Imitate others, what would be the effect of another merger in the SingularityNET ecosystem?

Original Author: Frank, PANews

On October 15th, SingularityDAO, Cogito Finance, and SelfKey announced plans to merge and form a new project called Singularity Finance (SFI), focusing on the tokenization of the artificial intelligence (AI) economy. According to the introduction, this new entity will provide a Layer 2 network for tokenizing assets such as GPUs and offering AI-driven financial tools.

This message has caused some confusion for many people. SingularityNET had already completed a merger in June this year, so why is the merger news being brought up again? In fact, in June, SingularityNET completed similar mergers with AI projects such as Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol. It's unknown whether SingularityNET has found the benefits of mergers, leading its ecosystem project SingularityDAO to follow suit this time.

SingularityNET, SingularityDAO, Singularity, I can't tell the difference.

Perhaps because the word Singularity is strongly correlated with technology, many projects are willing to use this word as their name. This also leads to confusion in the field of encryption, as there are three projects: SingularityNET, SingularityDAO, and Singularity, which are difficult to distinguish.

In fact, SingularityNET has a strong connection with SingularityDAO, while Singularity is an instant payment solution for Web3 games from India, which is not related to SingularityNET and SingularityDAO.

In simple terms, SingularityNET is a decentralized artificial intelligence platform and marketplace that allows developers and companies to share, create, sell, or purchase AI services. SingularityDAO, on the other hand, is a key project within the SingularityNET ecosystem that focuses on the integration of decentralized finance (DeFi) and AI technology.

SingularityNET was founded in 2017 and completed a first token issuance of 36 million USD in the same year. Subsequently, the project's token AGIX was launched in 2018, with a current market capitalization of approximately 7.5 billion USD.

On March 27, 2024, Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol announced the final protocol for merging tokens, creating the largest open-source independent body in the field of artificial intelligence research and development: the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance. The alliance has already been established, and in July, the original three projects will migrate from FET, OCEAN, and AGIX tokens to the new ASI token.

On October 15th, SingularityDAO, a project within the SingularityNET ecosystem, announced its merger with Cogito Finance and SelfKey to form a Layer 2 network centered around AI. The newly merged project is named Singularity Finance.

Can merging 1+ 1+ 1>3?

Projects merging into the ecosystem from the main network have also begun to embark on the path of merging, making people curious whether the merged projects can really bring about a 1+1+1>3 effect. Here, we will focus on the performance of the already merged Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol.

First of all, in terms of token performance, the market capitalization of SingularityNET's token AGIX was approximately $1.52 billion before the merger, while Fetch.ai token FET had a market capitalization of approximately $2.97 billion. Ocean Protocol token OCEAN had a market capitalization of approximately $673 million. As of March 27th before the merger, the total market capitalization of the three projects was approximately $5.163 billion. After the announcement of the merger, the market capitalization of the new token ASI (currently still coded as FET) reached $6.3 billion at one point. From the perspective of token market performance, the effect of 1+1+1>3 has indeed been achieved.

On September 11, 2024, the ASI Alliance announced the inclusion of the global distributed computing network CUDOS as part of its integration. As part of the integration, CUDOS Token (CUDOS) will be merged into the ASI Alliance Token (FET). On September 27, CUDOS officially started the token migration.

However, from the overall operation of ASI, the current merger is still in the Token merger stage, and the four projects seem to still be operating independently. According to the official website, after the Token merger, ASI network deployment and upgrading will be carried out, but the progress of this is currently shown as pending. As of October 16, the Market Cap of ASI Token is about 3.5 billion US dollars, which has decreased by nearly half since the merger. The official documentation states that the merger of Tokens is a prerequisite for the three ecosystems to achieve greater interoperability.

In addition, it seems that the merger has not brought real prosperity to these projects. Taking Ocean Protocol as an example, according to tokenterminal data, as of October 15th, the daily active users of this network are only 109. From the chart, the daily active users of this project once exceeded 7000 in June, and then declined all the way. Due to lack of data statistics, the specific network activity of the other two projects is unknown. Under SingularityNET's social media, many users commented on the alliance's lack of specific products and questioned it, for example, 'Create a product first, I don't even know why I invested in this.'

What will SingularityDAO create by following the same pattern?

Unlike the grand narrative of the merger with SingularityNET (creating a Decentralization AI infrastructure), SingularityDAO, formerly focused on Decentralized Finance protocol, plans to build an AI-based EVM Layer 2 after merging with Cogito Finance and SelfKey, for the tokenization of Real-World Assets (RWA) in the AI economy. According to official plans, the integration will transform SelfKey's existing token KEY into Singularity Finance's new token SFI. SingularityDAO's SDAO and Cogito's CGV will be merged into SFI at a ratio of 1:80.353 and 1:10.89 respectively.

However, this merger seems to have not generated much market expectation. Benchmark's Token KEY did not rise rapidly after the news came out, but instead fell all the way. On October 16th, it fell by 5.48% in a single day.

The three projects involved in this merger, SingularityDAO, previously focused primarily on the Decentralized Finance field, SelfKey, based on a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity ecosystem, and Cogito Protocol, an artificial intelligence-based RWA protocol. From a narrative perspective, the merger of these three has created a Layer 2 focused on the RWA track based on an AI system, which can be said to cater to the hot topic of the current mainstream narrative.

Looking back at the past experiences in the encryption field, mergers are relatively rare.

Looking at these two merger activities in the SingularityNET system, most of the participating projects were established before 2022, and most of them are 'old projects' from 2017 to 2018. With the development of the industry, the attention of most 'old projects' gradually drops in this round of Bull Market, and the difficulty of financing also increases. By merging to create a brand new project, not only can the strengths of various parties be integrated, but also better cater to market preferences.

Therefore, merging this path may be an innovative solution for 'old projects' facing the same dilemma. However, the ultimate goal of the merger is still worth observing: is it to create a more meaningful product, or is it just to achieve a 1+1+1>3 effect in TokenMarket Cap and narrative?