When AI meets DePIN, it may be the value narrative that drives this bull market.

Original author: Haotian

Editor’s note: AI and DePIN have always been popular narratives this year. Yesterday, Solana ecological DePIN protocol io.net announced the completion of $30 million in Series A financing. In the past six months, the tokens of various projects in the AI sector have continued to rise, and tokens such as WLD, RNDR, AGIX, and FET have all increased several times. Reference reading: "20 times increase in one weekend, the AI Summer of the crypto market Coming soon". When DePIN meets AI, what kind of sparks will collide? Crypto researcher Haotian  talked about his on X after conducting related research Understanding and analysis, the full text is reprinted by BlockBeats as follows:

Recently,I have devoted some energy to the AI+DePIN track, and I have a feeling that this will promote this The value narrative of a bull market is Shenglang, old DeFi protocols, NFTs, cutting-edge public chains, and many underlying technological innovations are moving closer to DePIN. Next, I will share some of my thinking logic: p>

1) How to understand the concept of DePIN. Simply put, traditional CePIN servers, sensors, communication networks and other physical facility networks need to rely on centers such as AWS and Alibaba Cloud to operate. The investment cost of computing power cluster services is too high for many small and medium-sized enterprises.

DePIN uses blockchain Token incentives to allow some users with "hardware devices" to establish large-scale collaborative relationships with physical devices, forming a An infrastructure network with service capabilities allows some small and medium-sized enterprises to access and utilize network resources in an affordable manner.

2) Some people say, isn’t this the “hardware equipment mining” narrative of the last bull market such as FileCoin, Chia, and Arweave? Yes, but not entirely. This round of bull market has added the "AI" variable.

There is a demand for decentralized storage, but it is not a strong demand. It will be mixed with some pseudo-demands, such as: data storage access. Although it can solve the storage demand, it cannot be solved due to network distribution. It is the instability of the structure and node efficiency that prevents some application scenarios with strong real-time requirements such as online videos and games from being implemented.

After the introduction of AI scenarios, large AI model training will be a very rigid demand. I consulted some small and medium-sized AI companies that do AI model training. Server hardware costs and configuration costs like AWS are not friendly to small and medium-sized AI companies.

If DePIN can enable supply chain cloud services such as GPU or mobilize hardware devices across the entire network to form an infrastructure network, large model training will be distributed Machine learning, data storage verification mining, distributed reasoning and other directions will generate strong demand. If this round of DePIN can take off, it will mainly be driven by the AI track. At the beginning of this process, there will be some projects that rely on a PPT narrative, but in the long run, the projects that can be implemented will not be too bad. .

3) There is a high probability that AI+DePIN will take over the role of the previous round of DeFi Summer and become the main value narrative of this round of bull market Shenglang. This explains why MeMe will rise after BTC rises, but the old DeFi that everyone is looking forward to has no movement, whether it is speculation in the new or old, or the burden on the car caused by the poor expectations of the last round of DeFi, The key is still the lack of a narrative opportunity that can drive the mixed linkage of on-site and off-site funds.

There is no doubt that the last bull market NFT brought in traditional users and funds through the reshaping of the artist’s digital market. This bull market AI+DePIN may would play a similar role.

Does this mean that old DeFi has no chance? No, in my opinion, this is exactly an opportunity to reshape the traditional old DeFi:

1. Public chain: The last round of DeFi was too trapped in the EVM environment. The narrative of EVM-Compatible has made the differences between chains smaller and smaller, and the possibility of linkage increasing. However, they are all working on chain Infra. When will the application ecosystem be able to Landed.

Therefore, the first thing to do in this round of AI+DePIN is to de-EVM and let some high-performance chains take the lead, which will in turn give birth to some killer applications, such as : @solana, Sui, Aptos and more. In particular, SOL itself is active with a unique group of developers. Whether this wave of AI+DePIN can emerge will directly determine SOL's mainstream status in this bull market.

Whether the slogan of impacting or surpassing Ethereum can be realized depends entirely on the implementation of the AI+DePin narrative on SOL. Recently, I came into contact with projects like @ionet_official. The valuation is already very high, but after experiencing it, I was a bit surprised. I feel that it will be a potential force to detonate DePIN;

2. DeFi protocol: A while ago, Vitalik talked about AI+blockchain, and the core actually guided an entrepreneurial direction: AI+intent DeFi transaction, which obviously allows the evolution of smart contracts Turning into a super smart contract, including the needs of lowering user thresholds, increasing user interaction experience, and reducing user wear and tear in cross-chain transactions, is the direction in which intent transactions really want to make efforts.

Therefore, It is critical whether the old DeFI can quickly promote a series of upgrades such as the intent transaction model + wallet front end. If you stick to this direction, you can merge it. There is no need to be left behind in the main Shenglang narrative of AI+DePIN; there are already many such innovative DeFi projects. As a reminder, the Intent-centric narrative is not over yet. What is missing is one that can combine AI and Projects that have actually been implemented have appeared.

3. Underlying innovation of other technologies: In fact, the current web3 innovation environment is very mature, and the product power and innovation power of web2 have already penetrated. Therefore, a series of narratives such as "modularization" and "chain abstraction" have emerged, and the goals of these narratives are to solve the problems of low inter-chain interaction efficiency and high collaboration costs existing in the web3 environment. The direction is very good, but due to the slow development of the old chain, these micro-innovations have no real potential.

Take ZK technology as an example. Everyone says that ZK is the end game, but now ZK only solves the problem of mutual trust between the main chain and side chain. In fact, ZK can Let all EVM and non-EVM chains realize mutual trust asset transfer, and the real value discovery of ZK is still in the future. Recently, I have paid attention to a @ProjectZKM project. The bottom layer of ZK technology realizes multi-chain interoperability. Coupled with its hardware acceleration and other DePIN designs, it is also likely to find a key position in the new wave of DePIN narratives.

Above.

Note: I briefly elaborated on some thinking logic that I think AI+DePIN has great potential. They may not all be correct, but I invest more in research and development based on value. It can be deduced from the perspective of mature and evolving trends in the industry, and the emotional component of FOMO in the secondary market has not yet been added. The above content is for reference only. You are also welcome to participate and learn together.

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