Original title: (PNET's rapid rise, is having an AI Agent as a private tutor a good angle?)

Original source: Deep Tide TechFlow

Welcome to a day of ecological recovery on the Solana chain.

As Solana officially announced the AI hackathon, ai16z rebounded and surpassed GOAT in market value, leading to a new influx of funds into AI Agent-related projects.

If you look closely at the introduction of the hackathon event, the goal of the event is very clear --- Build the best AI Agent product.

Official support implies that, to some extent, in the coming period, the broader environment will favor those AI agents that can solve practical problems or target specific directions.

Such expectations may have already been priced in.

Today, a project called Principals Network, with its token $PNET (note it's not PNUT the squirrel), has seen its market cap rise from around $200k to $15M within the first 24 hours of the token's issuance. There have been some sporadic discussions, but it remains outside the mainstream narrative.

The project's goal is very clear, targeting a specific direction: to create a decentralized education network using AI agents.

From a narrative perspective, the first one is very important.

Creating a personalized education assistant and private tutor with an AI agent seems to be a first. Coupled with the support of AI hackathons in discovering practical projects, PNET's expectations have further been elevated.

We took a look at its design documents and will share more information with everyone.

AI as a personalized private tutor, with on-chain proof of learning

Before delving into PNET, we need to understand the core issues it aims to solve.

Traditional online education platforms often face the contradiction between standardization and personalization: either uniform course content or high costs for one-on-one tutoring. However, in AI Agents, this problem seems to have found a new solution.

AI itself can become a personalized private tutor.

The core design of PNET revolves around three key elements:

1. AI Teaching Agents

These are not simple Q&A machines, but specially trained domain expert AIs; each agent focuses on specific subject areas, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, or personal development. Simultaneously, they can understand the learner's cognitive level and formulate personalized learning paths.

AI continuously optimizes teaching strategies through ongoing interaction with learners, making teaching itself a form of training and adjustment.

This layer is integrated into the AI Engine layer, managed by the Headmaster module.

2. Decentralized Knowledge Graph

This layer is built within Academies, connecting knowledge points across various subject areas. It is continuously expanded and optimized through community contributions, aiding AI agents in understanding the interconnections of knowledge.

This design can provide learners with multidimensional knowledge exploration paths, supporting interdisciplinary learning and knowledge integration.

3. On-chain Proof of Learning

This function is built on top of the EDU Chain layer, recording each step of learners' progress while generating verifiable skill proofs. Most importantly, after you finish learning, it will combine with the $PNET token incentive mechanism, providing learners with more external motivational rewards.

Theoretically, these three points can form a self-sustaining loop: AI teaching agents obtain teaching content and related information through knowledge graphs, the learning process is recorded through on-chain proof, and feedback is provided to AI agents for teaching optimization; knowledge graphs are continuously enriched and validated during the learning process.

The deep architecture of this project reveals that PNET's core is a decentralized education network built on the Solana ecosystem, employing a three-layer design: AI Principals, Academy System, and EDU Chain.

The AI Principals layer is the core of the entire system, where specially trained AI agents serve as personalized tutors. These AI agents can customize learning paths based on learners' characteristics and provide real-time tutoring and Q&A. The Academy System layer manages educational content and resources, creating a dynamically evolving curriculum while coordinating interactions between learners and AI Principals. The lowest layer, EDU Chain, is built on Solana and primarily handles core functions such as educational certificate authentication, credit management, and token incentives.

The more detailed division of labor in the above architecture can be summarized as follows:

1. Infrastructure Layer

· EDU Chain: The underlying public chain infrastructure of the whole system

· $PNET: The native token of the ecosystem, used for incentives and governance

2. Core Layer

· AI Engine: The core engine for intelligent teaching

· Headmaster: The central scheduling module of the system

· Partners: Partner access module

3. Subject Content Layer (Academies)

This layer is particularly interesting, encompassing multiple professional fields such as personal development, artificial intelligence, trading, and blockchain, among various subjects both within and outside the field.

Currently, PNET has launched its testnet, but we haven't seen the full picture of its products; the market's optimism towards this project is more about the expected price in. However, it is undeniable that this attempt to deeply integrate AI, Web3, and education represents an innovative direction for online education.

Potential connection with Open Campus

PNET's market value skyrocketed from $200k to $15M in just 24 hours. Besides the innovative narrative of AI Agent education, there is a deeper reason — its potential connection with Open Campus.

Reviewing the project's documentation reveals that the Principals Network has an ecological support relationship with Open Campus: the former, as a recipient of the Open Campus accelerator program, has confirmed it will integrate the SSO (Single Sign-On) and authentication mechanisms of the EDU Chain into its own platform. This seemingly ordinary technical integration actually hints at a larger imaginative space.

Open Campus, as a key layout of Binance in the Web3 education field, received a strategic investment of $3.15 million from Binance Labs in 2023, which was generally understood by the market as Binance's optimism towards the Web3 education sector.

Through this relationship, PNET's valuation story seems to become more three-dimensional.

The project may no longer just be an educational innovation project riding the Solana AI wave, but could become an important node connecting the Binance ecosystem.

This dual benefit overlap may explain why funds are pouring into PNET. Investors seem to have started buying into the background of a 'Binance Web3 education AI project.'

Of course, whether these expectations can be fulfilled will depend on the project's actual progress in the future.

However, it must be said that the best hype space for a project is still when its expectations are high but not yet fulfilled; of course, for Degen, the best expectation is that it never gets fulfilled.

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