Written by Frank, Foresight News
After TAO, who will be the next Alpha in the DeAI track?
In the first year of the Web3+AI narrative, Bittensor (TAO), the leader in the AI field backed by top investment institutions such as Polychain and DCG, led the DeAI field to a small climax after landing on Binance, prompting a series of concept tokens to rise.
The market is still fluctuating, but the AI narrative is still advancing by leaps and bounds. VanEck predicts that the AI market share may reach 1.8 trillion US dollars in 2030, which means that the demand for DeAI will continue to expand: if a set of co-construction and sharing architecture based on Web3 can be used to provide everyone with equal opportunities to participate in the AI era and allow everyone to share the dividends of the AI era, it will undoubtedly be the biggest opportunity for the next wave of "AI & Web3", and the potential scale will even be larger than the size of Bitcoin.
The Bittensor narrative has not yet ended, and the ecosystem has just started. Who will be the first Alpha? Just yesterday, as the first AI project to be publicly sold on CoinList in 2024, Masa officially announced the launch of an LLM-based AI data subnet on Bittensor, becoming the first data subnet with a token in the Bittensor ecosystem. MASA has become the only investable "new coin" in the pan-Bittensor ecosystem after TAO.
In the context of the ever-changing market, will the launch of the Masa Bittensor subnet become a catalyst for a new round of "AI & Web3" market? Can Masa (MASA) become a hotspot for the overflow of Bittensor ecological funds and developer resources?
Masa: Bittensor Ecosystem’s First Token-Issuing Data Subnet
To some extent, the Bittensor ecosystem and the “AI & Web3” narrative are similar.
Since the rise of this round of AI super narrative, the Web3 game comparing the three elements of AI, "computing power, algorithms, and data", has quickly heated up, and a number of leading players have emerged in different segments. Among them, Bittensor has taken the lead and played the role of "the elephant in the room" in the DeAI field:
Since its launch in March 2023, Bittensor has built a global AI ecosystem worth $10 billion, with institutional validators such as DCG subsidiaries Foundry and Polychain staking a total of 5.7 million TAO (about $1.8 billion), completely opening up the valuation ceiling of the DeAI narrative.
More importantly, because Bittensor operates through a central network composed of smaller, specialized subnets, each of which is dedicated to different areas of AI, and incentivizes the production of high-value AI subnets with its complex TAO economic model, it has been constantly stimulating innovation in the DeAI field as the "first generation Alpha" project in the DeAI field.
Just in May, Bittensor also announced that it would add 4 subnet slots per week until it reached the new 64 slot limit, and this year's goal is to move towards 1024 subnets. For this reason, the ever-expanding Bittensor subnet ecosystem has almost become a unified DeAI underlying innovation platform that siphons high-quality projects and resources, covering content generation, data collection and processing, LLM ecosystem, decentralized infrastructure, DeFi and other applications.
From this perspective, Masa's launch of the LLM-based AI data subnet on Bittensor is undoubtedly a great move to more widely reach global DeAI resources and projects - the Masa Bittensor subnet will use Bittensor's P2P machine intelligence network to accelerate the aggregation, conversion and acquisition of AI data, allowing AI developers to build anything anywhere in the world using any data in the world.
Therefore, this cooperation is essentially a ticket for Masa, which can greatly empower Masa's own ecosystem. It does not even rule out building the most active and highest-utilized Bittensor subnet within the pan-Bitterson ecosystem, thus becoming the "new generation Alpha" that will take over Bittensor.
After all, the subnet currently provides real-time and static, structured, annotated, and vectorized data from a variety of data sources, including X, Discord, recorded voice data (such as podcasts, YouTube, TikTok), restricted network data (such as the New York Times), and public network data (such as Google Search), which AI developers have used for a variety of use cases, such as capturing trading signals and building hyper-personalized AI companions.
By combining with Bittensor, Masa can obtain stronger technical support and resource advantages, further expand the functions and application scenarios of its data subnet, and provide users with better and richer services and experiences; at the same time, it will also help attract hundreds of mature developers in the Bitterson ecosystem to join, thereby expanding Masa's developer community and promoting the next step of its ecosystem's borderless innovation evolution.
Of course, this benefit is also two-way. In the past 2 years, the Masa network has developed more than 1.6 million contributors and more than 100 developers. Different participants have gained benefits by contributing data, and these Masa contributions The ecosystem of authors, developers and validators is also expected to significantly enhance the performance and utility of the Bittensor network.
What’s more interesting is that, previously in the entire pan-Bittensor ecosystem, apart from TAO, no other subnet project launched tokens, which also means that the tradable targets of the funds deposited in Bittensor are very limited. The launch of the Masa Bittensor mainnet also makes MASA the first Bittensor subnet project token, which undoubtedly provides a new option for the tens of billions of dollars of deposited funds in the Bittensor ecosystem.
At the same time, Masa also introduced the first dual-token reward model in the Bittensor ecosystem, allowing validators and working nodes of the Masa protocol and the Masa Bittensor subnet to obtain dual-token staking rewards through MASA and TAO. The TAO owned by the Masa Foundation from subnet operations will support MASA through repurchase or distribution as part of the emission plan.
In a nutshell, if we sort out the core logic behind the cooperation between Masa and Bittensor, TAO is the first leading ecological project in the AI track to be listed on Binance this year, and MASA is the only leading project with tokens in the Bittensor subnet ecosystem.
"Long-termism", Masa's progress
If Bittensor is the leading star in the DeAI field, then Masa is, in a sense, a rising star with a strong momentum and a promising future.
It is worth noting that the Masa core team itself embodies the dual attributes of "technology + market" in its architecture, taking its two co-founders as an example:
Masa co-founder Brendan Playford is a Web3 serial entrepreneur and blockchain technology veteran. He has been involved in Bitcoin mining since 2013, completed the ICO financing of the encryption project DAG in 2017, and the big data project he founded in 2020 received $17 million in financing;
Another Masa co-founder, Calanthia Mei, has served as a top investor in the overseas technology circle and a former Silicon Valley unicorn executive. In 2017, she co-founded the strategic investment department of PayPal, the world's largest payment company, and assisted it in the global strategic deployment of more than US$300 million in funds. In 2020, she joined a Silicon Valley star technology project as a founding team and executive and completed US$100 million in financing, and then successfully exited and sold it to a US listed company.
This is also a unique competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate for projects in the same track. Therefore, although the overall performance of the AI field has been sluggish since TAO was launched on Binance, as a star player in the DeAI field, Masa has indeed played a very beautiful combination of punches in the past 4 months. Whether it is the market and cooperation on the surface, or the product and technology dimensions under the surface, it has solidly reflected the team's long-termism.
First of all, in terms of the market, MASA has almost become the new generation of "top stream" in the DeAI field in the first half of the year. Through uninterrupted cooperation and actions, it has taken up the banner of investors' attention to the DeAI project:
On March 7, MASA landed on CoinList, becoming the first AI project to launch a community round of token sales on CoinList in 2024. It was sold out in 17 minutes, with an oversubscription of more than 6.4 times, setting a new record;
On April 11, MASA was launched on exchanges such as Bybit, HTX, KuCoin, Gate.io, CoinList, Pancakeswap and Uniswap and trading started, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding US$100 million.
Secondly, in terms of project progress and product release, whether it is the launch of the Masa AI data market, the introduction of a decentralized AI developer ecosystem, and the announcement of the first 13 developer partner teams, Masa is making steady progress day by day.
In particular, the network technology architecture and product application scenarios based on "Fair AI" announced at the beginning of this month are committed to taking the lead in promoting the construction of a collaborative ecosystem that supports the development of Fair AI.
The broader DeAI ecological cooperation is like a touchstone that can test the project's influence and development potential in the industry. In this regard, Masa has reached in-depth cooperation with a number of star projects in the past three months. In addition to further cooperating with CoinList to launch a new MASA staking plan, it also includes new cooperation with star developer projects in various fields of AI such as AlloraBase, SpectralTelle, Theoriq, Sleepless AI, and GT Protocol.
In addition, as a leading player in the DeAI field, Masa has also actively participated in or hosted a series of technical seminars, panel discussions and other Web3 & AI activities from Hong Kong in April to Brussels in July, including 8 dialogue activities on the banks of the Hong Kong River and 9 "AI & Web3" related peripheral activities during the ETHCC conference in Brussels. It has consistently shared with Builders the new changes and new developments in the AI track, and also imagined with industry leaders the possible paths for the integrated development of Web3 and AI in 2024.
For all these reasons, if "DeAI in 2024 is DeFi in 2020", then the current cold market environment may be a good time to do things. The focus is on how to make comprehensive market and technical reserves for the influx of new funds, new users, and new use cases in the future.
Although the current development trend of the AI track is still unclear, once there is a warming trend in the second half of the year, Masa's continuous first-mover layout will immediately be transformed into a unique competitive advantage - covering multiple levels such as technology research and development, ecological cooperation, and market expansion, and accumulating rich technical reserves and cooperation resources.
Therefore, if we focus on the macro perspective, we will find that the timing of Masa’s release of the Bittensor subnet is just right:
If the above series of efforts have enabled Masa to accumulate and strengthen its advantages in the DeAI competition in the past few months, it is like an athlete who is about to step onto the field. After a long period of hard training and sufficient preparation, he has the strength to win the championship and is standing at the last hurdle of accumulating strength and bursting into action, just missing the finishing touch.
The launch of the Masa Bittensor subnet may be the singularity moment that will introduce massive amounts of funds, developer resources, and new innovative application scenarios into the Masa ecosystem, triggering this chain reaction.
1+1＞2: Bidirectional coupling of Masa and Bittensor ecological resources
If TAO is the cornerstone and Beta of the "Web3+AI" track, then Masa is the first Alpha in this huge ecosystem. In other words, after Masa released the Bittensor subnet, it was equivalent to opening up a two-way flow channel for the accumulation of funds and developer resources between the Masa and Bittensor ecosystems.
First of all, Masa's DeAI data services will further reach DeAI applications and developers around the world. More projects will establish partnerships with Masa, thereby promoting the continuous improvement and growth of Masa's terminal application scenarios, bringing new business growth points and value creation channels to Masa.
Secondly, Bittensor's existing developer resources can also flow directly into the Masa ecosystem to carry out various use case innovations based on the DeAI architecture, enhancing the boundless innovation variables within the Masa ecosystem.
For example, Masa allows developers to automatically process the audio data of any podcast and efficiently process text information for training AI agents in scenarios such as health and wellness. At the same time, Masa also allows developers to summarize product feedback and community sentiment based on conversation messages and user interaction data extracted from the Discord server to provide product feedback with reference significance, etc.
To put it bluntly, the two-way coupling of Bittensor and Masa ecological resources can help more DeAI applications take root, and even more and more users will be expected to join the DeAI and Web3 ecosystem through the extended scenarios of Masa and Bittensor to achieve the goal of Mass Adoption.
The traffic dividend brought by this "1+1>2" cannot be underestimated - not only the Masa ecosystem, but also the Bittensor platform is expected to achieve a significant wave of user growth and scenario innovation. More users and richer use cases mean huge traffic advantages, which can not only further enhance the market demand and recognition of TAO/MASA tokens, but also create more commercial landing opportunities for Masa.
The prosperity of the ecosystem will inevitably bring about a significant increase in the value of the token. As the first real-time token in the Bittensor subnet ecosystem, the MASA token not only directly expands liquidity through the MASA / wTAO trading pair on Uniswap The trading channel is also equivalent to becoming the only optional target after TAO for the tens of billions of dollars of accumulated funds in the pan-Bittensor ecosystem, which provides MASA with sufficient appreciation potential.
summary
The real turning point often sprouts silently, especially when facing a technological narrative like DeAI, where there is often a huge error between an individual's local perception and the overall trend.
So who will be the next Alpha of DeAI? When will it come? We have no way of knowing, but from the front to the back, from TAO to MASA, from the ballast-like Beta to the new Alpha today, the pan-Bittensor ecosystem has always occupied an absolute dominant position in the "AI+Web3" narrative.
At least for now, especially with the launch of the Masa Bittensor subnet, Masa has shown its intention to take over from Bittensor (TAO) and become the "new generation Alpha". Let us wait and see.