While interest in AI has been brewing steadily over the last decade, that interest has only been exacerbated with the release of ChatGPT3 in late 2022. You know AI is going mainstream when it's no longer confined (as a topic of conversation) to circles likely found in Silicon Valley, but kitchen banter with your wife and kids.
It's now being said ad nauseam - AI has the potential to fundamentally change numerous industries, from robotics, cars, and finance to professional services like accounting, legal services, and medicine. Cryptocurrencies are also not immune to this change.
In cryptocurrencies, proponents of AI envision a utopian autonomous "entity" that can effortlessly facilitate new economic, financial, and social ecosystems, including (in one example) augmenting existing decentralised finance applications (DeFi) and scaling them so that billions of people can be onboarded via the use of AI tokens.
What are AI tokens?
AI tokens are generally cryptocurrencies that use AI to:
enhance or improve security,
build trust and efficiencies of systems,
combat and reduce the likelihood of a centrally controlled AI system by decentralising the network,
improve user experience,
increase scalability,
predict market forecasting including decentralised marketplaces; and
conduct many other purposes.
Challenges
Although there are many existing laws that are intended to serve the interest of consumer and investor protection, we are yet to see the unintended consequences from a regulatory standpoint caused by “disintermediation”. While these regulatory risks are not unique to AI tokens, the risks are potentially exacerbated by AI.
For example, in the case of P2P lending applications built with smart contracts and powered by AI. P2P platforms typically have less information on their borrowers, compared to classical banks, and are less able to deal with asymmetric information. There is typically no requirement for "know your customer" checks and nothing to prevent, for example, organised crime groups from using the platform. Whether AI can solve this problem or create a new set of challenges is yet to be seen.
While there are still significant challenges to overcome, some known and some unknown, supporters of AI tokens argue that the solution to the threat of a despotic centralised AI, is a decentralised AI by using blockchain and cryptocurrencies. One reason is that blockchain’s use of a decentralised ledger offers insight into the workings of AI systems and the provenance of the data these platforms may be using. As a result, transactions can be facilitated with a high level of trust while maintaining solid data integrity.
Below is a list of some of the most popular AI tokens:
AGIX - Perhaps one of the most well-known AI tokens today. AGIX is the token native to the SingularityNET decentralised platform. SingularityNET is one of the world’s leading decentralised AI marketplaces, running on blockchain. SingularityNET's core mission is the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for a beneficial technological singularity. SingularityNET provides an open-source, decentralised blockchain market allowing users to buy and sell a wide variety of AI-related products and services.
GRT - The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data for networks like Ethereum and IPFS, powering many applications in both DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL to retrieve blockchain data.
FET - FET is an Ethereum token that powers Fetch.ai, a decentralised machine learning platform for applications such as asset trading, gig economy work, and energy grid optimisation. Fetch.ai's first decentralised finance application helps Uniswap users automate trading according to predefined conditions.
NMR - NMR is a token associated with the Numerai AI-based decentralised hedge fund. Numerai is a model for how AI may be used to assist with investment decisions. It utilises a crowdsourced set of predictions from data scientists around the world as it considers possible investments.
HERA - An AI powered multichain dex aggregator. Hera claims to directly connect AMM pools together no matter the provider and will find all direct/multihop routes between any two tokens on multichain.
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