The Web3 + AI Newsletter 20
Today's edition discusses pivots, product launches, and the expansion of privacy-preserving technologies.
Hello, everyone, and warm welcome to all newly joined subscribers!
This is the Web3 + AI newsletter, where we explore the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence. As promised, this week I sent out my first Web3 + AI Funding Bulletin, summarizing the latest money rounds in the space. Though, I have plenty more news to share with you today!
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
What’s New in the Web3 + AI Startup World?
aelf Blockchain Pivots to AI
The Layer-1 modular blockchain ChronoAI has announced a pivot towards AI and support for decentralized AI through a partnership with AgentLayer, a Layer-2 AI Agent network.
Moreover, aelf's investment arm aelf Ventures intends to dedicate $50M to support AI initiatives and further the convergence of blockchain and AI.
Worldcoin Reveals World Chain
World, OpenAI‘s Sam Altman’s proof-of-personhood protocol, has introduced World Chain, a new Layer-2 chain based on Ethereum.
The network intended to launch in the summer will prioritize verified humans, i.e., users who have voluntarily sold their biometric data to Worldcoin, to bots when giving out its blockspace. The main value proposition to developers is that through building on World Chain, they’ll have direct access to these more than 10M of World ID holders.
PADO Unites with AO to Supercharge zkFHE
The crypto FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) revolution seems to be upon us, as more and more fascinating projects integrating the FHE cryptographic scheme appear weekly. However, this case is even more interesting since it combines FHE with another privacy mechanism, namely ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) to bring about verifiable confidential computation.
zkFHE is designed on top of the FHE algorithm, which synchronously performs ZK proof on the homomorphic computation process. The simultaneous integrity constraints ensure the reliability of homomorphic operations and the correctness of the encrypted result while preserving data privacy during the whole process.
Moreover, PADO Labs is now bringing zkFHE to AO, the Arweave‘s hyper-parallel computer I told you about a couple of months ago. That way, PADO will be able to use AO’s nearly limitless computing capabilities while also deliver trustless and confidential computing functionalities to the AO ecosystem.
Gnosis AI with Nevermined
The latest edition of the monthly Gnosis community call on AI topics featured Nevermined, a decentralized AI payment protocol. Nevermined is building an infrastructure for AI commerce, aimed at enabling AI-to-AI interactions and providing AI agents with a native payment solution.
The Nevermined team is already working with AI Agent builders like Valory‘s Olas, Polywrap, and FLock.io to equip their agents with a viable and secure payment method. During this call, they demoed an authentication mechanism (employing the account abstraction paradigm) for smart subscriptions, a credit system including price and time period for access, and number of unique requests a user can make to a specific AI agent.
Noteworthy Podcasts, Articles, Events
Emerging Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Since I mentioned the impending FHE revolution, here’s an interesting talk on the matter from ETHGlobal. Miguel de Vega of Nillion, Ravital Solomon of Sunscreen, Remi Gai of Inco Network, and Pascal Paillier of Zama came together to discuss confidential computation, FHE’s efficiency and performance variation when handled by experienced and trained FHE engineers. Listen to it below to learn why the next frontier, beyond the algorithmic side, lies in hardware enhancements.
Thank you for reading! I hope you found this article insightful.
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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.