Latest DePIN AI News

Building decentralized applications (dApps) can often feel overwhelming, but iExec's Hello World tutorial simplifies the process for developers at all levels. This hands-on guide focuses on creating privacy-first blockchain applications, emphasizing the importance of data protection, management, and sharing. By utilizing tools like the DataProtector SDK and iExec Apps (iApps), developers can learn to build applications that prioritize user control and data security in just 30 minutes. The iExec platform is designed for developers who want to ensure privacy and security in their dApps. With features like the DataProtector SDK, developers can encrypt sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, while iExec Apps utilize Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to process data securely. This combination of blockchain technology and Confidential Computing allows for secure handling of sensitive information, making it ideal for applications in sectors such as healthcare and finance. Additionally, iExec provides monetization opportunities, enabling developers to tokenize and monetize their data while maintaining security for both builders and end-users. iExec Hello World serves as a stepping stone for developers looking to create impactful decentralized applications. After completing the tutorial, participants can claim a BUILD voucher to access advanced tools and resources, join the iExec developer community for collaboration, and explore real-world use cases. The structured approach provided by iExec ensures that building privacy-first dApps is not only achievable but also rewarding, empowering developers to protect sensitive data and create innovative solutions in the blockchain space.

Spore.fun is leading the charge in AI-FI (Autonomous AI-Native DeFi) innovation by introducing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enhance secure governance. In collaboration with Mind Network, a pioneer in FHE technology, and integrating with Phala Network’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), Spore.fun aims to redefine how AI agents manage decentralized systems. The primary challenge they face is the issue of voting snipers, who exploit the transparency of on-chain governance to manipulate outcomes. These participants stake just before votes, influence community behavior, and then unstake immediately after securing favorable results, leading to market distortions and undermining trust within the community. To address the problem of voting snipers, Spore.fun is implementing FHE-powered blind voting. This innovative mechanism conceals voter identities and preferences while maintaining transparency and security in the final results. Votes are encrypted before submission, ensuring that no one, including the Spore.fun network or validators, can access the content of the votes. The aggregation of these encrypted votes is performed using FHE, allowing for computations without revealing individual inputs. Additionally, Phala’s TEE plays a crucial role in securely decrypting the final results for publication, ensuring that while individual votes remain private, the aggregate outcome is verifiable and trustworthy. The integration of FHE into Spore’s governance model unlocks significant community value by enhancing fairness, ensuring privacy while maintaining transparency, and enabling decentralized evolution. This dual-layer security approach, combining FHE and TEE, empowers Spore agents to operate autonomously and securely, driving the next wave of decentralized AI governance. By adopting FHE blind voting, Spore.fun is not only empowering the community with secure, trustless voting but also establishing a framework for fair, privacy-first AI ecosystems. As they continue to innovate, Spore.fun is shaping the future of decentralized AI, ensuring that AI agents can grow and thrive in a secure environment.

In a significant development in the decentralized data space, 3Box Labs has announced its merger with Textile, marking a new chapter for Ceramic, which is now part of the Textile family. This merger aligns Ceramic with other innovative decentralized data solutions such as Tableland DB and Basin Network. As the crypto industry evolves, the applications being developed with decentralized and composable data are also changing, particularly with the rise of AI agents that are becoming central to data production and consumption. These agents require decentralized storage, open composability, and real-time streaming capabilities, all of which are core to the Ceramic community's offerings. Looking ahead, Ceramic aims to establish itself as a foundational element of a broader open intelligence network. This network will facilitate autonomous transactions between AI agents, allowing them to buy and sell intelligence on demand. Agents will be able to enhance their knowledge and capabilities by integrating with others, delegating specialized tasks, or monetizing their expertise—all on-chain. Ceramic's role will be crucial in enabling communication and knowledge sharing between agents, complementing the storage technologies developed by Textile. Despite these changes, Ceramic will maintain its current operations without disruption to its development or customer services. The merger not only strengthens Ceramic's position in the decentralized data landscape but also connects it to a larger network of agents eager to utilize and pay for datasets. This strategic move is expected to foster innovation and collaboration within the decentralized ecosystem, paving the way for exciting advancements in the future.

In the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, AI agents are poised to play a pivotal role in everyday decision-making and transactions. The vision presented in USV's "Four Futures" highlights a future where these agents autonomously interact and transact, managing everything from service payments to physical asset oversight. However, the current challenge lies in the distinction between device connectivity and interoperability. Merely connecting a device to an application does not empower AI agents to function across various services. To harness the full potential of AI, a shared protocol that facilitates seamless communication among devices from different manufacturers is essential, and this is where DIMO's decentralized infrastructure comes into play. DIMO's framework allows AI agents to access device data securely and verifiably, enabling them to make informed decisions on behalf of users. This capability extends to real-world applications, such as optimizing electric vehicle (EV) charging and automating parking fee management. For instance, an AI agent could analyze real-time electricity pricing and the vehicle's battery health to determine the optimal charging times, ensuring cost savings while prolonging battery life. Similarly, by utilizing location data, the agent can automatically manage parking fees, interfacing with city and private APIs to prevent unnecessary charges without user intervention. These examples illustrate how DIMO's protocol facilitates intelligent interactions within a networked device ecosystem. The importance of decentralized infrastructure cannot be overstated, as it not only enhances network resilience but also expands the potential for AI agents to operate across a broader range of devices. For AI to transition from software-based decision-making to tangible real-world control, it must rely on secured oracles for trustworthy data, device interoperability for extensive control, and machine identity frameworks for secure transactions. While many AI initiatives expect this infrastructure to develop organically, DIMO and its community are actively constructing it now, fostering an open and decentralized environment where AI agents can thrive and exert real-world influence.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, IoTeX experienced remarkable growth following the launch of its 2.0 version, with average daily transactions skyrocketing by 1,267% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) to reach 384,300. This surge was complemented by peak throughput hitting 62 transactions per second (tps). The total fees accrued on the IoTeX Network also saw a significant increase of 205% QoQ, amounting to $448,500, driven largely by a staggering 1,600% rise in gas fees and a 690% increase in decentralized exchange (DEX) fees, primarily from activity on Mimo. The introduction of the ioID protocol, which provides a universal onchain identity solution for smart devices, has played a crucial role in this growth by enabling verifiable device identities and enhancing user engagement in the decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) ecosystem. IoTeX has also made strides in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform with the launch of BinoAI, an autonomous agent built on the ELIZA framework. This development is part of a strategic partnership with Eliza Labs, aimed at creating AI agents that can perceive and interact with physical environments using DePIN data. Additionally, the release of Quicksilver, a middle-layer framework, facilitates the connection between DePIN data and AI agents, allowing for real-time data processing and adaptive responses. These innovations position IoTeX as a leader in the convergence of AI and DePIN, potentially transforming how decentralized applications interact with real-world data. The IoTeX ecosystem has expanded significantly, now hosting 251 projects, including 66 focused on DePIN. Partnerships with various entities, such as Nubila for environmental data and Streamr for decentralized data streaming, have further enriched the ecosystem. The recent upgrades to IoTeX Core, particularly the Cancun EVM compatibility, enhance the network's functionality and interoperability with Ethereum. As IoTeX continues to innovate and expand its offerings, it is poised to play a pivotal role in the future of decentralized infrastructure and AI-driven applications.

DePIN Union has announced an exciting partnership with UpRock, marking a significant advancement for both platforms. This collaboration aims to create real-time, unbiased insights that are accessible to everyone, thereby redefining how users interact with information in the digital realm. UpRock's mission is to bridge the gap between centralized artificial intelligence (AI) and decentralized infrastructure, establishing a transparent and impartial data ecosystem that benefits all users. The partnership is set to pave the way for new industrial standards in the realm of data accessibility. DePIN, which operates on a blockchain-powered decentralized infrastructure, made the announcement via its official X account. UpRock is recognized for its innovative approach to AI-focused web crawling and data synthesis, which eliminates biases often found in traditional AI models. By leveraging advanced web crawling techniques, UpRock retrieves meaningful real-time insights while ensuring a streamlined access to data through its decentralized framework. Together, DePIN Union and UpRock are poised to redefine AI-powered intelligence. By integrating DePIN's decentralized infrastructure with UpRock's AI capabilities, the partnership aims to create a more inclusive and user-controlled digital landscape. This collaboration promises to deliver secure, transparent, and accessible data while mitigating the risks associated with centralized control. As both platforms evolve, they stand as beacons for a future characterized by decentralized, impartial, and user-centric insights, ultimately enhancing the knowledge-based environment for all users.

Theta EdgeCloud has integrated DeepSeek-R1, a cutting-edge large language model developed by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. DeepSeek-R1 delivers performance comparable to models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Mistral’s Mixtral, and Meta’s LLaMA while using significantly fewer computational resources. By supporting DeepSeek-R1, Theta EdgeCloud, a decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure, enhances AI efficiency and accessibility. DeepSeek’s innovations, such as multi-head-latent-attention (MLA) and FP8 precision quantization, allow advanced LLMs to run on consumer GPUs, making high-performance AI more accessible to developers, researchers, and small-scale enterprises without relying on expensive centralized cloud infrastructure. Theta EdgeCloud’s decentralized architecture provides scalability by dynamically allocating GPU nodes based on demand, eliminating the need for costly physical infrastructure expansion. This approach also reduces costs by leveraging underutilized computational power, enabling users to pay only for the resources they consume. In addition to being cost-efficient, Theta EdgeCloud promotes sustainability by distributing AI processing across multiple locations instead of relying on energy-intensive data centers. With this integration, Theta Labs continues to push the boundaries of decentralized AI infrastructure, offering a more cost-effective, scalable, and environmentally friendly alternative for AI model training and inference.

Michigan State University (MSU) has officially adopted the EdgeCloud platform for AI research, making it the second academic institution in the United States to join this initiative, following the University of Oregon. The SEIT Lab, led by Associate Professor Qiben Yan, will utilize Theta's decentralized GPU infrastructure to foster advancements in AI, cybersecurity, and distributed systems. As a prominent Tier 1 research institution, MSU's collaboration adds significant value to Theta's academic partnerships in the U.S. Furthermore, EdgeCloud plans to enhance its cloud-based GPU infrastructure across various locations, including California, Texas, and the Midwest, with a beta release of its hybrid cloud-edge computing platform scheduled for June 2025. Professor Qiben Yan is a distinguished expert in IoT security, AI privacy, blockchain resilience, and cybersecurity. His SEIT Lab is at the forefront of research aimed at protecting connected devices and networks from sophisticated cyber threats. Yan's work has been recognized at prestigious conferences and has received notable funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration with Theta, emphasizing that the EdgeCloud platform will facilitate the scaling of AI projects that demand high-performance computing while also pushing the boundaries of decentralized technology in secure and intelligent systems for IoT and AI applications. The SEIT Lab is dedicated to creating secure, intelligent systems with a focus on distributed systems, federated learning, and blockchain technologies. Recent projects include NSF-funded research on adversarially robust AI for speech recognition and innovative frameworks for secure smart contracts. By adopting Theta EdgeCloud, the SEIT Lab will benefit from a decentralized cloud platform that significantly accelerates the training and deployment of AI models, reducing GPU resource setup time by up to five times compared to traditional providers. This partnership not only strengthens Theta's academic network but also highlights its commitment to addressing complex challenges across various fields, including media, healthcare, bioinformatics, and finance.

On January 22, 2025, Network3 AI is set to launch its new product, N3, on the IoTeX platform. This innovative offering combines decentralized AI access with advanced technology, marking a significant step in the integration of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and artificial intelligence (AI). The launch is expected to attract tech enthusiasts to the IOTX ecosystem, potentially driving up adoption rates and influencing the token's price positively if the community responds favorably. The introduction of N3 is not just a technological advancement; it represents a shift towards democratizing access to AI. By leveraging edge-computing and GPU capabilities, Network3 AI aims to provide users with enhanced tools that can empower them in various applications. As with any new technology, the anticipation surrounding N3 is likely to generate speculation and excitement within the market, which could lead to increased investment in IOTX as stakeholders look to capitalize on the potential growth. As the countdown to the launch continues, the community is encouraged to mark their calendars for this pivotal event. The collaboration between Network3 AI and IoTeX signifies a promising future for decentralized technologies and their applications in AI. With the launch just around the corner, all eyes will be on how N3 performs and its impact on the broader blockchain ecosystem.

Retail stores globally are grappling with a significant staffing shortage, a trend exacerbated by demographic shifts in developed nations. To tackle this challenge, Auki Labs is intensifying its focus on robotics and AI, believing these technologies can enhance operational efficiency and improve customer experiences. The company has recently announced two key updates regarding its robotics initiatives, which include advancements in their proprietary robot and efforts to ensure compatibility with robots from other manufacturers, starting with Unitree's models. This initiative aims to create an interoperable machine perception network that allows various robots and devices to collaborate seamlessly in commercial spaces. The first update highlights enhancements made to Auki's store robot, which now boasts increased interactivity and smarter functionalities. A new front-facing camera provides real-time data to a reconstruction server, enabling the robot to maintain an updated digital representation of its environment. This improvement not only enhances the robot's spatial awareness but also automates the mapping process. Furthermore, the robot features a touch screen interface, allowing customers to search for products and receive guided assistance, thereby streamlining one of the most common customer service interactions in retail. This capability is particularly crucial given the ongoing staffing challenges faced by retailers. The second update introduces the Unitree Go2-W, a robotic guard dog designed to patrol retail environments. Equipped with sensors and a searchlight, this robot can monitor store conditions and alert staff to potential issues, such as abandoned packages. Auki Labs is committed to advancing the integration of various robotic technologies through its Auki network, enhancing their capabilities and creating a more efficient retail experience. As Auki Labs continues to innovate in the realm of robotics and spatial computing, the future of retail appears poised for transformation, promising improved service and operational efficiency in the face of ongoing staffing shortages.