AI Layer 1: An Emerging Track for Reconstructing the Underlying Architecture of AI Technology

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, traditional blockchain architectures can no longer meet the high-performance computing and complex data processing requirements of AI applications. Therefore, Layer 1 blockchain platforms optimized for AI have emerged, showcasing diverse characteristics in terms of technical architecture, application scenarios, and business models.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of five leading AI Layer 1 projects: Bittensor, Vana, Kite AI, Nillion, and Sahara.

Bittensor: Decentralized AI Network Infrastructure

Bittensor, as an early explorer in the blockchain AI field, is committed to building an open decentralized artificial intelligence collaboration network. Its goal is to break the centralized barriers in traditional AI research and development, allowing more participants to contribute and benefit together.

Unlike traditional centralized AI systems, Bittensor has created an open peer-to-peer ecosystem where participants can receive corresponding rewards based on their contributions to the network.

Bittensor's technical architecture adopts a dual-layer structural design:

• Core Network ( Mainnet ): Responsible for the coordination, verification, and issuance management of TAO tokens in the entire system, serving as the hub for resource allocation across the network.
• Subnet Ecosystem: Each subnet acts like an independent AI laboratory, developing specialized solutions for specific AI application scenarios and proving its value in market competition.

This design allows Bittensor to balance the stability of the overall network with the expertise of various fields, providing a flexible infrastructure for the development of decentralized AI.

Ecological Development Progress

• The number of subnets has expanded from the initial 32 to over 64, covering various AI application scenarios such as text generation, trading signals, and data labeling.
• The number of active users has reached 140,000, doubling compared to the previous year.
• The total valuation of the subnet market exceeds 100 million USD, with a daily trading volume maintained at around 45 million USD.
• Institutional participation has significantly increased, and a well-known fund has included TAO in its decentralized AI fund, adjusting its weight to 29.55%.

These data indicate that Bittensor is gaining recognition from an increasing number of market participants, and its ecosystem is entering a positive development track.

Bittensor recently completed the dTAO( dynamic TAO) system upgrade, which represents a significant innovation in its economic model. The core of this upgrade is to optimize the allocation mechanism of the TAO tokens, shifting from a resource allocation method that relies on the subjective judgment of validators to a more market-oriented allocation mechanism, enabling resources to flow more precisely to those subnetworks that are truly competitive.

The original economic model of Bittensor has exposed several key issues during actual operation:

1. Lack of objectivity in the evaluation mechanism: As the number of subnets increases, it becomes difficult for validators to comprehensively and objectively assess the actual value of each subnet, leading to a gradual decline in allocation efficiency.

2. Imbalance of Power Structure: Many validators are also subnet operators, and this overlapping role can easily lead to conflicts of interest. Validators may favor the subnet they are involved in, and there may even be cases of private trading.

3. Participation Barrier: Ordinary TAO holders find it difficult to directly influence the network's resource allocation decisions, with power overly concentrated in the hands of a few validators.

To address these issues, dTAO upgraded by introducing a dynamic resource allocation system based on market mechanisms.

This system transforms each subnet into an independent economic unit, driven by users' actual needs to allocate resources. Its core innovation is the subnet token ( Alpha token ) mechanism:

• Operating Principle: Users can obtain Alpha tokens issued by various subnets by staking TAO, and these tokens represent the user's support for specific subnets.
• Resource Allocation Logic: The market price of Alpha tokens serves as a signal for measuring the demand intensity of subnets. Initially, the price of alpha tokens is the same, with only 1 TAO and 1 alpha token in each pool. As the liquidity of the two types of tokens in the subnet increases, the price of alpha tokens will also change accordingly. The emission of TAO is proportionally allocated based on the price of subnet tokens among all tokens. Subnets with higher prices will receive more TAO allocation, thereby achieving automatic optimization of resource allocation.

This mechanism significantly improves the efficiency and fairness of resource allocation, stabilizes the value of TAO tokens, and provides more avenues for ordinary users to participate in network governance.

The most active subnets currently include:

• Subnet 4 Targon: Focused on AI inference services for text generation, characterized by fast response speed and low cost.
• Subnet 64 Chutes: Provides API interfaces for various LLMs, allowing developers to build and deploy AI applications on the Bittensor network.
• Subnetwork No. 8 PTN: Focused on the financial sector, incentivizing miners to generate accurate trading signals through a reward mechanism, covering various financial markets including foreign exchange and cryptocurrencies.
• Subnet 52 Dojo: Data annotation, encouraging users to earn tokens through data labeling.

Vana: Data Sovereignty and Value Reconstruction Platform

The Vana project focuses on solving a core issue in today's digital economy: the ownership of personal data and the distribution of its value. In the current internet ecosystem, users' data is mostly monopolized and controlled by large tech companies, while the users who actually create this data rarely benefit from it. Vana's innovation lies in establishing an ecosystem where users truly own and control their own data, while being able to derive economic returns from it.

As an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain network, Vana's technical architecture consists of five core components:

1. Data Liquidity Layer (: This is the core of the Vana network, which achieves the incentivization, aggregation, and verification of data assets through the Data Liquidity Pool ) DLP (. Each DLP is a smart contract specifically designed to aggregate certain types of data assets, such as social media data, browsing history, etc.
2. 数据可移植层)Data Portability Layer(: Ensures that user data can be easily transferred between different applications and AI models, enhancing the flexibility of data usage.
3. Universal Connectome ): Tracking the real-time flow of data across the entire ecosystem to form a data ecology map, ensuring transparency of the system.
4. Non-custodial data storage: An important innovation of Vana is its unique data management approach. Users' original data will not be on-chain, but rather stored in a location chosen by the user, such as a cloud server or personal device, which ensures that users have complete control over their own data.
5. Application Ecosystem: Based on data, Vana has built an open application ecosystem where developers can utilize the data accumulated by DLP to create various innovative applications, including AI applications, while data contributors can receive dividend rewards from these applications.

This design enables Vana to create a fairer data value distribution mechanism while protecting user data privacy, providing an important data foundation for the development of decentralized AI.

( Latest developments

Vana's financing and partnership expansion continue to advance:

• In February 2025, a certain Labs announced a strategic investment in Vana, and the founder of a certain trading platform joined as an advisor.
• In terms of ecological construction, Vana has built multiple data projects covering various fields from social media data to financial forecasting data, including: Finquarium) financial forecasting data###, GPT Data DAO( ChatGPT chat data), Reddit Data DAO( Reddit user data), Volara( Twitter data), Flirtual( dating data), etc.
• Recently, Vana organized a hackathon during Eth Denver, offering a prize pool of up to $50,000 to incentivize developers to build DataDAO and AI applications based on Vana data, further expanding its ecosystem.

These developments indicate that Vana is actively building a comprehensive ecosystem around data ownership and value monetization, and its momentum is worth paying attention to.

Kite AI: Technological Breakthrough of AI-Native Public Blockchain

Kite AI is a native Layer 1 blockchain project focused on the AI field, built on the Avalanche framework. It aims to address various challenges faced by traditional blockchains when handling AI assets, particularly how to achieve clear rights and incentives for AI data, models, and agent contributions. Kite AI proposes four core technological innovations:

1. PoAI Consensus Mechanism: Proof of Attributed Intelligence is a consensus mechanism pioneered by Kite AI, which accurately tracks the value contributions of data, models, and AI agents through an on-chain verifiable contribution record system. The project has designed a dynamic reward pool mechanism to distribute profits according to contribution ratios, effectively addressing issues such as "data black box" and "model plagiarism" in the traditional AI economy.

2. Composable AI Subnet: Kite AI adopts a modular architecture, allowing developers to build industry-specific AI collaborative ecosystems as needed. For example, in the healthcare subnet, patient data can be encrypted and selectively authorized for use by pharmaceutical companies for AI model development, with profits distributed in a certain proportion to the data subjects, model developers, and subnet maintainers, creating a win-win ecosystem for all parties.

3.AI Native Execution Layer: Kite AI is building an on-chain AI native execution layer specifically designed to handle AI computation tasks such as inference, embedding, and fine-tuning/training. Users can authorize smart contract wallets to execute inference calls and interact with the models through this layer. This execution layer not only supports blockchain transactions and state changes but also integrates confidential computing environments (, such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) ), ensuring data security and privacy protection during the computation process.

4. Decentralized Data Engine: Kite AI ensures that data creators receive fair compensation within the AI workflow. The platform includes compliance modules that adhere to regulations such as GDPR/CCPA, meeting data privacy requirements worldwide and reducing compliance costs for developers.

These technological innovations enable Kite AI to create a fairer and more transparent value distribution environment for AI developers and data providers, promoting the decentralized development of AI technology.

( Development Status

Kite AI launched its incentive testnet on February 6, 2025, which is the first AI-native Layer 1 sovereign blockchain testnet. The testnet performed remarkably well after going live:

• Less than 70 hours after the test went online, the number of connected wallets surpassed 100,000. So far, a total of 1.95 million wallets have joined the incentive test network V1, among which more than 1 million wallets have interacted with AI agents, with a total call count exceeding 115 million times.

• The project background is strong, built by an experienced Silicon Valley team, with co-founders having profound technical leadership experience in the field of artificial intelligence and having worked at several top tech companies. Core team members come from well-known enterprises and have academic backgrounds from top universities.

• In terms of capital support, the project has received investments from several top institutions and has established technical cooperation relationships with multiple well-known projects.

• As a selection committee member of a certain blockchain in the InfraBUILDL)AI### program, Kite AI plays an active role in promoting the development of its artificial intelligence ecosystem, with the aim of making this blockchain a leading blockchain for AI applications.

• With the global data economy expected to surpass $70 billion by 2025, Kite AI is poised to become an important infrastructure for data rights confirmation and monetization, and its development potential is worth looking forward to.

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