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

In the week following Trump's victory in the U.S. elections, BTC rose over 20%, and Meme coins have once again gone crazy. During the low period of the past six months, there has been a prevailing sentiment in the market that "the cryptocurrency industry lacks tangible support," while fields like Depin are still in the construction phase, and its subfield of cloud computing is still some distance away from true large-scale adoption. However, amidst the speculative frenzy surrounding Meme coins, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly gained traction again. Every new concept inevitably goes through a phase of speculation and hype at its inception, and DeSci is no exception. However, the blockchain industry has been developing for many years, and it's time to consider how to build applications that benefit humanity.

AI and DeSci

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new narrative power into this round of the bull market. The new paradigm consensus that "AI represents advanced productive forces, and blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relationships" sparked heated discussions in the community, becoming one of the important narratives on the eve of the bull market's arrival. Driven by this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai rapidly rose to prominence, becoming the leaders of this concept.

In September this year, as the crypto market gradually regained vitality, AI concept meme coins experienced a wave of launch frenzy due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop an AI Agent with specific functions and then cultivate their own community and fan base to "earn profits" by launching a meme coin of the same name.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of Crypto+Science, it has not had a strong presence in the crypto industry. The real breakout began on November 8 when a trading platform invested in BIO Protocol, marking the platform's first foray into the decentralized science (DeSci) field. Less than a week after the announcement, the platform held a DeSci Day event in Bangkok to discuss insights on DeSci and expressed hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, DeSci concept meme coins quickly gained popularity, with multiple hot coins emerging in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif launched by BIO, as well as $SciHub used for donations to Sci-Hub, with the total market value of related concepts surpassing 800 million USD.

However, good narratives require not only short-term popularity but also long-term infrastructure construction to realize the practical application scenarios. The foundational support of AI—computing power resources, through Depin cloud computing for idle computing power scheduling, is still in the development stage, with not much large-scale adoption. The cost and stability of the computing environment, as well as response speed, have not yet been effectively validated by the market.

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

Tracing the DeSci concept, is speculation still greater than practicality?

At the Hong Kong web3 carnival in April this year, project parties in the DeSci track generally stated that this is a project that requires a "long-termism" mindset. At this stage, it can only be said that DeSci has just been introduced to users' vision, and the construction of a glorious Rome has only just completed the design phase.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the singular control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding the risks of data leaks, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes scientific research activities more open and transparent, allowing researchers worldwide to freely share resources. Additionally, DeSci utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, assisting scientists in raising research funds, fundamentally changing the traditional funding source structure for research, and significantly enhancing the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, the DeSci model has achieved innovation in two areas: 1. Fundraising through the launch of tokens, with the currently popular $rif and $uro raising funds for the development of two drugs through the launch of meme coins. 2. The storage of research data has shifted from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently immutable blockchain.

DeSci has successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins into universities and laboratories around the world, supporting genuine scientific research. This reveals the essence of DeSci: leveraging the speculative psychology of the Crypto market to promote and accelerate the realization of value in the field of scientific research and more practical applications.

Currently, the popularity of the DeSci concept is primarily 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 funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which contrasts sharply with the short-term speculation and rapid liquidity exhaustion characteristic of memes.

In the short term, there may be a large number of speculators entering this field, launching project financing with the goal of "financing equals profit," rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. Therefore, after experiencing a brief surge in popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of distinguishing the genuine from the fake, 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 results through crypto finance."

At present, the demand for data storage and on-chain proof behind DeSci is extremely huge. If DeSci can break boundaries by leveraging the popularity of Memes and effectively establish a mature business model, decentralized storage will become the infrastructure in the DeSci field, and this stable and immense demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

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

Decentralized storage has gone through several development stages from the early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the underlying IPFS protocol. Analysis in May 2023 indicated that decentralized storage is on average about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Moreover, decentralized storage has clear advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 customers beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage with a more intuitive user experience and mature product systems 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 pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a trading platform launched decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. This infrastructure provides a decentralized storage framework for the entire ecosystem, enabling users and DApps to create, store, and exchange data that they fully own. Through a native cross-chain bridge with the smart chain, users can freely transfer tokens between the smart chain and this infrastructure, thus conveniently interacting with DApps built on this 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, possessing stronger scalability and ecological synergy effects. In the future, this infrastructure can be used in the following scenarios:

• Website Hosting: Users can quickly deploy and host websites through the API, simplifying the registration and payment process.
• Personal Cloud Storage: Create a secure personal cloud storage using a private key, easily upload and download encrypted files.
• Blockchain data storage: Store smart chain and other ecological data, reduce latency, and improve availability.
• Content Publishing: Creators store and mirror their works on the smart chain, and after completing the transaction, the buyer can access it.
• Social Media: Social media influencers can fully control content data, publish and profit through decentralized platforms.
• Personal Data Market: Provides decentralized data storage and management solutions to ensure the security of personal data.

The development of this infrastructure relies on support from ecological projects. This year, the ecological official launched a community voting event for the favorite projects, dividing the ecosystem into 5 categories. In the Infra category, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as the native infrastructures of this ecosystem, are very important components.

4EVERLAND

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in the decentralized storage infrastructure ecosystem. As an officially certified Storage Provider (SP) and validator, 4EVERLAND offers powerful storage resources on this infrastructure while supporting related networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, 4EVERLAND provides a superior storage network integration solution that offers a more user-friendly experience and reduces the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

Its key advantages are:

• Dual role of storage and validation: As a Storage Provider (SP) and validator, 4EVERLAND not only provides storage solutions for users but also participates in the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism to ensure blockchain security.
• Multi-chain support and compatibility: In addition to this infrastructure, 4EVERLAND also supports related networks.
• Decentralized storage and computing resource integration: 4EVERLAND provides storage services while using its own 4Ever Node to leverage idle hardware for users to access stored data instantly + computing, achieving more efficient data usage scenarios.
• Flexible storage solutions: 4EVERLAND offers hybrid solutions suitable for hot storage and cold storage, combining IPFS + Arweave/storage models of this infrastructure to meet different storage needs and be compatible with Web2.
• Decentralized AI Services: Through AI RPC (API standard), 4EVERLAND provides an aggregation solution of over 100 models, offering users efficient AI model calling services.
• 4EVERLAND's DWeb hosting service occupies an important position in this infrastructure ecosystem, providing developers with one-click deployment capabilities, allowing dApp front ends to be quickly deployed to storage, and in conjunction with the future RAAS (Rollup as a service) the ecosystem aims to achieve, enabling one-click chain initiation.

Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It stores 2000 TB on IPFS (third in the IPFS ecosystem) and 20 TB on Arweave (third in the Arweave ecosystem). The infrastructure has over 30,000 daily interactions (first in the ecosystem). In terms of financing, it has received support from multiple well-known foundations and several reputable investment institutions.

Recently, 4EVERLAND has collaborated with multiple projects of DeSci to jointly promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. Some content from DeSci that is not subject to change is suitable for permanent storage on Arweave, while data that is constantly being updated is suitable for IPFS and its infrastructure. 4EVERLAND has established a cold backup of data on Arweave and hot data access on the infrastructure by combining IPFS, Arweave, and that infrastructure, forming a decentralized storage solution suitable for DeSci.

BAS

BAS, as the underlying data protocol standard, aims to generate authentication of verification information to bring tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, particularly to provide data support for AI. The characteristics of BAS are:

• Decentralized Verification Services: By bringing Web2 and Web3 data on-chain, we provide cross-platform verification services, supporting information from multiple exchanges as well as data from social platforms. The research data verification services involved in DeSci can also directly use BAS for verification and put the results on-chain.
• User Sovereignty and Data Privacy: Users can actively upload data using the datasets created by the BAS and the defined data format standards through the dApp project parties; this reduces the steps of third-party data labeling and cleaning, achieves proactive classification and standardization of data, and returns the sovereignty of handling their own data back to the users.
• AI Training and Dataset Services: Through decentralized data validation, BAS will directly provide the most reliable and available data for AI training and dataset needs.
• Ecosystem Cooperation and Applications: BAS has connected with over 3,000 independent certification entities, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecological partners, supporting over 30M certifications.

For this decentralized storage infrastructure, the introduction of BAS provides data validation and management capabilities, further enhancing the platform's security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. Through the integration with BAS, this infrastructure...