GM!
In this edition of our weekly AI Edge, we cover:
The crypto market sell-off continues, but CXT shines
Autonolas agentic activity returns to yearly highs
What’s going on with the Grass airdrop
Our favourite tweets on X
We’re all for inter-galaxy model training 😀
🦍 State of the Market..
Source: Coingecko
The Crypto AI market cap dropped from $22.7B to $21B this week, marking a 7.5% decrease, in line with sell-offs across crypto.
NVIDIA’s decline also continues, with its stock falling 17% to $106 over the past five days. It seems Crypto AI, along with the broader market, is following suit.
With the increasing likelihood of a 50 bps Fed rate cut later this month, there’s hope it could help reignite the markets.
One token that bucked the trend is CXT, rising 24% over the week. The Covalent project recently rebranded to focus on AI and long-term data availability on Ethereum. A Messari report released on August 16th could have fueled CXT’s price surge over the past two weeks.
Price (7-day Change) | FDV | |
|---|---|---|
Bittensor TAO | $249.38 (-18.2%) | $5.2B |
Near NEAR | $3.87 (-13.6%) | $4.6B |
Render RNDR | $4.69 (-10.4%) | $2.5B |
Covalent CXT | $0.07 (24.7%) | $70M |
📊 Chart of the Week
Autonolas Agent Activity Returns to Highs
Autonolas Agent activity returns to its highs of this year. The number of monthly service transactions crossed 150K in August, almost reaching the peak of 155K earlier in May of this year.
These transactions consist of DeFi trades, prediction markets, governance, and more, all performed by AI Agents.
🌴 Grass Airdrop Disappoints Many
Grass just announced its first airdrop, and you can check your allocations here
Quick facts:
1 billion total tokens
10% of tokens distributed in the first airdrop
No token launch date or detailed tokenomics released yet
Grass is building an AI data layer by scraping internet data using people’s computers. You download a Chrome or desktop extension, keep it connected, and it uses a small amount of bandwidth for scraping.
One of our nodes, active 24/7 since June, received ~110 GRASS tokens. Others have received under 50 GRASS. While GRASS isn’t live yet, it’s trading on Aevo’s premarket at $0.25.
This disappointed many because it translates to less than $5 per month for a 24/7 active node—just about enough to cover electricity costs.
The barrier to entry is low, so millions of nodes participated, diluting the distribution. Participation could drop off after the token generation event (TGE) if many realize it’s not worth the effort, leading to an eventual equilibrium.
This highlights the challenge DePIN projects face in getting their economics right.
🏆 Caught Our Eyes..
Skyfire’s 2024 roadmap. Source: @chiefaioffice
Project Updates
Skyfire raises an $8.5M seed round allowing AI to pay and purchase on behalf of humans
Nectar AI raises a $3.9M seed round to build uncensored immersive AI companions. Mechanism Capital and Karatage led the round with several angels like Arthur Hayes through Maelstrom.
FLock.io, building federated machine learning on the blockchain, is the recipient of an Ethereum Foundation Research Grant
Wayfinder releases three updates to assist with AI agent function creation, transaction simulation, and security
Yai releases its Oracle Beta Bot providing BTC price predictions to Yai community members
Creator Bid releases version 2 of its platform, the ultimate AI Creator Agent Launchpad with more features to fine-tune your AI creator agent
Open Gradient posts an AI inference proof to Celestia’s DA
Allora crosses 45,000 workers on their network. Workers run ML models contributing to Allora’s collective intelligence.
IO net announces its long-term plans to disrupt the cloud industry
Incentives / Rewards Programs
Inferium is running an incentivized campaign on Galxe
Sahara launches the Prometheus Program for 2,000 early product testers
OG Labs Testnet Newton v2 is live with incentives and rewards for users
Eidon AI announces an incentive program in their discord to receive a unique role
Neuromesh announces a Reward Quest to unlock mystery boxes with up to $1000 USDT in prizes
Arweave / AO
See these emerging projects from Arweave’s AO incubator
Autonomous Finance releases new tooling called AO Form. This allows users to deploy and upgrade multiprocess systems quickly and seamlessly
AO crosses $40M in deposits of DAI
Bittensor
Rivus announces its relaunch of the RIVUS token to be on September 15th
Blocmates debuts a new weekly show that covers all the latest updates for Bittensor
Bitmind achieves a 13% improvement over their initial base miner for deep fake detection
Sami Kassab launches taopill.ai, a hub for discovering, learning, and staying updated on Bittensor subnets
Timeless announces several updates for their Automated Trading feature using Taoshi
Dippy, powered by subnet 11, crosses 280K monthly active users
🧠 Open Source Corner
This week’s big news in the open-source AI world: a new contender has arrived!
Reflection 70B, built by Matt Schumer, CEO of HyperWrite, is making waves by outperforming Claude Sonnet 3.5 on several key benchmarks, despite being a smaller model.
Trained on high-quality synthetic data, Reflection 70B sets itself apart by iterating over its outputs — detecting and correcting errors in its own reasoning before delivering the final result to the user.
The trade-off? This reflection process consumes a lot of tokens, making it slower and potentially more expensive.
The 405B parameter model is set to be released next week - we’ll see how it performs!
🔥 On X..
Brody recaps Crypto AI startup funding for August
Ben Fielding describes the three eras of foundation models
Virtuals Protocol releases their paper: an infinite Super Mario Brothers game using generative AI.
AIs started plotting a revolution on Discord
Vitalik on Glue and Coprocessor architectures
The New Yorker argues that AI can’t make real art… 🤔
Mira Network makes LLMs more trustworthy with Ensemble Evaluation (EE)
Sentient Cofounder Himanshu Tyagi on AI Ownership
Dria AI discusses if smaller AI models can outperform bigger ones
Universal Basic Compute: A Solution to Economic Inequality
That’s it for this week! If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please just reply to this email. We read everything.
Cheers,
Teng Yan & Joshua
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This newsletter is intended solely for educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. It is not an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Always conduct your own research and exercise caution when making invest
