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

How far is it from large-scale adoption? During the market slump over the past six months, the crypto industry seems to have been overshadowed by the narrative of "lack of practical support." Although emerging fields like Depin are still under construction, there is still some distance to go before true large-scale application. However, in the recent speculative frenzy surrounding Meme coins, the DeSci concept has unexpectedly regained attention.

Every new concept inevitably goes through a stage of speculation and hype in its early days, and DeSci is no exception. However, after many years of development in the blockchain industry, it is time to consider how to build applications that truly benefit humanity.

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

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually recovered, AI concept meme coins also surged due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop an AI Agent with a specific function, whether it's AI trading or AI virtual companionship, and by nurturing a community and fan base, they can profit by issuing a meme coin with 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 always had a weak presence in 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 to discuss insights on DeSci. Executives from the platform expressed hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, the official account mentioned DeSci multiple times. These actions triggered a meme coin frenzy around the DeSci concept, leading to the emergence of several popular coins in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub, which is used for donations to Sci-Hub. The total market capitalization of related concepts has surpassed 800 million dollars.

However, good narratives not only require short-term popularity but also need long-term infrastructure development to be truly implemented. 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, computational environment stability, and 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 basically been built, and now it mainly needs more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

Tracing back to the DeSci concept, it is currently still primarily speculative. At the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival in April this year, several DeSci project teams indicated that it requires preparation for "long-termism". Currently, DeSci has just entered the users' sight, and there is still a long way to go before it is truly established.

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 tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes research activities more open and transparent, allowing global researchers to freely share resources. In addition, DeSci uses smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping scientists raise research funds, fundamentally changing the traditional structure of funding sources in scientific research and significantly enhancing the efficiency of fund utilization.

Overall, DeSci has achieved innovation in two areas: 1. Fundraising through token issuance, such as $rif and $uro, raising funds for drug development via meme coins. 2. Research data storage is transitioning from centralized servers to decentralized and permanent blockchains.

"DeSci has successfully introduced liquidity of Meme coins to universities and laboratories around the world, supporting genuine scientific research." The response from the founder of BIO Protocol 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 DeSci is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes, and the industry's development is entangled with market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous large-scale funding, while facing high risks and high failure rates, which is contrary to the characteristics of short-term speculation and rapid depletion of liquidity seen in memes.

Therefore, in the short term, there may be a large number of speculators using this as a gimmick to launch project financing with the purpose of "financing equals profit", rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a stage of eliminating the false and preserving the true, gradually cultivating user awareness in the educational market process, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "using crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research results."

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

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple stages of development from the 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 differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Moreover, decentralized storage has significant 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 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 resolved.

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, allowing users and DApps to create, store, and exchange fully owned data. Through a native cross-chain bridge with the smart chain, users can freely transfer tokens between the smart chain and this infrastructure, thereby conveniently interacting with DApps built on this infrastructure.

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

At the same time, the development of this infrastructure relies on support from ecological projects. This year, the ecological official launched a favorite project community voting activity, dividing the ecological projects into 5 categories. In the Infra category, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as native infrastructures, are important components.

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in the ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider (SP) and validator, 4EVERLAND offers robust storage resources while supporting multiple networks, dedicated 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, offering a user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

4EVERLAND's key advantages include: dual roles of storage and verification, multi-chain support and compatibility, a combination of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, and DWeb hosting services. Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users and more than 100,000 daily active users, occupying an important position in multiple storage ecosystems. In terms of financing, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

Recently, 4EVERLAND has collaborated with multiple DeSci projects to promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and this infrastructure, a cold backup data storage solution is established on Arweave, while hot data access is placed on the decentralized storage solution of this infrastructure.

BAS, as a fundamental data protocol standard, aims to generate verification information for authentication, used to bring tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, providing data support specifically for AI. The features of BAS 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 introduction of BAS provides data validation and management capabilities, enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating with BAS, this infrastructure ensures data validation and compliance while offering efficient data management and access control features.

This infrastructure is an important strategic layout and has become a significant innovation in the ecosystem since its launch. Unlike the "frontline troops" that directly face end-users, this infrastructure works silently behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will benefit the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the DeSci business model is validated and supported by traffic, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and this infrastructure will also gain mass adoption. From a macro perspective, what truly matters for millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve long-term sustainable development.

Multiple parties have recently emphasized the importance of DeSci and invested actual resources to support it, which is undoubtedly a significant innovative attempt rather than mere hype. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision of blockchain finance truly serving the market, realizing value implementation, and promoting blockchain technology to contribute to society.