AI and DeSci: The Infrastructure Potential Behind the Narrative Amidst Bull and Bear Cycles

At the beginning of last year, the AI revolution injected new momentum into the crypto market. "AI represents advanced productive forces, while blockchain represents the redistribution and integration of advanced productive relations." This viewpoint sparked heated discussions in the community and became one of the important narratives before the arrival of the bull market. Under this trend, projects like Bittensor and fetch.ai quickly emerged as leaders of this concept.

In September this year, as the cryptocurrency market gradually recovers, AI concept meme coins have surged due to $Goat. Developers can launch AI Agents with specific functions in just one week, whether it's AI trading or AI virtual companionship, which can cultivate communities and fan groups, ultimately profiting by issuing a meme coin of the same name.

The concept of DeSci can be traced back to the last bull market, but due to the long cycle of "Science" in Crypto+Science, it has lacked presence in the crypto industry. The real breakout began on November 8, when a trading platform announced its investment in BIO Protocol, marking its first foray into the decentralized science field. Less than a week later, senior executives from the platform attended the DeSci Day event held in Bangkok, discussing DeSci insights with the founder of Ethereum, expressing the hope to see 1,000 DeSci projects next year. These statements sparked a craze for DeSci concept meme coins, with multiple popular coins emerging in just a few days, such as $uro and $rif corresponding to a single drug issued by BIO, as well as $SciHub for donating to the world's largest open-access paper platform, Sci-Hub, with the total market capitalization of related concepts exceeding 800 million dollars.

However, high-quality narratives require not only short-term popularity but also long-term infrastructure development to achieve real application scenarios. The core support of AI—computing power resources—through Depin cloud computing for idle computing power scheduling is still in the development stage, with limited large-scale adoption, and the cost and stability of computing environments have not yet been effectively validated by the market.

In contrast, the core technology behind DeSci—decentralized storage—has been proven to be more cost-effective and secure than traditional centralized storage solutions since the development of the IPFS protocol, and the current solutions are relatively mature. It can be said that the infrastructure for DeSci has been established, and now it only requires more people to recognize and adopt the concept of decentralized storage.

DeSci, or decentralized science, promotes global open access to scientific research data through distributed storage technology, reducing the singular control of data by governments or institutions, and avoiding issues of leakage, loss, and malicious tampering associated with centralized storage. This model makes scientific research activities more open and transparent, allowing global researchers to freely share resources. Furthermore, DeSci employs smart contracts and DAOs to improve the transparency and efficiency of research funding, assisting scientists in raising the necessary funds for their research.

The DeSci model innovates in two areas: 1. Fundraising through the issuance of tokens, such as the currently popular $rif and $uro, which raise funds for drug development by issuing meme coins. 2. The storage of research data is transferred from centralized servers to a decentralized blockchain that is permanently immutable.

The founder of BIO Protocol stated that DeSci has successfully introduced the liquidity of Meme coins into universities and laboratories around the world, supporting genuine scientific research. This reveals the essence of DeSci: leveraging the speculative psychology of the crypto market to promote and accelerate the monetization of value in the research field and more practical applications.

The current popularity of the DeSci concept is mainly supported by the wealth effect driven by memes, and the industry's development is wrapped up in market sentiment. However, the research field requires continuous and substantial funding, while also facing high risks and high failure rates, which contrasts with the characteristics of short-term speculation and rapid liquidity exhaustion of memes.

In the short term, there may be a large number of speculators entering this field, using it as a gimmick to launch project financing rather than sincerely investing in scientific research. Therefore, after experiencing a brief period of popularity, DeSci will enter a phase of filtering out the false and preserving the true, gradually cultivating users' awareness of DeSci in the educational market process, only then may it truly achieve the goal of "utilizing crypto finance to drive the monetization of scientific research outcomes."

Currently, the demand for data storage and on-chain proof behind DeSci is extremely huge. If DeSci can leverage the popularity of memes to break boundaries and effectively establish a mature business model, decentralized storage will become the infrastructure of the DeSci field, and this stable and massive demand will greatly promote the development of the decentralized storage ecosystem.

Decentralized storage has gone through multiple stages of development, from the early Storj to Filecoin, Arweave, and the underlying IPFS protocol. An analysis from May 2023 pointed out that decentralized storage is on average about 78% cheaper than centralized storage, with this difference reaching up to 121 times in enterprise-level data storage. Moreover, decentralized storage has clear advantages in data security, privacy, and reliability. However, despite some Web2 clients starting to adopt decentralized storage solutions such as Filecoin and Arweave, centralized storage with a more intuitive user experience and mature product systems still dominates the market. The limitations of Filecoin in programmability and permanent data storage, along with the relatively high costs associated with Arweave's focus on "permanent storage," remain pain points that the industry has yet to fully address.

In April last year, a certain trading platform announced the launch of a decentralized storage solution, marking a new height for decentralized storage. This solution provides a decentralized storage infrastructure for the entire ecosystem, allowing users and decentralized applications to create, store, and exchange fully owned data. Through a native cross-chain bridge between the smart chain, users can freely transfer assets between the smart chain and the storage solution, thereby conveniently interacting with DApps built on it.

Compared to IPFS and Arweave, the advantages of this storage solution lie in its deep integration with the ecosystem, cross-chain support, a combination of decentralized storage and computing capabilities, as well as low cost and high efficiency. This makes it more suitable for decentralized finance, smart contracts, and Web3 application scenarios, with stronger scalability and ecological synergy effects. In the future, this solution can be used in the following scenarios:

1. Web Hosting: Users can quickly deploy and host websites through the API, simplifying the registration and payment process.

2. Personal Cloud Storage: Create secure personal cloud storage using private keys, easily upload and download encrypted files.

3. Blockchain Data Storage: Store smart chain and other ecological data, reduce latency, and improve availability.

4. Content Publishing: Creators store and mirror their works on the smart chain, and after the transaction is completed, the buyer can access them.

5. Social Media: Social media influencers can fully control content data, publishing and profiting through decentralized platforms.

6. Personal Data Market: Provides decentralized data storage and management solutions to ensure the security of personal data.

At the same time, the development of this storage solution relies on the support of its ecological projects. Within the ecosystem, there are 5 categories, and in the infrastructure category, 4EVERLAND and BAS, as native infrastructures, are very important components.

4EVERLAND is the largest decentralized storage provider in the storage ecosystem. As an officially certified storage provider and validator, 4EVERLAND offers powerful storage resources while supporting smart chains and L2 networks, dedicated to building an efficient decentralized storage network. By integrating the features and advantages of IPFS and Arweave, 4EVERLAND provides a better storage network integration solution, offering a more user-friendly experience and reducing the difficulty of using decentralized storage.

Its key advantages are:

1. Dual roles of storage and validation: As a storage provider and validator, 4EVERLAND not only offers storage solutions for users but also participates in the proof of stake mechanism to ensure blockchain security.

2. Multi-chain support and compatibility: In addition to this storage solution, 4EVERLAND also supports smart chains and L2.

3. Combination of decentralized storage and computing resources: 4EVERLAND provides storage services while utilizing its own 4Ever Node to leverage idle hardware for users to access stored data instantly + computing, achieving more efficient data usage scenarios.

4. Flexible storage solutions: 4EVERLAND offers a hybrid solution suitable for hot storage and cold storage, combining IPFS + Arweave/this storage solution's storage model to meet different storage needs and is compatible with Web2.

5. Decentralized AI Services: Through AI RPC, 4EVERLAND offers an aggregation solution with over 100 models, providing users with efficient AI model invocation services.

6. DWeb Hosting Service: Provides developers with a one-click deployment feature, allowing the dApp frontend to be quickly deployed to this storage solution, and in conjunction with the future RAAS that the ecosystem intends to develop, enables a one-click chain initiation function.

Currently, 4EVERLAND has over 3 million registered users, with daily active users exceeding 100,000. It has 2000 TB stored on IPFS (third in the IPFS ecosystem) and 20 TB stored on Arweave (third in the Arweave ecosystem). This storage solution has over 30k daily interactions (first in the ecosystem). In terms of financing, it has received support from multiple public chains and well-known investment institutions.

Recently, 4EVERLAND has collaborated with multiple DeSci projects to promote the decentralized storage of scientific literature. Some content from DeSci that is certain and unmodifiable is suitable for permanent storage on Arweave, while data that is constantly being updated is suitable for IPFS and the storage solution. 4EVERLAND establishes cold backup data on Arweave and hot data access on the storage solution by combining IPFS, Arweave, and the storage solution, forming a decentralized storage solution suitable for DeSci.

BAS, as a foundational data protocol standard, aims to generate verification information authentication for bringing millions of trusted private data into the Web3 ecosystem, especially providing data support for AI. The characteristics of BAS include:

1. Decentralized Verification Services: By bringing Web2 and Web3 data on-chain, cross-platform verification services are provided, supporting information from major exchanges and data from mainstream social platforms. The research data verification services in DeSci can also directly use BAS for verification and put the results on-chain.

2. User Sovereignty and Data Privacy: Users can actively upload data through dApp project parties using the datasets created by BAS and define data format standards; reducing third-party data labeling and cleaning processes, achieving proactive classification and standardization of data, and returning the sovereignty of processing their own data to users.

3. AI Training and Dataset Services: Through decentralized data verification, BAS will directly provide the most reliable and available data for AI training and dataset needs.

4. Ecosystem Cooperation and Application: BAS has established connections with over 3000 independent certifiers, more than 100 data resource providers, and over 100 ecosystem partners, supporting over 30M certifications.

The introduction of BAS in this storage solution provides data validation and management capabilities, further enhancing platform security, transparency, and user control, making it a more robust decentralized storage solution. By integrating with BAS, this storage solution ensures data validation and compliance while offering efficient data management and permission control features.

This storage solution is an extremely important strategic layout personally taught by the trading platform and even its founders. Since its launch, it has also been a significant innovation in the ecosystem. Unlike smart chains, which directly face C-end users as the "main players on stage," this storage solution works more quietly behind the scenes, and its high performance and high interoperability will be more beneficial to the development of new narratives in the industry.

If the DeSci business model is validated and supported by traffic from trading platforms, it will undoubtedly greatly promote ecological prosperity, and this storage solution will also achieve large-scale adoption. This article only affirms the value investment potential of decentralized storage from a macro perspective.