Is AI Hype or Real Innovation for Established Blockchains?

Forward the Original Title: AI能成为老牌公链的新叙事吗？盘点7个公链与AI的结合

In the cycle of bull markets, public chains come and go. Each bull market sees a group of public chains leading the trend, while others fade away as the bull market ends. As the most critical infrastructure for cryptocurrency, public chains carry the hopes of many investors and projects. For public chains lacking a loyal user base, it seems that the only way to stay on the main stage of the next bull market is to constantly update their narrative and maintain their brand visibility.

AI is currently the most highly watched and easy-to-break-out hot track. PANews observed that some star public chains from the previous two bull markets did not shine again in this round, and AI has become a new narrative for the old public chains. In this article, PANews reviews the combination of seven old public chains and AI narratives. However, overall, even in combination with AI, the old public chains seem to show little vitality and determination, teetering on the line between bandwagoning and genuine efforts.

Qtum: Acquires 10,000 GPUs to support AI

On April 18, the Qtum Foundation announced the acquisition and launch of 10,000 Nvidia GPUs to provide support for artificial intelligence projects.

In addition to launching its GPU support plan, Qtum has also launched two AI products, Qtum Solstice and Qtum Qurator.

Qtum Solstice: A conversational chatbot similar to ChatGPT, based on an open source model. This Alpha deployment will engage users in useful and intelligent conversations.

Qtum Qurator: A text-to-image generation model similar to Midjourney, also is also based on open source models. This utility will allow users to generate images that would normally require tedious work in image processing software applications.

Qtum co-founder Miguel Palencia stated: “We have ambitious goals for artificial intelligence, which requires a three-phase rollout plan. Today, we have unveiled the first phase, namely a chatbot and an image generator. The next two stages will include a modeling layer and finally a decentralized economic layer that will integrate all content on the Qtum blockchain.”

The Qtum Foundation plans to offer up to 10 more AI-related products in the coming months to further utilize these 10,000 GPUs. Such abundant computing power will help the Qtum Foundation find partners for collaboration and joint development.

NEAR: Embracing the AI frontier with an AI mastermind at the helm

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin’s accomplishments in AI may well surpass those in blockchain. In 2014, he joined Google Research to develop models and tools that would eventually become integral to artificial intelligence. He was also a major code contributor to the Google TensorFlow AI open-source project. Eight researchers from this project co-authored the paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced a novel model architecture called Transformer, the underlying technology behind popular AI products like ChatGPT. It’s safe to say that NEAR’s connection to AI is the strongest among all blockchains. In fact, NEAR.AI was initially founded as a company solely focused on artificial intelligence.

However, during the initial years of NEAR’s founding, its main goal was to create a convenient, easy-to-use, and environmentally friendly blockchain. It wasn’t until the end of 2023 that NEAR announced the launch of NEAR Tasks, a smart contract for automatic payment via NEAR tokens. This could help AI projects better distribute rewards through this platform. But in reality, this project seems more like using the advantages of blockchain to optimize the development of artificial intelligence, rather than improving blockchain through artificial intelligence.

At NEARCON 2023, Illia Polosukhin named AI as one of the core vertical domains of the NEAR ecosystem. Prior to the Nvidia GTC in 2024, under the expected push of Illia Polosukhin as a speaker, the price of NERA nearly doubled.

Currently, NEAR Tasks has not officially launched. There has also not been an official AI application category within the NEAR ecosystem.

Algorand: Some thoughts on AI, but not much

In July 2021, Algorand announced that it would cooperate with Fortior to create AI-driven governance mechanisms and financial assets on the Algorand blockchain. Since then, there has been almost no AI-related news about Algorand.

A community member asked Algorand on the forum this year: Are there any plans to apply ALGO to artificial intelligence?

In response, the official ALGO team stated that they have been contemplating this question. Decentralization is almost necessary for AI models, with open-source models on a decentralized data network (allowing users or businesses to sell/share data with specific models), processing networks (lending out excess computing power, such as mining, to allow more output), and immutable records of outputs such as images (NFTs).

Algorand has been working hard to organize its thoughts, but what is surprising is that more cryptocurrency projects have not turned to this concept, or at least have not discussed how decentralized networks and artificial intelligence can establish a symbiotic relationship.

DFINITY: Optimizing ICP to run large AI models

In a blog post in March 2024, Dominic Williams, the founder and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, stated that artificial intelligence, smart contracts, and blockchain form a “perfect partnership”. He believes that centralized large models have the potential for harm, thus artificial intelligence must be tamper-proof.

Dominic Williams stated that ICP will next upgrade the memory capacity of its smart contracts to 32GB, while also supporting 64-bit. This would enable the running of some large language models.

Polygon: Launching AI tools based on GPT-4

Polygon appears to be sensitive to the AI track, having launched Polygon Copilot as early as June 2023. However, according to PANews testing, this product seems unable to achieve the expected results, failing to respond to multiple inquiries.

In addition to Polygon Copilot, Polygon has built another AI product called Brain, a similar tool but with superior functionality to Polygon Copilot. It not only offers a question-and-answer feature but also provides the ability to deploy contracts and send transactions via artificial intelligence.

Moreover, on April 19, the recently popular AI project ORA announced at Token2049 in Dubai that it had partnered with Polygon to introduce its artificial intelligence oracle, OAO, on the Polygon chain.

Polkadot: Launching PolkaBot AI chatbot

In 2024, PolkaBot introduced PolkaBot AI, an AI-powered educational platform. Similar to ChatGPT, PolkaBot AI serves as a language model currently offering content retrieval related to PolkaBot.

As of now, although Polkadot has not yet launched an official AI plan, it seems to attach great importance to the development of AI projects in its ecosystem. On April 16th, Polkadot’s official blog published an article that reviewed several AI projects related to its ecosystem, including the popular AI project Bittensor.

At the same time, Polkadot proposed that “Polkadot’s strong infrastructure has a unique advantage in supporting the AI revolution, providing scalability, interoperability, and security required for the enormous computing demands of AI.” It seems that Polkadot aims to provide infrastructure for projects that combine Web3 and AI.

Cardano: Defending Cardano through a comparative approach of AI models and blockchain

While Cardano has not yet announced any official AI initiatives, its founder, in response to community criticism of Cardano’s inaction in April, defended the project by drawing a parallel between AI models and cryptocurrencies, emphasizing the impermanence of short-term narratives. He stated: “The problem in our industry is that short-term narratives and hype have come to dominate the conversation. AI is facing the same issue. A few months ago, OpenAI was the talk of the town, but it is now facing increasing competition from other language models, starting with Claude 3, then Grok 1.5, and soon Llama 3.”

Conclusion

As evident from these projects, established blockchains seem eager to capitalize on the AI buzz to gain traction. However, none have yet embarked on in-depth exploration or significant efforts in this domain. Aside from Qtum, NEAR, and Polygon, which have invested heavily in AI products, other blockchains appear to be stuck in the hype stage. Despite this, the Web3+AI space is far from deserted. According to Coingecko, the total market capitalization of AI projects has reached $232 billion, with most projects favoring Ethereum and Solana as their primary technologies. For established blockchains seeking to revitalize themselves through AI, it may be necessary to present more compelling development strategies and products to gain credibility.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [PANews]. Forward the Original Title‘AI能成为老牌公链的新叙事吗？盘点7个公链与AI的结合’. All copyrights belong to the original author [Frank，PANews]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
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