What 600 Startup Apps Say About Blockchain and AI in 2024

This is an opinion post written for CryptoPotato by Ken Timsit, Director of Cronos Labs.

2023 is the year of artificial intelligence, and there is no better time than now to delve deeper into the different types and use cases of ai, especially for startups and projects working at the intersection of ai and the supply chain. blocks.

To carry the momentum into 2024, Web3 startups should have a better idea of ​​what to focus on when developing projects at the intersection of blockchain and ai. The Cronos Accelerator Program has evaluated over 600 Web3 startup applications, allowing us to get a precise idea of ​​the current blockchain and ai landscape.

Coming from all over the world, the reviewed teams were working on developing projects related to GameFi, nft, DeFi, data, and infrastructure. Derived from those 600 applications, here are four main areas of focus for projects in blockchain and ai.

Team Productivity

ChatGPT and Midjourney demonstrated how generative ai can improve the productivity of creative designers, coders, customer service specialists, and other content creators. While this may not seem specific to the blockchain industry, the newly formed Web3 teams’ review of applications showed that it is the area where ai will create the most value for the blockchain industry.

Increasing the productivity of teams working on blockchain protocols is a critical imperative as these protocols increasingly have to deal with local regulations, labor-intensive compliance, and multi-language localization. The best way forward for blockchain protocols is to increase team productivity by using ai tools across all departments such as software development, marketing, risk management, product design, and customer service.

For example, we’ve seen SaaS projects like Notifly, which use ai to create summaries of what’s happening in other startups’ community on Discord servers and Twitter spaces, two platforms widely used by Web3 projects for user engagement. In software development,

User experience

Blockchain protocols can do wonders on the backend, but that would mean nothing if they don’t provide a smooth user experience with clean screens and simple interfaces since no one other than the cryptocurrency-savvy minority would use them.

An ideal Web3 user experience should use ai to guide users as they navigate product features, interfaces, and notifications. ai can take on the role of interactive FAQs, chatting with users and presenting them with what they need with attractive images. Companies and startups like crypto.com (any chatbot) and Dune Analytics (natural language queries) have already started to deliver on this dimension.

2024 should bring about the next wave of “Siri for Web3,” where users will ask questions and enter data instead of being baffled by complicated interfaces.

Origin and digital identity

For years, Web3 technology has promised to provide users with a decentralized (or self-sovereign) identity. Decentralized identity protocols allow us to store assertions, such as “I am human” and “I am over 18,” and selectively share these assertions with applications that require some proof of identity.

The rise of ai may eventually create use cases for decentralized identity, such as determining which users are human and tracking the provenance and copyright status of training data used by ai models. .

However, decentralized identity protocols face a “chicken and egg” problem with respect to adoption: there are too many competing standards and none yet have a critical mass of users to be useful. The technology is ready, but the world needs entrepreneurs with sustainable answers to go to market and user adoption problems.

Driving the ai ​​economy

ai has created a vast ecosystem of tools for users and developers, from model builders like OpenAI and Midjourney to training data providers like Scale ai. This year, blockchain-based products have really joined the fight.

Some of them promise cheaper access to computing resources by leveraging peer-to-peer rental of unused hardware, considering that ai model training can cost anywhere from seven figures to more than $200 million.

Other startups, such as Modulus Labs and Risk Zero, are focused on providing better access to ai models, whether by offering censorship resistance or developing ways to certify which particular model is being used by a decentralized application.

Finally, some startups like Fetch.ai are betting on the fact that ai agents will need to transact with each other to get services from external APIs or more specialized agents, and are building blockchain-based financial rails to drive this. economy.

In the future, agent networks could operate like DAOs in that they would be governed by a community of users and designated gatekeepers and would have to pay fines for rule violations and prediction errors, thus creating a feedback loop that keeps agents AIs under control and control. aligned with their human overlords.

Blockchain and ai are emerging technologies, meaning they have been around for a while but still have a long way to go. 2023 was a defining year for determining where ai could be positioned in the business world, and 2024 would see how blockchain can benefit from ai to accelerate its own growth.

Author biography

and timsit is the head of Cronos Labsthe $100M web3 startup accelerator and ecosystem development arm of the Chronos block chain.

Prior to joining the Cronos project in 2021, Ken was Chief Revenue Officer at ConsenSysthe ethereum technology company behind market-leading products MetaMask and Infura, where he spent 5 years.

Ken began his career in The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he spent 15 years in Paris, New York and Singapore, and was a partner and managing director focusing on financial services and fintech. He later co-founded an e-commerce startup in Southeast Asia.

Ken is a frequent speaker at blockchain conferences and has co-authored several reports and publications on Web3 and fintech. Between 2018 and 2020, he served as a member of the management committee of the European Commission’s EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum.

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