The Rise and Innovation of AI Layer 1 Blockchain Platform

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, traditional Blockchain architecture can no longer meet the high-performance computing and complex data processing needs of AI applications. This has prompted the rise of Layer 1 Blockchain platforms specifically optimized for AI, which exhibit diversified characteristics in terms of technical architecture, application scenarios, and business models.

This article provides an in-depth analysis of the five leading AI Layer 1 projects: Bittensor, Vana, Kite AI, Nillion, and Sahara.

Bittensor: Decentralized AI Network Infrastructure

Bittensor, as an early explorer in the Blockchain AI field, is committed to building an open decentralized artificial intelligence collaboration network. Its goal is to break down the centralized barriers in traditional AI research and development, allowing more participants to contribute together and benefit together.

The technical architecture of Bittensor adopts a dual-layer structure design:

• Main Network: Responsible for the coordination, verification, and issuance management of TAO tokens for the entire system, and serves as the hub for resource allocation in the entire network.
• Subnet ecosystem: Each subnet acts like an independent AI laboratory, developing specialized solutions for specific AI application scenarios and proving its value in market competition.

This design allows Bittensor to balance the overall network stability and the specialization in various fields, providing a flexible infrastructure for the development of decentralized AI.

Progress of Ecological Development

• The number of subnets has expanded from an initial 32 to over 64, covering various AI application scenarios such as text generation, trading signals, and data annotation.
• The active user base has reached 140,000, doubling compared to the previous year.
• The total valuation of the subnet market exceeds $100 million, with a daily trading volume maintained at around $45 million.
• Institutional participation has significantly increased, with well-known funds incorporating TAO into their decentralized AI fund, adjusting its weight to 29.55%.

Bittensor recently completed the dTAO (Dynamic TAO) system upgrade, which is an important innovation in its economic model. The core of this upgrade lies in optimizing the allocation mechanism of the TAO token, shifting from a resource allocation method that relies on the subjective judgment of validators to a more market-oriented allocation mechanism, allowing resources to flow more accurately to those truly competitive subnetworks.

To address issues such as the lack of objectivity in the evaluation mechanism, imbalanced power structures, and participation barriers, the dTAO upgrade introduces a dynamic resource allocation system based on market mechanisms. This system transforms each subnet into an independent economic unit, driving resource allocation through users' actual demands. Its core innovation is the subnet token (Alpha token) mechanism:

• Operating Principle: Users can obtain Alpha tokens issued by various subnets by staking TAO, and these tokens represent the user's support for specific subnets.
• Resource allocation logic: The market price of Alpha tokens becomes a signal for measuring the demand intensity of the subnet. Initially, the price of alpha tokens is the same, with only 1 TAO and 1 alpha token in each pool. As the liquidity of the two types of tokens in the subnet increases, the price of alpha tokens will also change accordingly. The distribution of TAO is proportionally allocated based on the price of subnet tokens among all tokens, with subnets that have higher prices receiving more TAO allocation, thus achieving automatic optimization of resource allocation.

The most active subnets currently include:

• Subnet 4: Focused on AI inference services for text generation, characterized by fast response speed and low cost.
• Subnet 64: Provides various LLM API interfaces, allowing developers to build and deploy AI applications on the Bittensor network.
• Subnet 8: Focused on the financial sector, incentivizing miners to generate accurate trading signals through a reward mechanism, covering various financial markets such as foreign exchange and cryptocurrency.
• Subnet 52: Perform data annotation, encouraging users to earn tokens through data annotation.

Vana: Data Sovereignty and Value Reconstruction Platform

The Vana project focuses on addressing a core issue in today's digital economy: the ownership and value distribution of personal data. Vana's innovation lies in establishing an ecosystem where users truly own and control their own data while being able to derive economic benefits from it.

As an EVM-compatible Layer 1 Blockchain network, Vana's technical architecture consists of five core components:

1. Data liquidity layer: Achieve the incentives, aggregation, and verification of data assets through the Data Liquidity Pool (DLP). Each DLP is a smart contract specifically designed to aggregate certain types of data assets, such as social media data, browsing history, etc.
2. Data Portability Layer: Ensure that user data can be easily transferred between different applications and AI models, enhancing the flexibility of data usage.
3. Universal Connection Group: Track the real-time data flow within the entire ecosystem, forming a data ecology map to ensure system transparency.
4. Non-custodial data storage: Users' raw data will not be placed on the Blockchain, but rather stored in locations chosen by the users, such as cloud servers or personal devices, ensuring users have complete control over their own data.
5. Application Ecosystem: Developers can leverage the data accumulated from DLP to build various innovative applications, including AI applications, while data contributors can receive dividend rewards from these applications.

Latest developments

Vana's financing and cooperation expansion continues to advance:

• In February 2025, a certain laboratory announced a strategic investment in Vana, and the founder of a certain trading platform joined as an advisor.
• In terms of ecological construction, Vana has built data projects covering multiple fields from social media data to financial forecasting data, including: Finquarium (financial forecasting data), GPT Data DAO (ChatGPT chat data), Reddit Data DAO (Reddit user data), Volara (Twitter data), Flirtual (dating data), etc.
• Recently, Vana organized a hackathon during Eth Denver, offering a large prize pool to incentivize developers to build DataDAO and AI applications based on Vana data, further expanding its ecosystem.

Kite AI: Technical Breakthrough of AI-Native Blockchain

Kite AI is a native Layer 1 Blockchain project focused on the AI field, built on the Avalanche framework. It aims to address various challenges faced by traditional blockchains in handling AI assets, particularly how to achieve clear rights and incentives for AI data, models, and agent contributions. Kite AI proposes four core technological innovations:

1. PoAI Consensus Mechanism: Proof of Attributed Intelligence is a consensus mechanism pioneered by Kite AI, which accurately tracks the value contributions of data, models, and AI agents through a verifiable on-chain contribution record system.

2. Composable AI Subnet: Kite AI adopts a modular architecture, allowing developers to build industry-specific AI collaboration ecosystems as needed.

3. AI Native Execution Layer: Kite AI is building an on-chain AI native execution layer, specifically designed to handle AI computation tasks such as inference, embedding, and fine-tuning/training.

4. Decentralized Data Engine: Kite AI ensures that data creators receive fair rewards in the AI workflow. The platform features built-in compliance modules that adhere to regulations such as GDPR/CCPA, meeting data privacy requirements worldwide and reducing compliance costs for developers.

Development Status

Kite AI launched the incentive testnet on February 6, 2025, which is the first AI-native Layer 1 sovereign Blockchain testnet. The testnet performed impressively after going live:

• Less than 70 hours after the test went online, the number of connected wallets exceeded 100,000. So far, a total of 1.95 million wallets have joined the incentive test network V1, with more than 1 million wallets interacting with AI agents, and the total number of calls exceeding 115 million times.

• The project background is strong, built by an experienced Silicon Valley team. The co-founders have profound technical leadership experience in the field of artificial intelligence and have worked for several top technology companies. Core team members come from industry-leading enterprises and have academic backgrounds from top universities.

• In terms of capital support, the project has secured investments from multiple top-tier institutions and established technical cooperation relations with some well-known projects.

• As a selection committee member of a certain project in the AI program, Kite AI plays an active role in promoting the development of the artificial intelligence ecosystem.

Nillion: Frontier Exploration of Privacy Computing

Nillion is redefining the way sensitive data is processed through its unique "blind computation" technology, paving new paths for future digital privacy protection.

Nillion is a decentralized public network based on an innovative cryptographic primitive called Nil Message Compute (NMC), allowing network nodes to operate in a non-traditional Blockchain manner. This project was established in November 2021 with the aim of creating a system that can securely handle high-value data without exposing sensitive details.

The core advantage of Nillion lies in its "blind computation" capability------a process that allows data to remain encrypted throughout its lifecycle of storage, transmission, and processing. Its technological architecture integrates various cutting-edge privacy protection technologies:

• Multi-Party Computation ( MPC ): Enables multiple nodes to collaboratively compute a function without disclosing their private inputs, achieving joint computation without sharing data.
• Fully Homomorphic Encryption ( FHE ): Allows direct operations on encrypted data, ensuring that the data remains encrypted from start to finish, providing comprehensive privacy protection.
• Zero-Knowledge Proof ( ZKP ): Provides a method to verify computations without disclosing any underlying data, enhancing the system's credibility.
• Nada Language: This is a domain-specific language designed for creating secure MPC programs, simplifying the development process of privacy-preserving applications and reducing the learning curve for developers.

The network architecture of Nillion consists of three main layers: the processing layer ( responsible for secure computation ), the coordination layer ( NilChain, which manages communication between nodes ), and the connection layer ( that serves as a gateway to connect external systems ). This multi-layer architecture allows Nillion to provide powerful computing capabilities while protecting data privacy, meeting the needs of various privacy-sensitive scenarios.

latest development progress

According to the latest information, the development of the Nillion network is progressing steadily:

• The Nillion mainnet is scheduled to launch in March 2025 (this month). The total supply of Nillion tokens is 1 billion, which is expected to be distributed at the mainnet launch.
• In terms of financing, Nillion completed a $25 million funding round led by an institution on October 30, 2024, with investors including several well-known institutions and angel investors from some prominent projects. This funding round brought Nillion's total funding amount to $45 million, providing ample financial support for the long-term development of the project.
• In terms of ecological expansion, Nillion has established integration relationships with multiple mainstream public chains. Through collaboration with a certain protocol, Nillion aims to enhance privacy tools, enabling developers to innovate more effectively in the DeFi space.
• In the AI ecosystem, Nillion has established partnerships with several AI-related projects, including Ritual, Crush AI, Skillful AI, and Virtuals Protocol. For example, Virtuals Protocol is currently the largest multimodal AI agent protocol, which, through collaboration with Nillion, utilizes its secure computing infrastructure to support the private training and inference of AI models, achieving a perfect combination of AI and privacy.

Sahara AI: A platform for building a new economy of AI assets

project development

The core concept of Sahara AI is to build a "human-AI collaboration network" that enables ordinary users, developers, and enterprises to participate in the creation, deployment, and monetization of AI assets. Through this collaborative model, Sahara AI aims to lower the entry barriers for AI, allowing every participant to share in the dividends of industry growth. The project has successfully obtained support from multiple companies.