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Author: Antoine Cosson
Publication date: 16.04.2024
Cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the global financial landscape since the advent of Bitcoin in 2009. Based on decentralized technologies such as blockchain, these digital currencies offer innovative solutions to the challenges of the traditional financial system. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown exponentially, transforming various sectors thanks to its data analysis and process automation capabilities.
Against this backdrop of technological innovation, it's interesting to observe how these two fields combine to shape the future of decentralized finance and artificial intelligence learning models. While many cryptocurrency projects already use AI algorithms to improve trading performance and market data analysis, new trends are emerging: crypto projects fully integrating artificial intelligence into their architecture, and crypto projects that put decentralization at the service of AI.
The Foundations of AI Integration in Cryptocurrencies
AI encompasses a wide range of technologies aimed at enabling computers to mimic human capabilities such as perception, reasoning, learning and social interaction. In the context of cryptocurrencies, several specific AI capabilities are particularly relevant:
Data Analysis: Cryptocurrency market generate huge volumes of real-time data, including prices, transaction volumes and asset information. AI can be used to analyze this data quickly and efficiently, identifying patterns, trends and trading opportunities.
Machine learning: Machine learning is a sub-discipline of AI that enables computer systems to learn from data and gradually improve without human intervention. In the context of cryptocurrencies, machine learning algorithms can be used to develop predictive models of price, volatility and market behavior.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP is a branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret and generate human language in a natural way. In the crypto-currency field, NLP can be used to analyze and synthesize information from sources such as social media, online forums and news, to better understand market sentiment and emerging trends.
Potential Benefits of AI in Crypto Projects
Integrating AI into cryptocurrency projects offers several potential benefits:
Improved Accuracy: By using AI algorithms to analyze market data, crypto projects can benefit from increased accuracy in predicting trends and price movements.
Optimizing Performance: AI can be used to optimize smart contract trading, governance and execution processes, which can lead to more efficient and profitable performance.
Strengthening Security: By using AI techniques such as machine learning to detect fraudulent behavior and suspicious activity, crypto projects can strengthen the security of their networks and protect users from cyberattacks.
Example of an AI-enabled cryptocurrency project
Indeed, integrating AI into an existing crypto project can solve many problems and improve many aspects of the latter. But today, a new trend is emerging: that of using decentralization to make AI more efficient, accessible and equitable. Let's take a look at the Bittensor case study.
Today, cryptocurrencies operating fully in the AI sector represent a market capitalization of nearly $22B. The leader in this narrative is Bittensor with its $TAO token. It experienced a meteoric rise at the end of 2023, attracting many curious investors, as can be seen from the chart below:
Bittensor is a protocol that powers a decentralized network specialized in machine learning, which encourages and rewards the production of artificial intelligence. The project aims to solve the problems associated with current AI learning models, which are extremely costly, energy-intensive, biased, and remain centralized within the companies that fund them.
Users who make the computing power of their computers available to produce artificial intelligences are rewarded thanks to the token associated with the ecosystem: the $TAO. It is this system that decentralizes the knowledge of this general AI, allowing anyone to use the database and secure it.
Bittensor's revolutionary consensus model combines Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) to form the Proof-of-Inteligence consensus model. Miners make their computing power available to produce the network's AI via machine-learning, and validators put their tokens in staking to evaluate the data provided by miners, distributing rewards in relation to the quality of the information given.
The project has also been divided into subnets enabling AI models to be trained for different use cases, such as audio processing, image generation or data analysis. Applications have already been launched, such as Chattensor, a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The Bittensor project incorporates key elements of Bitcoin tokenomics, with supply limited to 21 million units, no pre-launch mining by teams, pre-sales or ICOs. A halving will also take place on $TAO approximately every 4 years to reduce the rewards awarded to network participants, thus ensuring controlled inflation, and slowing down.
Today, the Bittensor project and its $TAO token are capitalized at nearly $4B. This new way of letting users free up their computing power to shape tomorrow's AIs may well send shivers down the spines of the world's biggest corporations, who could eventually see their computing power far exceeded by this new kind of decentralized network dedicated to learning and training artificial intelligence models.
Advantages and Challenges of AI Integration in Cryptocurrencies
Despite its many advantages, integrating AI into cryptocurrency projects that don't operate in this core sector can present potential challenges:
Increased complexity: Integrating AI into cryptocurrency projects can increase the complexity of systems, which can make them more difficult to develop, deploy and maintain.
Excessive Dependence: Over-reliance on AI can make cryptocurrency projects vulnerable to technical failures and algorithmic biases, which can compromise network security and reliability.
Confidentiality and Data Protection: The use of AI in cryptocurrency projects raises concerns about user privacy and data protection, particularly in the context of the collection and analysis of sensitive data such as financial transactions and personal information.
Prospects for AI and cryptocurrencies
Despite the challenges, the integration of AI into cryptocurrencies projects presents considerable potential for innovation and growth in this rapidly expanding field. By exploring new AI applications, overcoming technical hurdles and ensuring user data protection, cryptocurrency projects can continue to push the boundaries of innovation and shape the future of decentralized finance by ensuring reliability, accessibility and security.
On the other hand, if done right, AI-enabled crypto projects such as Bittensor could have an even greater impact on the future of AI learning models by decentralizing computing power to reduce the costs and ecological impact of current models.
However, we must remain vigilant, and not allow ourselves to be charmed by any project that claims to integrate AI or to help make it better. This narrative will be the talk of the town over the next few years, and many projects with no real fundamentals or use cases will use this pretext to attract investors and sell their tokens once the hype is at its height, with the sole aim of enriching themselves at the expense of projects that deliver real value and investors in search of financial freedom. So be careful, and always do your own research.
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