Good Morning ☕️ 

What a week! While the broader market keeps printing ATHs with BTC casually touching ~$93,000, the real action is happening in decentralized AI sector. We're seeing the biggest players place their bets, and the numbers are... substantial.

In This Week's Roundup:

• Key trends from 100+ conversations at Devcon

• NEAR announces a project to train the largest open-source AI model

• 0G Labs secures massive $325 million in funding for decentralized AI OS

• Project Updates

Let’s dive in 👇️ 

The State of the Market

Total Crypto Market Cap: up 9.17% this week to $3.17 trillion
Total AI Sector Market Cap: up 15.5% this week to $35.78 billion

We’re into our second week post-election and crypto markets are still absolutely ripping. Total market cap surged another 9.17% to hit $3.17 trillion, with the AI sector flexing even harder with a 15.5% pump to $35.78 billion. With Bitcoin casually printing a new high of over $90,000, we're writing history in real-time.

Remember those long nights doomscrolling through Twitter during the FTX collapse? Well, look at us now. To everyone who diamond-handed through Terra Luna, 3AC, BlockFi, Celsius, FTX and the rest of the chaos – this one's for you!

The AI sector is continuing to outperform the overall market, with the collision of AI and memes absolutely melting faces. GOAT broke $1 billion, ACT got listed on Binance and pumped 35x, and Fartcoin is now almost $300 million.

Even the OG AI tokens are starting to move with RENDER, AIOZ, and AKT all casually posting 20-30%+ gains

Now there’s hundreds of sentient memes launching every day, and we have the first ‘agentic protocol’—what’s next?

Remember, anon: You can't catch every pump, and that's okay. While your bags might not all be performing as well as the intern on the Binance listing team, stay focused on your strategy. Now is the time to lock in and make sure you have your fingers on the pulse.

Highlights of the Week

Devcon - Timing This Cycle

After spending the past week bouncing between the countless AI x Crypto side events at Devcon and speaking to well over 100 people actively building or investing in both DeAI and crypto more broadly, it’s pretty clear there are some trends emerging:

Key Trends:

• Echoing the sentiment from Token2049, it’s clear that the intersection between Crypto x AI is on every investor’s list as one of the most promising sectors for this cycle. However, many VCs seem to be of the opinion that private markets are over-valued and are instead chasing opportunities in the liquid markets.

• Many people are still unsure where the value will flow in this sector, with others who aren’t in “the AI trenches” gravitating towards compute marketplaces. Our hypothesis here is that the problem/solution framework for valuing these projects is easy to grasp and easy to quantify, hence investor interest. OG compute marketplace projects like Akash and Render have had a reasonable week, showing how this could be playing out. Other components of the AI stack still appear to be less understood, leaving opportunity for those of you who are reading this and staying on top of the emerging projects across the full AI stack.

• Crypto investors who have experienced one or two cycles are predicting that this cycle will be shorter than others. Multiple people mentioned they had set sell alerts for themselves in Q1. This is particularly interesting to us, especially considering the bullish regulatory environment that will come into effect in the US from next year onwards. Given the consensus opinion is generally incorrect, it will be interesting to see if either we get A) an extremely short cycle or B) these investors sell out of the cycle too early and miss the final part of the run, leading to them aping back in at the top.

NEAR Unveils Massive AI Initiative at Devcon

Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR protocol, announced plans at Bangkok to build a 1.4T parameter open source AI model (3.5x larger than Meta's Llama-3), while positioning NEAR as the infrastructure backbone for user-owned AI.

Key Points

• Building 1.4T parameter model starting at 500M, scaling through 7 stages

• Each model will have its own token, targeting $160M raise for compute costs

• Introducing "intents" system for AI agents to interact with real world

• Developing TEE-based SDKs for private inference and training

• Creating open Research Hub for community-driven development

• Without user-owned AI, NEAR argues blockchain ecosystems will be controlled by centralized AI companies

Why It Matters

This represents the largest decentralized AI effort to date, aiming to solve core issues of AI centralization. NEAR's vision positions AI as the future interface for everything, making decentralized infrastructure crucial for blockchain survival.

However, training a model 100x larger than current decentralized efforts (e.g. Prime Intellect’s 10B parameter model) presents unprecedented technical challenges. The token economics could create new incentives for AI development, but success requires overcoming massive distributed computing hurdles.

0G Labs Secures Massive Round

0G Labs has raised $40 million in a seed round following their earlier $35 million pre-seed, while the 0G Foundation secured an additional $250 million token purchase commitment, bringing total ecosystem funding to $325 million. The funding will support the development of the world's first decentralized AI Operating System (dAIOS).

Key Points

• Seed round led by Hack VC with participation from major players including Delphi Ventures, Samsung Next, and Animoca

• Impressive investor lineup spans both traditional AI and crypto sectors, with over 200 backers total

• System promises breakthrough speeds of 50 GB/second—claimed to be 50,000x faster than competitors

• Tech aimsl handle high-throughput data processing and real-time AI computation directly on-chain

• Highest SAFE valuation cap exceeds $2 billion

Why It Matters

This represents one of the largest funding rounds in the decentralized AI space, signaling strong institutional belief in the convergence of AI and blockchain technology. 0G's ambitious goal of creating a decentralized AI Operating System addresses growing concerns about AI centralization and data privacy while promising performance specs that could make on-chain AI practically viable for the first time. With this level of funding and technical claims, 0G Labs is positioning itself as a potential cornerstone project in the decentralized AI infrastructure space.

Now, lets dive into the latest project updates 👇️