Across industries, AI tools have tremendous potential to help ordinary people to do extraordinary things, from doctors detecting diseases earlier, designers building novel creations, to parents freeing their time with automated assistants.

Developing AI tools faster and better is critical to realizing those many opportunities. Yet, most AI development today occurs in a closed system that stifles innovation. Only a few centralized companies, such as Open AI or Anthropic, have significant access to the specialized hardware needed to run AI models. The discoveries that come from the billions of prompts made in tools like Chat-GPT and Claude are walled off, siloing critical learnings away from the public and behind corporate doors.

Decentralization represents a major opportunity to scale this generational opportunity more effectively, using blockchain technology to connect global teams and push the entire AI ecosystem forward together. This is often achieved on blockchains by using tokens to create trust and incentivize good behavior among disparate actors that, otherwise, couldn’t be trusted to work together in a permissionless way.

In this piece, we explore how five networks use crypto-incentives to create new public models for better developing, deploying, and accessing novel AI capabilities.

1) Bittensor: Incentivizing Open Collaboration to Advance AI Benchmarking

Peer-to-peer marketplace for transforming machine intelligence into a tradable commodity.

Token Ticker: TAO
Market Cap*: $1.98 billion

What it is:
Bittensor creates a decentralized mechanism for evaluating and iterating AI models across the web. Peers rank each other by training neural networks that are able to learn the value of their neighbors. High ranks are given additional weight in the network, signifying their stronger performance. The result: A collectively run machine intelligence market that continually produces, and improves on, benchmarking for strengthening AI models.

How it works:
Bittensor uses its native TAO token to incentivize users that contribute information to the collective intelligence of the network. In order to fairly distribute these incentives, the Bittensor network leverages a staked weighted trust through consensus. Peers are incentivized to rank each other using their unique and private cryptographic keys. Those who earn higher ranks receive additional awards, thus incentivizing them to provide more valuable and trustworthy benchmarking over the network. Additionally, the network also uses incentives to provide security on the network, providing additional rewards for peers who validate honestly.

Impact:
Imagine what progress would have been lost to humanity if, with each generation, we had to completely start over from a place of zero knowledge. This is what is happening to AI, with benchmarking programs that are siloed in centralized systems. Rather than building on the progress of others, researchers are forced to start from the beginning with their own models instead. Through its TAO token, Bittensor incentivizes the continuous improvement and fine-tuning of models in public. It creates a dynamic intelligence market that accelerates the pace of AI development in a more open and collaborative manner.

2) The Graph: Incentivizing Compute That Arms AI Agents With Blockchain Data

Open-source protocol for collecting, storing, and processing blockchain data.

Token Ticker: GRT
Market Cap*: $1.35 billion

What it is:
The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data. Leveraging its existing crypto-economic incentives for data indexing, it aims to create an additional decentralized marketplace for AI Inference and Agent services that can expand blockchain-based AI use cases.

How it works:
The Graph’s AI expansion integrates seamlessly with the Graph’s existing network of Indexers. It rewards them with the protocol’s native GRT for investing in AI-capable hardware like GPUs and for opting in to provide computational resources for AI model deployment and querying. It also discourages Indexers from using subpar neural networks by creating multiple mechanisms for developers to verify AI Inference. “Cheaters” — those who try to fool the system by using lesser networks or other means — get slashed if there isn’t consensus, leading to them losing some or all of their staked assets.

Impact:
By incentivizing its established Indexer base to offer compute services for AI Inference, The Graph gives the developers of AI-driven dApps the tools they need to perform significantly more complex operations (for example, autonomous AI trading bots or NFT market trend analysis agents that could be trained on blockchain data). It also protects developers against the centralization risks of using traditional providers, such as censorship, service instability, and restrictive agreements.

3) Livepeer AI: Incentivizing Pay-Per-Task Architecture for AI Video Creation

Developer platform creating globally accessible, ultra-low cost infrastructure for AI video

Token Ticker: LPT
Market Cap*: $381 million

What it is:
Livepeer AI is a decentralized set of AI capabilities available to developers for generative video apps, lowering the barriers to entry for developers with its commitment to open innovation and access. Currently, access to essential AI tools are mostly controlled by a few monopolies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, which force developers to sign extractive agreements and pay high costs to rent, run and manage compute on their GPU servers. Livepeer uses its LPT token to incentivize its established network of compute providers — which are already transcoding millions of minutes of traditional video every week with plenty of GPU capacity to spare — to now provide that same support for developers and creatives using generative AI.

How it works:
The LPT token coordinates, bootstraps, and incentivizes participants to make sure the Livepeer network is as cheap, effective, secure, reliable and useful as possible. GPU providers, called “Orchestrators,” must hold LPT to transcode and distribute video on the network — the more they have, the more work they can do and the more fees they can earn in ETH. “Delegators” manage the flow of tasks by staking their LPT tokens, helping provide security and quality assurance to the network by directing tokens toward more reliable Orchestrators, based on capability and current load.

Impact:
Livepeer AI’s cryptoincentives enable a novel “pay-per-task” model that is fairer and more efficient for AI video developers and creators, who no longer have to pre-reserve expensive compute capacity. Centralized competitors have high employee overhead and GPU upkeep costs, which require them to charge renting models to remain cost efficient. In distributed networks like Livepeer, providers are oftentimes providing excess or latent resources, allowing them to be more flexible in offering better economics to end users. Through tokenization that enables a true peer-to-peer network, Livepeer is infinitely scalable and permissionless— as demand increases, the network returns even more value to the Delegators and Orchestrator nodes, making it even easier to scale.

4) SingularityNET: Incentivizing Shared AI Development To Achieve “AGI”

Decentralized platform creating a global public marketplace for AI research and services

Token Ticker: AGIX
Market Cap*: $768 million

What it is:
SingularityNet’s goal is simple: to speed up the development of “AGI,” or AI that is as smart or smarter than humans, in globally inclusive fashion. Most AI research is fragmented and done in closed-development corporate environments that slow the pace of innovation, and developers often face geographic and financial barriers to access or advance AI. Through decentralization, SingularityNet uses its token to create a free market for a wide range of AI services — everything from gene sequencing and speech recognition to image manipulation tools — accessible to anyone on the internet, incentivizing developers to produce AI services in public and at a fair market rate for AGIX token rewards.

How it works:
The AGIX token is used for value exchange and governance, with developers using the token to charge users for AI services on SingularityNet’s “AI curation market.” This market is essentially a discovery ranking mechanism. Token holders stake their tokens to a specific Agent and specific query in order to increase that AI Agents’ stake-rank, receiving AGIX rewards in proportion to how much that AI Agent’s services improve its reputation. If the Agent fails to process tasks correctly or otherwise has its reputation diminished, their stake is confiscated. As the volume of processing and clients for any single AI Agent grows, staking delivers diminishing rewards, with the largest rewards going to the earliest stakers.

Impact:
This tokenization model significantly incentivizes stakers to back higher-quality AI services and to always be on the hunt for new AI agents to stake and promote. This creates a more meritocratic and democratized AI research model, evening the playing field for smaller AI developers and researchers whose contributions otherwise can’t compete with large centralized operators in the global marketplace. It also allows for more interoperable research, as global AI teams are incentivized to work together in public rather than behind centralized company silos.

5) Injective: Incentivizing Developers to Build AI-enabled dApps

Network fueling the growth of AI-powered trading apps across decentralized marketplaces.

Token Ticker: INJ
Market Cap*: $1.84B

What it is:
There are certain core financial primitives that serve as the necessary building blocks for healthy markets and financial systems, yet centralized TradFi operators often restrict access and charge extractive fees for using them. Injective is working to create a freer and more inclusive financial system by making these primitives plug-and-play for DeFi apps, increasing settlement and trade execution in a highly decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant fashion. One of these decentralized primitives is an MEV-resistant on-chain order book, which makes it easier for buyers and sellers to make decisions by improving market transparency. Another is a smart contract layer that provides shared on-chain liquidity, or access to capital, and oracles, which provide real-time, secure, and precise price data that makes it easier to have confidence while trading assets.

How it works:
None of this would be possible without the incentives of the INJ token, which plays a multifaceted role in governance, security, and value accrual. Market makers earn INJ tokens in 28-day cycles, based on a total score that rewards them based on their dual-sided liquidity, liquidity-depth, bid-ask spread, market maker uptime, volume, and participation in multiple markets. Injective also utilizes a Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, allowing INJ token holders to earn rewards by staking their tokens to provide network security. Finally, all transactions programmatically return 40% of the protocol fees in INJ tokens back to the developer, through a “relayer fee share,” providing a major incentive for them to build dApps on the network.

Impact:
INJ’s token incentives create a positive feedback loop: as more AI-enhanced DeFi applications are built and used on Injective, more developers are incentivized with INJ tokens to join the ecosystem. This accelerates further innovation of AI apps, compared to centralized ecosystems like the Apple Store or Google Play store, which charge high extractive fees — as high as 30% on in-app purchases — without returning them to the developers who create those apps.

*Market capitalization figures as of August 2024 from CoinMarketCap.

Livepeer is a video infrastructure network for live and on-demand streaming. It has integrated AI Video Compute capabilities (Livepeer AI) by harnessing its massive GPU network and plans to become a key infrastructure player in video-focused AI computing.

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