Aethirs ambition: to become the AWS of Web3 in the AI Agent era

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author: Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )

As AI penetration rate gradually increases, the intersection of the crypto industry and AI has also welcomed more and more projects. Previously, AI Agents led the crypto market with a growth rate of 24.31%. The flourishing of various AI projects, AI Agents, and AI Meme coins have also made the demand for GPU computing power and cloud computing resources increasingly scarce. As the industrys leading enterprise-level decentralized cloud computing platform, Aethir took the lead and showed strong development momentum. The $100 million ecological fund also highlights its determination to focus on the AI track and build the AWS (Amazon Cloud) in the Web3 field.

Odaily Planet Daily will use 6 questions in this article to take a look at Aethirs AI industry landscape. (Note: The questions were asked by Odaily Planet Daily reporter Wenser, and the answerer was Aethir co-founder Mark)

Q1: As an enterprise-level decentralized cloud computing platform, Aethir has previously launched an ecological fund of up to US$100 million. The first batch of funded projects focused on the AI track. How is the current progress of these projects? What are the funding criteria?

A: Last October, Aethir officially announced an ecosystem fund of up to $100 million consisting of multiple funding programs. As an enterprise-level decentralized GPU cloud computing infrastructure platform focusing on AI and Gaming, Aethir has been committed to accelerating the widespread application of cloud computing platforms since TGE, empowering startups in the fields of AI and gaming, etc. The core funding program Aethir Catalyst has a scale of up to $20 million and will distribute 336 million ATH tokens in 2025, providing financial and ecological computing support to more than 100 projects in the form of funding or subsidies, and providing them with key computing resources such as GPUs required for project development.

In November, within 24 hours of the announcement of AethirCloud’s $100 million ecological fund seeking AI agent projects, more than 300 projects applied . Recently, our Batch 5 (fifth batch of projects) has also come out, and you can also learn about it. Among them, many AI-related applications in the previous batch have also been recognized by the market, and TopHat also launched Binance Alpha on January 7. As for the criteria for screening projects, we also want to do our best to promote the implementation and application of the entire AI-related application in the industry.

The other two $10 million ecosystem funding programs are also key components of the Aethir Ecosystem Fund, and will work with XAI and XPLA to promote innovation. At the Bitcoin MENA conference, we also joined hands with ADBC (Abu Dhabi Blockchain Center) to plan to empower more Web3 projects, and the application page is now officially launched; in addition, we participated in sponsoring the Solana AI hackathon AI Agents x MEMEs track. In addition, for companies that need GPU computing resources, Aethir provides a subsidy plan with a discount of up to 35% on off-platform service costs, which makes it convenient for startups or senior developers to access computing resources with the help of the Aethir platform and promote the development of innovative projects. Aethir will act quickly in the future to accelerate the embrace of AI Agent and AI Meme, and help complete the expansion and implementation of AI-related applications.

Currently, the funding for a single project ranges from $50 million to $500,000 in ATH tokens ; it is divided into tracks such as games, launch platforms, AI integrated enterprises, and cloud gaming platforms. Qualified companies can receive both funding and subsidies, which is quite friendly to many projects. (Note: Contracts lasting 6 months or more are eligible for subsidies. Shorter contracts may be eligible for grants, but not subsidies, unless approved by the transaction department. The $100 million ecological fund plan will be divided into steps and cooperation sections.)

Q2: Compared with traditional cloud service providers, cloud computing platforms, and other similar Web3 projects, what are Aethirs advantages, characteristics, or competitive differences? Is its ecological niche in the upper or middle reaches of the industry or somewhere else?

A: Compared with other DePIN projects, the advantages are:

From the perspective of project business, compared with other DePIN projects, Aethirs advantage mainly lies in the fact that Aethir had already built and served enterprise-level customers with high demand for computing power before entering Web3, which has generated stable and continuously growing positive income for Aethir. Enterprise-level services need to comply with the SLA agreement (service level agreement) in the physical industry. It is no exaggeration to say that Aethir is currently the only Depin project in Web3 that can provide stable services to enterprise-level customers. At the same time, we are also the only company that can realize cloud games and cloud phones through web3s virtual machine technology. The four business segments are in a state of rapid development.

In 2024, our annual recurring revenue has reached US$90.68 million, which is also shown in our GPU Dashboard (including US$7.6 million in revenue in December and over 266 million computing hours). The existing mature large-scale customers and steadily growing market demand are the biggest differences between Aethir and other DePIN projects.

On the business level, Aethir is very different from other Depin projects. Io.net mainly aggregates underutilized distributed GPU resources through a high-level coordination layer to solve some simple AI or machine learning tasks. Render provides 3D rendering services for consumer-level computing connections; or Grass uses idle network resources to mine points and earn tokens. For us, we focus on the software layer for enterprise-level service use cases including games and AI, so in the areas we focus on, Aethirs competitive advantage is very obvious.

From the perspective of ecological scalability, Aethirs ecological niche has laid a strong foundation for the scalability of its ecology. It has carried out cross-border and cross-field cooperation with many projects, and established deep ecological connections with partners in the fields of Web3, AI, games, DeFi or Web2. At the same time, it has enriched the use of $ATH tokens. Aethirs ecology conforms to the development of the industry.

Aethir plays a big role in the supply and demand market, because Aethir can help users use computing power at low cost through an optimized computing power network, while ignoring the physical space and the computing power cost of the actual market. In laymans terms, Aethir can help users obtain high-quality computing power resources at low cost. On the one hand, it can reduce the cost of user development or training; on the other hand, its flexible computing power allocation and market demand can meet the needs of users with various needs. Aethir has been expanding its ecological partners. I think there is a lot to expand on the computing power layer. To make a long story short, the expansion and breakthrough of decentralized AI in the future is unstoppable. As a computing power supplier, the breakthrough of more and more AI applications will be the best proof of our strength.

Q3: After Aethir went online, we saw a lot of cooperation with other projects and optimization of the business side. Does it have a certain scale effect?

A: There is no doubt that our team has been actively expanding the Aethir ecosystem before and after TGE. I have also mentioned this in some of my previous speeches at events.

In the new era, the demand for GPUs has skyrocketed. As the complexity of AI large language models has soared, problems such as insufficient purchasing power, slow product updates, and low efficiency have gradually become prominent. Decentralized, enterprise-level GPU cloud infrastructure that can adapt to the needs of the AI and gaming industries is an effective solution to the problem, and Aethirs products and services are one of the best choices to meet this demand. Taking the gaming direction as an example, Aethirs cloud gaming service can make capacity expansion cheaper, cloud the hardware layer, and allow mass players to play all games on various devices. In addition, the sales volume of the DePIN hardware device Aethir Edge we released at that time had exceeded 25,000. Users can use the device to run the Aethir network to earn tokens, or mine other projects, which has a huge ecological expansion scale effect. Aethirs core competitiveness lies in its decentralized computing infrastructure and edge computing capabilities, and it can use the growth trend of decentralized CDN and GPU to expand its business scope.

For example, right now, the price on our platform is about 1/10 of AWSs price. Compared to other low-frequency platforms, our price may be slightly higher because our computing resources are enterprise-grade, and most of our customers are also enterprise customers. But compared to Google Cloud and AWS, their GPU charges are still very expensive. By allowing retailers to participate and letting more computer resources serve us, we can gradually but powerfully cover more and more businesses, not only in the encryption field, but also in the AI field. This is also our expected goal. Our revenue and platform scale will become larger and larger over time.

At the same time, the breakthrough effect of AI Agent has been seen by the market. At the same time, Aethir and AI16Z have also reached deep support and ecological expansion based on the ELIZA framework. I believe that the application narrative of AI Agent and the expansion of the entire industry are moving towards AI content. I believe that the industry will revolve around the breakthrough of decentralized CDN and GPU high-growth applications in the future. As the demand for large model training, reasoning, game rendering, etc. supported by GPU reaches its peak in 2024, decentralized CDN will usher in explosive growth in 2025, serving delay-sensitive scenarios such as content streaming, data crawling, and AR/VR experience. Aethir has a complete computing power network. It can provide high-performance, low-cost decentralized computing and edge computing capabilities. It will become the core infrastructure supporter of this market. At the same time, it combines energy optimization and resource integration technologies to solve the current challenges of fragmented supply and inject greater innovation power into high-growth use cases.

Q4: Aethir has reached a cooperation with LayerZero to expand the full-chain ecological map. What are the follow-up plans?

A: Last November, Aethir announced the cooperation news . Based on the cross-chain versatility demand generated by the expansion of GPU cloud infrastructure, it cooperated with the full-chain solution LayerZero to build a multi-chain AI and gaming ecosystem, and introduce multi-chain functions into the Aethir DePIN stack, which will also help Aethir migrate to the Sophon ZK chain.

In the cooperation between the two parties, LayerZeros full-chain technology will ensure that the ATH token rewards of check nodes and Aethir Edge operators will be smoothly transitioned from the Arbitrum L2 network to Sophon, while maintaining network stability and ensuring a frictionless experience for the Aethir community. In the future, we will also use the Stargate full-chain liquidity protocol cross-bridge to facilitate users to seamlessly exchange ATH tokens across chains.

LayerZero supports our development towards multi-chain in terms of node migration, token rewards, and liquidity transfer; we provide GPU computing power support for AI and gaming projects on more chains. Therefore, the participation of partners such as LayerZero and Sophon will enable us to build a cross-chain asset ecosystem with Aethir, further raising the ceiling of industry imagination.

Subsequently, Aethir is also actively working with other partners to establish in-depth cooperation. For example, we recently cooperated with Eigen Layer, the leader in the ReStaking track, to use the AVS model to help listed or enterprise-level companies with zero Web3 background to buy coins on their balance sheets, stake them, or hold these tokens for a long time. Through our mechanism, we can provide them with a very compliant and secure way to provide computing power on our platform;

GAIB is the first GPU tokenization. It transforms enterprise-level GPUs into tradable, yield-generating assets; it cooperates with MetaStreet on the first node liquidity Yield; it cooperates with SuiDePIN, the first DePIN on Sui, and also co-founded the AI computing project Tactical Compute (TACOM) with partners Beam Foundation (through its wholly-owned subsidiary Beam Investments), Sophon Foundation and Permian Labs, intending to raise $40 million. It plans to use decentralized technology to combine traditional computing economics with tokenization and distributed solutions to meet the surging global demand for scalable computing infrastructure. The previous cooperation with ADBC is a preemptive layout in the Middle East.

In addition to the collaborations mentioned above, the development of the entire chain ecosystem is also within our plan. Therefore, the previous cooperation with LayerZero is also to ensure that Aethir can undoubtedly expand its full-chain partners. The cooperation with Eigen Layer is to ensure that the platform has high-quality GPU suppliers while also being able to continue to expand the utilization rate of ATH tokens.

Q 5: From the perspective of the industry track, what do you think of the DeAI project and AI Agent coin issuance projects? Do you think this is an industry trend?

A: There is no doubt that as the industry-leading decentralized computing power network, Aethir has a natural space for cooperation and complementarity with the DeAI project and AI Agent. DeFAI, GamFAI, DeSci, etc. are all the results and directions of the development of AI in various fields.

We can provide the latter with more stable and sufficient computing resources to facilitate project operations and long-term development; the latter can provide us with stable revenue while enriching ecological development and improving network utilization efficiency.

After a16z, DWF and other capital institutions joined DeAI, AI Agent coin issuance and other projects, the AI track has become a recognized hot sector in the industry. As a representative figure in the Crypto x AI Agent track, ai16z founder Shaw also issued a statement announcing the cooperation with us. He mentioned : The decentralized computing network @AethirCloud is providing free GPU computing power to Eliza agent developers. Developers with relevant needs can apply for it. This shows the technical recognition and support for Aethirs computing power supply. This is also the original intention of our launch of a $100 million ecological fund. This AI wave represented by AI Agent, as the industrys leading decentralized computing network, Aethir must participate in it.

Q 6: Currently, AI is expanding its application areas very rapidly, especially in the areas of AI healthcare, AI education, and AI entertainment, where a large number of demands and start-ups have emerged. Does Aethir have any relevant support plans or cooperation intentions in the future?

A: As early as August this year, we released a roadmap for the next six months, and we have been steadily advancing these plans. Through these business advancements and business growth, we hope to achieve more efficient business integration and enhanced AI capabilities, and introduce governance mechanisms and ecological funds.

In our roadmap, we also provide a detailed introduction to the functions designed for enterprises to enter the Aethir platform, which facilitates the conversion of enterprise revenue into ATH. Subsequent enterprise service expansion, including cloud games, cloud phones, AI training, and edge computing, we also plan to introduce special features to enhance the user experience.

In 2025, Aethirs key narrative will revolve around the breakthrough of decentralized CDN and GPU high-growth applications. As the demand for large model training, reasoning, game rendering, etc. supported by GPU reaches its peak in 2024, decentralized CDN will usher in explosive growth in 2025, serving latency-sensitive scenarios such as content streaming, data crawling, and AR/VR experience. Aethir can become the core infrastructure supporter of this market by providing high-performance, low-cost decentralized computing and edge computing capabilities, while combining energy optimization and resource integration technologies to solve the current challenges of fragmented supply and inject greater innovation momentum into high-growth use cases. At the same time, AI Agents with concepts including DeFAI and DeSci have also appeared in the market and are favored by the market, but I think AI Agents are still in a chaotic period. Let us move towards the direction of the emergence of real AI Agents and their wide recognition and use by users. In addition to this, we will also cooperate on some developer-focused projects in the future, especially to support young developers, especially in the field of AI. We want to support these different developers, use the computing power on our platform, and obtain free computing power through our infrastructure. We actually have a lot of Web3 projects that we like, and their development in the first 3 months has been strongly supported by us. Generally speaking, our sponsorship cycle is as long as 3 to 6 months, in order to support their early start-up and help their Agents to really play a role and do valuable things. This is also an important strategic direction for Aethir to achieve market expansion and enhance ecological influence in 2025.

References:
Aethir Official Documentation

XT Aethir AMA