Bankless: AI concept tokens are rising again, and 2024 will be the cycle of AI x Crypto

Author: David Hoffman, Bankless

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

As the NVIDIA AI Conference GTC approaches (a four-day period starting from March 18 to ending on March 21), tokens in the AI concept sector rose again today, with Fetch.ai (FET) rising by 51% in 24 hours; Render (RNDR) rose 49% in 24 hours; SingularityNET (AGIX) rose 43.3% in 24 hours. Even the public chain project NEAR has increased by more than 40% within a day (NEAR Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin will attend the "Transforming AI" keynote speech and panel discussion on March 20. NVIDIA founder Huang Jensen will also participate in the event). AI is undoubtedly one of the hottest narratives in 2024 in both the crypto industry and traditional industries.

Bankless issued an article elaborating on AI x Crypto, pointing out that the fundamentals of AI x Crypto have been formed, but speculation has also emerged. The following is the full text of the article:

Every bull market cycle is defined by a feverish narrative.

• 2013 is the era of “POW forks and fair issuance”
• 2017 is the ICO boom
• 2021 is the NFT bubble

Now, the crypto bull market of 2024 will belong to AI x Crypto. The two parallel industries each contain huge potential and generate huge bubbles in the process of collision.

Dollars flowing into Bitcoin ETFs are like jet fuel into a rocket ship that will soon be pushing capital downstream, with half of it going to riskier crypto markets. If the Ethereum ETF is approved in May or November, it will drive further capital influx into blue-chip tokens, prompting people to start looking for coins with hundreds of times the potential of low market capitalization. This is the tradition of every bull market.

Meanwhile, Nvidia's $2.2 trillion market capitalization has almost single-handedly achieved this narrative growth in traditional stock markets. Technology giants such as Google and Microsoft are pushing Web2 into artificial intelligence to change the future of the technology market. Beyond this, Silicon Valley continues to invest the vast majority of startup capital in artificial intelligence.

The era of artificial intelligence has arrived

There's just one problem. AI without encryption is a massively centralized phenomenon, with Web2 companies and their leaders controlling all the wealth and power that comes with AI. Thinkers and philosophers in the field of artificial intelligence have been warning about it long before it entered the public eye, and now the centralization problems that artificial intelligence brings to wealth and power are surfacing.

To quote Peter Thiel (famous Silicon Valley investor and founder of PayPal):

“Crypto is decentralized, AI is centralized. If you want to be more explicit ideologically, it’s that crypto is libertarian and AI is communist.”

Cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence may be on opposite sides, but they are not hostile. A combination of the two is better and will create a more efficient whole. AI needs cryptocurrencies to avoid creating a centralized dystopian oligarchic hell, and cryptocurrencies need AI to realize their full effectiveness and power.

Decentralized Artificial Intelligence

We may hear a lot about the concept of “decentralized artificial intelligence” in 2024. This very simple meme contains a lot of information and meaning, in short, "artificial intelligence, but for people".

Centralized Web2 AI occupies a monopoly on data and computing. They will devote all their resources to the development of artificial intelligence models to produce the most versatile and powerful models possible. These Web2s will stifle competition, limit innovation, and seek regulation to solidify their dominance. The result is that a handful of people become extremely wealthy and powerful, becoming the new oligarchs.

Casey Curaso said at the ETH Denver AGI Summit:

“We all want open source AI and the widespread dissemination of customized models suitable for various uses, but the driving force behind economies of scale in AI models is very powerful. Data monopolies and computing monopolies limit the development of open AI models.”

Ordinary people would certainly like to have as many AI models as there are blogs and websites. By democratizing AI models, human creativity, expression, and value creation will flourish. But centralized artificial intelligence cannot do this. Hence the need for decentralized artificial intelligence.

Decentralized Computing

The AI x Crypto narrative begins with the decentralized computing layer—the lowest layer of the AI x Crypto technology stack.

Decentralized computing has long been the domain of cryptography — there’s nothing new about it. The only novelty is that the tokens of these platforms have seen significant gains since the rise of the AI investment cycle. The bid behind the decentralized computing platform continues to grow as Nvidia adds billions to its market value and OpenAI launches new artificial intelligence products that redefine society.

• Filecoin: Up 100% in 30 days
• Arweave: Up 200% in 30 days
• Render: up 300% in 3 months
• Bittensor: up 1250% in 5 months

These are just four platforms picked out. There have also been hundreds of projects of varying quality levels that have seen massive increases over the past few months. Some of these platforms have real foundations. Some of them are actually experiencing growth due to the rise of the AI industry.

But overall, the price behavior of these projects is entirely speculative, either based on a perception of future adoption in the AI industry or a fool's errand about the future.

In the author's opinion, it belongs to the latter.

AI****Meme Coin

Worldcoin is a very real project, with a very real founder, a real team, and a real vision. But Worldcoin’s current valuation is highly unreal at $63 billion. This can only be explained by people trying to get into AI, which is being done through the use of WLD.

This is what cryptocurrencies offer the AI industry: tokens and liquidity.

The crypto industry is made up of rapidly growing radical innovators who are pushing the limits of technology. This is despite the unsatisfactory and restrictive pace of regulation and public market bureaucracy. But industry innovators won’t wait for the old guard and those in power to catch up and will create a better future.

But before all AI builders learn to use cryptocurrencies, and before all cryptocurrency builders learn to use AI, they will be the first to be hit by the wave of AI meme coins.

The overlap between AI and crypto is real – it’s just going to be preempted by vaporware (products announced by developers during or before product development and therefore may not be released) and spam tokens.

It is much easier to issue and develop an AI meme coin than to build a real project. Real Crypto x AI projects will take at least a few years to build, and we don't have that much time in the crypto bull market, which lasts 12-18 months at most.

AI tokens are the shiny new thing.

The reason why AI tokens are bullish is that buying them requires no brainpower at all. New retail investors only need to find some AI-related tokens, watch a YouTube video, and press the buy button.

This is what is called the left side of the curve, and it is also the reason why CorgiAI ranks among the top 100 companies by market capitalization.

The first page of the CorgiAI “white paper” is everything you need to know.

It's completely silly and has no future consequences, but it's cute and funny. Here is a quote from Jacob that the author likes: Meme coins will always be memes.

**What happens next? **

AI x Crypto is real and the fundamentals are there. And signals surrounding fundamentals will be completely overwhelmed by the next wave of recession in cryptocurrency speculation.

A large number of crypto projects will find a way to "become" a Crypto x AI project, and their coins will rise as a result.

Then everything falls apart.

Eventually everything will be rebuilt again on a better basis than before.

This is the story that once played out.

Related reading: The AI track is soaring to the sky, what is the catalyst that drives the currency price to soar?