The cryptocurrency industry is known for its explosive trends where a group of projects takes for the sky, outperforming the rest of the market considerably.
There’s been a few of these already in 2023, but one that stands out seems to be a trend related to projects that have been working on solutions based on Artificial Intelligence.
A closer look at AI-related crypto projects reveals that a whole lot of them have vastly outperformed the rest of the industry, multiplying their value by a considerable factor.
The following takes a closer look at the reasons this happened, what provoked it, and what are some of the best-known crypto projects associated with it.
Let’s dive in.
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First, artificial intelligence is not a new phenomenon in the world of technology. It’s also important to note that there is no consensus on the definition of AI, which makes it challenging to pinpoint a single-sided use case.
Many consider AI to be a particularly critical piece of technology with transformative properties and the potential to change our society.
In Layman’s terms, artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems or other types of machines. There are multiple applications, including expert systems, machine vision, machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, and so forth.
Typically, the way AI systems tend to work at the current level is by ingesting massive amounts of labeled training information, analyzing this data for patterns and certain correlations, and then using these patterns to make certain predictions and conclusions.
This is also how one of the more popular AI applications works – namely, ChatGPT – the OpenAI chatbot that took the world by storm recently.
Enters ChatGPT. While many companies are working on their own AI-related products, a few months ago, OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded in popularity, especially within the cryptocurrency industry.
Everyone was talking about ChatGPT. What is more, everyone was talking to ChatGPT. So what is it?
OpenAI trained a chatbot model that’s designed to interact with the user in a conversational way. The dialogue format itself makes it possible and rather easy for ChatGPT to answer various follow-up questions. It even admits its mistakes, challenges premises that are incorrect, and rejects requests deemed inappropriate (a point of contention for many).
But why not ask it about itself?
This is when things started getting heated up.
Crypto trends are oftentimes catalyzed by outside events. In this particular case, it was ChatGPT and other AI-based models catching speed amongst bigger names. One of them was the tech mogul Microsoft.
On January 23rd, 2023, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft invested a whopping $10 billion in OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT. It’s worth noting that Microsoft, at that point, was already a backer of OpenAI, having invested $1 billion back in 2019.
OpenAI also revealed that it’s using Microsoft’s cloud-based service called Azure – to train all of its models. One of the main purposes of the investment was to enable the company to further its independent research.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment of when the AI trend in the cryptocurrency market started, but it was somewhere around that time.
A lot of cryptocurrencies that had something to do with artificial intelligence started increasing in value.
As it’s almost always the case, this also meant that projects that were quite shady but only had “AI” in their name also started pumping.
And while there are a lot of serious projects with considerable backing, actively developing in the fields of crypto and AI, many were (and still are) nefarious, but more on that later.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the most popular AI cryptocurrencies out there.
The Graph is an indexing protocol designed with the specific purpose of querying networks like Ethereum and IPFS.
In other words, projects with complicated smart contracts (such as Uniswap and even the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection) store information on Ethereum’s network. This makes it very difficult to read anything other than the basic data directly from the blockchain.
Without getting too far into technicalities (which you can find here) The Graph solves the complexities through a decentralized protocol that’s designed to index and enable the performance of efficient querying of the network data.
Many reports claim that The Graph uses artificial intelligence to pretty much do what google did for the internet.
Its native cryptocurrency carries the GRT ticker and has exploded since the beginning of 2023.
SingularityNet is more of an ecosystem rather than a narrow-focused crypto project, but it does have artificial intelligence at its core.
In essence, it’s an open and decentralized platform of AI services that have been made available through blockchain-based tech. Developers publish their services on the network, and they can then be used by anyone who has access to the internet. Developers are also able to charge for their services through the usage of the ecosystem’s native cryptocurrency – AGIX.
The core mission of the team, however, is to create an “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)” for a beneficial technological singularity.
It’s also worth noting that the platform is based on two smart contract networks – Ethereum and Cardano.
AGIX has become one of the best performers in 2023.
FetchaiI brings forward a blockchain platform that takes advantage of artificial intelligence in an attempt to help people automate everyday tasks.
The goal for Fetch.ai is to become a completely open and permissionless network that leverages AI to create a decentralized system that uses machine learning to execute tasks on the blockchain.
It’s an interchain protocol, and essentially, it harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to implement automated applications that are P2P without any human interference. It was launched back in February 2019 through an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) on the Binance Launchpad.
The entire ecosystem is underpinned by the native token called FET. Positioned as digital currency, FET is the primary medium of exchange within the ecosystem. If you want to use any of the paid services provided by Fetch.ai, you will have to pay with FET.
The Oasis network is a layer 1 blockchain that’s designed to be versatile, scalable in a unique way, and also privacy-oriented.
Without going into too many technical details, the technology stack includes the following highlights:
The ParaTime layer is their way of naming the execution layer.
The native cryptocurrency is ROSE. Much like most AI-focused projects, it also saw substantial growth at the beginning of 2023.
The team came out with an official blog post that they are building “responsible AI primitives” and that it’s working with “industry leaders across multiple sectors to design and implement robust primitives for responsible AI.”
Last but not least on our list is Ocean Protocol. This is a platform that’s developed to connect data providers and data consumers in a blockchain-based marketplace.
Its model relies on multiple innovations, including AI and tokenizing certain datasets and data services so that providers are able to quickly, easily, and effectively monetize their data. On the other hand, consumers have convenient access to an ecosystem of useful information.
The cryptocurrency that powers the ecosystem is called OCEAN.
