Learn from Nvidia’s “selling shovels”, GPU rental has become the new favorite of crypto AI hype

In the mainstream crypto narrative of 2024, AI is undoubtedly the most popular one besides meme coins. In addition to relatively "crypto-native" projects such as Bittensor and Olas, tokens such as WLD have rapidly risen in price under the "product catalyst" of OpenAI's increasing popularity, and the hype of AI+Crypto has gradually become more and more similar to that of Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley. The correlation between U.S. stocks is getting stronger.

Recently, an AI token called GPU has shown strong trends again after consolidating for nearly two weeks, and has continued to create new price highs in the past few days, causing The market is once again paying attention to NodeAI, the protocol behind it. However, thanks to the publicity of many alpha KOLs, Node AI has been very popular in overseas communities. In addition, the community has also detected that whales continue to buy GPUs during the decline. BlockBeats once published in "AI concept coins have surged, these 10 Alpha projects Are you in the car? " has introduced Node AI in detail. Since the publication of this article, GPU prices have increased by more than 20 times so far.

According to official documentation, NodeAI Focusing on the concept of "GPU leasing", users can lend idle GPU computing power to other customers in need and earn GPU tokens based on usage.

Readers who are familiar with NVIDIA will find that the project’s LOGO and token name are direct reflections of NVIDIA and its flagship products. It is not difficult to understand that currently The encryption market has already hyped this "AI local dog" project as "NVIDIA Index". In fact, in the hype boom of AI+Crypto, NodeAI also represents a hype logic similar to NVIDIA stock NVDA, that is, it plays the role of "shovel seller" in the AI wave.

In the past year, as the AI track continues to be hot, GPU graphics cards produced by NVIDIA have become a scarce resource in this field. As an upstream hardware supplier, NVIDIA's stock price climbed all the way to above $900, shocking everyone's jaws.

Under this "eternal profit logic", many "shovel-selling" projects have also appeared in the AI+Crypto field. In addition to NodeAI mentioned above, the most popular project recently is the decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure Aethir.

On March 20, Aethir will launch the public sale of the first network-available node "Check Node", with a total of 100,000 Checker Nodes for sale, and the starting price of each node is 0.1259 ETH. Within only 1 hour after the public sale started, Aethir's T1-T23 nodes were all sold out, with a total sales amount of more than 65 million US dollars, which shows how popular it is.

Aethir is an enterprise-centric distributed GPU cloud service provider that has signed multi-year contracts with the world's largest telecommunications company, the largest game development studio, 10 AAA games, and WellLink, a cloud gaming company with more than 64 million monthly active users. In July 2023, Aethir completed its Pre-A round of financing with a valuation of US$150 million, with participating institutions including Hashkey, Animoca Brands, Big Brain Holdings, Impossible Finance, Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes), etc. ATH is the native token of the Aethir network, and 15% of its total supply is used to reward checker nodes to help verify the uptime, latency, service quality, and computing power provided by other node participants.

Of course, in addition to high-quality projects such as Aethir that have strong institutional endorsements, many GPU rental projects have sprung up in the market recently.

For example, DeTensor, which has seen a good increase since its launch recently, is one of them. DeTensor aims to simplify access to cloud services, nodes, and artificial intelligence resources by using blockchain technology. Its main business includes GPU node leasing, where users can rent AI servers equipped with GPU resources for specific use cases and pay monthly fees. By renting out idle GPUs to others through DeTensor, users can earn DETENSOR tokens. Since its launch, DETENSOR has gained more than ten times, but its current market value is only $7 million.

Another similar project is InfraX, whose official website describes its own project in almost no different way from NodeAI and DeTensor, but it has also gained 10 times in the past few days, and its current market value is around $20 million.

Same as most AI projects currently on the market Most of the "conceptual dogs" such as DeTensor and Infrax, which focus on GPU leasing, do not have any institutional endorsement. The tokens adopt a full circulation model, and the initial market value is basically around US$5 million. After "quietly issuing coins", these projects often receive the favor of KOLs and achieve good short-term gains due to the order effect.

Since this year, the hype of the AI+Crypto track has created a vacuum window between the ultra-high threshold for technology implementation and the continued popularity of the AI concept: investment Investors are eager to invest funds in the AI track, but there is no "coin issuance schedule" for endorsed and high-quality projects. Catalyzed by the powerful wealth-making effect of the US stock NVIDIA, this type of "AI local dog" has filled the gap in the encryption market, and may continue to be hot for a foreseeable period of time in the future until the market is oversaturated.

Of course, due to factors such as the anonymity of the team and the rat warehouse of KOL, most "AI native dogs" cannot escape the fate of returning to zero, so investors should not I was blown away by the "survivor bias" in the encryption market. Needless to say, this wave of hype won't last forever.

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