Written by: TechFlow
Welcome to the day of Solana’s on-chain ecosystem recovery.
With Solana's official announcement of hosting an AI hackathon, ai16z started to rebound and surpassed GOAT in market value. Funds in the market began to flow into AI Agent-related projects again.
If you look closely at the introduction of the hackathon, the goal of the event is very clear --- Build the best AI Agent product.
The official support, to some extent, also means that in the coming period of time, the general environment will be favorable to those AI agents that can solve practical problems or target specific directions.
And such expectations may have been priced in.
Today, a project called Principals Network, whose token $PNET (note not PNUT squirrel) has been rising all the way within 24 hours of the token issuance, and its market value has reached 15M from the initial 200k or so. There have been sporadic discussions, but it is still outside the mainstream narrative.
The goal of this project is very clear, which is to aim in a specific direction: to use AI agents to create a decentralized education network.
The first one is important from a narrative perspective.
The narrative of making an AI agent as a personalized educational assistant and private tutor seems to be the first of its kind. Coupled with the support of AI hackathons for discovering practical projects, PNET's expectations are further raised.
We took a look at its design documentation and shared more information with you.
AI as a personalized private tutor, with proof of learning on the chain
Before we dive into PNET, we need to understand the core problem it aims to solve.
Traditional online education platforms often face the contradiction between standardization and personalization: either the same course content or the high cost of one-to-one tutoring. In AI Agent, this problem seems to have found a new solution.
AI itself can become a personalized personal trainer.
The core design of PNET revolves around three key elements:
AI Teaching Agents
These are not simple question-answering machines, but specially trained domain expert AIs; each agent specializes in a specific subject area, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, or personal development. At the same time, they are able to understand the learner's cognitive level and develop personalized learning paths.
AI continuously optimizes teaching strategies through continuous interaction with learners, making teaching itself a form of training and tuning.
This layer of functionality is integrated into the AI Engine layer and is centrally scheduled by the Headmaster module. (See the architecture diagram below)
Decentralized Knowledge Graph
This layer is built in Academies and connects knowledge points in various disciplines. It is continuously expanded and optimized through community contributions to help AI agents understand the relevance of knowledge.
This design can provide learners with a multi-dimensional knowledge exploration path and support interdisciplinary learning and knowledge integration.
Proof of Learning on Chain
This function is built on the EDU Chain layer, recording every step of the learner's learning progress and generating verifiable proof of skills. The most important thing is that after you finish learning, it will be combined with the $PNET token incentive mechanism, providing learners with more external reward motivation.
In theory, these three points can form a self-sufficient cycle: the AI teaching agent obtains teaching content and related information through the knowledge graph, the learning process is recorded through on-chain proofs, and feedback is given to the AI agent to optimize teaching; the knowledge graph is constantly enriched and verified during the learning process.
If we delve deeper into the project's architecture, we can see that the core of PNET is a decentralized education network built on the Solana ecosystem, with a three-layer design: AI Principals, Academy System, and EDU Chain.
The AI Principals layer is the core of the entire system, with specially trained AI Agents acting as personalized tutors. These AI Agents can not only customize learning paths based on the characteristics of learners, but also provide real-time coaching and Q&A. The Academy System layer is responsible for managing educational content and resources, building a dynamically evolving curriculum system, and coordinating the interaction between learners and AI Principals. The bottom-level EDU Chain is built on Solana and mainly handles core functions such as education certificate certification, credit management, and token incentives.
The more detailed division of labor in the above architecture can be summarized as follows:
Infrastructure layer
EDU Chain: As the underlying public chain infrastructure of the entire system
$PNET: The ecosystem’s native token, used for incentives and governance
Core Layer
AI Engine: The core engine responsible for intelligent teaching
Headmaster: the central scheduling module of the system
Partners: Partner access module
Academies
This layer is particularly interesting, covering multiple professional fields such as Personal Development, Artificial Intelligence, Trading, and Blockchain, among other disciplines both inside and outside the industry.
At present, PNET has released the test network, but we have not actually seen the full picture of its product; the market is optimistic about this project more because of the expected price in, but it is undeniable that this attempt to deeply combine AI, Web3 and education represents an innovative direction for online education.
Potential links to Open Campus
PNET’s market value soared from 200k to 15M in just 24 hours. In addition to the innovative narrative of AI Agent education, there is a deeper reason - its potential connection with Open Campus.
According to the project documentation, there is an ecological support relationship between Principals Network and Open Campus: as a recipient of the Open Campus accelerator program, the former has confirmed that it will integrate EDU Chain's SSO (single sign-on) and authentication mechanism into its own platform. This seemingly ordinary technical integration actually implies greater imagination.
As an important layout of Binance in the field of Web3 education, Open Campus has received a strategic investment of US$3.15 million from Binance Labs in 2023. Previously, the market generally understood this as Binance's optimism about the Web3 education track.
Through this relationship, PNET's valuation story seems to become more three-dimensional.
The project may no longer be just an educational innovation project that takes advantage of the Solana AI craze, but may become an important node connecting the Binance ecosystem.
This double benefit may explain why funds are pouring into PNET. Investors seem to have started to pay for the background of a "Binance Web3 Education AI Project".
Of course, whether this expectation can be fulfilled depends on the actual progress of the project.
But then again, the best hype space for a project is still when its expectations are full but have not yet been fulfilled; of course, for Degens, it is best if the expectations never come true.
