Author: Joyce, blockbeats
In the mainstream crypto narrative of 2024, AI is undoubtedly the most sought-after one besides meme coins. In addition to relatively "crypto-native" projects such as Bittensor and Olas, tokens such as WLD have seen their prices rise rapidly under the "product catalyst" of OpenAI's growing popularity, which has also gradually strengthened the correlation between AI+Crypto hype and Silicon Valley and US stocks.
Recently, an AI token called GPU has shown strong trends again after consolidating for nearly two weeks, and has continued to create new price highs in the past few days, drawing renewed attention from the market to the protocol behind it, NodeAI. However, thanks to the publicity of many alpha KOLs, Node AI has been very popular in overseas communities. In addition, the community has also detected that whales continue to buy GPUs during the decline.
According to official documents, NodeAI focuses on the concept of "GPU leasing". Users can lend idle GPU computing power to other customers in need and earn GPU tokens based on usage.
Readers familiar with NVIDIA will find that the project's logo and token name are direct reflections of NVIDIA and its flagship products. It is not difficult to understand that the current crypto market has hyped this "AI dog" project as the "NVIDIA Index". In fact, in the AI+Crypto hype, NodeAI also represents a hype logic similar to NVIDIA's stock NVDA, that is, playing the role of "selling shovels" in the AI wave.
Over the past year, as the AI track continues to heat up, GPU graphics cards produced by NVIDIA have become a scarce resource in this field. As an upstream hardware supplier standing at the cusp of the trend, NVIDIA's stock price has climbed all the way to above US$900, shocking everyone.
Under this "eternal profit logic", many "shovel-selling" projects have also appeared in the AI+Crypto field. In addition to the NodeAI mentioned above, the most popular project recently is the decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure Aethir.
On March 20, Aethir will launch the public sale of the first network-available node, the Check Node, with a total of 100,000 Check Nodes available for sale, with each node starting at 0.1259 ETH. Within just one hour after the public sale started, all of Aethir's T1-T23 nodes were sold out, with a total sales amount of more than $65 million, which shows how popular it is.
Aethir is an enterprise-centric distributed GPU cloud service provider. It has signed multi-year contracts with the world's largest telecommunications company, the largest game development studio, 10 AAA games, and WellLink, a cloud gaming company with more than 64 million monthly active users. In July 2023, Aethir completed its Pre-A round of financing with a valuation of US$150 million, with participating institutions including Hashkey, Animoca Brands, Big Brain Holdings, Maelstrom (Arthur Hayes), etc. ATH is the native token of the Aethir network, and 15% of its total supply is used to reward checker nodes for helping to verify the uptime, latency, service quality, and computing power provided by other node participants.
Of course, in addition to high-quality projects such as Aethir that have strong institutional endorsements, a number of GPU rental projects have sprung up in the market recently.
For example, DeTensor is one of them, which has seen a good increase since its launch recently. DeTensor aims to simplify access to cloud services, nodes, and artificial intelligence resources by using blockchain technology. Its main business includes GPU node leasing, where users can rent AI servers equipped with GPU resources for specific use cases and pay monthly fees. By renting out idle GPUs to others through DeTensor, users can earn DETENSOR tokens. Since its launch, DETENSOR has gained more than ten times, but its current market value is only US$7 million.
Another similar project is InfraX, whose official website’s introduction to its own project is almost the same as NodeAI and DeTensor, but it has also increased 10 times in the past few days and its current market value is around 20 million US dollars.
Like most AI projects on the market, most of the "concept dogs" such as DeTensor and Infrax, which focus on GPU leasing, are not endorsed by any institutions. The tokens are fully circulated, and the initial market value is basically around 5 million US dollars. After "quietly issuing tokens", these projects often receive the favor of KOLs and achieve good short-term gains due to the shouting effect.
Since the beginning of this year, the hype of AI+Crypto has created a vacuum window between the extremely high threshold for technology implementation and the continued popularity of AI concepts: investors are eager to invest in the AI track, but projects with endorsements and good quality have not yet had a "coin issuance schedule." Under the catalysis of Nvidia's powerful wealth-making effect in the U.S. stock market, this type of "AI dog" has filled the gap in the crypto market and may continue to be hot for a foreseeable period of time in the future until the market is oversaturated.
Of course, due to factors such as team anonymity and KOL insider trading, most "AI dogs" cannot escape the fate of zeroing out, so investors should not be confused by the "survivor bias" of the crypto market. There is no doubt that this hype trend will not last forever.
