AI in the hands of the many, not the few.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is among the most groundbreaking innovations in history. It promises an exciting and abundant future. However, gathering and employing its essential elements—data, models, and computational resources—is beyond the reach of many. AI, like much of web2, is at risk of being controlled by just a few powerful actors. This raises a pivotal question: Is it possible to create a marketplace where individuals can freely exchange data, model rights, and computational power to provide AI products in a transparent and verifiable manner?
Blockchain is the most suitable technology for building this marketplace. Not only does it offer digital transparency, ownership tracking, tokenization, and verifiable compute, but it also enables users to give authorization and even collect payment for their own data, marking a stark difference from web2. Furthermore, it allows anyone to contribute to AI in new ways, such as offering unused computational resources for product development.
AI should be controlled by the many, not the few. By adhering to the principle of decentralization, AI can truly realize its potential to create a better world for all. To effect this vision, AI needs a performant and secure execution environment with bountiful liquidity to thrive on-chain.
Enter Talus Network
Our vision is to create a new network that addresses the problems of centralized AI systems and leverages decentralization for AI. With maximal speed, security, and liquidity, Talus ushers in a new era of consumer AI applications, particularly smart agents.
Talus blends Move’s smart contract security, performance, and object-oriented programming to create strong developer tools and a symbiotic ecosystem for a plethora of new AI smart agent use cases.
Some examples:
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DeFi: Monetizable smart agents that can automatically provide real yield with minimal actions from users
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Intents: Smart agents as solvers in intent networks where models are incentivized to provide the best outcomes for users
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Gaming: Smart agents deployed by players or guilds to collect resources (automated farming)
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Governance: DAOs driven by smart agents as decision-makers representing stakeholders to deal with low voter participation and misalignment
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Initial Model Offering (IMO): Coordination to raise funds and computational power to provide communities with the most innovative agent technologies
Talus Under the Hood
Move enables developers to build the most performant applications. We chose the MoveVM for three core reasons:
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Security - Safety checks and object-oriented programming prevent smart contract vulnerabilities, hacks, and exploits and enable developers to build more complex applications
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Speed - Optimized parallelization and resource management remove the bottlenecks of traditional slow execution environments, enabling higher throughput and lower latency.
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Developer Experience - First-class resources, improved frameworks, and simple asset representation allow developers to build better programs than they could with traditional VMs.
Move’s asset-centric approach naturally extends to the ownership and control of smart agents within Talus. By leveraging Move in Talus, developers can write contracts for managing and trading resources for AI, ensuring these agents can be owned and monetized while acting securely and transparently.
From Vision to Reality
We successfully closed our first funding round of $3M led by Polychain Capital with participation from dao5, Hash3, TRGC, WAGMI Ventures, and Inception Capital. This is a testament to our team’s unwavering dedication and the groundbreaking work we’ve accomplished behind the scenes. We also have the backing of several angels from Nvidia, IBM, Blue7, Symbolic Capital, and Render Network.
We express our sincere appreciation to our investors, angels, advisors, and supporters, all of whom have been instrumental in turning our vision into reality. This is merely the start of our journey to reshape the convergence of AI and blockchain technology.
Looking Ahead
The protocol is currently under development, and we’re close to launching the private testnet. Sign up here to learn more and get early access to this testnet, along with direct and exclusive support from our team.
Over the upcoming months, we will disclose more details about our technical architecture and elaborate on our design choices. In the meantime, reach out with ideas for what you would want to build on Talus. Some topics that are an excellent fit for Talus:
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Move + AI
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Data and model ownership/management
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ML-parameterized DeFi applications
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Decentralized AI consumer applications
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Smart Intent Solver Networks
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Autonomous Liquidity Balancing
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Evolving-NPCs for Gaming
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Automated Governance and DAOs
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Multi-Agent Systems
If you’re passionate about AI, innovative blockchain applications, and cutting-edge infrastructure, we want to hear from you. You can reach out to hi@talus.network.