State of AI

Chris Davis, Mohamed Allam, Dylan Bane, and Sam Ruskin have co-authored the 2025 State of Crypto x AI. The 89-page report offers an in-depth analysis of the decentralized AI (deAI) sector, framing it against major AI industry trends and providing a forward-looking view of what lies ahead for the space.

Key Insights

• AI tailwinds are driving a deAI revival. Surging inference demand, breakthroughs in post-training, stronger open-source models, agentic commerce, and frontier data requirements are quietly pushing deAI into its “age of enlightenment,” even as investor interest lags.
• Decentralized compute networks are repositioning. With inference demands soaring and smaller, open-source models closing the intelligence gap, supply is expanding, demand is growing, and new network structures are emerging.
• Protocols are industrializing frontier data collection. As AI capabilities push further into the frontier, demand for differentiated, hard-to-source data is exploding. Unexpected players are turning global users into coordinated collectors of frontier datasets worth millions.
• Crypto rails are powering agentic commerce. The agentic economy is beginning to take shape, with trillions in revenue from agentic commerce expected by 2030. Stablecoin rails will play a key role in facilitating these payments, and both crypto-native and traditional companies are positioning themselves accordingly.
• Top talent is routing into Darwinian networks. While leading labs pay hundreds of millions to poach researchers, Darwinian networks continue to attract top talent through open, competitive, merit-based markets rather than closed org charts.