Forward the Original Title ‘Masa’s “AI+Crypto” Guide: How CoinList’s First AI Project of 2024 Serves the Pan-AI Developer Ecosystem’

Introduction

The crypto world boasts countless projects, with AI taking center stage. As a pervasive narrative throughout the year, AI constantly directs attention and trading decisions in the crypto market.

According to CoinGecko data, as of March this year, the total market capitalization of the entire AI sector has skyrocketed from $2.7 billion in April last year to $26.4 billion. In the past 30 days, tokens associated with AI projects have seen average increases ranging from 145% to 297%.

Expectations drive attention, yet the current AI projects in the crypto market seem to face a shortage of viable options. Established AI leaders like Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol have already undergone value discovery, becoming the last cycle’s beta. Meanwhile, promising newcomers like Ritual and Myshell, despite significant funding, are still refining their products, let alone token issuance.

Against this backdrop, comparing the “computing power, algorithms, data” trifecta of AI, currently prominent AI projects include Bittensor (TAO) in decentralized computing power and Masa Network, set to launch its mainnet and token on April 11, as the top player in decentralized data. These projects stand as leading examples in the segmented narrative of AI in the market.

Masa’s positioning with its “AI Data Chain” is also clear — dedicated to building a personal data network usable by AI, allowing users to profit from contributing their data value while safeguarding privacy through technologies like ZKP. This endeavor aims to provide vast data sources for AI and large language model networks.

Last December, we delved into Masa Network in detail in the article “Exploring the Potential of Decentralized Google: Unleashing the Dormant Value of Web3 Data.” We extensively covered Masa’s product principles and technical designs. Fast forward to today, Masa Network is experiencing its most significant catalyst in the short term — the launch of its mainnet and the $MASA token on April 11th.

After several months, with a better overall environment, what changes and progress has Masa Network itself undergone that are worth noting? In this issue, we will once again explore Masa Network, uncover key catalysts beneficial to its token, and further investigate its product updates.

The First AI Project to Land on CoinList This Year Is Expected to Attract Significant Attention

For technically complex projects, it’s helpful to first understand market expectations and positive developments that are easier to grasp. On March 7th, Masa Network debuted on CoinList and initiated its community token sale.

So far this year, CoinList Launchpad has hosted a total of 6 projects: Subsquid, zkLink, Nibrum, Meson, Masa, and Bondex, with Masa being the only AI project among them.

Simultaneously, the token allocation for the community sale was sold out within 17 minutes, with oversubscription exceeding 6.4 times.

Historically, CoinList can be seen as a litmus test for identifying the value of crypto projects to some extent. Many top-tier projects in today’s cryptocurrency market began their journey on CoinList:

For instance, Ocean Protocol, also in the AI sector, has seen roughly a 10x increase in value since its debut on CoinList. Another well-known example is Solana, which is arguably the most successful case on this Launchpad.

It’s widely acknowledged that the bull market cycle was the heyday of CoinList. Projects like SOL and FLOW, among many others, provided substantial wealth effects for users participating in their public sales. Now, amidst market fluctuations, it’s intriguing to see if Masa, buoyed by the narrative surrounding AI, can carry the torch for the new generation of wealth creation.

Transitioning from primary litmus tests to larger secondary markets is another aspect not to be overlooked. Masa has secured $18 million in funding, attracting leading overseas VCs like Anagram, DCG, and GoldenTree. With the narrative around AI and ZK technology, expectations are evidently running high.

On April 11th, the Mainnet Went Live, and the AI Business Has Been Thriving Ever Since.

Beyond market expectations, Masa Network has concrete business operations. Most cryptographic AI projects fall into two categories: those that enhance AI with cryptography and those that enhance cryptography with AI. Masa Network belongs to the former.

As is widely known, AI’s development hinges on three crucial elements: computing power, algorithms, and data. However, while previous AI+Crypto projects predominantly focused on computing power, data, as the “oil” of the AI era, is equally essential—especially at a time when critical data is held by large corporations, diverse data is scarce, and calls for data democratization are increasing.

Since 2023, there has been an explosive growth of AI developers. In an era where big data models are becoming increasingly homogeneous, controlling unique data has become a winning strategy for AI application developers. Therefore, Masa, which provides decentralized data solutions for AI, serves not only AI developers in the Web3 domain but also those in the broader technology field.

In summary, Masa, based on blockchain architecture, aims to serve the entire AI developer ecosystem encompassing “Web2+Web3” with a decentralized approach.

Specifically, Masa optimizes data collection, contribution, and value transformation to help AI access a wider, more diverse, and decentralized array of data sources. Meanwhile, data contributors can receive their fair share of profits while ensuring privacy protection.

Describing the above business operations in one sentence, Masa functions as a data market that balances privacy protection and data value, connecting AI data demanders with data contributors.

Regarding privacy protection, Masa aims to return control of personal data to users. Through its pioneering introduction of zero-knowledge Soulbound tokens (zkSBTs), you can think of it as an industry-leading encryption technology, serving as a “safe” for personal data that doesn’t record privacy. Anyone with internet access can contribute their data and passively earn rewards in the form of MASA tokens.

In terms of data value, proprietary, high-quality, and verified personal data becomes more democratized, and available for AI enterprises and large language models in need, thus adding massive and diversified data sources for AI model training.

But how does this data market, connecting both ends, actually work?

With the mainnet going live on April 11th, Masa’s current product structure has become clearer:

On the user end, you can easily contribute data to the Masa network by participating in tasks on the Masa application, browsing the internet using the Masa browser extension, or simply using products within the Masa partner ecosystem.

Furthermore, each user can become a data collector through Masa’s web browser extension.

The Masa Oracle network acts as a decentralized web data collector, seamlessly extracting text from websites, Twitter streams, authenticated websites, and more, inputting it into the database.

Therefore, the most direct mode users can feel is “contribute to earn,” with an option for actively staking their data, such as:

• All your historical activities and information within Masa Network are encrypted and protected, aggregated into your exclusive information safe, known as zkSBT.
• You can visually see this data on the Masa App and have the right to choose to “stake” some or all of this data. This implies an active form of “authorization,” meaning you agree to contribute this data, making it available for organizations with data needs, within the time frame you specify.
• For your data contribution, you’ll receive corresponding rewards, which may come in the form of Masa tokens or stablecoins.

Therefore, fundamentally, Masa turns everyone into a data contributor, and each person can become a node, more akin to being part of the AI infrastructure.

Moreover, all contribution actions have corresponding features in the product:

“Quest-to-earn”: Masa’s mobile application

“Surf-to-earn”: Masa’s browser extension

“Node-to-earn”: Become a Masa Oracle node, crawl data, and contribute unused computing power (CPU and GPU) to fulfill requests from global users and developers.

On the business side, Masa is also matching data usage demands. Developers can easily access this powerful dataset by setting up data staking pools on the Masa Network, directly rewarding users who choose to share their data. Developers can utilize this data to train “specialized” rather than “generalized” artificial intelligence models, thus creating highly personalized AI agents, AI assistants, and more.

Compared to last year’s research on Masa, the mainnet launched with new features that make large language models (LLMs) more decentralized. Masa allows anyone to easily choose from various LLMs such as phi-2, bakllava, llava, and milstra. These models can be readily deployed on user-friendly platforms like Hugging Face, enabling B-end users to download and deploy them on Oracle Node Workers immediately.

Moreover, decentralized data access enables LLMs to evaluate encrypted data in the network to draw conclusions or present results without revealing any sensitive or personal information stored in the network.

Overall, the best outcome Masa can achieve is the bidirectional matching of AI data demands and supplies. With a diverse range of products supporting the connection between C-end and B-end, Masa Network has evidently built a robust ecosystem. But has its development received market response from product refinement to mainnet launch? How are users utilizing it?

Since its launch in August 2022, Masa Network has rapidly accumulated over 1.4 million unique wallets. Behind each wallet lies a contribution of personal data, facilitated through various products and methods as mentioned earlier.

Corresponding to the wallet addresses contributing data, the number of various events captured within the Masa network has also seen a significant increase.

According to its official data dashboard, users’ activities in the crypto world, such as claiming, swapping, mining, cross-chain operations, liquidity addition, and Minting, are all meticulously recorded. Additionally, common web browsing events typically found in Web2 are also captured and continue to increase in quantity.

Indeed, the vast amount of user multi-dimensional data is crucial for supporting B-end data usage. The more data there is, the more decentralized it becomes, and the greater the variety of dimensions, the more beneficial it is for AI training.

Token Utility and Cross-Ecosystem Synergies

In the overall design of Masa, how will the MASA token be utilized?

From both the C-end and B-end perspectives, MASA can be utilized in various incentive and usage scenarios.

Firstly, it serves as an incentive for data supply: Masa incentivizes users to contribute personal data to the Masa Network. When enterprises and developers use users’ data, users can passively earn rewards in MASA.

Secondly, it is used for paying data usage fees: Enterprises and developers pay fees to access and utilize data, products, and services on the Masa Network. These fees can be paid in MASA tokens, stablecoins, and other native blockchain tokens. All fees not priced in MASA are subsequently converted into MASA tokens, with a portion being burned.

Moreover, MASA can also be used as a fee for managing personal data: Users pay MASA Gas fees on the Masa Avalanche subnetwork to mint and manage their zkSBT (a secure personal data safe), with a portion of the Gas fee being burned.

Lastly, the token can reward node operators. Masa Oracle node operators stake MASA to operate Masa’s zk-oracle nodes. Node operators receive staking rewards during the first two years of network operation. The staked tokens are locked up during the vesting period.

In terms of the economic model, based on the token allocation ratios provided by the official source, the team and private sale rounds hold the largest portion. However, there is a lock-up period of six months to one year after the public sale, followed by a linear unlocking over the next three years.

For market valuation, the value of the MASA token stems from its utility value, forming a positive feedback loop in the process of user utilization and network expansion:

As individual users contribute a vast array of diverse data — leading to more enterprises/developers adopting it — the demand for MASA increases, leading to a reduction in circulation and an increase in value. Higher economic incentives attract more users to provide data…

In addition to its utility value, another potential value of MASA comes from the “shovel effect” generated by connecting more ecosystems.

The recent announcement of a partnership with Layerzero allows for the contribution of data from different chains. This means that regardless of which blockchain ecosystem users and AI developers are in, they can use Masa, allowing users on any chain to contribute data. Thus, Masa becomes the underlying infrastructure driving data-driven AI+Crypto across the entire chain ecosystem, directly capturing the value of on-chain users and on-chain data across the entire network.

Moreover, this may lead to effects similar to Wormhole and Pyth — where anyone who has used the platform can receive airdrops and have token benefit expectations. This “golden shovel” effect may become one of the key factors in accumulating expectations for tokens in the secondary market.

Conclusion

Starting from Web3 but extending beyond it, Masa fundamentally employs a decentralized Web3 approach to serve the entire AI developer ecosystem, encompassing both Web2 and Web3:

As Masa’s co-founder, Calanthia Mei stated in an interview with Bitcoin.com, “Personal data is a digital footprint, and every online and on-chain action (browsing, posting, trading) leaves a trace.” With the development of the digital economy and Web3, personal data becomes increasingly valuable for companies to understand users and train AI models. Thus, using Web3 as a link and incentivizing data contribution and AI training with tokens, Masa Network serves as a platform that bridges the supply and demand sides of data, beyond merely speculative AI narratives.

As for how far Masa Network can go, time and the market will naturally provide answers based on value.

Backed by the top narrative of AI+Crypto, with a grand vision in mind, if successful, Masa will likely become the core infrastructure service component and data “water seller” for the global AI developer ecosystem covering both Web2 and Web3. Through this, it can build a cross-Web2+Web3 AI data chain, offering immense potential for the future, albeit undoubtedly filled with challenges.

The future always lies beyond imagination, so let’s wait and see.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [TechFlow]. Forward the Original Title ‘Masa’s “AI+Crypto” Guide: How CoinList’s First AI Project of 2024 Serves the Pan-AI Developer Ecosystem’. All copyrights belong to the original author [TechFlow]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
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