Sapien is committed to addressing the current scarcity of high-quality material resources used for AI training.

Written by: Umbrella, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, the decentralized AI data project Sapien on Base has shown strong growth momentum.

Since its listing on Binance Alpha on August 20, Sapien first experienced a continuous decline, but began a strong rebound starting September 1. As of now, it has doubled in value, and the 24-hour trading volume has also quadrupled from around $5 million at the beginning of the month, breaking through the $20 million mark.

With the rise in price and trading volume, discussions about Sapien in the market have gradually increased. Among the publicly displayed client list of Sapien, several well-known traditional giants have appeared: 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 is still a relatively attractive narrative, especially when most AI crypto project tokens lean more towards being memes.

Project Background

In the current commentary from the crypto community about Sapien, "star team" has become a key phrase.

The CEO of Sapien, Rowan Stone, was a co-founder of Coinbase's L2 network Base, which gives 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 significant support for the Sapien project.

In terms of financing, Sapien disclosed two rounds of seed funding of $5 million and $10.5 million in April and October 2024, respectively. The October seed round investors included well-known institutions such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Yield Guild Games.

This round of financing not only provided sufficient operational funds for the project but also validated the market's long-term demand for decentralized AI data infrastructure and the optimism of VCs regarding this narrative.

It is worth mentioning that Sapien's token launch through Binance Alpha also represents its market popularity, and with Alpha's support, it has enhanced the visibility of the Sapien project.

Technical Innovation

Sapien is dedicated to solving the current scarcity of high-quality material resources used for AI training. Although this is not a new narrative, Sapien has provided a brand new solution.

The traditional AI data field faces pain points such as opaque data sources, inconsistent quality, and a lack of effective incentive mechanisms. Sapien's innovative PoQ (Proof of Quality) mechanism addresses this issue through core components such as token staking, peer verification, reputation scoring, and token rewards and penalties.

Specifically, contributors providing data to Sapien need to stake their Sapien tokens as collateral. After passing multiple data verifications, they will receive stablecoins and token rewards, while low-quality submissions will face penalties of 25%-100% of their staked amount.

This reward and penalty mechanism effectively prevents some users from using bots to inflate data and the proliferation of low-quality data materials, ensuring that the data ultimately adopted is high-quality and valuable.

From the application scenario perspective, 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, an oncologist can earn hundreds of dollars per hour by annotating cancer data. Such cases reflect the immense value of high-quality professional data materials and validate the effectiveness of Sapien's PoQ mechanism in incentivizing professional contributors.

(Source: Sapien project official website)

Market Size

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 over 110 countries worldwide.

According to the latest data on the official website, Sapien has over 1.8 million registered contributors and has completed a total 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 growing at an average monthly rate of 50%. This sustained significant growth also indicates market recognition of the Sapien mechanism and brand.

The reason Sapien has attracted market attention is not only due to the rapid growth in user numbers but also its impressive lineup of enterprise clients. Currently, Sapien serves 29 enterprise clients, including well-known international organizations such as Toyota, Alibaba, Baidu, Midjourney, and the United Nations, covering multiple fields such as autonomous driving, e-commerce, AI drawing, and international organizations.

Particularly noteworthy is Sapien's collaboration with Midjourney. As a leading project in the AI image generation field, Midjourney is renowned for producing high-quality AI images, which also indicates its high standards for the quality of image drawing data. Only with a large amount of high-quality material for training can effective AI drawing functions be developed. 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 like 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 significant reforms this year, and the two have formed a positive growth cycle.

The current TVL of the Base chain has surpassed $6.8 billion, surpassing Tron to become the fifth-largest DeFi network, with AI-related protocols having a TVL exceeding $2 billion. Information disclosed through the Base App also shows that Base has made significant investments in the AI track, while also establishing Sapien's leadership position in the AI infrastructure field.

Moreover, Sapien is likely to form complementary relationships 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 the two can provide a complete infrastructure stack for AI developers. This specialization and ecological collaboration is the core competitive advantage of Base compared to other L2 networks.

Coinbase's current strategy also seems to confirm this trend. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that 40% of the code in Coinbase has been generated by AI, with a goal of reaching over 50% by October 2025.

This dual-driven approach, combining internal applications with external trends, provides strong strategic and resource support for AI projects within the Base ecosystem.

Market Discussion and Sentiment

Current discussions on social media and community platforms reflect an optimistic sentiment towards Sapien overall.

The main narratives focus on the potential immense value of AI data infrastructure in the current global AI and crypto wave, the unique advantages of a global contributor network, and the strategic significance of collaborating with world-renowned giant enterprises.

Although the method of listing through Binance Alpha and the subsequent decline in price for several days initially caused some controversy, as its price has risen in recent days, the market has gradually discovered the unique charm and stable fundamentals of the Sapien project.

Earlier this month, before Sapien's price surge, an overseas analyst named Game provided an optimistic view based on Sapien's background and some data. Coincidentally, the day after he posted this, Sapien's price began to rise sharply.

The Pros and Cons of Sapien

Sapien's current performance is indeed eye-catching, but from an investment perspective, we need to analyze it calmly.

On the positive side, the problem that Sapien is committed to solving is a real demand; high-quality AI training data is a need that spans both traditional and crypto industries. The collaboration with major companies like Alibaba and Toyota also indicates that this mechanism is indeed effective.

In the niche of AI training data, Sapien has an earlier ecological position and a large existing scale compared to other similar products. More contributors will bring higher quality data, creating a positive cycle and building competitive barriers. Additionally, being backed by the Base ecosystem gives it a competitive advantage in resource integration and business expansion.

However, the risks faced by Sapien are also very apparent.

First is the sustainability of the PoQ mechanism. Just because the model is reasonable does not mean it can maintain such data growth indefinitely. Once most AI models are trained, will the demand for continuous data significantly decrease? Moreover, as Sapien's scale continues to expand, the marginal cost of controlling the quality of materials provided by contributors may rise sharply, making it challenging to manage such a large user base.

Finally, there is the common challenge faced by many crypto projects—regulatory risk. Issues related to cross-border data flow, privacy protection, and AI training compliance could paralyze the entire chain if any link encounters regulatory problems.

Overall, as an important component of the AI infrastructure within the Base ecosystem, Sapien has undoubtedly attracted widespread attention in both project and token price.

In the current context of rapid development of AI technology, increasing data demand, and support from the Base ecosystem, Sapien's future performance may be worth watching.

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