Base ecology adds a powerful player? Detailed explanation of the AI infrastructure project Sapien

The decentralized AI data project Sapien has recently demonstrated strong performance, aiming to address the scarcity of AI training materials. This article will detail its background, technology, market scale, and future potential. (Background summary: OpenAI collaborates to create animated films! Musk is not outdone: xAI discusses cooperation on AI game development) (Background supplement: Summary of the Silicon Valley study tour: The innovative secrets of Crypto, AI, and Silicon Valley) Recently, the decentralized AI data project Sapien on Base has shown a robust growth momentum. After being listed on Binance Alpha on August 20, Sapien initially experienced a continuous decline but began a strong rebound starting September 1. As of now, it has doubled in price, and the 24-hour trading volume has also increased fourfold from around 5 million dollars at the beginning of the month, breaking through the 20 million dollar mark. With the rise in price and trading volume, discussions about Sapien in the market have gradually increased. Among the notable traditional giants in the publicly displayed client list of Sapien are Alibaba, Baidu, Toyota, Lenovo, and the AI image generation unicorn Midjourney. Clearly, using more data to train AI and serve traditional Web2 companies remains a missed opportunity from the last AI hype cycle. Although the current AI narrative in the crypto market is not as FOMO-inducing as the previous wave, it still presents a relatively attractive narrative, especially when most AI crypto project tokens are more meme-oriented. Project Background In the current commentary from the crypto community regarding Sapien, the term "star team" has become a keyword. The CEO of the Sapien project, Rowan Stone, was a co-founder of Coinbase's L2 network Base, giving Sapien a natural advantage within the Base ecosystem. Its Chief Strategy Officer, Trevor Koverko, is the founder of the early securities digitization project Polymath and one of the creators of the ERC-1400 RWA standard. His extensive experience in asset tokenization provides crucial support for the Sapien project. In terms of financing, Sapien disclosed two rounds of seed financing of 5 million dollars and 10.5 million dollars in April and October 2024, respectively, with investors in the October round including well-known institutions such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Yield Guild Games. This round of financing not only provides sufficient operational funds for the project but also validates the long-term market demand for decentralized AI data infrastructure and VCs' optimism about this narrative. It is worth mentioning that Sapien's token launch through Binance Alpha also represents its market heat, and with Alpha's support, it has enhanced the visibility of the Sapien project. Technological Innovation Sapien aims to address the current shortage of high-quality material resources for AI training. Although this is not a novel narrative, Sapien provides a completely new solution. The traditional AI data field faces pain points such as opacity in data sources, uneven quality, and lack of effective incentive mechanisms. Sapien has innovatively launched the PoQ ( quality proof ) mechanism, which addresses this problem through core components such as token staking, peer verification, reputation scoring, and token rewards and penalties. Specifically, contributors providing data for Sapien need to stake their Sapien tokens as collateral. After passing multiple data verifications, they will receive stablecoin and token rewards, while low-quality submissions will face penalties of 25%-100% of their staked amount. Under this reward and penalty mechanism, the use of bots for wash trading and the influx of low-quality data is effectively prevented, ensuring that the data ultimately adopted is of high quality and value. In terms of application scenarios, Sapien has already proven its value in high-precision demand fields such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. According to the cases currently disclosed by the project party, an oncologist can earn hundreds of dollars per hour by annotating cancer data. This case reflects the enormous value of high-quality professional data materials and also verifies the effectiveness of the PoQ mechanism introduced by Sapien in incentivizing professional contributors. Image source: Sapien project official website Market Scale In terms of commercialization progress, Sapien's pace far exceeds that of other projects in the same track, having built a vast contributor network covering more than 110 countries worldwide. According to the latest data from the official website, the number of registered contributors on the Sapien platform exceeds 1.8 million, with a cumulative completion of 187 million data annotation tasks. More noteworthy than the current scale is its growth rate: in 2024, the number of contributors on the Sapien platform is expected to grow by an average of 50% per month. This sustained significant growth also indicates market recognition of the Sapien mechanism and brand. The reason for Sapien's market attention is not only the rapid growth in user numbers but also its demonstrated lineup of corporate clients. Currently, Sapien has served 29 corporate clients, including Toyota, Alibaba, Baidu, Midjourney, and the United Nations, covering various fields such as autonomous driving, e-commerce, AI image generation, and international organizations. Of particular concern is the collaboration between Sapien and Midjourney. As a leading project in the AI image generation field, Midjourney has built its reputation on producing high-quality AI images, which also indicates its high standards for the quality of image drawing data. Only based on a large number of high-quality materials can effective AI drawing functions emerge, and its choice of Sapien as a data supplier fully validates the feasibility of Sapien's high-quality data collection mechanism. At the same time, the participation of traditional giants such as Toyota and Alibaba also indicates that decentralized data services are gaining recognition from mainstream enterprises. Support from the Base Ecosystem Sapien's current success is inseparable from Base's sweeping reforms this year, and the two have formed a positive growth cycle. The TVL of the Base chain has currently exceeded 6.8 billion dollars, surpassing Tron to become the fifth largest DeFi network, with AI-related protocols’ TVL exceeding 2 billion dollars. Through the information currently disclosed by the Base App, it is also evident that Base has heavily invested in the AI track, while also establishing Sapien's leadership position in the AI infrastructure field. Moreover, it is highly likely that Sapien will form a complementary relationship with other AI projects within the Base ecosystem in the future. For example, Venice's DIEM project focuses on tokenizing AI Computing Power, while Sapien provides verifiable human data. The combination of both can offer AI developers a complete...