The Rise of AI Layer 1 Projects: In-Depth Analysis of Five Pioneer Platforms

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, traditional blockchain architectures have struggled to meet the high-performance computing and complex data processing needs of AI applications. This has led to the rise of Layer 1 blockchain platforms optimized specifically for AI, which exhibit 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.

The technical architecture of Bittensor adopts a dual-layer structural design:

• Root Network (Mainnet): Responsible for the coordination, verification, and issuance management of TAO tokens for the entire system, and serves as the hub for resource allocation across the network.
• Subnet Ecology: Each subnet is 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 simultaneously balance the stability of the overall network and the expertise in 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 active user base has reached 140,000, achieving a twofold increase compared to the previous year.
• The total market valuation of subnet exceeds 100 million USD, with a daily trading volume maintained at around 45 million USD.
• The participation of institutions has significantly increased, with well-known funds incorporating TAO into their decentralized AI funds, 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 virtuous development track.

The recent dTAO (Dynamic TAO) system upgrade completed by Bittensor is an important innovation in its economic model. The core of this upgrade lies in optimizing the distribution mechanism of the token TAO, shifting from a resource allocation method that relies on the subjective judgment of validators to a more market-oriented distribution mechanism, allowing resources to flow more precisely to those truly competitive subnets.

The currently most active subnets include:

• Subnet 4 Targon: Focused on AI inference services for text generation, characterized by fast response speed and low cost.
• Subnet 64 Chutes: Provides various LLM API interfaces, allowing developers to build and deploy AI applications on the Bittensor platform.
• Subnet 8 PTN: Focused on the financial sector, incentivizing miners to generate accurate trading signals through a reward mechanism, covering various financial markets such as forex and cryptocurrencies.
• Subnet No. 52 Dojo: Perform data labeling and encourage users to earn tokens through data labeling.

Vana: Data Sovereignty and Value Reconstruction Platform

The Vana project focuses on addressing a core issue in today's digital economy: the ownership of personal data and the distribution of its value. The innovation of Vana lies in establishing an ecosystem where users truly own and control their own data while being able to derive economic benefits from it.

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

1. Data Liquidity Layer: Achieve the incentives, aggregation, and validation of data assets through the Data Liquidity Pool (DLP).
2. Data portability layer: Ensure that user data can be easily transferred between different applications and AI models.
3. Universal Connection Group: Track the real-time data flow across the entire ecosystem to form a data ecology map.
4. Non-custodial data storage: Users' raw data will not be on the chain and will be stored at a location of the user's choice.
5. Application Ecosystem: Developers can leverage the data accumulated by DLP to build various innovative applications, including AI applications.

Latest Development Trends

• In February 2025, a certain laboratory 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 data projects covering multiple areas, from social media data to financial forecasting data.
• Recently, Vana organized a hackathon event during Eth Denver, offering a high prize pool to incentivize developers to build DataDAOs and AI applications based on Vana data.

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

Kite AI: Technical Breakthrough of AI-Native Public Chain

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 in handling AI assets, particularly how to achieve transparent rights and incentives for AI data, models, and agent contributions. Kite AI proposes four core technological innovations:

1. PoAI Consensus Mechanism: Precisely track the value contributions of data, models, and AI agents through an on-chain verifiable contribution record system.
2. Composable AI subnet: supports developers to build industry-specific AI collaborative ecosystems on demand.
3. AI Native Execution Layer: Specifically handles AI computational tasks such as inference, embedding, and fine-tuning/training.
4. Decentralized Data Engine: Ensures that data creators receive fair compensation in the AI workflow.

Development Status

• Kite AI launched the incentive testnet on February 6, 2025, which is the first AI-native Layer 1 sovereign blockchain testnet.
• Less than 70 hours after the online test went live, the number of connected wallets exceeded 100,000, and so far, a total of 1.95 million wallets have joined the incentive testnet V1.
• The project background is strong, built by an experienced Silicon Valley team, with core team members from several top tech companies.
• In terms of capital support, the project has received investment from multiple top institutions and has established technical cooperation relationships with several well-known projects.
• As a selection committee member of Avalanche in the InfraBUILDL(AI) program, Kite AI plays an active role in promoting the development of the Avalanche artificial intelligence ecosystem.

Nillion: Frontier Exploration of Privacy Computing

Nillion is redefining the processing of sensitive data through its unique "blind computation" technology, opening new avenues for future digital privacy protection.

The core advantage of Nillion lies in its "blind computing" capability — a process that allows data to remain in an encrypted state throughout its lifecycle of storage, transmission, and processing. Its technical architecture integrates various cutting-edge privacy protection technologies:

• Multi-Party Computation (MPC )
• Fully Homomorphic Encryption ( FHE )
• Zero-Knowledge Proof ( ZKP )
• Nada Language

Nillion's network architecture consists of three main layers: the processing layer, the coordination layer, and the connection layer. This multi-layer architecture enables Nillion to provide powerful computing capabilities while protecting data privacy.

Latest Development Progress

• The Nillion mainnet is scheduled to launch in March 2025 (this month).
• In terms of financing, Nillion completed a $25 million funding round led by an institution on October 30, 2024.
• In terms of ecological expansion, Nillion has established integration relationships with several mainstream public chains.
• In the AI ecosystem, Nillion has established collaborations with multiple AI-related projects.

Sahara AI: The platform for building a new economy of AI assets

The core idea of Sahara AI is to build a "human-AI collaboration network" that enables ordinary users, developers, and enterprises to participate in the creation, deployment, and monetization of AI assets. The project has successfully raised a total of $43 million in funding.

The platform's technical architecture consists of three key components:

1. Sahara Blockchain
2. AI Infrastructure
3. Sahara AI Marketplace

Latest Development Process

• In December 2024, Sahara AI launched the Beta version testnet of the first phase data service platform.
• In February 2025, Sahara AI launched the second phase of its testnet.
• On March 10, 2025, Sahara AI will launch a public testnet called "SIWA."

Sahara AI has announced its roadmap for the 2024-2025 period, which includes several key milestones.

On March 1, 2025, Sahara AI launched an incubator program aimed at discovering and supporting the most promising AI x Web3 innovative projects globally.

Summary

AI Layer 1 is currently in a critical stage of rapid evolution. This emerging track is reconstructing the underlying architecture of AI technology through decentralized infrastructure. From data rights confirmation to computing resource allocation, from model training to application deployment, these platforms are breaking through the limitations of traditional centralized AI systems, building a more open, transparent, and efficient technological ecosystem. In the future, this track will continue to drive technological innovation and advance the development of artificial intelligence towards a more decentralized and collaborative direction.