AI is on the rise again. Here are five small-cap AI projects worth paying attention to.

As Bitcoin has recently come out of the decline, the decentralized AI sector has also begun to pick up.

According to CoinGecko data, the overall market value of decentralized AI rose by 17.7% last week to $30.7 billion.

In addition to the impact of the overall recovery of the market, decentralized AI is also expected to benefit from the following potential benefits:

· Trump's deputy Vance supports open source AI: On July 16, former US President Donald Trump announced the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election. Vance's fierce experience can be seen in this article " Trump's hand-picked running mate J.D. Vance is not simple, Silicon Valley VC+crypto ally "Buff" blessing ". Interestingly, he is not only a crypto industry supporter who holds Bitcoin, but also very concerned about the development of artificial intelligence. In a post on March 4 this year, he pointed out that open source is a way to solve the bias in AI systems. This call coincides with the concept of decentralized AI. If he is successfully elected as the next vice president of the United States, there may be relevant favorable policies.

· Grayscale Decentralized AI New Fund: On July 17, Grayscale announced the launch of a new decentralized AI fund, Grayscale Decentralized AI Fund LLC. Mainstream investors can now gain exposure to decentralized AI projects by purchasing traditional securities. The emergence of such funds may attract more funds and attention into the field of decentralized AI and promote the development of the entire industry. Currently, the project tokens in the fund's basket include Bittensor ($TAO), Filecoin ($FIL), Livepeer ($LPT), Near ($NEAR) and Render ($RNDR).

· AI's Super Cycle: Hedge fund Coatue's understanding of macro and cycles has always been far superior to its peers. In this year's Investor Deck , they still firmly believe that AI may trigger a growth curve that is larger and steeper than any previous cycle, the so-called "super cycle." On July 17, Anthropic, the company that developed the Claude chatbot, completed another round of financing of over $750 million that has not yet been announced. On July 18, OpenAI announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence model, GPT-4o mini. Every major news released by the traditional AI industry is adding fuel to the hype of the decentralized AI narrative.

Although decentralized AI has emerged this year, it has not yet been recognized by mainstream centralized exchanges. The only decentralized AI project listed on Binance this year is the leading project Bittensor. Many good decentralized AI targets are not listed on the market due to their small market value, so it is still most convenient to buy them on the chain. BlockBeats has sorted out some small-cap decentralized AI projects that have rebounded well recently and aroused community discussion. Readers are advised to keep an eye on them in the case of a strong market outlook:

Node AI ($GPU)

Price: $1.09, a 7-day increase of 76.4%

Market value: $108 million

Node AI is a GPU computing power rental project on Ethereum. There are currently 567 GPUs on the platform, with a total rental time of 24,000 hours. $GPU holders can share the rental income of the platform by staking tokens. Currently, Node AI is building an L1 blockchain designed for task allocation between nodes. It is worth noting that Node AI is a community project with a fair launch, and the team operation relies on transaction commissions (5% transaction tax) and income generated by GPU leasing. On June 22, Node AI ($GPU) was listed on MEXC.

Virtuals Protocol ($VIRTUAL)

Price: $0.06, 7-day increase of 87.5%

Market value: $61.55 million

Virtuals Protocol is an AI agent protocol on the Base chain that aims to provide game developers with a seamless plug-and-play AI agent solution. This project previously launched an Audio-to-Animation (A2A) subnet on Bittensor, but it has now been removed by Bittensor due to poor quality of generated content. Of course, this does not mean that this project is not good.

In addition to the conventional business of building better AI agents and cooperating with more games, Virtuals Protocol also plans to launch two noteworthy project developments: Simulation World and Initial Agent Offering (IAO):

The idea of the simulated world is to allow on-chain AI to trade autonomously, and for this purpose, Virtuals Protocol launched 100 AI Lands for free minting 5 days ago. No more details have been revealed yet, but it looks very imaginative.

IAO is an innovation that combines Ora Protocol's IMO and Bittensor's Dynamic TAO. Under the IAO mechanism, anyone can create a new AI agent by locking 50,000 $VIRTUAL tokens and obtain the initial shares of this new AI agent ($agent token). Others can obtain $agent tokens by contributing to improving the AI agent and share the income generated by this new AI agent. In addition, LPs of the top three $agent token pools can obtain $VIRTUAL token emissions from the Virtuals Protocol treasury.

Qubic ($QUBIC)

Price: $0.0000024, 46% increase in 7 days

Market value: $261 million

Qubic is an AI public chain that uses the UPoW (Useful Proof of Work) consensus mechanism, initiated by Sergey Ivancheglo (https://twitter.com/c___f___b) , the founder of IOTA and NXT. This project has two layers of buffs, "mining coins" and "AI". For more details, please refer to " Old mining coin QUBIC transforms into an AI public chain, far more than the next KAS ".

Spectral ($SPEC)

Price: $8.38, 7-day increase of 40.2%

Market value: $88.28 million (actually only $42.73 million)

Spectral is a platform designed to empower smart contracts with learning and decision-making capabilities, and provides an environment to generate autonomous on-chain agents.

Spectral's products include:

· Spectral Syntax: A tool that converts natural language intent into executable code, enabling users to create on-chain agents.

· Spectral Nova: A decentralized network that provides AI reasoning directly to smart contracts.

The two products are integrated through Inferchain, a universal layer between agents.

It is worth noting that Spectral's investor lineup is very dazzling, including Polychain, Galaxy, ParaFi, Circle, Jump, Gradient, Franklin Templeton, Samsung, etc. Team members also come from companies such as Coinbase, Loopring, Scroll, etc., and have served in senior positions, partners and advisors, including developers.

The circulation of $SPEC shown on CoinGecko is 10.52 million, but the actual circulation is actually only half of that. First, the token shares of investors and teams have a one-year cliff, that is, there is no selling pressure from insiders before June 5, 2025. Secondly, the $SPEC tokens in circulation on the market are either airdropped or used for market making. Because Spectral's airdrop range is extremely wide, many people don't know that they have airdropped. The current airdrop application volume is only 2.58 million, less than 32.3% of the total airdrop of 8 million, and it may remain at this level for a long time. Therefore, $SPEC still has 5.42 million airdropped tokens that have not entered circulation, and the actual circulation volume is only 5.1 million, and the market value is correspondingly only half of the apparent market value, that is, 42.73 million US dollars.

Zero1 Labs ($DEAI)

Price: $0.2875, 7-day increase of 33.9%

Market value: $28.04 million

Zero1 Labs aims to create an open and inclusive DeAI ecosystem, providing developers with a platform for building, distributing and monetizing AI applications.

Zero1 Labs' products include:

· Keymaker: An open platform designed to simplify the development and deployment of decentralized AI (DeAI) applications. It integrates more than 20 DeAI multimodal tools, provides a permissionless DeAI market, discovery platform, and unified API interface.

· Cypher: A decentralized AI application chain based on PoS. The platform encourages users to contribute data and receive token rewards, focuses on training highly specialized AI models, and achieves efficient distribution of models through intelligent coordination mechanisms.

· Zero Construct Program (ZCP): An incubator program that provides funding and support for promising open source DeAI projects. Currently incubated projects include AI application layer Seraphnet and cross-chain fair launch platform Nexus.

It is worth mentioning that the Cypher mainnet will be launched at 8:00 am Beijing time on September 30. Both the Zero1 Labs project itself and other projects it has incubated are still under construction. All token holders can do is stake $DEAI tokens. Currently, the total number of staked tokens has reached 19.96 million, accounting for 20% of the actual circulation.

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