Can Sahara AI, which raised $43 million, build a true "AI Chain"?
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Can Sahara AI, which raised $43 million, build a true "AI Chain"?
Up to 780,000 applicants applied for the first testnet round, but only 10,000 were ultimately selected.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
The winding yet magnificent year of 2024 for cryptocurrency is coming to an end, and 2025 is already beckoning us. Major crypto institutions including Coinbase, a16z, VanEck, and Messari have all placed bets on AI becoming one of the key themes next year.
Beyond the AI Agents and AI Meme coins that led market trends in the second half of the year, a series of high-quality projects in the AI sector are gradually attracting significant market attention. Among them, Sahara AI—previously raising a total of $43 million and recently launching Phase One of its testnet—has become a recent market focal point. According to official updates today, the 2024–2025 roadmap has been released, with the mainnet scheduled to launch in Q3 2025.
Odaily Planet Daily will provide a comprehensive introduction to this project in this article, helping readers understand this star project positioned as a "decentralized AI blockchain platform" committed to building an AI Chain.
Overview of Sahara Project: $43 Million Raised, Star Team + Renowned Investors
As previously introduced, Sahara AI is a decentralized artificial intelligence network that enables everyone to leverage their knowledge capital to discover opportunities for monetization and automation through AI. Its initial core products include the Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data.
In August this year, Sahara AI announced a new round of funding led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Siam Commercial Bank, Dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, and Mirana Ventures. The new funds will be used to further expand its global team, enhance the performance of its AI blockchain, and accelerate the development of its developer ecosystem. This was Sahara AI’s Series A round, raising approximately $43 million in total. At the time, due to the project being in its early stages, we provided a brief walkthrough of potential interactions in our article “Hands-on Guide to Interacting with Binance Labs’ Top Five Investments in August.”
The Sahara Team: Top-Tier Talent from Both Crypto and AI Industries
According to official website information, the Sahara AI team includes Sean Ren (@xiangrenNLP), Professor of AI at the University of Southern California and Chair of the Viterbi Center, who previously worked at AI2, Snapchat, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Tyler Zhou (@tz_sahara), former Investment Director at Binance Labs; and several other key members with elite academic backgrounds responsible for product, operations, ecosystem development, and community management.
Sahara AI Team Roster
Following the August funding round, He Yi, co-founder of Binance, directly expressed her expectations and confidence in Sahara's future development, stating: "I look forward to Sahara AI leading the way in building a decentralized AI blockchain platform, reshaping the future of AI to make it more transparent, secure, and accessible to all."
Notably, on December 20th this month, Sahara AI hosted an AMA session with technical staff from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, discussing outlooks for AI development in 2025. The discussion leaned heavily toward technical exploration and industry research, with relatively light crypto elements—highlighting a marketing approach distinct from other DeAI projects and conveying the impression that "we're seriously building something at the intersection of AI and blockchain, not just telling stories." Previously, the project also announced it had achieved SOC 2 compliance (SOC 2 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification), emphasizing the importance of enhancing security, availability, and confidentiality in AI development.
Recent AMA Session by Sahara AI
Inside Sahara AI: Building a Human-AI Collaboration Network
Based on information from Sahara AI’s official whitepaper and documentation, the project focuses primarily on the following aspects—
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Self-positioning: A decentralized blockchain platform for an open, fair, and collaborative AI economy;
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Core concept: "Artificial Intelligence Assets"—ownership and management protocols for private AI resources such as personal data and proprietary models;
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Target audience: AI developers, data providers, and other stakeholders, including both individual (C-end) and enterprise (B-end) users, as well as participants in AI asset trading;
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Service offerings: Covering data collection and labeling, model training and services, AI agent creation and deployment, multi-agent communication, AI asset trading, and crowdsourcing of AI resources.
User Journey on Sahara Blockchain
Currently, Sahara AI primarily focuses on the "data" component among the three pillars of AI (computing power, algorithms, data)—specifically, enhancing AI model performance through collecting, refining, and labeling datasets. Going forward, as developer tools and data service platforms continue to evolve, Sahara AI plans to launch an AI asset marketplace and AI market, enabling developers, users, and enterprises to form a closed-loop "AI economy."
Project Progress: Phase One of Testnet Live, Mainnet Launch Scheduled for Q3 2025
On December 19th, Sahara AI officially announced the launch of Phase One of its testnet, selecting 10,000 participants from nearly 800,000 applicants. The primary tasks involve check-ins and data labeling to contribute to the construction of the data services platform. The official stated this initiative aims to encourage user participation in knowledge contribution and early rewards acquisition.
This afternoon, Sahara AI published its 2024–2025 project roadmap, which includes the following key milestones:
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Q4 2024: Launch Phase One of the testnet via the data services platform—now live; Phase Two will begin in Q1 2025.
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Q1 2025: Launch the AI Market, introduce limited access to developer tools, and expand the data services platform.
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Q2 2025: Release Sahara Studio—an integrated suite simplifying AI development—including model training kits, model deployment kits, and model orchestration tools.
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Q3 2025: Launch the Sahara Chain mainnet, providing on-chain infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale decentralized AI applications.
Latest Roadmap of Sahara AI
For specific product roadmaps, Sahara AI’s official website provides detailed planning, as shown in the image below:
Sahara Product Planning Diagram
According to official website data, the Sahara AI ecosystem currently includes 200,000 AI trainers, over 35 enterprise clients, and more than 3 million data annotations.
Current Statistics on Official Website
Latest Interaction Guide: Testnet Engagement + Application for Testnet Phase Two
Participants selected for Phase One of the Sahara AI testnet can now engage through the following steps to earn corresponding point rewards:
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Visit http://app.saharalabs.ai to create a profile;
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Go to https://faucet.saharaa.info to claim SAH test tokens;
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Complete various tasks on the data services dashboard to earn Sahara Points (SP) or Experience Points (EXP);
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For more details, refer to the task requirements page: https://docs.saharalabs.ai/data-services-page.
It should be noted that since data labeling quality is highly emphasized, users who submit random or low-quality answers repeatedly may face restrictions or even disqualification from the testnet—so please proceed with caution.
Data Services Dashboard Preview
Additionally, the waitlist registration link for Testnet Phase Two is: https://hi.saharalabs.ai/get-started.
Conclusion: Can Sahara AI Build an 'AI Oasis' in the Desert?
Finally, Sahara AI has repeatedly emphasized its mission to build an AI Chain centered around the concept of an "AI economy." At a time when countless crypto projects treat AI merely as a meme label, this ambition stands out as bold and exploratory. Whether Sahara AI can cultivate an "AI oasis" for AI users and developers amid today’s barren cryptographic landscape may soon be answered by the project itself.
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