Pumping AI Data as an Asset: What to Watch as Veteran Payment Project Pundi X Enters DeAI?
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Pumping AI Data as an Asset: What to Watch as Veteran Payment Project Pundi X Enters DeAI?
By examining its operational mechanics, specific project advantages, and future roadmap, explore the opportunities and challenges ahead for Pundi AIFX and decentralized AI.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: TechFlow
As the crypto market celebrates Bitcoin breaking through $89,000, the crypto AI sector is also experiencing a broad rally.
AI, as the greatest consensus between East and West in this cycle, has seen major corporations racing to position themselves, culminating in two pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics—marking an unstoppable wave of development.
Having smarter AI equates to possessing more efficient production tools. Yet behind the hype, current AI development faces critical challenges such as rampant model copying, monopoly by computing giants, and high data costs. As a result, increasing attention is turning toward the DeAI space. Notably, Grayscale, the well-known cryptocurrency trust firm, stated in its latest report:
The convergence of crypto and AI technologies will continue to have profound impacts. Between humans, AI, and IoT devices, blockchain technology can serve as an effective tool for transferring economic value.
To address how decentralization can break through current AI bottlenecks, numerous innovators have emerged within the crypto industry:
For AI models, Bittensor aims to schedule and filter various algorithms via blockchain networks and incentive mechanisms, building a free-competition, knowledge-sharing AI algorithm (model) marketplace;
For AI computing power, Render Network seeks to establish a decentralized rendering service ecosystem enabling transactions and resource sharing between content creators and GPU providers.
On the AI data front, recent moves by veteran payment project Pundi X—launching a new brand, Pundi AI, and accelerating expansion into the DeAI arena—have sparked widespread discussion.
Reportedly, Pundi X launched Function X—an L1 payment platform built on Cosmos SDK—in 2020, followed by an L2 solution based on Function X. In August this year, with community voting support, Function X was rebranded to Pundi AIFX, and the native FX token of Function X, already listed on major exchanges, officially transitioned to AIFX at a 100:1 ratio.
As a decentralized AI data initiative, Pundi AI encompasses core products including the Pundi AIData platform, PURSE+ browser extension, Pundi AI Data Marketplace, and the omnichain Pundi AIFX layer. With the vision of democratizing AI development, it aims to realize data value ownership and return across the full lifecycle of data sharing, processing, and trading, empowering AI advancement.
Payment and AI appear to be unrelated sectors. What strategic considerations underlie Pundi’s shift toward AI? And amid fierce competition in the AI data space, what innovations does Pundi AI bring?
This article explores Pundi AIFX’s transformation journey, examining its operational logic, specific advantages, and future roadmap to uncover opportunities and challenges ahead for Pundi AIFX and decentralized AI.
Millions of Users Strong: Why Is a Veteran Payment Project Entering DeAI?
Before diving into Pundi AI, it's essential to understand its parent team, Pundi X, and their achievements in Web3 payments—to better appreciate the potential of Pundi AIFX.
Founded in 2017 as a pioneering crypto payment project, Pundi X initially focused on Southeast Asia—a fertile ground for crypto adoption. Leveraging dense populations, supportive policies, and underdeveloped financial infrastructure, Pundi X set out to build a borderless payment ecosystem. Its flagship product, the hardware payment device XPOS, enables merchants and consumers to conduct blockchain-based transactions in physical stores.
Over the years, Pundi X has continuously enhanced its offerings and expanded globally: The XPOS Web3.0 cross-chain payment function supports multiple blockchains including Bitcoin Lightning Network, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Polygon, and Avalanche. Additionally, Pundi X has partnered with leading projects like Binance Pay and TRON. Its XPOS devices are now deployed across 30+ countries in Asia, the Americas, and Europe, deeply integrated into real-world consumption scenarios, delivering millions of users across Southeast Asia and beyond with efficient, seamless, and convenient crypto payment experiences.
Talent drives success. Pundi X’s remarkable achievements in crypto payments owe much to the strategic foresight and market execution of its elite team:
Zac Cheah, CEO of Pundi X, studied at Singapore Management University, Royal Institute of Technology, and Norway’s NTNU. After graduation, he worked at Opera, gaining solid theoretical foundations and valuable industry experience.
Peko Wan serves as Co-CEO of Pundi X, holding an MBA from USC Marshall School of Business and a BA in Foreign Languages from National Sun Yat-sen University. She focuses on strategic partnerships, product development, and global deployment of Pundi X solutions.
Another key figure, Danny, holds a PhD in Law from Tsinghua University and is ACMA and CGMA certified. Having previously held product design roles at major firms like Baidu and Lenovo, Danny brings deep insights into Web3 economic model design, offering Pundi X a unique Web3 perspective.
Under the leadership of this multi-industry expert team, Pundi X has earned wide acclaim from both markets and professional institutions: It was named one of KPMG and H2 Ventures’ Top 50 Innovative Fintech Startups in 2018, recognized by Gartner as an outstanding blockchain services provider, and ranked among Singapore FinTech Association’s Top 10 Fintech Leaders in 2019.
After achieving notable success in payments, Pundi X continues to expand and transform, seeking a second growth curve.
But why choose DeAI—specifically revolutionizing data distribution—as the new direction?
The answer is clear.
From a market standpoint: Throughout this cycle, AI has become the dominant narrative shared by East and West. Crypto’s AI fever keeps rising—from AI memes to AI agents. In the foreseeable future, AI will undoubtedly remain a central theme driving rapid growth in crypto.
Equally important is Pundi X’s observation of structural issues in AI development:
We know that data fuels AI progress, yet long-standing problems persist in the AI data space—privacy breaches, monopolies by tech giants, and high costs. A few large corporations control vast amounts of high-quality data, creating formidable market barriers, resulting in severe centralized imbalances in data value.
For most AI startups, scarce and expensive access to quality data makes it difficult to build competitive advantages. For ordinary users—the actual data owners—not only is privacy at risk, but the value generated from their data is captured by big tech without fair compensation.
Having spent years in crypto, Pundi X recognizes blockchain’s unique strengths in solving these AI data pain points:
By tokenizing data, it becomes a tradable digital asset—assigning clear market value and laying the foundation for unlocking further value.
Moreover, blockchain’s decentralized architecture ensures data is traceable and immutable. This enhances data security and integrity. Whether generating, processing, transferring, or using data, blockchain honestly records every participant’s contribution and uses smart contracts for transparent reward distribution—fundamentally reshaping relationships among data owners, processors, and users in AI development.
More importantly, by introducing scientifically designed economic incentives, blockchain effectively encourages broader participation in data sharing, processing, and trading—fostering a healthy, sustainable data economy.
Notably, Pundi X’s exploration of AI isn’t starting from scratch. Before officially announcing its DeAI push, Pundi X had already engaged in multiple collaborations with AI projects and laid the foundational framework for AI development.
Social media reveals that Pundi X is consolidating all its AI products under the Pundi AI brand. This includes the next-generation AI-powered DeXPOS (a fully decentralized point-of-sale system), aiming to deliver superior AI payment experiences; Pundi AIData, focused on decentralized AI data labeling to empower data ownership and usage rights; and the underlying blockchain infrastructure Pundi AIFX for AI on-chain verification and storage.
Crucially, Pundi AIFX is not built from nothing—it evolved from Function X, an experienced Layer 1 veteran. The transformation of Function X into an AI-focused chain began in August 2024, when a community governance proposal received strong support, aiming to better facilitate chain abstraction and AI-driven DApp development.
As a veteran player in crypto payments, Pundi X possesses a massive user base, rich ecosystem resources, and deep technical expertise in bridging Web2 and Web3. How will these advantages translate into momentum for Pundi AIFX to accelerate data-empowered DeAI development?
Turning Data Into Assets: How Does Pundi AI Unlock Value and Introduce Pump-like Mechanics?
Centered on data, Pundi AI offers a one-stop suite of four decentralized products—providing services across data sharing, labeling, omnichain layers, and data trading—to drive de-monopolized, transparent, and democratized AI development. Through effective economic incentives, participants earn rewards at every stage of data contribution and circulation.
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Pundi AIData Platform
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PURSE+ Browser Extension
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Pundi AI Data Marketplace
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Pundi AIFX Omnichain Layer (formerly Function X)
At the data acquisition level, Pundi AI aims to aggregate Web2 + Web3 data to better empower DeAI.
Users can upload data—including text, images, video, audio—to the Pundi AIData platform, retaining control over what they share, enhancing privacy protection, while earning rewards to encourage active participation.
Additionally, the browser extension PURSE+ allows users to earn rewards by completing tasks such as labeling content from Web2 platforms like X (Twitter).
Both products are already live and enjoy positive community feedback. According to Pundi AIData, over 25,000 participants have used PURSE+ to label AI data on X (Twitter). In the future, PURSE+ plans to support more mainstream Web2 social platforms to attract broader user engagement and aggregate richer datasets.
Furthermore, Pundi AI is integrating with open-source AI platforms like Hugging Face for long-term collaboration, enriching Pundi AIData’s data sources. Impressively, after connecting with platforms like Hugging Face, Pundi AI will issue exclusive NFTs representing dataset copyrights to contributors, which will be claimable in the future.
That means once claimed, contributors will receive known and future earnings, royalties, and dividends generated from the dataset’s circulation, sale, and use—respecting contributors' work and incentivizing broader participation through revolutionary value redistribution.
At the data processing level, the Pundi AIData platform provides comprehensive tools designed to make data labeling simple, efficient, and accessible to all users.
Even regular users can participate in data labeling via Pundi AIData, helping meet AI training needs for precision and small-scale pre-training. Meanwhile, AI teams in need of data can create requests on the platform to attract skilled contributors.
Additionally, Pundi AIData integrates RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) to enable data processors to provide high-quality, targeted services meeting model fine-tuning requirements and original data providers’ specifications.
Through peer-to-peer data matching, everyday users gain low-barrier access to AI-related income, while data seekers obtain higher-quality data at lower cost.
At the data trading layer—where value is maximized—Pundi AIData introduces distinctive innovations.
Tokenization is the prerequisite for data monetization—and central to Pundi AIData’s “data assets and intellectual property” philosophy. Thus, at Pundi AI:
Labeled data = Intellectual Property
Data contributors can list their data on the Pundi AI Data Marketplace. Buyers can efficiently search by category and pay to download, with smart contracts distributing rewards based on data quality and usage.
In today’s era of AI tokens, Pundi AI will soon introduce a creative, Pump.fun-inspired mechanism—giving users a tangible sense of "data as asset":
Contributors can bundle their data’s ownership, usage rights, and future revenue into tradeable tokens and place them in an auction/trading pool.
Once certain trading volume and market cap thresholds are reached, the Pundi AI system automatically generates a unique virtual character or avatar for the data. No design input is required from the user. The data token is then transferred to a corresponding AMM DEX for public trading.
Throughout this process, data contributors—whether owners or labelers—earn ongoing rewards. Like Hugging Face contributors, their returns aren’t limited to past sales: as long as the data circulates and sells, contributors keep earning.
All of this rests on the foundational support of Pundi AIFX as a decentralized omnichain AI data processing layer.
Through Pundi AIFX’s chain abstraction reducing barriers for users and developers, combined with effective economic incentives, Pundi AI aims to attract global data participants permissionlessly—further advancing AI decentralization.
In Pundi AIFX’s decentralized system design, data is sent as NFTs to contracts for validation and recording. Labeled content is encrypted jointly by uploaders and contracts. Source files are uploaded to cloud or IPFS via these tools, ensuring all content is easily indexed on-chain and via associated contracts.
Data undergoes cross-validation by multiple independent and complex nodes, with all contributions and transactions faithfully recorded on-chain—greatly improving data quality and ensuring accurate reward distribution.
Additionally, since Pundi AIFX is built using the Cosmos SDK and modified to support various EVM and Cosmos-compatible chains, it seamlessly integrates with major blockchains like Ethereum, Base, BNB, and Polygon—delivering smooth cross-chain experiences.
From data upload and labeling to trading, we see Pundi AI’s sophisticated and rigorous design in realizing its DeAI vision through reimagined data value distribution. Beyond the strong market response to Pundi AIData and PURSE+, and the robust backend support from Pundi AIFX, upcoming milestones and active ecosystem partnerships further reassure the community that Pundi X’s DeAI expansion is progressing steadily and securely.
Transformation in Motion: Ecosystem Partnerships and Innovation Incubation for True Community Engagement
Since rebranding Function X to Pundi AIFX in August this year, Pundi AIFX has been intensively preparing for transformation.
Tokens are of utmost interest to the community—especially for a project like Pundi AIFX, which has never raised funds and has no intention of doing so.
We’ve seen many VC-backed projects underperform this cycle. Industrialized airdrops created impressive on-paper metrics, while large VC rounds inflated valuations. But post-launch, low liquidity and weak prices triggered strong backlash from retail users, shifting focus toward projects offering “fair participation and shared benefits.”
This is where Pundi AI stands out: with no VC funding and no plans to raise, there is no VC sell pressure. FDV equals actual circulating market cap.
The Pundi AIFX ecosystem token evolves from the original Function X token FX. Previously, FX was already listed on major exchanges like Coinbase and Upbit. Now, Pundi AIFX is implementing measures to enable seamless automatic conversion from old FX tokens to new AIFX tokens, expected in Q1 2025. The swap ratio is 100 FX = 1 AIFX.
For most wallet users, the conversion will require just one click. Meanwhile, Pundi AIFX is refining functionality and negotiating with exchanges to enable frictionless, invisible swaps.
As the utility token of the Pundi AIFX ecosystem, AIFX will serve multiple functions—such as purchasing data and rewarding contributors—expanding its use cases and intrinsic value. The seamless conversion process aims to enhance user upgrade experience.
Leveraging Pundi X’s extensive user base and partnership network, Pundi AI has established collaborations with several prominent AI projects in recent months following the rebrand announcement.
In August, Pundi AIFX announced a partnership with Oraclus, an AI-powered on-chain analytics platform, to provide deeper analytical tools and strengthen its strategy of building a user-centric AI ecosystem.
In September, Pundi AI partnered with Futureverse, an AI and metaverse company, to build an omnichain AI data layer on Pundi AIFX. This enables Futureverse creators and consumers to mint AI data tokens for their works and brings Futureverse and The Root Network communities onto Pundi AIFX’s SocialFi platform Purse+, advancing innovation in DeFi, metaverse payments, and AI data.
In October, Pundi AIFX announced a strategic partnership with Nubila Network, integrating Nubila’s rich environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data into the Pundi AIData platform. This enhances Pundi AIFX’s services for climate-affected industries such as agriculture, energy, and logistics. As Pundi AI’s product suite matures, more ecosystem collaborations are underway.
Beyond bringing quality projects via partnerships, Pundi AI is actively launching ecosystem incentives to discover and nurture next-gen AI innovators. The ongoing AI PitchFest is a powerful testament.
Co-hosted by Pundi AI, Woo Innovation Hub, and The Generative Beings, the judging panel includes Dr. Lunwei Gu from Academia Sinica, Dr. Yi-Chieh Wu from National Chengchi University, Shivang Gupta (Founder of The Generative Beings), Alex (Head of AI at Woo Innovation Hub), Ian Chong (Lead, Developer Ecosystem at Circle), and Zac Cheah (Founder of Pundi AI). Submissions are evaluated based on innovation, market potential, scalability, and technical feasibility.
The event drew enthusiastic global participation. After thorough evaluation by experts across market, technology, team, and project quality dimensions, six teams advanced to the finals: ChemT Biotechnology, Cynthia Systems, OmniSkills Pte. Ltd., AI Square, KanjuTech, and IsCoolLab Co., Ltd.
These six teams will continue competing through online presentations. Winners will be announced after the final round and receive up to $100,000 in resources plus a six-month incubation program, including mentorship, increased ecosystem exposure, industry introductions, and full technical support to accelerate growth.
While ecosystem initiatives advance steadily, the tech and product team is set to achieve multiple breakthroughs in the coming months:
According to Pundi AIFX’s published roadmap, in Q4 2024, the Pundi AIFX data layer will connect to EVM or Cosmos-compatible chains, launch the beta version of Pundi AIData, alpha version of the Pundi AI Market, testing version of data labeling tools, and introduce the “Tag-to-Earn” model.
In Q1 2025, the highly anticipated AI Market and referral program will launch, along with the AI Market reward and权益 pools, delivering a complete data asset yield experience. Additionally, the Pundi AIFX data layer will continue expanding integrations with more L1/L2 networks.
Conclusion
In today’s digital age, data is an eternal business.
Recognizing the pain points in AI data development, Pundi AI leverages its strong technical capabilities, extensive experience, and industry resources to offer users and developers easier, cheaper, and more rewarding ways to engage with AI—driving de-monopolized, transparent, and democratized AI progress.
Beyond transforming data value into data assets, Pundi AI introduces innovative ways to interact with these assets. Community discussions show strong anticipation for the upcoming AI data asset tokens with Pump.fun-like mechanics.
Certainly, brand expansion is challenging—requiring not only choosing the right赛道 but also overcoming market perceptions. As a decentralized project, maintaining open communication with the community is crucial. Yet each cycle brings new narratives and conditions. By integrating DeAI into its ecosystem while sustaining growth in its core crypto payment business, Pundi X not only attracts community engagement and maintains vitality but also builds long-term competitiveness—with broad community backing secured through governance votes.
Notably, thanks to its sophisticated decentralized AI framework addressing key data layer challenges, Pundi AI may soon extend into computing power. Its Gitbook already outlines visions for a decentralized compute market. Such signals of deep commitment to the AI market, coupled with steady transformation progress and roadmap execution, could propel Pundi AI into a thriving new phase in this cycle.
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