The Web3 + AI Daily #28
AI performing crypto audits, dAI-specific domain extensions, and one big, fat, Italian-style dAI divorce.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly-joined subscribers!
This is The Web3 + AI Daily, your definitive guide to the world of Decentralized AI (DeAI/dAI)! Today’s edition boasts a juicy collection of tech announcement, research, investment news, along with one big, fat, Italian-style dAI divorce 🤭
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?
Ocean Protocol Withdraws from ASI Alliance
With a publication on X, Ocean Protocol announced its withdrawal from the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, without providing any particular reason for its resignation.
Here’s some context: In spring of 2024, three major Web3 x AI firms, namely Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and Ocean Protocol, announced their merger into the Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance). The merger involved for the three separate tokens to become one under the auspices of Fetch.ai’s $FET, which was supposed to be renamed $ASI. The newly-combined $ASI token was supposed to have a market cap of $5.8B as of May 2024.
The token merger, initially set for June 15th 2024, got postponed to July 15th “due to necessary adjustments by our partners”, Humayun Sheikh, CEO of Fetch.ai commented at the time.
In the meantime, though, Coinbase announced its decision not to support the merger and the ASI token migration:
Coinbase has decided against facilitating the upcoming migration of SingularityNet, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol AI tokens to the new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) cryptocurrency.
The ASI token merger involves SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol implementing a two-phase migration process starting on July 1. This process will first see a migration of SingularityNET’s AGIX and Ocean Protocol’s OCEAN tokens into Fetch.ai‘s FET, followed by transitioning the resultant combined FET tokens into the new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) cryptocurrency later in the month.
In response, Sheikh declared:
Fast-forward to October 2025, the ASI Alliance continues to trade under the $FET token.
While announcing its withdrawal, Ocean Protocol clarified what the destiny of its token $OCEAN will be:
A portion of profits from spin-outs of Ocean derived-technologies will be used to buyback and burn $OCEAN, offering a permanent and continual supply reduction of the $OCEAN supply.
Since 7/2024, 81% of the $OCEAN token supply has been converted into $FET, yet there are still 37,334 $OCEAN token holders representing 270 million $OCEAN, that have not yet converted to $FET on the existing $OCEAN token contract (0x967da … b9F48).
The ASI Alliance’s reaction to Ocean Protocol’s decision can be summed up as follows:
Later in the day today, Fetch.ai held an “ad-hoc” (per their words) X space to address Ocean’s leaving, which you can hear here.
Phala Migrates to Ethereum L2, Joins Confidential Computing Consortium
Phala, the provider of confidential computing powered by Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), is undertaking a strategic pivot. Its community has decided to sunset the Phala parachain (whose slot expires on November 20, 2025) and migrate the network to an Ethereum Layer 2 chain.
The rationale includes:
Phala currently runs on Intel SGX, which Intel is de-emphasizing in favor of TDX and GPU-based confidential compute, technologies better suited for enterprise use.
Maintaining the parachain would consume considerable resources and lock the project into infrastructure with limited long-term viability.
An Ethereum L2 environment would bring better alignment with the EVM ecosystem, access to tooling and liquidity, and a more scalable base for staking, governance, and confidential compute workloads.
Meanwhile, Phala also joined the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), a project community at The Linux Foundation dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing. Other CCC members include AMD, Google, Meta, Huawei, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and fellow crypto x AI firm iExec.
Web3 + AI Research & Stats
Can AI Be Trusted to Perform Crypto Audits? It Seems Not!
A team of Bulgarian smart contract auditors have performed an interesting experiment to answer the burning question: how would most Web3 x AI audit agents perform in a blind, empirical test using real Sherlock contests? The answer is not unexpected:
Most tools missed critical flaws, drowned users in false positives or fail to run at all.
Lead author Lyuboslav Lyubenov and independent auditor / evaluator Radoslav Radev went over 11 AI audit tools, from which only 3 worked: AlmanaxAI by Almanax, AuditAgent by Nethermind, and SavantChat.
The ones that didn’t work are: Bughunter, Finite Monkey, Hound, QuillAI by QuillAI Network, SolidityScan by CredShields, Quantpulsar, LISA, and Octane.
I urge you to read the full report below. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with Lyubenov’s bottom line:
Web3 + AI Investment News
TransCrypts Secures $15M to Solve Digital Credential Verification
TransCrypts has secured $15 million in a seed funding round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures, California Innovation Fund, Protocol Labs, Techstars, Informed Ventures, Apertu Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, and Marc Cuban.
The blockchain-based digital identity start-up plans to expand beyond employment credentials into health and education records, aiming to broaden its scope across identity sectors.
375ai Raises $10M to Source Intelligence from Physical Environments
375ai, a mobility data DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network), has raised $10 million across multiple funding rounds, with $5 million led by Delphi Ventures, Strobe Ventures, and Hack VC. The funds will be used to scale deployment, expand the network, and prepare for a Token Generation Event (TGE) planned for late October 2025.
The company uses devices called 375 Edge, equipped with cameras, audio, and environmental sensors, to monitor physical environments (e.g. vehicles in cities), converting analog signals into structured data intelligence. They’ve already deployed in cities like Los Angeles and are expanding to New York, Miami, and aiming for further international growth.
Grass Collects $10M to Power Internet-Scale Web Crawl
Grass, a Solana Labs-based DePIN project, has raised $10M in a bridge round led by Polychain Capital and Tribe Capital. The funding will support growth, development of “live context retrieval” (a mechanism to fetch real-time web data), and scaling toward what the team describes as “internet scale web crawl” capabilities.
Grass enables users and applications to monetize idle internet bandwidth, positioning itself as infrastructure for AI firms needing large-scale data access. The team says it’s already seeing strong commercial traction, with clients buying access to training data and plans to expand into inference data.
Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations
Prime Intellect Supercharges Open, Decentralized AI
WIRED covered the dAI start-up Prime Intellect and its mission to spark a U.S. “DeepSeek moment”: a revival of open, decentralized AI development.
The company is building INTELLECT-3, a large language model fine-tuned via distributed reinforcement learning across many hardware environments, enabling developers to run RL tasks themselves rather than relying on centralized AI labs.
According to CEO Vincent Weisser, the current AI landscape is bifurcated: closed U.S. models on one side, open Chinese models on the other. Prime Intellect aspires to bridge that gap by empowering a broader community to build, train, and improve state-of-the-art AI, shifting some control away from big tech.
More
0G and Unstoppable Domains Unveil dAI-Specific Extensions
0G has teamed up with Unstoppable Domains to introduce two new blockchain name extensions: .AGI and .robot.
The vision is to enable AI systems and applications to have verifiable, on-chain identities and domain names, blurring the line between human and machine presence online.
The .AGI domain is aimed at developers, organizations, and AI applications that want a persistent “home” on the internet, potentially hosting services or models directly under that domain. Meanwhile, .robot acts like an ENS name in a decentralized AI ecosystem, letting users and AI agents transact, send messages, or execute instructions via human-readable identifiers.
Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.
If you’d like to keep up with the latest developments at the burgeoning intersection of blockchain and AI, I invite you to subscribe.
And if you find value in my writing, consider supporting the newsletter. I’d greatly appreciate it.
The Web3 + AI Book Club is live on Fable. Follow the link below and come join our literary community.
I'm looking forward to connecting with fellow Crypto x AI enthusiasts, so don't hesitate to share your thoughts here or reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Firefly.social.
Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice or as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any of the companies or assets mentioned.
Please don’t take my views at face value. Instead, do your own research (DYOR), think critically, and share your perspective so we can challenge ideas, learn from one another, and arrive at better conclusions through thoughtful discussion.