AI and DeSci: The Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narratives in Bull and Bear Cycles

Recently, despite Bitcoin's price rising over 20% and Meme coins going crazy again, there has been a persistent discourse in the market during the past six months of stagnation that "the crypto industry lacks real-world support." For instance, the Depin industry is still under construction, and its subfield of cloud computing is still quite far from true large-scale adoption. However, amidst the speculative frenzy for Memes, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly become popular again.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new narrative momentum into the bull market. "AI represents advanced productivity, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations." This new paradigm consensus quickly sparked heated discussions and became one of the new 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 recovered, AI concept meme coins surged in popularity due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop AI Agents with specific functions, cultivate communities and fan groups, and then "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 always had a weak presence in the crypto industry. The true breakout began on November 8, when a trading platform invested in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the DeSci field. Less than a week after the announcement, the platform's head attended the Bangkok DeSci Day event, discussing DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum, and expressed hopes to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, related platforms mentioned DeSci multiple times. The enthusiastic recommendations from two industry leaders temporarily ignited the DeSci concept meme coins, leading to the emergence of several popular coins in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub, which is used to donate to the world's largest open-access paper platform. The total market value of related concepts has exceeded $800 million.

However, high-quality narratives are not only reflected in short-term popularity but also require long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application scenarios. The most essential foundational support of AI—computing power resources—through Depin cloud computing for idle computing power scheduling is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale adoption, and the cost, stability of the computing environment, and response speed have yet to be effectively verified by the market.

The core technology behind DeSci - decentralized storage, has been proven to be more cost-effective and secure compared to traditional centralized storage solutions since the development of the IPFS protocol. Currently, the solutions have been relatively mature in implementation. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci has been established, and now it only requires more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing single control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding issues of leakage, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model allows scientific research activities to be open and transparent, enabling researchers worldwide to freely share resources. Additionally, DeSci utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise the necessary funds for their research, fundamentally changing the traditional structure of research funding sources and significantly enhancing the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, the DeSci model achieves innovation in two areas: 1. Raising funds through the issuance of tokens, such as $rif and $uro, which raise funds for the development of two underlying drugs through the issuance of meme coins. 2. The transfer of research data storage from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently immutable blockchain.

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

Therefore, in the short term, a large number of speculators may flood into this track, using it as a gimmick to release project financing, with the purpose of "financing equals profit," rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief surge of interest, DeSci will enter a phase of distinguishing the true from the false, gradually cultivating users' awareness of DeSci during the educational market process, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "driving the monetization of scientific research achievements through crypto finance."

Currently, it seems that there is a great demand for data storage and on-chain proof behind DeSci. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of Memes to break boundaries and effectively establish a mature business model, 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 the 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 terms of data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions such as Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage, which offers a more intuitive user experience and a mature product system, still dominates the market. Limitations of Filecoin in programmability and data permanence, along with the relatively high costs associated with Arweave's emphasis on "permanent storage," remain pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a trading platform announced the launch of a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. This infrastructure provides a decentralized storage framework for the entire ecosystem, allowing users and DApps to create, store, and exchange data that they fully own. Through a native cross-chain bridge with the main chain, users can freely transfer tokens between the main chain and this infrastructure, facilitating convenient interaction with DApps built on it.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this infrastructure has advantages in deep integration with the main 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 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 relies on the support of ecological projects. This year, the official ecology launched a community voting event for the most favored projects, dividing the ecology into five categories. In the Infra category, two projects serve as the native infrastructure for this ecosystem and are important components of it.

A certain project is the largest decentralized storage provider in the infrastructure ecosystem. As an officially certified Storage Provider (SP) and validator, this project offers powerful storage resources while supporting both the main chain and Layer2 networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. Based on this infrastructure, by integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, the project provides a better storage network integration solution, offering a user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

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, and provision of DWeb hosting services. Currently, the project has over 3 million registered users, with 100,000+ daily active users, 2000 TB in IPFS storage, 20 TB in Arweave storage, and over 30,000 daily interactions with the infrastructure. In terms of financing, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

The project has recently collaborated with multiple DeSci project parties to jointly promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. Content in DeSci data that does not need to be modified is suitable for permanent storage on Arweave, while continuously updated data is suitable for IPFS and the underlying infrastructure. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and the underlying infrastructure, the project establishes cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access on the underlying infrastructure, creating a decentralized storage solution suitable for DeSci.

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

For this infrastructure, the project introduces data validation and management capabilities, further enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating these features, the infrastructure ensures data validation and compliance while providing efficient data management and access control functions.

This infrastructure is an important strategic layout personally taught by the platform and its leaders, and since its launch, it has also been a significant innovation in the ecosystem. Unlike Layer2, which directly faces C-end users as the "main force on stage," this infrastructure works quietly behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will be more conducive to the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the DeSci business model is validated and supported by the traffic of the trading platform, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and this infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption. From a more macro perspective, what truly matters to millions of cryptocurrency users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can thrive and achieve sustainable development.

Industry leaders have recently emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested real money to support the field. Even the official account of a certain trading platform has specifically published a DeSci research report to vindicate it. This is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt, rather than just hype. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision of blockchain finance truly serving the market, realizing value implementation, and promoting blockchain technology to contribute to society.