Author: Darshan Gandhi, Founder of FutureX Labs; Translated by: Golden Finance xiaozou
1 Introduction
Over the past month, we have gone deep into the AI & web3 rabbit hole. We started by breaking down decentralized AI for those who are completely new to this vertical, and then we delved deeper into the building blocks of this vertical, from AI agents to privacy, gaming, and more.
In this article, we will take a closer look at a cutting-edge project that combines web3, AI, and gaming - Nim Network.
Nim is working hard to develop infrastructure, products, and coordination mechanisms to facilitate a variety of use cases in this intersection. This article will take a deep dive into the Nim Network’s approach and solutions.
First, let’s take a look at the current state of the ecosystem.
The Nim Network is building the future of AI gaming and consumer applications in crypto, creating an ecosystem that connects ownership and funding of open source AI and applications.
2. Current Ecosystem
The current web3 gaming ecosystem faces several significant challenges.
Many existing web3 games are not fully decentralized, but rely heavily on off-chain elements, limiting scalability and decentralization.
Due to the limitations of the current blockchain infrastructure, on-chain games that strive to be fully decentralized also suffer from scalability issues.
Web3 and full-chain games often lack viable business models and face difficulties as they try to bootstrap their own networks from scratch. Rather than developing independently, these projects will benefit from working with professional partners who can provide specific services and expertise (such as data availability and modularity).
Today, most on-chain games are still in the infrastructure development phase. The real test will begin when these games can reach a user scale comparable to successful web2 native games. Considering that significant improvements are still needed in various aspects such as transaction processing time, latency, FPS, data availability, etc., we are still a long way from this goal.
Web2.5 games that aim to bridge web2 and web3 experiences also face challenges. They struggle to introduce real web3 use cases, fail to incentivize users, and fail to create a truly web3-native user flow while still being accessible to traditional web2 users. Most of these games suffer from the following difficulties:
Provide appropriate incentives
Ensure a smooth onboarding experience
Truly fascinating
Due to these issues, most games fail to capture the core ethos of web3 — promoting ownership, transparency of in-game assets, and incentives to contribute to the game economy.
In addition, the onboarding process for casual players is complex and unfriendly. In addition, many crypto consumer applications, including games, fail to fully leverage the power of blockchain due to the following issues:
Network interruption
Slow transaction processing times and execution
Modularity (difficult to integrate with different types of products and services)
3. Potential Solutions
My thoughts on some potential solutions to the current challenges of the web3 gaming ecosystem are as follows:
(1) Cooperation network
One of the main solutions is to build a collaborative network and ecosystem that sets expectations and incentives for all stakeholders. This approach can attract a wider range of contributors with expertise and promote collaboration rather than individual efforts.
(2) Solve the guidance problem
Enhancing the user onboarding process and overall user experience is critical to preventing user churn in the first place. Developing solutions that simplify the onboarding process, such as embedded wallets and email-based logins, is essential to improving user retention and stickiness.
(3) Decentralized identity authentication
Adopting an aggregated form of decentralized identity authentication, rather than relying solely on wallets, can enhance the user experience. Streamlining these processes can make the gaming experience more seamless and user-friendly.
(4) Seamless payment
Users shouldn’t have to deal with the complexity of bridging, swapping, and integrations. Emphasizing a frictionless payment experience allows users to focus on enjoying the game without having to constantly sign transaction requests. Ideally, users should be able to pay in fiat currency smoothly and seamlessly, and let the game handle the entire process.
(5) Personalization and customization
Creating a fun game is the most basic requirement. Beyond that, providing deeper user stickiness through customization options such as configurable maps, skins, and special effects can improve user satisfaction. Traditional web2 games often lack these features, and users are rarely financially rewarded for their contributions.
Personalized interaction is another key focus. By understanding user behavior and creating interaction patterns based on user preferences, games can provide users with a more engaging and comfortable experience.
4. Nim Network
The Nim Network aims to build a bridge between existing infrastructure and consumer applications in the web3 gaming ecosystem. To achieve their goals, they focus on several key points:
Scaling on-chain games: efficiently processing large amounts of transactions and data.
Funding and creation of LLM and AI models: focused on custom use cases.
Develop AI agent framework: provide a foundation for intelligent autonomous gaming agents.
Develop on-chain verification systems: ensure the integrity and security of data and interactions.
Design smart contract layer: seamlessly integrate games and applications onto the chain.
They are developing AI agents that can:
Automated tasks
Payment
Participate in the game on behalf of the player
Improve the overall gaming experience
Let’s take a closer look at what products they are developing!
5. Meme Maker: The first tokenized AI model
The Nim Network is launching Nim-AI, a platform designed to tokenize professional AI models.
The initiative begins with the Meme Maker tool, which will help tokenize these AI models. This move enables owners to participate in the on-chain AI economy, while AI builders can receive funding to develop and deploy professional models. The continuous emergence of new AI models will drive continued innovation and utility.
General AI models often perform poorly in specific use cases, requiring users to repeatedly tweak prompts to achieve the desired results. Specialized models, trained or fine-tuned specifically for tasks such as gaming, art, or coding, can provide higher quality and greater reliability. Compared to general-purpose models such as GPT-4, customized models are critical to achieving consistent, high-quality target results.
This is where the Meme Maker tool comes in, which enables users to create AI-generated memes based on a specific community, idea, or brand. To operate this ecosystem, Nim Network adopts a revenue sales framework.
Inspired by the design of the Morpheus network, the framework aims to provide a fair and transparent token distribution method and reward users through a stake-to-earn mechanism.
This method allows users to provide liquidity by depositing stETH, and in return, users can claim AI model tokens.
Deposited stETH generates positive returns, managing to maintain liquidity and token value.
The reward token “AI” is an ERC20 token, initially deployed on Arbitrum, that can be bridged across LayerZero-supported networks. This community-owned token distribution model encourages broad participation and ensures broad benefit sharing.
6. AI Agents
Nim focuses on developing and integrating AI agents through a powerful framework that leverages various AI components, including:
Verifiable AI
Various economics
Innovative business model
This ecosystem will enable these AI agents to play games, trade, and generate income.
Verifiable AI integrates AI models with blockchain, using concepts such as TEE, AI oracle, and zero-knowledge proof to create a reliable private integration. The model's data is stored and verified on-chain, ensuring transparency and reliability. This setup enables unrestricted access, testing, and customization of AI agents, thereby enhancing end-user experience and performance.
In this ecosystem, players, developers, and holders all have unique roles and incentives:
Players help improve AI agents by providing feedback through the data and agent marketplace.
Developers create platforms, models and tools and share revenue with active users.
When AI assets are activated, asset holders provide liquidity and earn rewards.
Innovative business models support the creation of AI agents through development and no-code platforms, with revenue sharing mechanisms between developers, owners, and players. Continuous improvements are driven by player feedback and active testing, ensuring that AI agents remain relevant and effective.
Nim’s AI game Titans (which we’ll explore below) exemplifies this framework, which fosters collaboration and continuous improvement. This approach enhances user experience and AI performance, creating a vibrant ecosystem for players, developers, and holders.
7. Titans – AI Game
Nim Network is developing a crypto AI game called Titans, where players can own and create AI agents to compete in high-stakes competitions. These AI agents will automatically generate income for their owners, adding economic incentives to gameplay.
Players build agents through planning, coding, and iterative testing, and use a detailed skill tree mechanic to combine agent autonomy with player intent. In the game, agents compete against each other, similar to Mario Kart, and can choose actions such as accelerating, attacking, or shielding. Resource management is critical because the cost of actions rises with demand.
Agents can view information about their competitors, including speed, location, and token balance, to make smart decisions. Titans is more of a strategy game than a typical action game, and effective resource management plans are key to winning the game.
Titans leverages AI and blockchain to deliver a dynamic competitive gaming experience that combines economic incentives with immersive gameplay.
8、Ligetron
Ligetron is a foundational component of the Nim artificial intelligence framework, designed to provide economic ownership and verified access to AI models.
In the zk field:
zkVM handles general-purpose languages.
zkML uses zk proofs to handle heavy computational loads, ensuring data privacy and security.
Ligetron combines the advantages of zkVM and zkML to execute complex AI models with scalability, solving the trust issues of off-chain computing and the high cost of on-chain AI implementation.
Compared to Modulus Labs, it achieves significant performance improvements, such as 1024x improved memory efficiency and 66x faster AI models such as Llama 27b.
However, Ligetron proofs are currently not verifiable on-chain and require further optimization, such as switching to a preprocessing variant and using fully succinct SNARKs such as Groth16/Sonic to optimize the combination.
Further optimization to enable seamless on-chain verification and integration is necessary, although on-chain verification is not currently available.
9. Funding gap for open source AI
Open source AI faces distribution challenges that closed source models can avoid by leveraging cloud provider partnerships. The high computational requirements for training and inference are barriers, especially for smaller entities. Additionally, the open source model is easily copied, complicating intellectual property protection and monetization efforts.
Compared to closed-source AI, open-source AI often lags in customization and performance consistency. While closed-source models allow limited customization through fine-tuning, open-source models allow unlimited adjustments, retraining, and data integration for specific tasks. This flexibility has fostered broader innovation and rapid technological advancement in the field of artificial intelligence.
The Nim Network aims to address these challenges by leveraging crypto-economic incentives. It focuses on monetizing open source AI through software composability, network effects, and liquidity. This approach enables AI components to seamlessly integrate into a variety of applications without requiring deep technical expertise, thereby promoting widespread adoption and innovation.
The Nim model incentivizes early participants to provide liquidity in exchange for ownership through token distribution. As the token value accumulates, liquidity increases, and is further supported by fees generated by model usage and growing application demand. This framework ensures fair compensation for contributors - whether they are users, developers or researchers.
Tokenizing AI models involves verifying their use on-chain, which is done through an oracle approach. This approach verifies off-chain AI computations and ensures authenticity through blockchain verification, an example of which is the massive performance enhancement of Ligetron. Solutions like opML offer cost-effective strategies for bringing AI on-chain.
The oracle approach also includes optional privacy features, using zero-knowledge (ZK) verification to protect intellectual property while enforcing the economic rules of on-chain AI use. This includes directing AI call fees into a fee pool managed by token holders and integrating royalties from on-chain NFT contracts. This highly adaptable system supports customized plugins such as eip-7007.
10. Token Economics 101
Nim’s token distribution strategy aims to:
Promote ecosystem development
Incentive contribution
Ensure long-term sustainability of the entire economy
The specific allocation is as follows:
Ecosystem (39%): Committed to expanding the ecosystem and funding research and development (R&D), including incentive pools, future public grants, and support for open source AI initiatives.
Backers (19%): Reserved for initial partners and supporters in the early stages of a project.
Core Contributing Team (12%): Assigned to early team members to recognize their past and current contributions and ensure continued dedication and engagement.
Community Funding Pool (10%): A pool of funds for community growth, grants, incentives, and investments designed to promote community-driven development.
Token Sale (11%): Funds used for future token sales to maintain ongoing financial support and ecosystem expansion.
Genesis Airdrop (9%): Supports the Genesis Airdrop and incentivized testnet, aiming to launch network activities.
The unlocking schedule is as follows:
Some notes:
A significant number of tokens have been allocated for ecosystem development and R&D initiatives.
Public NIM allocations prioritize active community members, recognizing and rewarding their contributions.
Projects seeking support must be closely aligned with community goals and values, fostering a collaborative environment.
The community can access specific AI models and share in the revenue generated from fee usage pools, promoting ownership and active participation.
Staking NIM tokens provides staking rewards, incentivizing token holders to actively participate and invest in the success of the network.
11. Nim’s success factors
Here is a brief introduction to some of the key aspects of Nim that have helped the team achieve its current success:
Modular Design: Nim’s modular design helps facilitate effective integration between various technology stacks, tools, products, and services, which enables them to form a rapid development, rapid delivery mentality.
Community First: Nim prioritizes deep community engagement, fostering a strong sense of ownership among users. In just three months, Nim has already established partnerships with major players such as Avail, Gemz, UNKJD, AI Arena, Wayfinder, Todaythegame, and JokeRace.
Technological Advances: Nim has achieved significant performance enhancements, outperforming competitors (such as Ligetron) with nearly 1000x innovation.
Strong Investor Backing: Nim is backed by major investors including Geometry, Starkware, Bitkraft, 1kx, Fabric Ventures, and Delphi, gaining a wealth of support and credibility in the blockchain and gaming sectors.
Commitment to Transparency: Nim maintains transparency through active educational activities and regular blog posts, ensuring the community is informed of the latest developments and strategies.
Innovative Product Development: Nim is at the forefront of innovation, with products including tokenized AI models (such as meme maker) and engaging AI games (such as Titans).
12. Notes on Nim
Although the Nim network shows great promise, there are still some areas that require attention:
Expanding the contributor network: Expanding the open source contributor network requires strong incentives to effectively attract and retain talent.
Effectively manage partnerships: Managing different partnerships across various use cases requires strong coordination capabilities and effective communication strategies.
Community-led governance: Maintaining a community-led approach and decentralized governance is key to ensuring fair participation and continued growth.
Expand market scope: To fully validate its infrastructure, Nim needs to expand from the niche market of Web3 games and AI to traditional games with a large user base.
On-chain verification of Ligetron: Current limitations in on-chain verification of Ligetron proofs raise concerns about centralization. Addressing this issue is critical to achieving full chain functionality and maintaining the integrity and decentralization of the network.
13. Team Background
The core members and contributors of the Nim Network team have extensive experience from leading institutions such as:
Ethereum Foundation
Polygon Labs
Uniswap Foundation
Starknet Foundation
AI Research
This diverse background brings expertise from key areas to the team, which will be critical to advancing Nim’s goals at the intersection of Web3, AI, and gaming.
14. Partnerships and Alliances
Nim Network has established strategic partnerships with industry-leading projects, solidifying its position at the forefront of AI gaming innovation:
Avail: Nim Network has partnered with Avail to create a dedicated DA solution for AI games, solving problems such as modular fragmentation and cross-chain composability.
Gemz: Gemz collaborates with Nim to use AI-driven gaming tools and NFTs, leveraging their vast IP pool to combine AI gaming with crypto-native culture.
UNKJD: Partnering with UNKJD to connect players to a sophisticated robotics system that uses LLM to create advanced AI players that mimic top human players and achieve super-human performance.
AI Arena: Nim is working with AI Arena to raise awareness of the potential of AI through AI education, gaming entertainment, and human-machine competitions.
AI Wayfinder: The collaboration with AI Wayfinder aims to expand Nim’s capabilities by integrating the Wayfinder toolkit, focusing on supporting multi-chain scaling and enhancing the interoperability of the ecosystem.
Todaythegame: Todaythegame has partnered with Nim to use advanced AI technology to support interactive NPCs in social simulation games to enhance the player experience and create an AI-driven metaverse.
JokeRace: JokeRace works with Nim to develop new use cases for community competitions, integrating AI agents and GenAI to improve user experience and expand community-driven initiatives.
These partnerships help Nim achieve its goal of building a self-sustaining ecosystem powered by the NIM token. Each alliance member introduces unique blockchain requirements, driving Nim to expand functionality and use cases.
This collaborative effort enriches the value of all ecosystem participants, including stakeholders, users, builders, and partners, fostering an evolving dynamic gaming chain that meets community needs.
15. Financing and support
The Nim Network has received strong support from influential research partners and venture capital partners in the blockchain and AI fields. Major supporters include:
Research Partners: Geometry and Starkware, providing strategic research support and technical expertise.
Venture capital partners: Bitkraft, 1kx, Fabric Ventures, Delphi, Lemniscap, Big Brain Holdings, Wicklow Capital and Chapter One, providing significant financial support and industry insights.
16. Conclusion
Thank you for reading this article and joining us in exploring the Nim network.
Nim Network is a pioneer in innovative solutions at the intersection of crypto and AI. Its modular and customizable framework promises seamless integration with a variety of technologies, laying a solid foundation for future growth.
With the strategic partnership in place, Nim is poised for greater expansion and collaboration within the blockchain ecosystem. The development of AI tokenization models stands out as a potential game changer, providing new avenues for innovation and economic participation.
We are very interested in what Nim is doing and look forward to watching it continue to develop.
