AI and DeSci: The Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narrative of Bull and Bear Markets

Since the results of the U.S. election were announced, the cryptocurrency market has become active again. Bitcoin's price has risen by more than 20%, and the meme coin craze has returned. However, during the sluggish period of the past six months, the market generally believes that the crypto industry lacks practical application support. For example, sub-industries such as cloud computing in the field of distributed physical infrastructure (DePIN) are still in the construction phase, and there is still some distance from large-scale application.

However, amidst the speculative frenzy of meme coins, the DeSci( decentralized science) concept has unexpectedly gained attention again. It is undeniable that every new concept inevitably goes through a phase of speculation and hype at its inception, and DeSci is no exception. However, as the blockchain industry has developed to this point, it is time to consider how to build applications that can truly benefit humanity.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new narrative power into this bull market. The new paradigm that "AI represents advanced productive forces, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" quickly sparked heated discussions in the community, becoming one of the important narratives before the bull market arrived. Driven by this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai rapidly emerged as leaders in this concept.

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually recovers, meme coins related to the AI concept have also sparked a wave of enthusiasm due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop an AI Agent with specific functions, cultivate a community and fan base, and they can profit by issuing 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 "Science", it has not attracted much attention from the crypto industry. 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. Less than a week after the announcement, the platform held a DeSci Day event in Bangkok and discussed DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum. The platform's person in charge expressed hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, the platform's official account and person in charge mentioned DeSci multiple times.

The enthusiastic recommendations from two industry leaders quickly ignited the DeSci concept meme coin craze. Within just a few days, multiple popular DeSci concept tokens emerged, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub for donating to the world's largest open-access paper platform, Sci-Hub. The total market capitalization of related concepts has surpassed 800 million USD.

However, high-quality narratives are not only reflected in short-term popularity, but also require long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application implementation. The core support of AI—computing power resources, is still in the development stage through DePIN cloud computing scheduling of idle computing power, with limited large-scale adoption and the cost and stability of the computing environment, as well as response speed, have not been effectively validated in 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 needs more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

Looking back at the concept of DeSci, is the speculative component still greater than its practical value? During the Web3 event in Hong Kong this April, some projects quietly working on the DeSci track stated that it requires a good mental preparation for long-termism. Currently, DeSci has just entered the users' sight, and we are still in the design phase of building a glorious "Rome".

DeSci, or Decentralized Science, promotes global open access to scientific research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the singular control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding the risks of leakage, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model not only makes scientific activities more open and transparent but also allows global researchers to freely share resources. DeSci utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise research funds. This fundamentally changes the traditional structure of funding sources in scientific research and greatly enhances the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, DeSci achieves innovation in two areas: 1. Fundraising through token issuance, with the currently popular $rif and $uro raising funds for the development of two drugs by issuing meme coins. 2. Research data storage is shifting from centralized servers to decentralized and permanently stored blockchains.

The response from the founder of BIO Protocol to the head of a certain trading platform reveals the essence of DeSci: leveraging the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote and accelerate the monetization of value in the research field and more practical applications.

Currently, the popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect brought by meme coins, and the development of the industry is entangled with market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous large-scale funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the characteristics of short-term speculation and rapid liquidity depletion of meme coins.

Therefore, in the short term, it may lead to a large number of speculators entering this field, launching project financing with the aim of "financing equals profit," rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of eliminating the false to retain the true, gradually cultivating users' understanding of DeSci during the educational market process, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "using crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research outcomes."

Currently, the demand for data storage and on-chain proof in DeSci is extremely large. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of meme coins to break boundaries and 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 development stages from 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. Additionally, decentralized storage has clear advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage, which offers a more intuitive user experience and a mature product system, still dominates the market. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and permanent data storage, along with the relatively high costs associated with Arweave's focus on "permanent storage," remain pain points that the industry has not fully addressed.

In April last year, a certain trading platform announced the launch of decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. The main feature of this infrastructure is to provide a decentralized storage architecture 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 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, this infrastructure has advantages in deep integration with the chain, 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 effects. In the future, this infrastructure can be applied in various fields such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

The development of this infrastructure cannot be separated from the support of ecological projects. This year, the ecological official launched a community voting event for the most popular projects, dividing them into 5 categories within the ecosystem. In the infrastructure category, two projects serve as native infrastructure for this infrastructure and are important components of it.

One of the projects is the largest decentralized storage provider in the infrastructure ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, the project offers robust storage resources on the infrastructure while supporting multiple networks, dedicated to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave on the infrastructure, the project provides a better integrated storage network solution, offering a user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

The key advantages of this project 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 DWeb hosting services. Currently, the project has over 3 million registered users, with more than 100,000 daily active users. It ranks in the top three for storage volume on IPFS and Arweave, and holds the first place for daily interactions in this infrastructure ecosystem. 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 projects to promote decentralized storage of scientific literature. Certain immutable content in DeSci 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 a decentralized storage solution for DeSci, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access placed on the underlying infrastructure.

Another project serves as a standard for underlying data protocols, aiming to generate verification information authentication and bring tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, especially providing data support for AI. The project's features include decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, as well as extensive ecosystem collaboration and applications.

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

This infrastructure is an important strategic layout for a certain trading platform, and after its launch, it has become a major innovation in the ecosystem. Unlike the "frontline forces" that are directly aimed at C-end users, this infrastructure works quietly behind the scenes, and 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 traffic support from a trading platform, it will greatly promote the prosperity of this ecosystem, and this infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption. This article affirms the value investment potential of decentralized storage, and from a macro perspective, what truly matters to millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve long-term sustainable development.

Industry leaders and platforms emphasize the importance of DeSci so much and invest substantial resources to support this field that even an official account of a trading platform has published research reports on DeSci to legitimize it. This is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt, rather than just a hype of concepts. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision that blockchain finance can truly serve the market, realize value landing, and promote blockchain technology to contribute to society.