What Do 600 Startup Applications Say About Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence in 2024?
This is an opinion piece written for CryptoPotato by Ken Timsit, President of Cronos Labs.
2023 is the year of AI, and there’s no better time than now to dive deeper into different types and use cases of AI, especially for startups and projects working at the intersection of AI and blockchain.
To carry this momentum into 2024, Web3 startups need to better understand what they should focus on when developing projects at the intersection of blockchain and AI. The Cronos Accelerator Program evaluated over 600 Web3 startup applications, allowing us to gain an accurate understanding of the current blockchain and AI landscape.
Teams participating in the review from around the world were working on the development of projects related to GameFi, NFT, DeFi, data and infrastructure. Here are four main focus areas for blockchain and AI projects derived from these 600 applications.
Team productivity
ChatGPT and Midjourney have proven how generative AI can increase the productivity of creative designers, coders, customer support specialists, and other content creators. Although this situation does not seem specific to the blockchain industry, when the applications of newly established Web3 teams are examined, it is seen that this is the area where artificial intelligence will create the most value for the blockchain industry.
Improving the productivity of teams working on blockchain protocols is a critical imperative; because these protocols increasingly have to contend with local regulations, lab-intensive compliance, and multilingual localization. The best way forward for blockchain protocols is to increase team productivity by using AI tools in every department, such as software development, marketing, risk management, product design and customer service.
For example, we’ve seen SaaS projects like Notifly using AI to create summaries of what’s happening in other startups’ community in Discord servers and Twitter spaces, two platforms commonly used by Web3 projects for user interaction. In software development,
User experience
Blockchain protocols can work wonders on the backend, but it means nothing if they fail to provide a seamless user experience with clean screens and simple interfaces, as no one outside the crypto-savvy minority will use them.
An ideal Web3 user experience should use artificial intelligence to guide users as they navigate through product functions, interfaces, and notifications. AI can take on the role of an interactive FAQ, chatting with users and presenting what they need with attractive visuals. Companies and startups like Crypto.com (Any chatbot) and Dune Analytics (natural language queries) are already offering this dimension.
2024 will make the next wave of “Siri for Web3” a reality, where users ask questions and enter input instead of being confused by complex interfaces.
Source and Digital Identity
For years, Web3 technology has promised to give users a decentralized (or self-managed) identity. Decentralized identity protocols allow us to store claims like “I am human” and “I am over 18” and selectively share those claims with applications that require some form of proof of identity.
It’s possible that the rise of AI will create use cases for decentralized identity, for example to ensure which users are human and to track the source and copyright status of training data used by AI models.
But decentralized identity protocols face a “chicken and egg” problem when it comes to adoption: Too many standards are competing, and none have a critical mass of users yet to be useful. The technology is ready, but the world needs entrepreneurs with sustainable answers to market and user adoption challenges.
Powering the AI Economy
AI has created a vast ecosystem of user and developer tools, from model creators like OpenAI and Midjourney to training data providers like Scale AI. This year, blockchain-based products have truly joined the fray.
Some promise cheaper access to computing resources by leveraging peer-to-peer rentals of unused hardware, considering that AI model training can cost from seven figures to well over $200 million.
Other start-ups, such as Modulus Labs and Risk Zero, are focusing on providing better access to AI models by offering censorship resistance or developing ways to certify which model is used by a decentralized application.
Finally, a few startups like Fetch.ai are banking on the fact that AI agents will need to transact with each other to receive services from external APIs or more specialized agents, and are building blockchain-based financial rails to power this. economy.
In the future, agent networks could operate as DAOs in the sense that they would be governed by a community of users and appointed guardians and would have to pay fines for rule violations and prediction errors, thus creating a feedback loop that keeps AIs in check. he was aligned with his human masters.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence are emerging technologies, meaning they have been around for a while but still have a long way to go. 2023 was clearly the year that AI could come to a halt in business, and 2024 would see how blockchain could leverage AI to accelerate its own growth.
Author Biography
Ken Timsit is President of Cronos Labs, the $100M web3 start-up accelerator and ecosystem development arm of the Cronos blockchain.
Prior to joining the Cronos project in 2021, Ken was chief revenue officer at ConsenSys, the Ethereum technology company behind the market-leading MetaMask and Infura products, where he worked for 5 years.
Ken began his career at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG); where he spent 15 years in Paris, New York and Singapore and served as 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 many Web3 and fintech-related reports and publications. Between 2018 and 2020, he served as a steering committee member at the European Commission’s EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum.
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