Recently, with the strong rise in Bitcoin prices, the altcoin market has ushered in a rare "big rebound". Among them, the price performance of popular sectors such as Meme and AI is particularly outstanding. Last night, Grayscale announced the establishment of a new decentralized artificial intelligence fund - Grayscale Decentralized AI Fund LLC. The fund will focus on funding the following three key areas: artificial intelligence services, solving problems related to the use of centralized artificial intelligence, and developing infrastructure related to artificial intelligence.
In addition, Grayscale announced some decentralized artificial intelligence projects that have been included in the fund, including TAO, FIL, LPT, NEAR and RNDR. After the news was released, the AI sector generally rose, and these projects held by Grayscale all saw an increase of more than 5% in a short period of time.
How much room do these tokens have for a bull market? Is it worth buying?
Bittensor（TAO）
Bittensor has received more than $200 million in venture capital. According to people familiar with the matter, Polychain, a venture capital firm founded by early Coinbase employee Olaf Carlson-Wee, incubated Bittensor in 2019 and holds about $200 million in Bittensor tokens TAO.
In addition, Dao 5, an investment fund founded by Polychain alumnus Tekin Salimi, holds $50 million worth of TAO and is also an early backer of the Bittensor ecosystem, according to a person familiar with the matter. Digital Money Group is another backer of Bittensor, holding about $100 million worth of TAO.
Filecoin（FIL）
There are several key points worth noting:
Active trading volume increased 9% QoQ, and utilization increased from 18% in 4Q23 to 23% in 1Q24;
As of the end of Q1 2024, more than 2,000 customers loaded data on Filecoin, of which 508 customers loaded large data sets (larger than 1,000 TiB in size), an increase of 9% from 465 in Q4 2023;
Pyth and Uniswap V3 (Oku.trade) were launched in Q1 24, and deposits on GLIF increased by more than 2x month-on-month;
As of March 31, 2024, there were over 3,400 unique contracts deployed on FVM, a 26% increase from 2,700 contracts at the end of Q4 2023;
Filecoin FVM TVL exceeded US$600 million in the first quarter of 2024, nearly 2 times the previous quarter.
In addition, the Filecoin Foundation recently established a partnership with artificial intelligence platform developer SingularityNET and data ecosystem collaboration infrastructure provider Nuklai.
LPT
Driven by live streaming platforms, usage of the LPT network grew 31% QoQ and reached an all-time high in Q1 24. In addition to transcoding, LPT also plans to introduce AI video computing capabilities to its network.
LPT network usage increased by 31% QoQ in Q1 2024
In addition, LPT announced that it will launch a subnet with AI computing capabilities. The LPTAI subnet allows hardware providers to earn fees by contributing GPUs to AI inference jobs such as text to image, text to video, and image to video. This subnet is a branch of the LPT main network that supports new artificial intelligence features while still using the LPT protocol for node discovery and payment. LPT's AI subnet is expected to be launched in three phases, the first phase has been completed and is currently being optimized, with the mainnet scheduled to be launched in the third quarter of 2024.
Near（NEAR）
NEAR Protocol is one of the biggest winners in Q1 2024. NEAR’s TVL in Q1 was $335 million, up 163% from the previous quarter and 547% from the previous six months. The number of daily active addresses was 1.2 million, up 42% from the previous quarter and 377% from the previous six months. NEAR’s stablecoin market capitalization increased by 176% from the previous quarter to $214 million. NEAR’s total number of cumulative accounts exceeded 100 million.
In addition, judging from the official developments in Q2 this year, the focus is on developing product AI-related businesses, including plans to use AI chatbots to help people without coding experience create DApps, cooperating with the NEAT protocol, an aggregation protocol designed for scaling AI applications on NEAR, to accelerate the development of AI applications with a 1 million NEAR staking delegation, and the NEAR Foundation launching an incubation program to build infrastructure for users' own AI.
Render（RNDR）
At present, the reasons why Render is popular and attracts a large number of practical application needs are:
LightField Labs, in which Render Network’s parent company OTOY invested in February this year, has seen rapid developments in holographic imaging technology, and the digital restoration process requires rendering work;
Partnership with Stable Diffusion, large language model generation of images, text-to-video/3D scenarios can all be supported by Render Network;
Apple briefly mentioned Octane, the creative workflow software powered by the Render Network, during its keynote presentation showcasing the M 4 chip in its latest iPads.
If you can't choose by yourself, then follow the footsteps of the institutions. Grayscale's vision in selecting coins is definitely better than that of most retail investors. Although Grayscale's influence is not as great as it was in the past, will institutions make deals that will make them lose money? I vaguely remember that in the last bull market, when news came out that Grayscale or Sanjian invested in a certain coin, there was a big positive line immediately, no less than today's DWF. So it's okay to follow the vision of the institutions.
Later, I will bring you analysis of leading projects in other tracks. If you are interested, you can click to follow. I will also organize some cutting-edge consulting and project reviews from time to time. Welcome all like-minded people in the cryptocurrency circle to explore together.
