AI and DeSci: The Narrative and Infrastructure Potential Amidst Bull and Bear Cycles

There is still a long way to go before the large-scale application of the cryptocurrency industry. Although Bitcoin has surged recently and Meme coins are frenzied again, the argument that "cryptocurrency lacks practical applications" has persisted during the market downturn in the past six months. Emerging fields like Depin are still under construction, and its subfield of cloud computing is still far from being widely adopted. However, amidst the Meme speculation boom, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly regained popularity.

Every new concept inevitably experiences speculative hype in its early stages, and DeSci is no exception. However, after years of development, it is time for the blockchain industry to consider how to build applications that truly benefit humanity.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new momentum into this bull market. The new paradigm of "AI represents advanced productivity, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" has sparked heated discussions and become one of the key narratives before the bull market. Driven by this, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai have rapidly emerged.

In September this year, as the crypto market recovered, Meme coins centered around the AI concept surged due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop AI Agents with specific functions, cultivate communities, and profit by issuing Meme coins 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 received much attention. The real breakout began on November 8 when a trading platform announced investment in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the DeSci field. Less than a week later, the platform's founder attended the Bangkok DeSci Day event, discussing DeSci insights with Vitalik and expressing a hope for 1,000 DeSci projects to emerge next year. This sparked a meme coin frenzy around the DeSci concept, with multiple popular coins emerging in a short period, and the total market capitalization of related concepts surpassing 800 million USD.

Good narratives not only require short-term popularity but also need long-term infrastructure construction to achieve real application landing. The core support of AI—computing power resources, is still in the development stage through Depin cloud computing scheduling, with limited large-scale adoption, and costs and stability still need market validation.

The core technology behind DeSci - decentralized storage, has been proven to be lower in cost and more secure than traditional centralized storage solutions since the development of the IPFS protocol. The current solutions are relatively mature, the infrastructure has been established, and now more people need to adopt this concept.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing single control, and avoiding data leakage, loss, and tampering. It makes research activities more open and transparent, allowing researchers worldwide to freely share resources. DeSci also utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping to raise research funds and changing the traditional funding structure.

The DeSci model innovates primarily in two aspects: 1. Raising funds through the issuance of tokens; 2. Transitioning research data storage from centralized servers to the blockchain. Essentially, it leverages the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote the monetization of value in the research field and the practical application of its results.

Currently, the popularity of DeSci is mainly supported by the wealth effect brought by memes. However, scientific research requires continuous large amounts of funding, facing high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the short-term speculative characteristics of memes. In the short term, it may attract a large number of speculators to raise funds under this pretext, rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. Therefore, after the peak of DeSci, it will enter a phase of eliminating the false and retaining the true, gradually cultivating user awareness, in order to truly achieve the goal of "using cryptocurrency finance to drive the monetization of scientific research results."

DeSci has a huge demand for data storage and on-chain proof. If it can leverage the popularity of Memes to break boundaries and establish a mature business model, decentralized storage will become the infrastructure of DeSci, and this stable and vast demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple development stages from Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the IPFS protocol. Analysis in May 2023 pointed out that decentralized storage is, on average, about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with enterprise-level data storage being up to 121 times more expensive. Decentralized storage has significant advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients adopting solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage, which offers a more intuitive user experience and more mature products, still dominates the mainstream. Filecoin has limitations in programmability and permanent storage, while Arweave's focus on "permanent storage" comes with higher costs; these remain pain points that the industry has not fully resolved.

In April last year, a trading platform launched a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. Its biggest feature is providing a decentralized storage infrastructure for the entire ecosystem, allowing users and DApps to create, store, and exchange data that they fully own. Through the native cross-chain bridge of the smart chain, users can freely transfer assets between the smart chain and the storage chain, facilitating interaction with DApps built on the storage chain.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this storage chain has advantages in deep integration with smart chains, cross-chain support, a combination of 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. In the future, it can be used in multiple scenarios such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

The storage chain ecological project is also supporting its development. In a community voting event of a certain ecosystem this year, two projects in the infrastructure category, as native infrastructure of the storage chain, are important components.

A certain project is the largest decentralized storage provider in the storage chain ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, the project offers powerful storage resources on the storage chain while supporting smart chains and Layer 2 networks, aiming to build an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, the project provides a better storage network integration solution, offering a more user-friendly experience and reducing usage difficulty.

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 DWeb hosting services. Currently, the project has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It ranks high in storage volume on IPFS and Arweave, and leads in daily interaction counts on storage chains. In terms of financing, it has received support from multiple well-known projects and institutions.

Recently, the project has collaborated with several DeSci projects to promote decentralized storage of scientific literature. The immutable content in DeSci data is suitable for permanent storage with Arweave, while updated state data is suitable for IPFS and storage chains. This project establishes a storage solution suitable for DeSci by combining the three.

Another project serves as the underlying data protocol standard, aiming to generate verification information certification, bringing a large amount of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem to support AI with data. Its features include: decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, as well as ecosystem collaboration and applications.

For the storage chain, the introduction of this project provides data verification and management capabilities, enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By combining, the storage chain can ensure data verification and compliance while providing efficient data management and permission control functions.

The Storage Chain is an important strategic layout, and its launch represents a significant innovation in the ecosystem. Unlike the "frontline players" aimed at C-end users, the Storage Chain works more 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, along with traffic support, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and the storage chain will also achieve large-scale adoption. This article affirms the investment potential of decentralized storage. From a macro perspective, what really matters to millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve long-term sustainable development.

Recently, multiple parties have emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested resources to support it, marking an innovative attempt rather than mere hype. 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.