OKX Ventures Monthly Investment Report: The potential of Crypto + AI is enormous, with investments already made in multiple projects including iO.NET and Myshell.
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OKX Ventures Monthly Investment Report: The potential of Crypto + AI is enormous, with investments already made in multiple projects including iO.NET and Myshell.
A Deep Dive into OKX Ventures' Investment Activities from January to February 2024: Investment Rationale and Innovative Projects
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights
With the widespread adoption of the internet and the acceleration of digitalization, massive amounts of data have become easier to access and utilize. At the same time, advancements in cloud computing and distributed computing technologies have made processing this data more accessible and cost-effective. This has provided richer resources for training and optimizing AI models, enabling the development of smarter and more complex systems, thereby driving progress in the AI sector—particularly in areas such as deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.
Over the past year, the AI field has exploded, led by breakthroughs from ChatGPT and NVIDIA. For instance, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months—the fastest user growth rate in internet history. Additionally, its recently launched text-to-video product, Sora, has drawn significant market attention, sparking a wave of interest in AI-generated video. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's net profit surged 581% year-on-year in 2023, with its stock price soaring from over $100 per share at the beginning of the year to more than $800 today, adding over a trillion dollars in market value. Furthermore, OpenAI’s founder is reportedly seeking to raise $7 trillion for chip development, and new AI startups continue to emerge at a rapid pace.
Against this backdrop, the AI boom is now spreading into the crypto industry. OKX Ventures believes that AI and crypto are naturally complementary. Crypto can play a crucial role in addressing challenges related to decentralized computing power, data ownership, transparency in AI, and model training and inference. Currently, Crypto + AI is emerging as one of the most exciting frontiers of innovation.
Wide-Ranging Applications of Crypto + AI
According to OKX Ventures, there is currently a large global community of developers and researchers actively advancing AI technology, forming a vast and dynamic ecosystem. The emergence and collaboration of these talents have continuously driven innovation and progress in AI. In particular, the Crypto + AI sector is becoming the most promising alpha opportunity within this market cycle.
The most direct use case of crypto lies in assetizing key production elements in AI applications—such as AI agents, decentralized computing power, and data—which are prime candidates for early assetization and rapid growth.
In the area of AI agents, OKX Ventures identifies three major innovation directions. First is the intelligence and agency of assets—enabling assets to act autonomously and interactively, expanding their utility and value. Second is interoperability between agents—establishing standards and frameworks so different AI agents can efficiently communicate and collaborate, enhancing overall ecosystem performance. Third is the creation of a new agent-based economy—leveraging the integration of AI and blockchain to pioneer novel economic models where AI agents play pivotal roles in content creation, financial services, and beyond. A representative example is MyShellAI, which allows players worldwide to train their own AI agents from game clips, thereby creating a new on-chain Agent Economy. This signals the emergence of a new economic system where AI agents not only participate in content creation and gaming interactions but also function as independent economic entities, fostering the growth of creator economies and deeper AI integration within crypto.
Regarding decentralized computing power, solutions such as secure multi-party computation (SMPC), differential privacy, and federated learning address the demands of large-scale AI model training and inference. While facing technical challenges, decentralized compute shows greater near-term potential in inference. io.net demonstrates how token incentives combined with hardware aggregation can reduce resource costs while maintaining economic efficiency, offering ML teams highly scalable GPU resources. Decentralized compute networks will continue evolving and may provide viable solutions for large-scale AI training and inference.
On the data front, OKX Ventures highlights decentralized AI data markets, data incentive mechanisms, and privacy protection with data rights enforcement. In decentralized AI data markets, transactions gain transparency, immutability, and traceability, while smart contracts automate trade execution and revenue distribution, improving market efficiency. Data incentive mechanisms use tokenized rewards to encourage contributions of data and computational resources, promoting self-sustaining ecosystem growth. Privacy and data ownership are safeguarded through cryptographic techniques like zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring users retain full control over their data. Together, these trends advance decentralized AI technologies, fostering a safer, more efficient, and equitable digital economy. For example, 0xScope has fine-tuned a crypto industry-specific model using on-chain and blockchain industry data, generating practical utility.
In summary, the Crypto + AI space has spawned numerous sub-sectors across multiple layers: infrastructure (model training, data, decentralized compute, hardware), models (AI agents, ZKML, FHE), applications (metaverse, gaming, AIGC, memes), and blockchain components (RAAS, oracles, coprocessors, UBI). Projects at the infrastructure and application layers are developing rapidly, including Io.net (compute), Flock (foundation models), ZeroGravity (blockchain infrastructure), MyShell (AI agents), and 0xScope (applications).
A Snapshot of OKX Ventures’ AI Investments
Currently, OKX Ventures has invested in numerous innovative projects in the Crypto + AI space, providing comprehensive support beyond capital—including technical guidance, community engagement, and strategic resource alignment.
0xScope
• Project Overview
￮ 0xScope is the AI data layer for Web3, focusing on providing datasets for Agent training and knowledge bases to support Agent operations. To date, most mainstream Web3 AI DApps rely on 0xScope’s data services.
• Project Highlights
￮ 0xScope has launched analytical products such as ScopeVC and ScopeScan. It has accumulated over 500,000 total users to date.
￮ Based on its robust data foundation, 0xScope introduced ScopeChat—a Web3 AI Q&A Agent that is currently the only analytics agent capable of answering both real-time general knowledge and on-chain data queries. ScopeChat has already been integrated into OKX Wallet, serving over 500,000 users with DAU exceeding 10,000 (excluding sybil users).
￮ Next, 0xScope plans to collaborate with Ritual, Flashbots, and Chainlink to build a universal decentralized Web3 AI Agent, aiming to lower the entry barrier for Web3 usage.
￮ Overall, 0xScope has evolved through five stages: data analysis tool → data infrastructure → AI-powered data analytics → AI data infrastructure → general-purpose Agent, consistently deepening its moat around high-quality data. The team continuously explores market needs and technological evolution, experimenting proactively and receiving strong market validation.
Flock
• Project Overview
￮ Flock is an innovative end-to-end AI co-creation platform that integrates decentralized machine learning onto the blockchain. It redefines the processes of AI model training, fine-tuning, and inference, allowing the public to contribute knowledge and enrich AI models—all while preserving privacy. Flock’s vision is to democratize AI through three pillars: community-owned models, privacy-preserving data, and decentralized computation. The platform encourages diverse AI models—from intelligent agents to sophisticated trading and aggregation bots—ushering in a new era of accessible AI tools.
• Project Highlights
￮ Key features include community-owned models, privacy-protected data, and decentralized compute. Flock leverages cutting-edge technologies such as federated learning, zkFL, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation (SMPC) to protect user data privacy, and uses decentralized computing power to train and fine-tune AI models. Moreover, Flock encourages community participation in model expansion and refinement via its co-creation platform and supports decentralized model training and verification by offering a federated learning client to developers—all while upholding its commitment to data privacy.
￮ Flock addresses limitations of centralized AI models—including restricted access, model bias, and unfair compensation for data contributors. Through decentralized learning, local models are trained on decentralized nodes and synchronized with the global model, ensuring user data remains securely on-device. Flock further enhances privacy with zkFL, homomorphic encryption, and SMPC, and implements transparent, immutable governance of the entire training process via blockchain.
￮ These features enable Flock to realize decentralized machine learning and solve systemic issues caused by centralized AI control.
Zero Gravity
• Project Overview
￮ ZeroGravity (0G) is the first data availability system with a built-in universal storage layer, featuring exceptional scalability and decentralization. It achieves scalability by splitting the data availability workflow into two channels: a data publishing channel and a data storage channel. High-volume data transfer occurs on the storage channel supported by a horizontally scalable storage layer designed with careful partitioning, while the data publishing channel ensures data availability through data availability sampling consensus—requiring only minimal data flow via the consensus protocol, thus avoiding broadcast bottlenecks.
￮ ZeroGravity’s current product suite includes the Data Availability Layer (0G DA) and the Storage Layer (0G Storage).
• Project Highlights
￮ 0G DA (Data Availability): The 0G DA system is a scalable data availability (DA) service layer built directly atop a decentralized storage system. By minimizing the volume of data required for broadcasting, it solves scalability issues. Its generalized decentralized storage design enables support for various types of availability data from diverse scenarios—not limited to Layer 2 networks but also extending to decentralized AI infrastructure. 0G DA focuses on delivering data availability guarantees with both high security and high throughput.
￮ 0G Storage (Storage Layer): The 0G storage layer consists of a storage network connected to a separate consensus network. Each storage node participates in mining by submitting accessibility proofs of specific data to smart contracts deployed on the consensus network. Upon successful verification, nodes receive corresponding rewards. Partitioning is enabled by offering higher rewards to nodes storing specific data within the same partition. This incentive-based mechanism rewards contributions rather than penalizing misbehavior, encouraging broader network participation and better practical scalability. 0G Storage is also designed as a general-purpose storage system with multiple abstraction layers, including an append-only log layer for archiving unstructured data and a key-value layer for managing mutable and structured data—enabling reliable data indexing and supporting a wider variety of availability data types from Layer 2 and AI applications.
MyShell
• Project Overview
￮ MyShell emerged from deep reflection on the closed-source model ecosystems prevalent in current AI development. MyShell envisions a fair and open AI ecosystem—a space where every participant can find their value. The project advocates for AI democratization, supporting an AI industry centered on open-source models, stimulating ecosystem vitality and innovation through comprehensive incentive mechanisms, ensuring creators and users are fairly compensated for their data and creations, and allowing users and developers to freely choose among different AI models without fear of dependency or monopolization—including choices involving decentralized compute and storage.
• Project Highlights
￮ Support for open-source models and an open, compatible development platform: MyShell promotes AI industry growth by centering on open-source models and enabling multi-contributor-driven technological advancement. Creators can invoke different models and external APIs using a unified method, while third-party model and API providers can integrate their services into the platform for developer use—lowering the barrier to innovation.
￮ Ecosystem incentives and value redistribution: Ensures creators and users are fairly rewarded for their data and creations through transparent distribution mechanisms. A transparent reward system equitably distributes benefits to all ecosystem contributors—including model providers, app developers, users, and investors—maximizing innovation and contribution through comprehensive incentives.
￮ Application creation and distribution platform: An app store that helps creators publish and manage AI applications, allowing them to track trending AI apps and purchase ads to promote their work.
￮ Freedom of choice: Allows users and developers to freely select different AI models and decentralized compute and storage options, avoiding reliance on any single model or technology and preventing potential monopolies.
￮ Currently, MyShell has 14.9k stars and 1.3k forks on GitHub, with peak daily active users exceeding 100k, making it one of the most active communities in the AI + Crypto space.
io.net
• Project Overview
￮ io.net is an advanced decentralized computing network built on Solana, designed to allow machine learning engineers to access distributed cloud cluster resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional centralized services. By aggregating underutilized GPU resources from independent data centers, crypto miners, and crypto projects like Filecoin and Render, io.net creates a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) that provides engineers with abundant computing power. This system is highly efficient and easy to implement, meeting a wide range of task requirements—from preprocessing and distributed training to hyperparameter tuning, reinforcement learning, and model serving.
• Project Highlights
￮ io.net is an advanced decentralized computing network on Solana, enabling machine learning engineers to access distributed cloud clusters at extremely low costs. The platform aims to integrate one million GPUs into a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), delivering large-scale computing power that surpasses traditional centralized services in cost-efficiency, customization, and ease of deployment.
￮ Cost Efficiency: By leveraging underutilized resources such as GPUs from independent data centers and crypto miners, io.net offers computing costs up to 90% lower than traditional cloud providers like AWS.
￮ Fast Access and Deployment: Compared to traditional cloud providers, io.net users can access and deploy clusters within 90 seconds, without undergoing cumbersome KYC procedures or signing long-term contracts.
￮ Flexibility and Control: io.net offers high flexibility and user control, supporting a wide range of GPU and CPU options—including NVIDIA RTX series, AMD Ryzen series, and Apple M2 chips with unparalleled neural engines.
￮ Optimized for Machine Learning: Built on the ray.io machine learning framework, io.net supports a broad spectrum of ML workloads—from reinforcement learning and deep learning to tuning and model serving—meeting the needs of machine learning engineers.
￮ Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN): As the first and only GPU DePIN, io.net connects computing power providers and users, solving the issue of underused GPU capacity. By aggregating underutilized GPUs from independent data centers, crypto miners, and projects like Filecoin and Render, io.net combines these resources into a DePIN, giving engineers access to vast computing capabilities.
￮ io.net supports batch inference, model serving, parallel training, parallel hyperparameter tuning, reinforcement learning, and more, aiming to deliver general-purpose computing services for Python workloads. Since its debut at the Solana Hackathon in February 2023 and the Solana Austin Hacker House, io.net has demonstrated powerful functionality and efficiency in providing distributed GPU networks for training and inference workflows for ML teams.
Diverse Empowerment: OKX Ventures Will Continue Supporting Crypto + AI Innovation
Crypto + AI will play a pivotal role in shaping the digital future, endowing services and products with higher levels of intelligence and accelerating digitization and smart transformation across industries. For example, intelligent investment, risk management, and anti-fraud systems will enhance the intelligence of financial services, reducing risks and improving efficiency—bringing greater convenience and opportunities to society.
Technological innovation in AI is evolving rapidly, with new algorithms, models, and applications continuously emerging, unlocking immense market potential across healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing, and other sectors. In particular, the integration and innovation of Crypto + AI bring more efficient, secure, and intelligent transactions and services to the crypto industry, driving the development and adoption of cryptocurrency technologies, while also opening new application scenarios and opportunities for AI.
As a frontline industry participant, OKX Ventures will continue to focus on innovative intersections between AI and crypto, adopting a pragmatic yet forward-looking strategy to actively contribute to market development and support high-potential innovators and entrepreneurs.
Although the current AI token market may contain speculative bubbles, OKX Ventures’ long-term goal is to move beyond this phase—focusing on identifying and investing in projects that deliver genuine technological innovation, solve real-world problems in AI, and can sustainably thrive in the market. We firmly believe that only those AI + Crypto projects with technological breakthroughs and substantial value creation will achieve true success and sustainable growth in the future.
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