The partnership comes despite web3 AI tokens suffering heavy drawdowns in recent weeks.
Filecoin is the latest web3 firm to target the burgeoning AI sector, with the Filecoin Foundation teaming up with Nuklai, an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure platform, to create a decentralized database to power AI and machine learning.
Announced on July 8, Nuklai will store data on the Filecoin network via its Lighthouse perpetual storage service. Nuklai said the database seeks to provide a data ontology solution supporting both raw information and metadata with traceable archiving. A data ontology organizes and defines the relationships between different data concepts, offering a robust resource to train AI models.
“Our objective is to aim to store data efficiently, transparently, and in a decentralized manner using Filecoin’s decentralized data storage network,” Nuklai said in a press release. “Everyone can contribute by sharing and contextualizing datasets, accessible via app.nukl.ai.”
Nuklai and Filecoin hope to challenge the dominance of the centralized incumbents within the data storage sector through their partnership.
Currently, most data is stored by centralized cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
Data uploaded to Lighthouse is standardized to improve the efficiency of using it to train AI and machine learning models.
“Once the data is defined and standardized, it is stored using Filecoin’s data storage network and accessible through Nuklai at all times, while the data owner retains ownership,” Nuklai said.
The price of Filecoin (FIL) is down 13.5% in the past week amid the broader market pullback, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.
AI tokens tumble
Many web3 projects were quick to jump on the AI bandwagon following the explosive emergence of large-language models (LLMs) ushered by the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Tokens associated with AI-aligned web3 projects nearly doubled during May, with their combined market cap tagging a local high of $39 billion on June 1, according to CoinGecko. However, with most protocols failing to deliver concrete AI products, the sector has suffered from violent volatility.
The capitalization of AI tokens has since crashed 37.5%, currently sitting at $22.9 billion after dipping 2.6% in 24 hours.
Nuklai’s NAI token was the best-performing asset over the past 24 hours with a 27% gain. However, NAI has crashed 88.4% since tagging an all-time high on April 19 — two days after the token went live.
A June 26 report from Grayscale Research noted that AI tokens were among the strongest-performing segments of the crypto market in 2024, having posted an 80% year-to-date gain at the time. The report added that AI tokens had the largest amount of dominance when it came to the social media landscape.
