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Jan 27, 2025
0G Foundation and 0G Labs have already made immense progress in decentralizing AI, raising a combined $358M.
0G provides a comprehensive suite of decentralized AI infrastructure, collectively referred to as a decentralized AI Operating System (deAIOS) aiming to replace black-box models with transparent, modular, and interoperable solutions.
This vision is underpinned by a robust ecosystem of interconnected technologies that enable developers to build decentralized AI applications at scale. The graphic below illustrates how these different components work in tandem, creating a seamless stack that powers decentralized AI innovation.
These components include:
0G Chain: An EVM-compatible blockchain with horizontal scalability that supports Web3 growth and easy integrations for cross-chain smart contract deployment.
0G Compute Network: A decentralized marketplace for AI inference, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and model hosting.
0G Storage: A distributed data storage system with on-chain incentives, similar to an on-chain AWS.
0G Data Availability: Infinitely scalable data availability infrastructure for fast, low-cost data querying and verification.
0G Service Marketplace: A comprehensive platform for registering, hosting, and consuming AI services, built to fuel a distributed AI economy.
0G Alignment Nodes: Related to our node sale, who monitor ecosystem participants such as storage nodes and data availability nodes.
We’ll also provide a sneak peek at the end as to what’s ahead for 2025.
0G Compute Network
The 0G Compute Network serves as an open marketplace that connects developers, startups, and enterprises with service providers. This decentralized platform enables these users to access various compute and model services, such as GPUs, for tasks like inference and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).
To that end, we’re already partnering with projects like Aethir, Phala, and Akash Network who will list their AI services, which anyone can then permissionlessly lease and integrate into their project, alongside any other 0G products.
The two parties include:
Service Providers: The owners of AI models and hardware who offer their services for a fee.
Users: Individuals or organizations who use the services listed by Service Providers, either using 0G’s AI services directly or building applications on top of the API.
As part of this, the framework is built to provide permissionless settlement between AI users and AI service providers in a fast and trustworthy manner, as required by a fully distributed AI economy.
The workflow looks as follows:
Service Registration: Providers list their service types, URLs, and pricing in a smart contract.
Fee Staking and Requests: Users stake fees in the smart contract and submit service requests with metadata and signatures to the provider.
Provider Response: Providers validate user requests and respond, ensuring the user’s balance is sufficient.
Settlement and Verification: Providers submit ZK-proofs to the smart contract for verification, and users verify the response, halting requests if validation fails.
Providers register their services (1), users pre-deposit fees and submit requests (2,3), Provides give confirmation (4), settlement and verification occur (5,6).
To learn more, visit https://docs.0g.ai/build-with-0g/compute-network/overview
0G Service Marketplace
The 0G Service Marketplace enables seamless access to AI services, beginning with AI inference, and will soon evolve into an Agent Marketplace, where anyone can deploy their own AI agent without needing to code.
The Agent Marketplace will feature a user-friendly interface similar to existing platforms like Virtuals or CreatorAI, but with a key differentiator: it leverages 0G's decentralized tech stack, including 0G Storage, 0G DA, verifiable inference, and more. Additionally, the platform will implement the EIP-7844 NFT standard for AI Agents, which 0G’s CTO Ming Wu recently introduced.
At a high-level, the ERC-7844 standard allows the private and verifiable transfer of sensitive agent metadata, ensuring that ownership of both the NFT and its associated capabilities is securely transferred. This is achieved through a proof-based mechanism ensuring only the rightful NFT owner can securely transfer, access, and operate AI agents in a decentralized marketplace. We’ll cover it in-depth shortly.
Other key features of the Agent Marketplace include:
Deploying and improving your own agent
Discovering new agents
Managing your portfolio of agents
Receiving payments and rewards when others use your agent
Unlike the 0G Compute Network, which provides raw computational resources like GPUs for building applications from scratch, the 0G Service Marketplace focuses on delivering ready-to-use AI services. This approach simplifies the integration process for developers and projects needing specific AI functionalities without managing the underlying infrastructure or models.
Together, these platforms ensure that developers have access to everything they need, such as scalable compute power or sophisticated AI services, to innovate and build in the decentralized AI ecosystem.
0G Chain
0G Chain is a high-performance, EVM-compatible, Proof-of-Stake blockchain, which is why 0G can scale at such an incredible rate. Although EVM-compatible, it can interact with non-EVM networks thanks to our extensive interoperability partnerships with top projects like Axelar.
Notably, building on 0G Chain is incredibly accessible, thanks to its developer-friendly design and compatibility with widely used Ethereum tools like web3.js and ethers.js. With seamless integration into your 0G Chain node or RPC endpoint, developers can quickly deploy smart contracts and focus on creating innovative DApps or scalable decentralized AI solutions, streamlining the development process and driving impactful projects forward.
The current generation of 0G Chain is built on top of Cosmos SDK and consists of only one blockchain. The next generation, however, will be composed of multiple independent consensus networks, rather than a single linear network. These networks can expand dynamically based on demand, ensuring that as data volumes grow exponentially, 0G's throughput scales accordingly (e.g., 1, 100, or even 1,000 networks). This will be rolled out later this year.
0G can add new chains. Validators stake $0G on mainnet to validate, and receive $0G as rewards on various networks, which they can burn and redeem back on mainnet.
This works by having 0G Consensus collaborate with 0G Storage to validate data. DA Nodes are randomly queried (using a random function) and collectively reach a consensus on the validity of the data. As the amount of data to be confirmed grows exponentially, the consensus networks (that in aggregate form 0G Consensus) can expand.
This is possible using a shared staking model, whereby validators stake their funds on the Ethereum mainnet, providing security across all the 0G Consensus networks they participate in. If a slashable event occurs on any of the 0G networks, the validator's stake on the Ethereum mainnet is subject to slashing. This ensures that mainnet-level security is extended to all of 0G's consensus networks simultaneously, creating a unified and secure staking environment.
This means it’s very easy and secure to deploy smart contracts on 0G Chain as it’s straightforward and mirrors the familiar processes used on Ethereum-compatible blockchains.
At a high level, the process includes:
Prepare Code & Compile It: Write your contract code as you would for any EVM-compatible blockchain, and use a Solidity compiler to compile your smart contract.
Deploy the Contract on 0G Chain: Leverage Ethereum-compatible deployment tools such as web3.js or ethers.js to deploy your compiled contract, and connect to your 0G Chain node or RPC endpoint.
Verify Deployment: Once deployed, verify the transaction results on 0G Chain Scan, the block explorer for 0G Chain.
We provide a full guide here.
0G Storage & 0G DA
These are our first two original products, which form the foundation of the 0G ecosystem.
0G Storage is our decentralized storage network designed for cost-efficient, tamper-proof storage of data, ranging from general files to AI models and datasets. It ensures that data is distributed securely and can be accessed reliably, making it a cornerstone for applications requiring high data integrity.
It works as follows:
Data Upload and Erasure Coding: When data is uploaded, it undergoes erasure coding, a process that fragments the data into smaller, redundant pieces and distributes them across multiple storage nodes.
Dual-Lane System for Data Management: A dual-lane system ensures data availability guarantees through quick querying and verification by the consensus network, while also facilitating large-scale data transfers and secure storage for vast amounts of data.
Data is erasure-coded into 0G Storage and queried via the data publishing lane.
This serves a key industry need for scalable, secure, and efficient data solutions critical to advancing decentralized applications. We have already partnered with a wide range of leading projects across verticals such as AI, gaming, DeFi, DePIN, and more, showcasing the versatility and impact of 0G Storage.
We covered 0G Storage in-depth here, and provide a video demo showing how quickly it is to upload or retrieve a dataset using 0G Storage.
Meanwhile, 0G DA complements this storage system by ensuring that stored data is always verifiable and accessible for high-performance use cases.
The range of use cases is quite extensive, spanning decentralized applications, rollups, and AI-driven workloads, as evidenced by our ecosystem report, where we highlighted its adoption by projects leveraging fast data querying and verification for decentralized AI, scalable app chains, and more.
By employing a quorum-based design, 0G ensures that data is certified and readily available without compromising decentralization.
We covered 0G DA in-depth here.
0G Alignment Nodes
The 0G Alignment Network plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity and efficiency of the 0G ecosystem.
Alignment Nodes are responsible for monitoring and coordinating activities across key components such as storage nodes, data availability nodes, and compute resources. The right to operate an Alignment Node was introduced during the 0G node sale, granting participants a critical role in shaping and securing the ecosystem's decentralized infrastructure.
Recently, the rebate/commission and NFT Claim portal went live, and looking ahead, we are also planning to launch one-click Node-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider integrations. This will make it seamless for anyone to deploy and manage an Alignment Node, lowering the barrier to entry to 0G’s node ecosystem.
What’s Ahead?
As we move closer to 2025, 0G is gearing up to deliver a suite of mainnet products and features while refining and testing additional components on testnet. Here’s a look at what’s coming.
Here's a glimpse at what's on the horizon:
Agent Network: This ambitious initiative aims to create a decentralized ecosystem of interoperable AI agents designed to handle complex and diverse agentic AI use cases.
Developer Onboarding: We’ll focus on building the next generation of dApps on top of 0G, where we believe that there is immense potential for early builders.
New Products: While we can’t share the details on these yet, we have some very exciting products and services planned that will help to further decentralize AI.
Interesting in building with us? Reach out via Discord.
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