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

Recently, the crypto market has welcomed a new wave of excitement. Bitcoin's price has surged by over 20%, and Meme coins are going crazy again. However, during the sluggish period of the past six months, the market has been discussing the issue of "the lack of real-world support for the crypto industry." Although areas like Depin are still under construction, there is still some distance to go before true mass adoption.

In the Meme speculation frenzy, the concept of DeSci has unexpectedly become the focus again. It is undeniable that every new concept inevitably goes through a phase of speculation and hype at its inception. However, as the blockchain industry has developed to this point, it is time to consider how to build applications that benefit humanity.

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 social relations," this new paradigm has sparked heated discussions in the community. Driven by this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai have rapidly emerged.

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually recovers, AI concept meme coins have sparked a wave of enthusiasm due to $Goat. A small team or even an individual can profit by launching a meme coin of the same name after developing an AI Agent with specific functions and cultivating a community and fan base.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of "Science", it has not attracted much attention until now. The real breakout began on November 8, when a trading platform announced its investment in BIO Protocol, marking the platform's first foray into the DeSci field. Subsequently, the platform's executives attended the DeSci Day event held in Bangkok and discussed DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum. The executives expressed their hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. This series of actions sparked a craze for DeSci concept meme coins, with several popular coins emerging in just a few days, and the total market capitalization of related concepts surpassing 800 million USD.

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

In contrast, the core technology behind DeSci—decentralized storage—has been proven to have low costs and high security since the development of the IPFS protocol. It can be said that the infrastructure of 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 the single control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding the potential leaks, losses, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes scientific research activities more open and transparent, allowing researchers worldwide to freely share resources. Furthermore, DeSci utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise research funds.

DeSci has achieved innovation in two areas: 1. Raising funds through token launches; 2. Transitioning research data storage from centralized servers to a decentralized blockchain that is permanently secure.

Currently, the popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the short-term speculative characteristics of memes. Therefore, in the short term, there may be a large number of speculators entering the market with the aim of "financing as profit," rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After experiencing a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of identifying the true from the false, gradually cultivating user awareness, and ultimately achieving the goal of "utilizing crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research results."

Currently, 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 its infrastructure, 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 differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Decentralized storage also has significant advantages in terms of data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 customers beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions, centralized storage still dominates the market due to its more intuitive user experience and mature product system.

In April last year, a certain blockchain platform announced the launch of a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. This infrastructure provides decentralized storage 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, users can freely transfer tokens between the two, conveniently interacting with DApps built on this infrastructure.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this new infrastructure lie in its deep integration with blockchain, 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 the following scenarios: 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 support from ecological projects. In a recent community voting event, two projects were recognized as native infrastructures and became important components.

These two projects are respectively a decentralized storage provider and a data validation service. The former offers powerful storage resources, supports multiple networks, and is committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. The latter aims to generate authentication for verification information, used to bring tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, particularly to provide data support for AI.

This infrastructure is an important strategic layout for blockchain platforms and represents a significant innovation in the ecosystem. If the business model of DeSci is validated, along with the support of the platform's traffic, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and the infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption.

From a macro perspective, what truly matters to millions of cryptocurrency users and practitioners is whether the cryptocurrency industry can remain evergreen and achieve sustainable development. Industry leaders emphasize the importance of DeSci and invest funds to support it, marking an innovative attempt rather than mere hype of a concept. Behind this is the vision of blockchain finance serving the market, realizing value landing, and promoting blockchain technology to contribute to society.