Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI): A token to rule them all?

What you need to know 🐳

ASI is a new token created by the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, an alliance bringing together three major crypto AI narrative projects: Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol.

This alliance aims to compete with the tech giants in the artificial intelligence race, with the aim of tomorrow's super-IA being open source and decentralised.

ASI is the amalgamation of tokens from the alliance's member projects: FET, AGIX and OCEAN. These tokens performed exceptionally well in early 2024, due to the popularity of AI storytelling. This new collaboration is attracting particular attention from the ecosystem.

Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol 🧬

The member projects of this super-alliance have all been around since 2017. To understand this coalition, we first need to understand the foundations of each project:

Fetch.ai is developing a framework for deploying autonomous agents capable of communicating and interacting economically in a simplified way, through the Fetch network (a Layer 1 blockchain from the Cosmos ecosystem). These 'autonomous agents' behave according to the logic predefined in their code (quite simply, they are bots). Fetch.ai has therefore created an environment that makes it easy to deploy bots that interact with each other.

Fetch.ai is also developing a conversational agent (an LLM, like chatGPT), called DeltaV, which aims to interpret user requests and select and interact with the Fetch network's autonomous agents to respond to them. For example, if an autonomous agent has been developed to search for and book a restaurant according to certain criteria, it will be possible to ask DeltaV to find and book a restaurant, and DeltaV should be able to do this by interacting with the appropriate autonomous agent. DeltaV would then not just be a simple chatbot, but a chatbot augmented by the functionalities of all the autonomous agents in the network. Nevertheless, the DeltaV demo available today is a long way from being functional.

SingularityNET is a decentralised marketplace for the commercialisation of AI models. Anyone who has developed an AI can list that AI on the marketplace, and any user can use the AIs listed. Each use is subject to a fee and must be paid for in AGIX, the project's token. SingularityNET is therefore a decentralised platform bringing together supply (AI developers) and demand (AI users), on which transactions are paid for in AGIX tokens.

SingularityNET is also developing a project called Opencog Hyperon, whose mission is to create a decentralised, democratic, inclusive and beneficial IAG (General Artificial Intelligence). It's a classic open source project, with no obvious connection to blockchain, except that it's funded by SingularityNET and run by the same individuals.

Ocean Protocol is a protocol for "tokenising" data. This tokenisation is done by encrypting the data and issuing an NFT representing the property right to this data. The owner of the NFT can then issue associated data tokens, which allow access to the data. Only a user who owns a data-token linked to a dataset can access the underlying data. In particular, this system makes it possible to market the use of different data sets through the market that is created around the data-tokens.

Ocean Protocol also offers a feature called "Compute-to-data", which makes it possible to perform certain predefined operations on a data set, without having direct access to the data. This makes it possible to sell the use of a dataset without disclosing the data to the buyer.

Finally, Ocean offers a product called the Predictoor, an interface that pits predictions from different sources against each other. Users, who have developed predictive algorithms, provide their prediction to the network. Consumers" can pay for access to the network's aggregated predictions. For the time being, Predictoor only offers predictions on price trends for certain crypto pairs (BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, ADA/USDT, etc.). Consumers can pay to find out what the network predicts will happen to the price over the next 60 minutes. Aggregating the predictions gives more accurate predictions on average.

Artificial Superintelligence Alliance 🤝

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance aims to create the largest open source and independent AI research and development foundation, with the sole purpose of developing a "General Artificial Intelligence" (GAI), and then an "Artificial Superintelligence" (ASI).

A IAG is an AI capable of understanding, learning and applying knowledge with the same generality and flexibility as humans. A SIA is an AI that, beyond matching or mimicking human capabilities, would be superior in every way to a human. Such a tool could lead to extremely rapid and unpredictable gains in productivity and acceleration of technological progress, which could be dangerous if its use is not aligned with the common good.

The Alliance expresses strong concern about the current AI race, which is accelerating and largely dominated by private entities. In their view, an IAG could emerge within eight years, followed shortly thereafter by an SIA. The future seems to lie in the control of these AIs by tech giants, making it urgent, in their view, to create a decentralised body capable of competing with these private giants.

But in concrete terms, how does this coalition intend to go about it?

In the first instance, the member projects will continue to develop in the same direction. Each of these three projects is working on an AGI in its own way:

• SingularityNET, which has always pursued the development of an open source AGI via its Opencog Hyperon project.
• Fetch.ai, through the development of a network of autonomous agents, each with its own speciality, and a conversational agent (DeltaV) enabling all these functionalities to be accessed through commands formulated in human language.
• Ocean Protocol, through its Predictoor tool, whose ultimate aim is to extend this "prediction market" to all types of data (predictions of weather, energy use, logistics, etc.), to create the predictive machine.), to create the most powerful predictive machine in the world (it doesn't sound like the IAG as we imagine it, but it certainly sounds like some form of super-intelligence).

Each of these three projects is working on a different avenue for creating an IAG. In practice, therefore, the creation of the Alliance will not change each project's individual roadmap.

Aside from the creation of the unique ASI token, no major new developments have been announced as part of the creation of the Alliance.

Based on the information we have at the moment, this coalition appears to be primarily a marketing move, giving rise to a larger and more influential entity than individual projects, in order to attract more attention, adoption and funding.

Funding 💰

Since their inception in 2017, Alliance projects have raised large amounts of funding:

Fetch.ai has accumulated $83 million in funds raised between 2018 and 2023, including $6 million in a public sale on Binance. Investors include Outlier Ventures, which led the first round of 15 million in 2018, and Bitget, which invested 10 million in April 2023 (source: cryptorank.io).

SingularityNET raised $33 million via an ICO in 2017, and $25 million in 2022 in a round led by LDA Capital.

Ocean Protocol raised a total of $39 million between 2017 and 2022, including $8.5 million in public sales, with private investors such as Outlier Ventures or Cypher Capital.

A total of $155 million has therefore been raised by these projects.

As far as the Alliance is concerned, no new fundraising has been announced at the moment.

Team 💪

The main figure and CEO of the Alliance's board of directors is Ben Goertzel, the founder of SingularityNET. He is a world-renowned researcher and one of the most important figures in General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) research.

The second most important figure is Humayun Sheikh, Chairman of the Board. Founder of Fetch, he has long been involved in artificial intelligence research, being notably one of the initial investors in the DeepMind project, a company specialising in artificial intelligence owned by Google, known for having beaten a professional player at the game of go for the first time (2015).

Finally, Ocean Protocol founders Bruce Pon and Trent McConaghy are also on the Alliance board.

Community 👾

Here are the main community metrics for these projects:

• Fetch: 237,000 followers on X and 2800 members on Discord (recently recreated due to a hack of the previous channel)
• SingularityNET: 154.000 followers on X and 3700 members on Discord
• Ocean Protocol: 194.000 followers on X and 16.000 members on Discord
• Artificial Superintelligence Alliance: 80.000 followers on X

However, let's note a few important points that leave us sceptical about the level of engagement of these projects' communities, in terms of real adoption of their products:

• The metrics available on the use of Ocean Protocol's data tokenisation functionality are low, stagnant or even decreasing over time.
• SingularityNET's AI marketplace is very poor, with few models on the market and very few reviews of the models on offer. This seems to testify to fairly low adoption of their product at the moment.
• The majority of blocks on the Fetch Network contain 0 transactions, which testifies to how little the network is being used at the moment.

To sum up, there is a lot of speculative buzz around these projects, which are being closely followed at the start of 2024, and are generating a lot of interest on the networks. However, in terms of actual users and adoption of their product, current activity is relatively uninspiring, especially for projects that have been in existence since 2017. Little data is available on the adoption of these projects (which doesn't help to get an idea), but it's certainly the case that no obvious growth momentum is apparent.

The ASI token 🪙

Timeline of the merger

The ASI token is the merger of the FET, AGIX and OCEAN tokens.

On July 1, phase 1 of the merger began, aimed at bringing the three tokens together by transforming all AGIX and OCEAN into FET. A migration smart contract was opened, allowing AGIX and OCEAN to be converted into FET tokens at a rate of approximately 1 FET for 0.43 OCEAN/AGIX.

From mid-July, phase 2 will begin: a new migration smart contract will be opened, enabling FET tokens to be converted into ASI tokens at a ratio of 1:1, and OCEAN/AGIX (which have not yet been converted into FET) to be converted into ASI at a ratio of around 0.43:1. During this phase, the Fetch network will be updated and will become the Artificial Superintelligence Network.

After this, the merger will be finalised.

It is important to note that:

• Investors holding AGIX/OCEAN/FET on centralised exchanges have nothing to do, the exchanges take care of the migrations and this is automatically updated in the investors' portfolio.
• The phase 2 migration contract for converting AGIX/OCEAN/FET into ASI will still be in service and will still offer the same exchange rate. There is therefore no urgency to make the conversion.

Token utility

ASI inherits the utility of the 3 merged tokens:

• Like FET, ASI is the native token of the Fetch network (soon to be Artificial Superintelligence Network), and can be staked to become a validator and participate in the consensus mechanism.
• Like AGIX, ASI is used as a currency for transactions on the SingularityNET marketplace. Each time an AI on the network is used by a consumer, that consumer must purchase ASI to pay the associated fees.
• Like OCEAN, ASI must be staked in order to participate in Ocean Protocol's Data farming programme and earn more ASI by completing the necessary tasks (data curation, participation in Predictoor, etc.). In addition, part of the value generated by data monetised on Ocean Protocol is extracted as Protocol revenue, and part of this revenue is supposed to fund ASI (formerly OCEAN) buy back burn. However, no data is available on this mechanism, and given the current uptake of Ocean Protocol, the volumes burned (if any) are bound to be very marginal.

Note on token design: the AGIX token design is fairly ill-suited to taking token value, and the buy back & burn mechanism inherited from the OCEAN token is highly dependent on the revenue generated by the protocol, which is close to zero at the moment. On the other hand, the utility inherited from FET, as the Fetch network's native token, is interesting, and will lead to organic upward pressure on the ASI token in the event of widespread use of the network. The most important metric to watch, which could lead to a natural uptick in the value of the ASI token, is the adoption of the Fetch.ai Agentverse, and the growth of agent-to-agent transactions. At the moment, as we have already mentioned, the majority of Fetch network blocks contain zero transactions.

Token release programme

As far as the vesting schedule is concerned, ASI is the sum of the vesting schedules of the 3 projects. Key takeaways:

• A maximum supply of 2.6 billion, which represents a FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) of around $3 billion at current prices.
• 91% of the supply is already in circulation.
• 43 million tokens (around 1.5% of the total supply) are due to be released imminently, following a governance vote (accepted) to accelerate the release of AGIX tokens. These tokens will be sold by SingularityNET in order to acquire a large quantity of GPUs for their research. No details have been given on the exact date of the sale, the method of sale (probably OTC) or the potential buyer. The impact of this release on the market (in terms of scale and exact timing) is therefore uncertain.
• The remaining ≈7% will be released gradually: around 8 million tokens (0.1% of the total supply) are currently being released per month, and this rate of issuance will gradually slow.
• 288 million of the circulating ASI (or 11% of the total supply) are held by the Ocean Protocol foundation, and released progressively as rewards for data farming seasons. This release is not deterministic, with amounts paid out changing regularly.

Risks and limitations 😨

The AI narrative made the FET, OCEAN and AGIX cryptos explosive in early 2024. In this context, the price of these cryptos is potentially already inflated by speculation. Volatility could be extremely high on the upside if the hype continues, but it could also be very violent on the downside. In fact, since the announcement of this merger, these tokens have corrected sharply and underperformed the overall crypto market.

As we have said, the adoption of the three projects making up this Alliance is not glorious and does not show any obvious growth momentum. The fundamentals are therefore not the strongest, and we are not immune to changes in market sentiment towards these projects.

Finally, 10% of supply is controlled by a multi-signature of the Ocean Protocol foundation and is being released progressively in a non-deterministic manner. An unforeseen change in the distribution policy for these rewards could occur and impact the market if necessary.

Competitors ⚔️

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance is being built in opposition to the tech giants developing AI, all with the same goal in mind: to be the first to develop ASI. ASI's direct competitors are therefore all these private giants (OpenAI, Google, Apple, etc.).

As far as web3 projects are concerned, ASI's natural competitor is Bittensor's TAO token. Bittensor was the leader in artificial intelligence storytelling in early 2024 and has attracted more attention and cash than Alliance member projects.

However, it's worth noting that Bittensor's approach is quite different. The project does not openly display the desire to create an AGI, but rather to stimulate innovation and the optimisation of AIs for specific tasks (via multiple subnets).

Bittensor has the potential to become a much more direct competitor to ASI if it one day decides to interconnect all its subnets in an attempt to create an AGI (on a model similar to Fetch.ai).

But it is also possible to imagine cooperation between Bittensor and the Alliance:

• The intelligence created by Bittensor's subnets could be monetised via Singularity NET's marketplace.
• The Alliance could fund its research by exploiting Bittensor's incentive model by creating their own subnet.
• The subnets could be exploited by the Fetch.ai network via autonomous agents capable of querying the intelligence of the subnets.

There is therefore both a natural rivalry and potential synergies, and it is difficult to predict the relationship that Bittensor and the Alliance will have, given that no announcement has been made on the subject.

Market analysis by Chadi El Adnani, Head of Content & Research at SUN ZU Lab 📈

FET is a highly liquid token, with daily volumes exceeding $400m in March, a period when FET's performance was approaching 400% in 2024. The price and volumes have fallen in recent months, but FET's performance over the year remains ahead of bitcoin and ether.

Where to buy the ASI token? 🛒

For the time being, the future ASI token still goes by the name of FET.

FET can be bought on almost all the biggest centralised exchanges (Binance, OKX, Kraken, etc.). The transition from FET to ASI will take place automatically on these exchanges, with no action required from investors.

It is also possible to buy FET on decentralised exchanges on the Ethereum blockchain (Uniswap, for example). However, if you buy FET in this way, it will be necessary to interact yourself with a migration smart-contract from mid-July, to convert your FET tokens into ASI.

The Big Whale's opinion 🐳

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance is a marketing stunt by three projects that individually seem to be on their last legs, particularly in terms of adoption, none of which seem to have achieved product market fit.

This didn't stop their three tokens from strongly outperforming the market earlier this year, thanks to the AI narrative. Since the announcement of the merger, however, these tokens have largely underperformed the market. It is difficult to know whether this recent trend reflects a loss of market interest in these projects and in this merger, or whether it is a natural correction following an excess of tokens that had previously significantly outperformed the market.

Note that the leader in AI storytelling, the TAO token, also underperformed the market throughout the recent correction. The underperformance of Alliance tokens is therefore not an anomaly compared to the AI narrative in general. The market's reaction to the Alliance's announcement is not necessarily alarming, and it is likely that the ASI token will outperform the market if the AI narrative as a whole also starts to outperform again.

From a fundamental point of view, the Alliance has a very clear vision (to develop an open source and decentralised AGI, which is laudable), but their action plan to get there is rather unclear at the moment. Apart from merging tokens, each project is likely to continue to act according to its initial roadmap, with very few concrete changes planned. This looks like a simple marketing stunt to bring attention back to their projects, with the aim of attracting users and liquidity.

Buying ASI today is betting on a continuation of the performance of the AI narrative, and on a flow of liquidity linked to the attention this Alliance attracts; or it is betting on the fact that these three projects will be able to implement synergies and novelties that really trigger growth in adoption; but it is NOT betting on the fundamentals of their current products or a visible adoption dynamic.