Author: TechFlow
The market has long been stuck in a cycle of “AI is no longer popular, but AI is popular again.”
Especially with the news of top VC investments, AI projects can often go from being lukewarm to being discussed by everyone in an instant.
Apart from the discussion of Vitalik’s live singing at Token 2049 yesterday, the most discussed project in CT was Vana: after the project officially announced that it had received a total of US$25 million in financing from the three giants of crypto VCs, Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm and Polychain, various likes, congratulations and analysis posts immediately emerged.
You may not love VC coins, but any large-scale financing in a market lacking in popularity is still worth paying attention to.
Vana’s Twitter profile reads: “Enabling user-owned AI through user-owned data.”
It seems to be a narrative against big companies’ monopoly on AI, it also focuses on the data layer, and familiar VCs gather together... What is the differentiation of Vana this time?
Data DAO is high-end and unites VCs
As soon as Vana's financing information came out, all parties were optimistic.
For example, a Twitter user analyzed that Vana was the first AI project invested by Paradigm, and Vana received investments from different top VCs in different financing rounds:
Strategic round: Coinbase Ventures invests $5 million
Round A: Paradigm led the investment with US$18 million
Seed round: Polychain invested 2 million US dollars
If the three VC giants all love a project, it is probably because the narrative of the project and the problem it wants to solve are big enough.
As mentioned at the beginning, Vana's main problem area is still the "dragon-slaying" narrative of data control in the AGI era --- individuals contribute data for free but get no reward, and data privacy is not guaranteed; large companies dominate the training of oligopolistic AI models... Therefore, we must break this situation.
But following the AI trends of the past two years, calling for the development of multiple AI models and opposing a single dominant player has become the correct narrative in the crypto community.
(Related reading: Delphi Labs: AI will see multi-model competition, which encryption applications do we think are promising?)
This is not a new story, but most of the current encryption AI projects that tell this story are mostly concentrated in the DePIN field, which encourages the use of hardware in different fields to contribute different resources.
Vana's starting point for solving the problem is more innovative -- using DAOs with different purposes to allow everyone to contribute different types of data, thereby training AI models for different purposes.
Vana wrote in his technical blog post:
“A data DAO is a decentralized entity that allows users to pool and manage their data... It’s a bit like a data union. The DAO has full control over the dataset and can choose to rent or sell anonymized copies. For example, Reddit’s data could even be used on other platforms owned by new users, including friends, past posts, and other data, ready to be used on new platforms.”
Currently, Vana’s official website lists 16 different data DAOs, allowing users to contribute various types of data such as Reddit, Twitter, and dating apps, and control their own control over this data through Vana’s blockchain network.
At the same time, the data can also be contributed to the training of AI models that require data in specific vertical fields, and users can also benefit.
If all kinds of data from all walks of life can be contributed through this DAO method, it is indeed a relatively ideal model, but the problem lies in how to achieve it.
There are at least two specific issues involved:
How do you ensure that I actually contributed the data?
How do you ensure the security and ownership of contributed data is maintained?
This also involves the implementation method and principle of the Vana network.
The core of the Vana Network lies in its unique multi-layered architecture design, which aims to create a decentralized data ecosystem that solves the key issues of data ownership, privacy protection and value creation mentioned above.
According to the latest architecture diagram, the Vana network is mainly composed of three key components: Data Portability Layer, Data Liquidity Layer and Universal Connectome.
Data Portability Layer - This layer is the top layer of the Vana network and is responsible for processing applications and AI models of on-chain data. In this layer, there are two main types of participants:
Developers: They create applications and AI models that use on-chain data.
Users: They use these applications and models and are also the ultimate beneficiaries of the data.
The main function of this layer is to ensure data portability and interoperability, allowing users to easily transfer and use their data between different applications and models.
Data Liquidity Layer --- This layer is responsible for bringing user-owned data to the chain and is the foundation of the entire system. It includes two important types of participants:
Contributors: They contribute their own data to the system.
Validators: They are responsible for verifying the authenticity and value of the contributed data.
This layer solves the problem of how to safely and reliably convert offline data into on-chain assets, providing data liquidity for the entire ecosystem.
Universal Connectome – This is a unique component that acts as a real-time data flow graph for the entire ecosystem. It consists of the following roles:
Propagators: They are responsible for spreading and updating information about data flows in the ecosystem.
The role of the Universal Connectivity Group is to provide a real-time map of data flows throughout the ecosystem, allowing all participants to understand where data is flowing and how it is used.
These three components work closely together to form a complete data ecosystem:
The data liquidity layer brings user-owned data securely onto the chain, providing original data for the entire system.
The data portability layer uses this on-chain data to support the development and use of various applications and AI models.
The Universal Connectivity Group monitors and displays data flows across the entire ecosystem in real time, ensuring transparency and traceability.
Without going into the technical details of the implementation, such as smart contracts, ZK, and code-level stuff, you can simply think of Vana as a blockchain network that provides a comprehensive solution for data contribution, verification, use, and monitoring.
Large-scale infrastructure, slaying the dragon of monopoly AI model, new arrangements for DAO’s old work... With these factors added together, it becomes relatively reasonable to unite a few top VCs.
(Note from Shenchao: Readers interested in the technology can directly visit the project doc to learn more)
Click mining to be down-to-earth and unite the masses
According to the tone and routine of previous encryption AI, this type of project focuses on being high-end and technological, and ordinary players only stay at the stage where they feel it is mysterious and powerful but difficult to actually participate in and use.
But this time, Vana has become more down-to-earth in its actual gameplay --- in addition to the high-sounding narrative for VCs, there is also a "click mining" mode that is targeted at retail investors, with a lower threshold and is popular.
Narrative is important, tone is important... but popularity is more important.
Speaking of Paradigm's investment projects, the gameplay of collecting points, attracting popularity and focusing on operations inherited from Blur and Friend.Tech is also reflected in Vana. The specific gameplay is as follows:
Open Telegram and go to the Vana Data Hero app (interested players can try it out here)
The main gameplay is also very simple at present. Just click the mouse to hit the ball on the screen with various Web2 application icons. The more times you click, the faster you click, and the more VANA points you will gain per unit time (which may symbolize contributing data from various Web2 applications for mining)
In addition to simply clicking on the screen, there are other activities that can be completed, such as following social media, inviting friends, adding test networks, etc., which will then be rewarded with different scores.
The project team obviously understands marketing and hype. For example, one of the tasks is to reply to Musk’s posts on topics related to AI, data, and privacy. Completing the task will earn you 500 VANA points. This is a bit like rallying the masses to promote Vana.
However, we do not yet fully understand the ratio and distribution rules of the VANA points for redemption tokens. Interested players can pay further attention to Vana’s social media for more information.
However, with the support of VC giants and the precedent of successful Telegram mini-program projects, there will definitely be money-spending and expected gains. It’s just that the PUA points gameplay makes people tired and FOMO, so how to choose to participate is a matter of personal opinion.
My Lord, times have changed.
The interesting thing is that even the big-name AI projects have to use the Telegram mini-program to gain popularity and warm up.
Previous AI projects gave people a high-end feeling, but after the industry sparked a big discussion about VC coins not taking over and TON ecological mini-programs representing mass adoption, the current project parties have also clearly adapted to the changes in the industry.
We must unite VCs upwards and win over the masses downwards.
If you look up earlier information about Vana, you will find that after its establishment in 21 years, the project was positioned as an AI identity generation application.
Obviously, developing applications is not as good as developing infrastructure, and VC-oriented narratives are not as good as catching both VCs and the masses.
After the transformation of Vana, you can clearly see the strategic changes in the project's Go To Market. There are only so many big narratives, and new technologies will never come out immediately. Instead of counting on changes in the macro environment, it is better to adjust your posture to the maximum extent possible to match the current market rhythm.
The author expects that there will be more and more new projects, or old projects with new revamps that change their gameplay.
It’s the time and it’s the fate.
