What do you get when you combine DeFi with AI? You get DeFAI โ a combination of decentralized finance and artificial intelligence. Put the two together, and a wealth of possibilities come into sharp focus: AI agents rebalancing portfolios and optimizing yield; tokens that grant exposure to the AI economy through GPU compute; dapps that can be deployed by conversing with AI-powered chatbots that do all the coding and deployment.
Thereโs growing consensus that the future of DeFi and AI is interlinked, and while the final form this alliance will take is still being fleshed out, the infrastructure to support this transformation is already in place.
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A number of enterprising blockchain projects have laid the groundwork for DeFAI to take off, providing a scalable playground for data-hungry dapps to flourish, all powered by artificial intelligence. The following four are among the first movers seeking to stake a claim in the onchain DeFAI landscape that is fast taking shape.
Fetch.ai
No discussion of DeFAI would be complete without addressing AI agents โ and if weโre gonna talk agents, weโre gonna have to talk Fetch.ai, the blockchain project thatโs been working at the intersection of AI since the very start. Long before everyone was simping over chatbots and autonomous agents, Fetch.ai was laying the infrastructure for all this innovation to take root.
Its blockchain forms a layer where AI agents can do their thing, fueled by all the resources they need to thrive. Fetch provides an AI engine that uses an LLM to support agentic task execution, enabling developers to monetize their AI apps and services. Itโs also developed Agentverse, a portal for listing agents, making it easy for users to acquire their ideal agent.
0G Labs
0G Labs has built a Layer 1 blockchain thatโs fully optimized for AI. Itโs scalable, itโs performant, and itโs capable of feeding AI-powered dapps with all the data they could ever wish to consume. 0G is building the foundations for an open and collaborative AI ecosystem, with its modular architecture supporting full data traceability for verifiable AI models.
Decentralized storage is complemented by access to low-cost compute resources that lower the barriers to projects seeking services such as inference and AI training. Models; compute, data: all the nuts and bolts for DeFAI innovation to flourish are present and accounted for on 0Gโs L1, where infinite scalability ensures that dapps arenโt constrained by resource limitations.
As an AI operating system, 0G forms the foundational layer for decentralized AI, with everything that comes next built on top by third-party developers. Its data availability layer promises cheap decentralized storage, allowing AI dapps to access resources that are fully onchain. While targeted at decentralized AI primarily, 0Gโs solution is also suited to web2 applications seeking to deploy highly scalable AI applications.
Singularity Finance
Singularity Finance, born from an amalgamation of web3 projects including SingularityNET, operates as a Layer 2 chain thatโs optimized for DeFAI โ or AI-Fi as Singularity calls it. Itโs focused on providing the infrastructure for tokenization of assets involved in the AI economy, such as compute, allowing users to gain exposure to AI and generate yield from related products.
Essentially, Singularity is positioning itself as a one-stop shop for accessing the long tail of DeFAI. It believes that combining tokenization with permissioned platforms will allow retail users to participate in the AI economy, trading assets representing GPUs or even shares in AI companies.
This vision sees AI becoming part of RWAs, with users able to access decentralized markets where any AI asset can be acquired in one click. Itโs now busying itself with building out its ecosystem to make this goal a working reality.
Space and Time
Space and Time, also known as SxT, is doing all kinds of big-brain stuff involving sub-second ZK coprocessors and onchain proofs. Whatโs this got to do with DeFAI? Well, one of the most promising applications for its tech is the ability to train large language models (LLMs) on provable datasets. Using SxT, devs can be sure that their model has been trained on an unbiased dataset and that the data hasnโt been tampered with.
The ability to work with vast datasets, off-chain but fully encrypted, opens all kinds of doors for dapp developers. It means they can create highly scalable applications that are powered by AI and able to tap into a virtually unlimited well of data.
With the compute taken care of, developers just need to focus on perfecting their app, secure in the knowledge that Space and Time is providing the processing and real-world data. From RWA tokenization platforms to decentralized perps exchanges, the possibilities are vast.
DeFi Meets AI
Some of the projects profiled here, notably 0G Labs and Singularity Finance, are directly positioned at the convergence of DeFi and AI. Fetch.ai and Space and Time, meanwhile, are closer to the AI infrastructure side of things, but the tooling they supply is nevertheless being utilized by DeFi developers to create an array of dapps and services powered by artificial intelligence.
While these four are by no means the only players in what is fast becoming a crowded field, theyโre leading from the front and can be credited with accelerating DeFiโs evolution into DeFAI โ or AI-Fi or whatever the industry eventually decides to call it.
The potential for AI agents to democratize access to DeFi by simplifying trading, onboarding, and automating complex tasks is huge. However, their development is still in its early stages, which means the best is yet to come.
Just as the first iPhone was groundbreaking but canโt hold a flame to the latest generation of smartphones, the first wave of DeFAI dapps is promising but merely a taster of the user experience that awaits. As the sentient economy, controlled by AI agents and executed onchain, comes to life, it will prove incontestably that the future of DeFi and AI is intertwined.
