of distinguishing the false from the true, gradually cultivating user awareness in the educational market process, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "driving the monetization of research results through crypto finance."

Currently, it seems that 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 the infrastructure of DeSci, and this stable and massive demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has matured, and the underlying infrastructure of DeSci should not be underestimated.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple development stages, from the 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 differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Decentralized storage also has significant advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 customers starting to adopt solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage, which offers a more intuitive user experience and a more mature product system, still dominates the market. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and permanent data storage, as well as the relatively high costs associated with Arweave's focus on "permanent storage," remain unresolved pain points in the industry.

In April of last year, a certain trading platform launched a new decentralized storage infrastructure, providing decentralized storage architecture for its ecosystem, enabling users and DApps to create, store, and exchange data that they fully own. Through the native cross-chain bridge with the smart chain, users can freely transfer assets between the two and easily interact with DApps built on the new infrastructure.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this infrastructure lie in its deep integration with the ecosystem, cross-chain support, the combination of decentralized storage and computing power, 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 used 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 cannot be separated from the support of ecological projects. This year, the ecological authority launched a community vote for the most popular projects. In the infrastructure category, two projects serve as their native infrastructure and are important components.

4EVERLAND

As the largest decentralized storage provider in the ecosystem, 4EVERLAND offers powerful storage resources while supporting multiple networks, dedicated to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features of IPFS and Arweave, it provides a better storage integration solution, improving user experience and reducing usage difficulty.

Its key advantages include: dual roles of storage and verification, multi-chain support and compatibility, combination of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, and DWeb hosting services.

Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It ranks among the top three in storage volume on IPFS and Arweave, and leads in daily interaction counts on a certain network. In terms of financing, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

Recently, 4EVERLAND has collaborated with multiple DeSci projects to promote decentralized storage of research literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and a certain network, a storage solution for DeSci has been established with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access on a certain network.

BAS

As a standard for underlying data protocols, BAS aims to generate verification information certifications, bringing tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem to support AI with data. Features include: decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, as well as extensive ecosystem cooperation and applications.

For a certain network, BAS introduces data validation and management capabilities, enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By combining, the certain network can ensure data validation and compliance while providing efficient data management and permission control features.

Attempts at Sustainable Development in the Crypto Industry

A certain network is an important strategic layout and a major innovation in the ecosystem. Its high performance and high interoperability are conducive to the development of new narratives in the industry. If the DeSci business model is validated, coupled with support from platform traffic, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and the certain network will also achieve large-scale adoption.

From a macro perspective, what truly concerns millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve sustainable long-term development. Recently, various parties have emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested actual resources to support it, which is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt rather than mere hype. Behind this reflects the vision of the blockchain financial services market, realizing value landing, and promoting technology to contribute to society.