AI and DeSci: The Narrative Behind the Bull and Bear Market Holds Huge Infrastructure Potential

Recently, the cryptocurrency market experienced a surge, with Bitcoin rising over 20%, and Meme coins going crazy again. However, during the dull period of the past six months, the market generally believed that the crypto industry lacked support from practical applications. Even in emerging fields like Depin, its subfields such as cloud computing are still some way from widespread adoption.

Interestingly, amidst the speculative frenzy of memes, the concept of DeSci has unexpectedly garnered attention. While new concepts inevitably come with speculation and hype, the blockchain industry has developed for many years, and it is time to consider how to build practical applications that benefit humanity.

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution led by ChatGPT injected new momentum into the bull market. The view that "AI represents advanced productivity, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced production relations" sparked heated discussions and became one of the new narratives before the bull market. Driven by this, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai rapidly emerged.

In September this year, with the market warming up, AI concept Meme coins also sparked a wave due to $Goat. Small teams or even individuals only need to develop AI Agents with specific functions, nurture the community, and "profit" by issuing tokens.

The concept of DeSci originated from the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of "Science", it has been largely overlooked. The real breakthrough began on November 8 when a trading platform invested in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the DeSci field. Subsequently, the platform's senior executives attended DeSci events, discussed DeSci insights with industry leaders, and expressed the hope of seeing 1,000 DeSci projects emerge next year.

These statements have triggered a wave of Meme coins related to the DeSci concept, such as $uro and $rif issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub used for donating to Sci-Hub, with the total market value of related concepts surpassing 800 million dollars.

However, good narratives require not only short-term popularity but also long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application implementation. The core support of AI—computing power resource scheduling—is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale adoption, and its cost and stability still need to be verified.

In contrast, the decentralized storage technology behind DeSci has become relatively mature. Compared to traditional centralized storage, it offers advantages of lower costs and higher security. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci is basically ready, and now it needs more people to recognize and adopt this concept.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global scientific data open access through distributed storage, reducing single control and avoiding data leakage, loss, and tampering. It makes scientific activities more transparent and allows global researchers to share resources. DeSci also employs smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, helping to raise research funds.

DeSci achieves innovation in two aspects: 1. fundraising through tokens; 2. transferring research data storage from centralized servers to the blockchain. The founder of BIO Protocol pointed out that DeSci successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins into global universities and laboratories, supporting genuine scientific research.

Currently, the popularity of DeSci is mainly driven by Memes, but scientific research requires continuous and substantial funding, facing high risks and high failure rates, which contradicts the short-term speculative nature of Memes. In the short term, it may attract a large number of speculators, aiming for financing rather than a genuine commitment to research.

Therefore, after a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of removing the false and preserving the true, gradually cultivating user awareness, and ultimately achieving the goal of "using crypto finance to drive the monetization of research outcomes."

DeSci has a huge demand for data storage and on-chain proof. If a mature business model can be established, decentralized storage will become the infrastructure of DeSci, driving the development of the entire ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has gone through several stages of development from Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the IPFS protocol. An analysis in May 2023 showed that decentralized storage is, on average, 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with differences in enterprise-level data storage reaching up to 121 times. Although some Web2 customers have adopted solutions like Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage still dominates the mainstream. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and permanent storage, as well as the high costs of Arweave, remain pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a trading platform launched a decentralized storage infrastructure to support the entire ecosystem. Users and DApps can create, store, and exchange fully autonomous data. Through a native cross-chain bridge, users can freely transfer assets between different chains and conveniently interact with DApps.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, this new infrastructure has advantages in ecological integration, cross-chain support, the combination of storage and computation, and low-cost high efficiency, making it more suitable for DeFi, smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios. In the future, it can be used in various fields such as website hosting, personal cloud storage, blockchain data storage, content publishing, social media, and personal data markets.

In infrastructure development, support for ecological projects is crucial. Recently, in community voting activities, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as native infrastructure, are important components.

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in the ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, it offers robust storage resources across multiple networks. By integrating the features of IPFS and Arweave, 4EVERLAND provides a superior storage network integration solution, reducing the difficulty of use.

Its advantages include: dual roles in storage and verification, multi-chain support and compatibility, integration of decentralized storage and computing resources, flexible storage solutions, decentralized AI services, and DWeb hosting services. Currently, there are over 3 million users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000, holding an important position among multiple storage networks.

4EVERLAND has partnered with several DeSci projects to advance the decentralized storage of research literature. By combining IPFS, Arweave, and new infrastructure, a storage solution suitable for DeSci has been established, with cold backup data stored on Arweave and hot data access placed on the new infrastructure.

BAS, as a foundational data protocol standard, aims to generate verification information certification, introducing trusted private data to the Web3 ecosystem, especially providing data support for AI. Its features include decentralized verification services, user sovereignty and data privacy, AI training and dataset services, as well as extensive ecosystem collaboration.

The introduction of BAS provides data validation and management capabilities for new infrastructure, enhancing the platform's security, transparency, and user control. By combining these features, the new infrastructure ensures data validation and compliance while offering efficient data management and permission control functions.

The new infrastructure is an important ecological innovation. If the business model of DeSci is validated, along with the traffic support from trading platforms, it will greatly promote ecological prosperity, and the new infrastructure will also achieve large-scale adoption.

From a more macro perspective, the sustainable development of the crypto industry is key. Industry leaders and major institutions emphasize the importance of DeSci and invest resources, demonstrating the vision of the blockchain financial services market, realizing value implementation, and promoting the contribution of blockchain technology to society. This is not just a hype concept, but an important attempt to drive industry innovation and practical applications.