AI and DeSci: Narratives and Infrastructure Potential Amidst Bull and Bear Markets

There is still a long way to go before large-scale adoption. Despite Bitcoin's recent rise of over 20% and the renewed frenzy of Meme coins, the market generally believes that the crypto industry lacks practical applications during the low period over the past six months. Emerging fields like Depin are still under construction, and its subfield of cloud computing is still a distance away from widespread application. However, amid the speculation frenzy of Meme coins, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly attracted attention. Although new concepts inevitably come with speculation, the blockchain industry has developed for many years, and it is time to consider how to create practical applications that benefit humanity.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new momentum into the bull market. "AI represents advanced productive forces, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" has become a new consensus. Some AI-related projects rose rapidly. In September this year, as the market warmed up, AI concept meme coins also sparked a wave of enthusiasm. A common model has become to simply develop AI functions and cultivate communities to "profit" from newly launched coins.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but it did not attract much attention due to the long research cycle. After a trading platform invested in BIO Protocol on November 8, the DeSci concept sparked widespread interest. Senior executives discussed DeSci insights at related events, expressing expectations for the emergence of 1,000 DeSci projects next year. These comments triggered a meme coin craze around the DeSci concept, with the total market value of related coins surpassing 800 million dollars.

However, good narratives require long-term infrastructure support. The core support of AI—computing power resource scheduling—is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale applications and costs and stability yet to be verified. The core technology of DeSci—decentralized storage—is relatively mature, with low costs and high security. Currently, the infrastructure for DeSci is taking shape, and the key lies in promoting the concept.

DeSci promotes global open access to scientific research data through distributed storage, reducing single control, and avoiding data leakage and tampering. It makes research activities more transparent and allows researchers around the world to share resources. DeSci also utilizes smart contracts and DAOs to enhance the transparency and efficiency of research funding. The innovation of DeSci is mainly reflected in two aspects: raising funds through tokens and transferring the storage of research data to the blockchain.

Currently, the popularity of DeSci mainly stems from the wealth effect brought by meme coins. However, scientific research requires continuous and substantial funding, facing high risks and high failure rates, which is contrary to the short-term speculative nature of meme coins. This may attract speculators to enter the field for financing purposes. Therefore, after a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of distinguishing the genuine from the false, gradually cultivating user awareness, and ultimately achieving the goal of leveraging crypto finance to monetize scientific research outcomes.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple development stages from Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and others. Analysis shows that decentralized storage is on average 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with differences in enterprise-level storage reaching up to 121 times. Decentralized storage has clear advantages in terms of security, privacy, and reliability. However, user experience and product maturity remain bottlenecks in its development.

In April last year, a certain platform launched a new decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height in the field. The system provides storage infrastructure for the entire ecosystem, supporting the creation, storage, and exchange of data. With the native cross-chain bridge, users can freely transfer assets between different chains and conveniently interact with applications based on the system.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this system has advantages in deep integration with the existing ecosystem, cross-chain support, the combination of storage and computing capabilities, and low-cost 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, it can be applied in various fields such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

Two important projects within a certain ecosystem play a key role in the decentralized storage field:

Project A is the largest decentralized storage provider in the ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, it offers powerful storage resources on the new system while supporting multiple networks. By integrating features of IPFS and Arweave, it provides superior storage solutions and user experiences. Its advantages include dual roles of storage and validation, multi-chain support, a combination of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, and DWeb hosting services.

Project B, as an underlying data protocol standard, aims to generate verification information certification, bringing a large amount of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, particularly providing data support for AI. Its features include decentralized verification services, ensuring user sovereignty and data privacy, supporting AI training and dataset services, and extensive ecosystem collaboration.

The development of these projects marks an attempt by the crypto industry to achieve sustainable development. If the DeSci business model is validated and gains mainstream support, it will greatly promote the prosperity of the related ecosystem and drive the large-scale adoption of decentralized storage. From a macro perspective, this relates to whether the crypto industry can achieve long-term sustainable development.

Industry leaders and major platforms emphasize the importance of DeSci and invest resources to support it, demonstrating a commitment to truly leveraging blockchain technology for the benefit of society. This is not just hype around a concept, but an innovative attempt aimed at realizing the vision of blockchain financial services market and driving value to the ground.