AI and DeSci: The Hidden Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narrative of Bull and Bear Markets

In the past week, the crypto market has experienced a surge, with Bitcoin rising over 20% and meme coins going crazy again. However, during the sluggish period of the past six months, the market has been discussing the rhetoric of "the crypto industry lacking real applications." Although some emerging fields like Depin are still under construction, there is still a long way to go before true mass adoption.

In the speculative frenzy of meme coins, the concept of DeSci has unexpectedly gained attention again. It is undeniable that every new concept inevitably goes through a phase of speculation and hype at its inception. However, as the blockchain industry has developed to this point, it is time to consider how to build practical applications that benefit humanity.

The Combination of AI and DeSci

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

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually recovers, meme coins related to the AI concept have also experienced a wave of popularity due to $Goat. A small team or even an individual can simply develop an AI Agent with specific functions, cultivate their own community and fanbase, and "earn profits" 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 received little attention 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 decentralized science (DeSci) field. Less than a week after the announcement, senior executives from the platform attended the DeSci Day event held in Bangkok and discussed DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum, expressing their hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. Subsequently, the platform's official account mentioned DeSci multiple times. The strong support from the executives sparked a craze for DeSci concept meme coins, with several popular tokens emerging in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif, which correspond to single drugs released by BIO, as well as $SciHub for donations to the world's largest open-source paper platform Sci-Hub, with the total market value of related concepts surpassing $800 million.

However, a good narrative not only requires short-term popularity but also needs long-term infrastructure development to realize the actual application scenarios. The most basic support for AI—computing power resources—through Depin cloud computing for idle computing power scheduling is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale adoption, and the cost, as well as the stability of the computing environment and response speed, have not yet been effectively validated by the market.

The core technology behind DeSci - decentralized storage, has been proven to be relatively lower in cost and higher in security compared to traditional centralized storage solutions since the development of the IPFS protocol; the current solutions are relatively mature. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci has been built, and now it only requires more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

Tracing the DeSci Concept

DeSci, or Decentralized Science, promotes global open access to research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the single control of data by governments or institutions and avoiding the risks of leakage, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes scientific research activities more open and transparent, allowing researchers worldwide to freely share resources. In addition, DeSci employs smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, assisting scientists in raising the funds needed for their research. This fundamentally changes the traditional funding source structure for scientific research and greatly enhances the efficiency of fund utilization.

The DeSci model has achieved innovation in two areas: 1. Fundraising is realized through the issuance of tokens. The currently popular $rif and $uro have raised funds for the development of two drugs by issuing meme coins. 2. The storage of research data has shifted from centralized servers to a decentralized and permanently immutable blockchain.

The current popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by meme coins, and the development of the industry is wrapped in market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial funding and faces high risks and high failure rates, which contrasts with the short-term speculation and rapid liquidity exhaustion characteristics of meme coins.

Therefore, in the short term, a large number of speculators will enter this field, issuing project financing with the goal of "financing is profit" rather than genuinely investing in scientific research. After a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a stage of distinguishing the false from the true, gradually cultivating users' understanding of DeSci in the process of educating the market, and only then may it truly achieve the goal of "using crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research results."

Currently, the demand for data storage and on-chain proof behind DeSci is extremely huge. If DeSci can leverage the hype of meme coins to break boundaries and establish a mature business model, then decentralized storage will become the infrastructure of the DeSci field, and this stable and enormous demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has matured, and the underlying infrastructure potential of DeSci is immense.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple stages of development, from the early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the IPFS protocol behind them. An analysis in May 2023 pointed out that decentralized storage is on average about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with this difference reaching up to 121 times in enterprise-level data storage. Additionally, decentralized storage has obvious advantages in terms of data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients beginning to adopt decentralized storage solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage with a more intuitive user experience and mature product systems 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 yet to fully resolve.

In April last year, a trading platform announced the launch of a decentralized storage infrastructure, marking a new height for decentralized storage. This infrastructure provides a decentralized storage framework for the entire ecosystem, allowing users and decentralized applications to create, store, and exchange fully owned data. Through a native cross-chain bridge between the smart chain, users can freely transfer assets, thus conveniently interacting with DApps built on this infrastructure.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this infrastructure lie in its deep integration with the ecosystem, cross-chain support, the combination of decentralized storage and computing power, as well as low cost and high efficiency. This makes it more suitable for decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios, possessing stronger scalability and ecological synergy. In the future, this infrastructure can be applied in scenarios such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

The development of this infrastructure is inseparable from the support of its ecological projects. This year, the ecological official launched a community voting event for the most popular projects, which are divided into 5 categories within the ecosystem. In the infrastructure category, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as the native infrastructure of this infrastructure, are very important components.

4EVERLAND

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in this ecosystem. As an officially certified Storage Provider (SP) and validator, 4EVERLAND offers robust storage resources while supporting multiple networks, committed to building an efficient decentralized storage network. On top of this infrastructure, by integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, 4EVERLAND provides a superior storage network integration solution, offering a more user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

Its key advantages include:

• Dual roles of storage and verification
• Multi-chain support and compatibility
• Combination of decentralized storage and computing resources
• Flexible storage solutions
• Decentralized AI Services
• DWeb Hosting Service

Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users, with more than 100,000 daily active users. It has 2000 TB of storage on IPFS (third in the IPFS ecosystem) and 20 TB on Arweave (third in the Arweave ecosystem). The infrastructure has over 30,000 daily interactions (first in the ecosystem). In terms of financing, it has received support from several well-known public chains and investment institutions.

Recently, 4EVERLAND has collaborated with multiple project parties in DeSci to promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and this infrastructure, a decentralized storage solution for DeSci has been established, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access facilitated by this infrastructure.

BAS

BAS, as the underlying data protocol standard, aims to generate certification of verification information for bringing tens of millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, especially to provide data support for AI. The characteristics of BAS include:

• Decentralized Verification Service
• User Sovereignty and Data Privacy
• AI training and dataset services
• Ecosystem Cooperation and Application

The introduction of BAS for this infrastructure provides data verification and management capabilities, enhancing the platform's security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating with BAS, this infrastructure can ensure data verification and compliance, while also providing efficient data management and access control features.

Attempts at Sustainable Development in the Cryptocurrency Industry

This infrastructure is an extremely important strategic layout and has also been a significant innovation in the ecosystem since its launch. Unlike the "frontline players" targeting C-end users, this infrastructure will more quietly cultivate behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will be more conducive to the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the business model of DeSci is validated, along with the support of traffic from trading platforms, it will undoubtedly greatly promote the prosperity of the ecosystem, and this infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption. From a more macro perspective, what truly concerns millions of crypto users and practitioners is whether the crypto industry can achieve long-term sustainable development.

Industry leaders have recently emphasized the importance of DeSci and have invested real money to support this field. There are even trading platforms that specifically publish research reports on DeSci to validate it. This is undoubtedly a significant attempt at innovation, rather than just hyping a concept. Behind the industry dynamics is the vision of blockchain finance being able to truly serve the market, realize value landing, and promote blockchain technology to contribute to society.