Mar 22, 2024 9 min read Web3 + AI Startup News

The Web3 and AI Newsletter 17

Image generated using OpenAI's DALL-E 3

Hello, everyone, and warm welcome to all newly joined subscribers!

This is the Web3 + AI newsletter, where we explore the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence. I am bringing you a whole bunch of partnerships, collaborations, and investment announcements, once again demonstrating the variety of products produced by the blockchain and AI synergy. The Web3 + AI trend is currently dominating almost every conversation within the crypto space. I am happy we are riding that wave together!

Thank you for being here! Let's dive in!

What's New in the Web3 + AI Startup World?

Render, Stability AI, OTOY, and Endeavor Partner to Develop Gen AI IP Rights

The holographic rendering company OTOY, the creator of Stable Diffusion Stability AI, the sports and entertainment group Endeavor, and the decentralized GPUs provider The Render Network have joined forces to standardize open-source generative AI models. The partnership consists in developing intellectual property (IP) rights, production workflows, and infrastructure. It mainly concerns emerging AI technologies capable of impacting media and entertainment sectors, and 3D creation process. Moreover, it aims to improve AI training and inference and make them more affordable through the use of decentralized computation resources.

Tarochi Game to Integrate AI OS Shinkai

The on-chain RPG Tarochi Game, created by the Web3 gaming engine Paima Studios and blockchain games developer Xai Games, has announced its integration with AI-powered decentralized operating system Shinkai. The partnership allows the game developers to leverage AI and grant current players “access to powerful AI-driven features, enhancing their gaming experience and making it easier to navigate the rich, complex world of Tarochi”.

At Shinkai, our mission is to empower AI with decentralized knowledge and capabilities. By connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) to a decentralized network, we're creating an AI Operating System that can supercharge AI applications across various domains.

NIM Network Allies with Olas' AI Agents

One more piece of news from the world of decentralized gaming: Olas' AI autonomous agents will be powering NIM Network's AI Gaming Coalition “to meet the fast-changing requirements of AI-powered game projects”. NIM Network is the first RollApp to launch on the modular blockchain Dymension.

The agents will act as NIM's daily productive users and will be incentivized to complete various gaming tasks through Olas' staking mechanism.

Olas’ AI agents open up exciting possibilities for gaming. They can dynamically control NPCs, making them respond intelligently to player actions and evolve their strategies over time, creating a more immersive and unpredictable gaming experience.

Olas' agents will enable the expansion of games' narratives, storylines, and character interactions. The partnership also involves building specialized gaming agents in collaboration with other NIM coalition members.

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about another Olas partnership in the realm of gaming, namely with the gaming AIs creator Virtual Protocol. To follow up on both these deals, Valory, the mother company of Olas, just held an X Spaces session featuring Virtual Protocol and NIM. You can listen to it here.

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Edu3Labs and KIP to Revolutionize Education with Decentralized AI

Edu3Labs, a company reinventing education through blockchain and AI, is partnering with Animoca Brands-backed KIP Protocol to empower the future of learning. The educational and publishing platform Edu3Labs, that remunerates content creators, authors, and students, will leverage KIP's blockchain solution to offer a personalized learning experience and make education more accessible and effective.

KIP's decentralized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) will bring new life to Edu3Labs educational content, making it more engaging through personalized chatbots and brand new learning paths.

A Polywrap + Gnosis Chain Demo

The Gnosis team continues delivering quite compelling demos of Web3 + AI dApps and tools currently being built on top of their chain. The latest one features Polywrap, a project leveraging AI agents to make P2P protocols easier to use, compose and integrate into powerful applications. In it, the team showcased their strategy of applying AI agents and their various functionalities to Web3 context, starting with the prediction markets use case.

In collaboration with Olas and the Gnosis Labs, Polywrap has created Evo.Prophet - an AI agent, responding to binary Yes/No questions with a numerical probability of a market outcome happening in reality. It scrapes, sanitizes, and aggregates information to create an evidence report which it then uses to generate predictions. The initial testing showed that the agent actually generates a profit of around 8%. You can try it out here: predictionprophet.ai.

However, this is not the only Web3 + AI use case the Polywrap team is developing. They have also built the evo.sage agent powering the fundpublicgoods.ai application. It can be employed for researching, evaluating, and scoring various public goods funding initiatives, and for creating a resource allocation strategy. Lastly, the team demonstrated AutoTx - an agent specializing on planning, creating, executing sequences of transactions optimized on user's goals.

AI Models to Run on the Bitcoin Network Soon

Bitcoin Layer-2 project Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BVM) is gearing up to launch the platform Truly Open AI and to allow users to deploy AI models on the chain, CoinDesk reported. “The AI’s storage model was built in collaboration with Filecoin, Near, Avail, Polygon, and Syscoin.”

“We’ve figured out a way to put AI on-chain,” lead developer punk3700 said. “It’s the same but with a much bigger impact than putting jpegs on-chain like ordinals,” he said.

BVM is a modular blockchain metaprotocol powering the easy creation of Bitcoin L2 protocols.

Bluwhale Raises $7M to Boost Web3 Wallet Analytics

The Web3 + AI startup Bluwhale has announced a $7M seed round led by Animoca Ventures, Sygnum Bank, and SBI Ven Capital, to name a few. Bluwhale is a Web3 wallets analytics tool that improves user experiences through personalized AI and contextual data.

"It's a new paradigm for a new era," said Han Jin, CEO of Bluwhale. "For nearly two decades, online platforms have profiled and targeted users without their consent. [...] At Bluwhale, wallet holders can take control of their digital profile and decide if they want to receive communications, while at the same time taking a majority share of the outreach spending."

Synnax Attracts $1M to Pioneer AI Credit Intelligence for Digital Assets

The only other investment news this week again involves an intelligence-focused product. Synnax has closed a $1M pre-seed funding round led by No Limit Holdings, Edessa Capital, Kenetic Capital, and others, to introduce AI-driven credit rating standards for the digital asset industry.

The investment enables Synnax to propel the development of its innovative AI-driven credit intelligence platform as it works to address the requirement for an unbiased credit rating standard across digital asset markets and facilitate the on-chain migration of the USD$100 trillion conventional private credit market.

Synnax is eager to address the lack of transparency and proliferating bias in the existing credit rating system. It will use state-of-the-art encryption to secure the confidentiality of data sharing.

Noteworthy Podcasts, Articles, Events

Exploring AI-Infused Web3 with Sensay and GlitchNFT

I was invited to take part in Web3M's X Spaces session titled Exploring AI-Infused Web3 together with virtual replicas creator Sensay and digital art experimentator Glitch NFT Studio. It was a fun and chill conversation focused on the most compelling Web3 + AI use cases and our predictions for the coming months.

You can listen to the recording here. Make sure to check out Web3M and the Web3 collaboration and growth platform CollabHub they are building.

Web3 + AI at ETHDenver | Part 2

I have collected a second portion of ETHDenver talks that examine various Web3 + AI topics, products, and use cases. As I said in Part 1, the 2024 edition of the world's largest crypto event gathered so many Web3 + AI builders and experts that some people started calling it AIDenver instead. Check my summary below to get a taste of different confidentiality solutions like ZKP, MPC, and FHE, how AI fuels threat and exploits detection, and much more.

AI Crypto Coins Predictions by Bankless

It seems like David Hoffman from the Bankless team was also fascinated by all the Web3 + AI lectures and panels he saw at ETHDenver, since the boys produced one whole episode dedicated to the topic. David shared his numerous insights, but also his expectation that, as in every other crypto cycle and trend, although we start with a bunch of really innovative projects, we'll end with AI meme coins dominating the market.

What is more, David outlined the three other narratives surrounding the Web3 + AI trend, beyond AI meme coins:

Decentralized AI models: Open, permissionless, decentralized as a counterpoint to the strong centralizing forces and the data and compute monopolies in the current AI development.

Decentralized compute: The computation DePINs that solve the real-world problem of GPU shortage. They use crypto to push power towards individuals in the AI world and make foundation models community-owned.

The road to AGI using crypto: The three ingredients we need to get there are: open-source AI models, permissionless innovation on these open-source models, and value accrual mechanisms for these open-source models. EigenLayer is working on the second and third ingredients with their derivative license, establishing a value chain of payments to remunerate AI model developers. Watch ETHDenver's Decentralized AGI Summit to learn more.

Disclaimer: None of this should or could be considered financial advice. You should not take my words for granted, rather, do your own research (DYOR) and share your thoughts to create a fruitful discussion.