Written by Tyler
The second half of DeAI is not a single decentralized AI storage/computing power/data network, but a battle for "platform-type" global AI infrastructure.
Imagine if any developer could easily implement a fully decentralized AI application from AI data collection, preprocessing, model training to agency, and individual users could participate in the entire process by contributing their own data/storage/computing resources to jointly build and share a platform-based ecosystem covering the entire life cycle of DeAI. Wouldn’t that be very cool?
This is exactly what OORT wants to do, that is, to form a DeAI full-ecosystem platform that covers the entire chain of computing power, data, storage, etc. and derives a large number of innovative applications.
After all, since the rise of this round of AI super narrative, although a number of leading players have emerged in the subdivided tracks of the three elements of "computing power, algorithm, and data", they are almost all limited to GPU cloud, traditional De+ or +Fi project stereotypes. Entrepreneurs and users still do not have the opportunity to participate in DeAI with lower thresholds, better costs, and lower risks.
From this perspective, if DeAI wants to be implemented and derive a rich application ecosystem, it urgently needs to go down to the grassroots - through a set of DeAI co-construction and sharing architecture based on Web3, to provide everyone with equal opportunities to participate in the AI era, so that every developer, individual user, and project application can share the dividends of the AI era.
In this context, as a "DeAI+DePIN" dual-line narrative player favored by long-term top European and American funds, OORT has proposed a new idea that covers AI computing power, storage, and data and builds an integrated DeAI ecosystem to aggregate global AI resources to promote the development of the DeAI ecosystem. It is not impossible for it to become a package solution to achieve a breakthrough in the DeAI field.
DeAI network turns to ecological dimensionality reduction attack
Specifically speaking, the current DeAI narrative has actually reached a turning point from a network to a platform-based ecosystem. It cannot be limited to a single architecture of decentralized AI storage/computing power/data network. It is necessary to build a global AI infrastructure and integrate global AI resources for co-construction and sharing, thereby supporting various DeAI project parties to build an AI application ecosystem with low cost and low threshold.
This reminds people of Pinduoduo, which was once labeled with the false proposition of "consumption downgrade". In essence, it used the highways of the Internet, manufacturing, and logistics to reach the grassroots general public and the most mainstream but ignored "absolute majority", stimulating the production/consumption potential of a wider range of merchants/consumers, thereby miraculously subverting the first-mover advantages of giants such as Alibaba and JD.com and achieving an "impossible reversal."
A single spark can start a prairie fire. Today’s AI+Web3 needs such a “sinking” and a growth strategy that focuses more on the general public, especially from the perspective of users and entrepreneurs:
For ordinary users, with so many DeAIs and increasingly high barriers to participation, whether contributing computing power, data and other resources as a node, or participating in testing, mining and other interactions to earn potential profits, they are increasingly only friendly to large users, making it difficult for ordinary AI players and contributors to get equal participation and share the dividends of the AI era;
For developers, traditional Web2 giants monopolize high-quality high-performance GPUs, computing power, and data resources, while small and medium-sized entrepreneurs have no bargaining power or autonomy, and even face the dilemma of having no rice to cook. It is difficult to obtain sufficient and high-quality computing power, data and other services, and they are in urgent need of an entrepreneurial-friendly DeAI ecosystem;
To put it bluntly, the development of AI+Web3 has not yet seen an AI application innovation ecosystem that is extremely friendly to both users and developers. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the general public to share the benefits of DeAI and project development.
From this perspective, if we can use a Web3-based co-construction and sharing economic model, through decentralized technology and economic models, so that everyone can participate in sharing the dividends of the AI era, thereby providing everyone with equal opportunities to participate in the opportunities of the AI era, it will be the biggest opportunity for the next AI wave.
This is what OORT is currently doing: bringing more AI contributions and participation solutions to ordinary users, and providing AI entrepreneurs with lower-cost, zero-risk entrepreneurial opportunities.
OORT's goal is to achieve a dimensionality reduction from a single computing power/data/storage network to an AI platform-based ecosystem by encompassing a decentralized AI storage market, a decentralized AI data network, and a decentralized AI computing power pool.
In a nutshell, OORT's core vision and value lies in building an integrated platform centered around AI-supported services and application ecosystems - through a package of solutions covering decentralized AI storage services, decentralized AI data networks, decentralized AI computing power markets, and decentralized AI application stores, it provides entrepreneurs and users with more opportunities to create AI-based technology applications and services.
OORT: The Three Horsemen of Platform Ecosystem
A simple review of OORT's product architecture reveals that its main focus is also simple and clear, namely the "three carriages" of data, storage, and computing power.
OORT Datahub (DeAI Data)
Among them, OORT Datahub allows global community users to participate at any time, provide data for AI innovation projects and perform pre-processing to ensure data accuracy and usability for AI development.
During this process, OORT will use blockchain architecture to ensure that every step of the operation has a clear and permanent record, allowing users to obtain corresponding OORT tokens and exclusive NFT rewards based on their corresponding contributions.
It is worth noting that any user only needs to download the Ale Wallet application and complete the registration, verification, and staking process to join DataHub to participate in data contribution. It is an almost zero-threshold "contribution to earn" model that turns everyone into a data contributor. Everyone can become a node and become part of the global DeAI infrastructure.
This helps make proprietary, high-quality, verified personal data more democratized for use by AI companies and large language models in need, adding massive and decentralized data sources for AI model training.
OORT Storage
OORT Storage integrates storage servers from global giants such as Seagate and Tencent Cloud, providing a decentralized object storage solution with performance comparable to Amazon AWS S3, saving up to 80% of costs compared to hyperscale enterprises.
More importantly, OORT Storage provides flexibility. Developers can "personally" integrate any storage management tool to connect to smaller-scale storage services with more flexible deployment times, and meet their own needs with better prices and more flexible configurations than large clouds such as AWS.
OORT Compute (DeAI computing power)
OORT Compute has not yet been launched, but plans to integrate and utilize GPUs from around the world within the year to provide a better computing power matching market for AI model training and reasoning.
Essentially, it is connected to tens of thousands of idle GPUs in small and medium-sized IDCs, mining farms, encryption projects, etc. on one end, and to the computing power needs of hundreds of millions of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs on the other end, and then performs intermediate scheduling, just like a broker matching countless buy and sell orders one by one.
This helps entrepreneurs train more personalized small and medium-sized AI models by gathering idle computing power at low cost and in a more flexible deployment configuration form, greatly improving resource utilization. The advantages are obvious - no matter whether the market is too cold or too hot, as long as there is a mismatch of resources, the demand for platforms to achieve matchmaking is the strongest:
On the supply side, suppliers of idle computing power resources such as small and medium-sized IDCs, mining farms, and crypto projects only need to connect with OORT Compute to directly match idle computing power to suitable small and medium-sized computing power customers at market prices or even higher prices with extremely low friction costs, thereby gaining profits;
On the demand side, small and medium-sized computing power demanders who originally had no bargaining power in front of large clouds such as AWS can also use the OORT Compute resource pipeline to connect to smaller-scale computing power that does not require permission, waiting, KYC, and has more flexible deployment time. They can freely select and combine the chips they need to form a "cluster" and complete personalized computing tasks.
DeAI technology architecture integrating DePIN
In addition to product architecture, how does OORT realize the vision of reconstructing the DeAI platform ecosystem at the technical level?
In a nutshell, OORT has completely achieved decentralized transformation at the bottom protocol layer by integrating DePIN narrative, and has built a closed-loop ecosystem from bottom to top:
Node layer (DePIN node infrastructure), network layer (Olympus protocol), product layer (OORT Storage, OORT Storage, OORT Compute) and various AI innovative applications based on this, thus forming a full-chain and full-ecological layout advantage covering data, storage, computing power and even applications.
Node layer: Activating AI resources distributed around the world
As the bottom layer, OORT's node layer can integrate the computing power, data, and storage resources of physical device nodes distributed around the world mainly through wallet addresses and the DePIN decentralized network architecture, enabling them to exchange and collaborate on a unified platform.
OORT’s DePIN network consists of three types of physical nodes:
Super nodes: servers from OORT partners such as Seagate and Tencent Cloud, responsible for tasks such as training AI models and storing large amounts of data;
Archive nodes: Nodes from the Filecoin and Arweave networks, responsible for cold data storage, mainly used to back up AI datasets;
Edge nodes: Personal devices owned by users, such as the “Deimos” edge device customized for OORT, laptops, and PCs, responsible for local data storage, data preprocessing, and running AI models to make decisions quickly;
In general, the core idea of this integrated DePIN architecture is to combine Web3 incentives to include a global hardware network to activate idle AI resources distributed around the world and solve the core pain points of excessive resource concentration and the inability to flexibly and effectively allocate computing power supply and demand globally under the traditional AI network framework.
Under this framework, there are currently nearly 30,000 hardware nodes deployed in the OORT network, distributed in hundreds of countries and regions around the world. After connecting to the OORT network, you can contribute resources and get token rewards.
That is to say, in the short term, OORT can promote the co-construction of DeAI resources to reduce costs and allow individuals to participate in contributions to achieve a decentralized DeAI ecological network.
Network layer: underlying technical support and security assurance
The network layer of OORT is mainly the Olympus protocol, a public blockchain protocol, which can be used by any interested organization or individual.
Olympus uses a U.S. patent-protected consensus algorithm called "Proof of Honesty" (PoH) to connect nodes from around the world in the OORT DePin network. This algorithm ensures that all nodes complete their assigned tasks honestly and transparently, and dynamically optimizes and uses network resources in a distributed manner.
Application layer: the "three pillars" connecting developers and users
The application layer is the OORT Storage, OORT Storage, and OORT Compute mentioned in the previous chapter. It aims to build a platform that directly connects AI data/storage/computing resources and AI innovative applications, and provides them to ordinary developers and users at a low cost and conveniently. We will not go into details here.
Token Economics
The total supply of OORT project token OORT is 2 billion, with a current circulation supply of about 150 million and a total market value of about $300 million. In addition, nearly 40 million OORTs have been pledged, which means that the pledge penetration rate of the circulation exceeds 26%, and is still growing steadily (including the total data of witnesses on the main network, edge node users, OORT Earn, DataHub users, etc.).
Among them, OORT has the dual attributes of a functional token and a governance token. It can be used for user product payments and staking to obtain rewards, and it can also be used for community members to participate in project governance decisions.
Paying for OORT products: Users can use fiat currency to pay for OORT products and services via credit card, but using OORT tokens to pay for purchases will receive additional discounts;
Staking: Currently, there are two ways for users to stake OORT tokens: 1. You can place tokens in staking pools to get staking rewards, including DeFi, OORT Earn, and DEX liquidity staking pools; 2. You can delegate tokens to node providers through binding pools (such as OORT Boost), and node providers will use them for staking of network nodes, and will receive a portion of mining rewards from node providers;
Governance: OORT encourages community members to make suggestions and make decisions that are beneficial to the project, such as product fee setting or community rule making. If a user wants to make a suggestion, they need to deposit a specific number of tokens, which will be returned after the proposal is passed. Otherwise, these tokens will be allocated to node providers that support the OORT network.
As mentioned above, ordinary users’ participation in contributing their own data, storage, and computing resources, as well as entrepreneurs’ purchase of OORT’s products and services, all rely on OORT tokens, allowing OORT to directly capture the rich dividends brought by the growth in the number of DeAI nodes and the number of innovative applications in the entire OORT ecosystem.
This means that as the OORT ecosystem continues to expand and grow, new DeAI applications emerge in an endless stream, and the number of nodes continues to rise, which is directly linked to the demand for tokens, making the demand/consumption on the chain far greater than the supply/emission, and the demand for OORT tokens is also growing rapidly. Since the supply of tokens is fixed, this situation of supply and demand further strengthens its deflationary characteristics.
Project Team and Investment and Financing
If we focus on the macro perspective, we will find that OORT has a clear idea. It first builds a complete decentralized AI infrastructure from bottom to top through the node layer (DePIN) + network layer + application layer service infrastructure architecture covering the entire chain from bottom to top, and finally fully activates the innovative ecosystem of global DeAI applications.
The team structure can often reflect the core tone of a Web3 project, and the composition of OORT's core members can be said to perfectly reflect the underlying tone of the entire project, which is "technology first, focus on work." Headquartered in the United States, its core members come from world-renowned institutions such as Columbia University, Qualcomm, AT&T, JP Morgan, etc. They are basically "veterans" in the field of Internet and encryption development. Therefore, although the technology is solid and the node network is steadily expanding, its voice in the market is not prominent.
In terms of investment and financing, as of January 2024, OORT has raised a total of US$10 million. To some extent, it is a potential stock favored by long-term European and American funds in the DeAI platform ecosystem.
Taisu Ventures (Emurgo - Cardano Venture Arm), Red Beard Ventures (a16z and Animoca Brands funded fund), Angelist, Trinity Venture Capital, Linkvc and Waterdrip Capital, as well as individual investors from institutions such as JP Morgan, Columbia University, Cornell University, Ausum Ventures and ISKER Group participated in the investment. It has also received funding from Microsoft and Google.
summary
If we focus on the landmark event of the last era of new prosperity in the Internet industry - the birth of the App Store in July 2008, we will find that for a new technological narrative, whether it can produce a transformative impact that is enough to change people's work, entertainment and other dimensions through the combination of application layer + platform ecology is the key to judging whether it can usher in an explosion and create a new economic ecology out of thin air.
However, in the past two years since ChatGPT set off a new AI wave, AI, especially the "AI+Web3" narrative, is still far from this goal. As an open, co-built economic model, Web3 perfectly provides users/developers with equal opportunities to participate in the opportunities of the AI era, which is also the core vision of OORT to activate global AI resources.
If it can succeed, it will not only provide users with the opportunity to participate in the DeAI wave and "contribute to earn", but also provide AI entrepreneurs with lower-cost, lower-risk entrepreneurial opportunities, then OORT will most likely become the core service of the global DeAI developer ecosystem. Components to build a DeAI infrastructure across "Web2+Web3". The future is very imaginative, but it is undoubtedly full of challenges.