🌵 The Intersection of Crypto & AI 🌵

Big Brain Breakdown

Market Metrics

Total Crypto Market Cap: down 0.1% to $2.38T
Total AI Sector Market Cap: up 2.3% to $29.3B

Top Movers (24hrs):

📈AIT Protocol (AIT): up 25.9% to $0.1001
📈SingularityDAO (SDAO): up 16.9% to $0.3988
📈Zero1 Labs (DEAI): up 15.9% to $0.3102

Daily News

🟠 Bittensor announces "Supercommodities" for TAO ecosystem. Supercommodities are assets produced competitively within specialized subnets. They serve as raw inputs for real-world digital services, with only superior versions selected in accordance with the Bittensor subnet framework.

🟠 Nosana partnered with Arbius AI for Test Grid Phase 2. Arbius will use Nosana's GPU network to power miners for advanced generative AI tasks.

🟠 Injective hinted at a partnership with Fetch.ai, however there has been no official announcement on what this partnership entails.

🟠 The German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) has now sold over $150 million worth of BTC since last week, with an additional $147 million transferred to an unidentified address yesterday. Bitcoin briefly dipped below $60k yesterday in response. Germany retains 45,609 BTC ($2.8B) from it’s seizure from piracy site Movie2k, ranking 4th among nation-state holders.

🧠 Big Brain Breakdown

Welcome back to another Big Brain Breakdown. This week we are diving into the small, yet developing AI and DePIN ecosystem on Solana.

To (mostly) everyone's shock, Solana has come back in a big way over the past 6-12 months. Despite the massive rug that was FTX, Robinhood market selling users' SOL close to the pico bottom to avoid regulatory meddling, and all of the FUDing when SOL was worth $8, the ecosystem has not only recovered but reached new highs in almost all metrics.

Acknowledging that most of the excitement was driven by memecoins, let's not forget that there are, in fact, legitimate projects taking the bet that Solana is more than just a casino. The infrastructural components of the network play a crucial role in a protocol’s decision to make Solana their home.

Just like DeFi on Solana was basically non-existent only 12 months ago, AI and DePIN projects on Solana are few and far between. However, like any investment, you don’t want to get in when everyone is talking about it, hence the reason for today’s breakdown.

If you've been with us for a while, you probably know we've covered a lot of the big names in the space, so we'll briefly reintroduce those. However, the edge is in discovering the shadow builders, the under-appreciated, and the soon-to-be ecosystem rockstars. Let’s dig in 👇

Cant Miss ‘Em

Of course, the list, while not comprehensive in today’s edition, would still be incomplete if we didn’t mention the ecosystem leaders.

Nosana: Decentralized computing marketplace purpose built for handling AI inference workloads, specifically Llama 2 and Stable Difussion. The project is still in phase 2 of testing but is partnering with other teams such as Arbius & Alpha Neural to facilitate that testing.

io.net: Decentralized computing marketplace and one of the most high-profile launches of the year due to their $30 million Series A in March. The protocol leverages Solana to post the inference IDs onchain for verifiability.

Render: Decentralized computing marketplace specifically for 3D content creation and rendering (obviously). While not solely based on Solana, their mint-and-burn mechanism is and ~68,000 RENDER has already been burned via network usage.

Lesser Known

Grass: Grass aims to become the "Data Layer for AI" by offering a simple web extension that rewards users for contributing to data collection. This gathered information will be used to train various AI models. The team recently announced “Grass Summer,” encouraging users to connect their Solana wallets to the Grass dashboard so that they can begin earning rewards for their data contributions. We can assume that the Grass TGE is just around the corner.

Additional Alpha: The Grass team’s “Giga Bud” NFT collection Public Sale will kick off on Magic Eden this Thursday, June 27. It is still undetermined how the team plans to reward holders, but vibing and holding is a utility in and of itself.

Synesis One: Synesis One is a protocol that combines a data utility and AI-focused NFT marketplace, using a dual token system (Synesis for governance and Kanon for transactions) to facilitate the crowdsourcing and trading of ontologies for AI development. The protocol aims to create a decentralized ecosystem for AI data management, with revenue streams from various sources including mining fees, trading fees, and DeFi services.

The team has recently rebranded and will focus more on building its data provenance layer, similar to what Grass is doing with the L2 it is building.

Dither: Most known for its Telegram bot that flags promising Solana memecoins early, Dither has matured and has started to develop additional AI time-series models and accessible APIs that leverage Solana data for trading purposed. One could classify that the project is still in “stealth” since its believed to still be ran by solo dev, Matness, and how there has not been very many official marketing or fundraising announcements made. The DITH token came out of the gates hot upon launch, but has since cooled down significantly, as the trend with most short-lived hype cycles. We will see if Mattness’ shipping will revive DITH’s price action and get the community going again.

It is quite apparent the AI and DePIN ecosystem on Solana is still very early stage, with many of the projects leveraging the blockchain in limited ways compared to applications launching on infrastructure purpose-built for AI such as Bittensor, Talus, NEAR, & Ritual. We are closely watching AI teams building DePIN and AI solutions on Solana, as we are curious to see the use cases for the network expand past memecoins and outright gambling. We are bullish on Solana as the consumer chain of the cycle, and hope that we can see more consumer facing AI products built in the near future.

Meme of the Day

It changed ours too! 🫡