DePIN & Decentralised AI | Panel Session @Web3LagosCon

Hi guys, amazing faces. I hope we're going to have a wonderful conversation together this afternoon. Uh we're going to start off with introductions. Uh once the microphone is passed to you, I'd like you to briefly introduce yourself and tell us what you're building. So I'm going to start with you Marcus, please.

Yeah. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us in this uh fun panel. Uh I'm Marcus. I'm one of the co-founders of XYO and uh we are the first deepen we launched in 2018 and in 2018 we uh launched with a certainty around data uh today basically we are fullyfledged decentralized data company and the trustless oracle collecting real world data and connecting it with blockchain.

Thank you very much mas give him round of applause. All right. May please introduce yourself briefly and tell us what you do.

Good day everyone. Glad to have you all here. My name is Olua Adiquba and I'm my I'm a data scientist and a decentralized AI architect and part of my project was trust me which happened like 2023 whereby you link verifiable intelligence with zero knowledge proofs and help to build privacy and transparency which we all know that's what blockchain is about. Thank you.

Oh, thank you very much. M. Let's give him a round of applause. All right, Dre.

Yeah. Um, my name is Dre. I'm a privacy advocate and the ZedCash ambassador and I help lead um developer on boarding for the Zcash ecosystem. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Let's give him a round of applause. All right. Um, just moving straight into the session. As I mentioned earlier, this session is about deep and decentralized AI.

I'm going to assume some of us in this room do not even know what deepin is right. So this is going to bring me to my first question to Olu. Please um imagine you're explaining deepin to someone who do not understand crypto or the infrastructure that supports it currently. What is deepin and what problem does decentralization solve for us today?

Thank you. So what is deepin? Deepin simply means decentralized private infrastructure network. And what this s is is like a technology that acts as a community whereby instead of using them AWS them Microsoft and all these giant companies that stand on their own deep simply give you like a chance to link and compute with network other hardways that you can use that is very cost effective that is easy to manage easy to use less less traffic and available for the long term. And what does decentralization do?

Decentralization simply is exactly what deepening some is about at the same time cuz decentralization you are not just using an hardware from the big active monopolies that are in play. You are actually using infrastructures that already in play built by engineers, UIUX designers and other people in their various field whereby maybe you need the services of an hardware or a network, a connected network to make things happen and you do not like have the right amount to like purchase that stuff. That's where the centralization comes in. the connection of all these dots together without having to go to the main party to use their stuff.

Thank you very much. Um, Marcus, do you want to expand on that?

Yeah, there can be a lot of deep ends. You know, you just spoke about compute, right? Someone previously said we have to bring infrastructure, AI infrastructure to Africa. You know, it's easy to do that uh with a deep network, right? where you build uh compute power and distribute it across Africa in a decentralized way and and and you have it and uh but it's not only compute but you can do it with cell networks and uh energy and and and a lot of things.

It's a way to decentralize the economy and incentivize people to participate in it. So for example, if you put up a computer and you do some compute for uh AI, then you you earn tokens and so you are able to earn assets. Um and so it's an exciting way to participate in this uh decentralized economy.

All right. Uh thank you very much for that answer, Dre. Uh with deepin we're talking about distributing compute storage and other infrastructure across these machines are operated by strangers people who we do not know with decentralized AI as well but potentially adding sensitive user data and AI workloads on top of that does decentralization inherently give us more privacy or could it actually create a new privacy risk? Um basically as someone who um is an advocate for privacy, I would say um no in the sense because um one thing decentralization actually gives is what I will call democracy which is what we all know as it were. It gives it takes the power from a centralized authority and distributes it.

So it does not necessarily gives um privacy. Privacy can only be achieved cryptographically.

All right. Um thank you very much. Back to you. When you were talking earlier, you mentioned uh the reason we're doing this decentralized infrastructures is to take away the um like the workload from the unicorns for example that we already have. So right we already have like AWS, Google cloud, telecom companies, data centers and centralized infrastructure.

Why exactly do we still need a decentralized alternative if we already have these infrastructures already providing these services to people? For example, in life now you always need a backup. You always need plan B, you always need plan C. Whatever plan you might come up with cuz you should never trust the big parties making the main play. You should always have like steady and reliable infrastructure in place cuz there's no architects that is too much.

No architect is too less. So the more it is, the more options there are for us to like use it. And Africa as a an ecosystem itself. We need this like infrastructures in place. We are really lacking behind.

We need to participate so we are able to like take things further globally. we were able to compete globally cuz deep down we really do not have that such power within to be able to perform these functions but with time I'm sure and with our builders engineers and everybody in play we'll be able to come up with like steady and rock solid infrastructures that we know can stay and perform that AWS and the other giant unicorns you said can do and in order for this like decentralization to work and this deep It's an like more like an open source where you get to participate and when you participate you get like tokens you get like gifts and this gift is not like transferred to the big parties transfer to people in that community whereby you use their hardware their network their transport their their sense um sensory nodes you get what I'm saying so that's what decentralization is really about like you said

all right thank you very much uh back to you Marcos because you've experienced what it actually takes to operate a blockchain company. What do people building in web theory underestimate about turning interesting decentralized technology into a sustainable business?

Sorry, can you repeat that? I heard about how

all right um particularly the question right what do people building in web 3 underestimate about turning interesting decentralized technology into a sustainable business? Ah yeah it you know deepen built the real thing. You know the problem u in like 2017 there was something called the ICO boom and about 99% of the businesses from that time went out of business because you know they didn't build something real. They wanted your money. They wanted you to invest in the tokens.

They told a good story uh but not much uh was behind it. And so um there was this flush out of tokens and and and and projects and deep in when we launched in 2018 we launched uh right into a bare market and we said we need to build something real. We need to build a a real company and deepen uses this real economy and and real business fundamentals to build a project and then the revenue and profits flow back into the token economy to support the token. In our case, XYO token, it's listed on Coinbase and many other exchanges and and uh you know the revenue flows back into that token. And so if you contribute to our network and we have more than 10 million nodes in our network, we have contributors in every single countries in Africa.

Uh Nigeria is of course our largest uh economy in in Africa for XYO. you're able to collect data and validate and verify it and then you earn XYO tokens as the data is useful you know as it's purchased from someone or put into a smart contract and so on. So you have this economic circle in in Deepin uh which makes it very sustainable and our project is around for more than 9 years already and that is uh because uh deepin is real. All right, thank you. Um, Marcus, I'm just going to follow up on that real quick.

Right. Um, talking about rewards, many AI and the systems reward users for contributing bandwidth, right? Location, information, compute, or data. How do we make sure users understand what they're contributing exactly? And how do we make sure these users receive a fair value for what they're contributing to this decentralized infrastructures?

Yeah. So, being very transparent. In the beginning, we had this IoT devices you needed to buy and most deeper networks are like that. You have to buy some device and you have to install it and it's complicated as a developer a lot of developers here. Maybe not for you guys, but if you want to have a large address market, you need to make it easy and because not everybody's a developer.

And so we we developed a app called coin. Um you can uh uh just you know download it in the both the app stores and uh and and then you can start to contribute data and all the data inside the app you have to opt in and some of it you collect passively like some of the location data and location verification. It's called geommining in the app. Uh but sometimes you might go uh there's a quest for example go into the supermarket and take a picture of all the products in there or go and take a picture of the clouds. You know it's the weather really how it's supposed to be there and and there's a lot of ondemand data requests you can take inside the app.

depends where you are and how much demand there is and and so you choose uh basically which data you share and that's what really much about you know it's like right now your data gets abused by Google and matter and X and you know all the big corporations and the idea of of blockchain and decentralization and deepen is that you you are the owner uh of your data and and you have the right to monetize it or keep it private uh as you like and and we are facilitating that.

Thank you very much um Dre. So now let's bring this um conversation back to AI right training frontier AI models require enormous GPU clusters and extremely fast communication between them. Can decentralization sorry can decentralized compute realistically compete with hypers scale data centers already existing for training AI models or inferences for smaller workloads? Well, I would say um for now no because this are um compute that has gathered a whole lot of data and basically decentralized um AI basically uses data from your phone and as as we have now majority of this data are still being fed to centralized compute. So for now I would say no we are we can't achieve that same scale but I believe over time with much more innovation that comes up we would be able to if not um match it we will be able to at least be able to stand um the test of the quality of work that is being done with centralized compute.

All right um thank you very much. uh palumi. So um this is uh actually a very interesting question that I think uh audience might be interested in right because it brings it down to the local context. If I'm sitting here in Lagos, Nigeria with a laptop with uh internet connection and some hardware, what could participating in a deep network realistically look like for me? Okay.

what's participating in a deep network would look for like for a human.

Yeah. Living in Lagos, Nigeria, you have a normal laptop with um internet connection.

Yes. So, it doesn't really cost like so much money or so much comput power or so much hardware in order to be able to participate in a deep like technology or machine. All it takes is like you said like you said now you said you have a laptop and an internet you could just like do small tasks like maybe you're using this type of RAM or this type of video whereby you perform tasks that whereby where you do the tasks you get small like tokens and even if your computer is asleep and you you're not really ready to spend much your computer runs based on the graphic user interface on your system and your input it runs once he does what he wants to do because the AI has been like giving guidelines on what to do. And number two, when you're ready to like spend maybe small on an hardware, maybe you just buy like a dash cam, you install it in your home or in your car whereby this dash cam is picking up like things that will be needed maybe on the ecosystem or around whereby to log it in in a file on the deep network like that. So you're you're also participating in the DP.

So and in the level three side where you maybe ready to get the like huge hardware whereby you get like this 3D cam there's an app called I mapping where you use if you're ready to like really participate and you have like small change and you really want to like feel the impact of the deep technology you just like buy this cam. This cam like they can ask you to install it in your car. It records like footage when you are maybe moving across the the road these specific boundaries specific locations whereby might not be on the net but it helps to install it there like now blurring people's faces and like giving privacy doesn't show face and like that like that yeah

all right um thank you very much right from what I can get from your response right you don't have to as much as um this infrastructure structures require like a lot of capital you don't have to have that much capital before you start you can start with whatever you have and move on level as you wish right uh Marcos as someone who has experience in like global markets and stuff and now bringing the context to Africa in infrastructure Africa has infrastructural challenges around connectivity energy and access to compute does that make a Africa a particularly strong market for deepin or does this actually make um deploying a deep pin um deploying deep pin harder. No, it definitely makes it a strong markets. You know the there is shortcomings for example in the credit market we heard earlier right and and investing you know so with a DP network you suddenly can have a global investor base build the solar farm in the next village right and they can invest in in different solar cells and you know the villagers put it up for example and then you know they have solar and you know they can have a battery and and maybe connection to the internet and they're connected to the global economy and and so it's uh it's definitely a huge page turner I think for Africa in deepin and it's it's not only solar right it's it's cell networks and and many many many other things there's this uh connection between deepin and tokenized real world assets um and uh and both of them will enable huge investments into Africa and it's I think interesting for global investors is right for for me I live in California. Uh I think it's typical for me to find a a solar project uh in in southern Nigeria to invest in and but through deep in it it could be easily findable and investable on a on a marketplace and uh and so yes I I think it's it's a huge opportunity and then on the on the data side on our side for example we realized that AI for example today like clawed and open uh and chativity and and you know the others they they're biased towards the markets where they make the most money. So you know for English in English speaking you know they they're really really really good you know German they're good French Spanish and so on but in a lot of the African languages for example the models are not that good yet you know we translated our website into like 30 languages uh one of them was Amharic which is a national language of Ethiopia and it it failed miserably it was really really bad and Amharic is spoken by 150 million people or something so it's huge population and that is just African data is under represented in these AI models uh because it's not as lucrative for them you know they have enough business somewhere else and I think that needs to change and for that to change right you need to be able to collect data in a decentralized way from the most remote corner of Africa and you can do that uh with uh deepen cryptography and AI

thank you Thank you very much, Marcos. All right, uh back to you, Dre. You're deeply involved with Zcash and Zero knowledge technology. What role do you think um zero knowledge proves play beyond private payments, particularly in deep and decentralized AI? Um yeah, Zcash actually have proved that um zero knowledge technology is powerful and it's very important for decentralization.

So um for the paying and decentralized AI I would say um zero knowledge proofs are going to be very important especially when interacting with AI and I'm talking about um zero knowledge machine learning where you don't necessarily need to trust the server or the AI all you need to trust is the cryptography that is um supporting this particular AI um such that um with zero knowledge I believe um you don't need to trust the other part all you need to do is trust the cryptographic uh when you make uh these interactions you are assured that there is no leakage and that your data is securely um safe is secured safely on your device which you are using.

All right. Um, thank you very much. Uh, the next question is going to be for you Marcus. Right. We've gone through several cycles where narratives attract enormous capital before a sustainable product emerge.

Do you think DPIN and decentralized AI are currently being driven by more genuine market demand or just by speculation?

Can you say the beginning of your question?

Okay. We've gone through several cycles where narratives attract enormous capital before a sustainable product emerge. So, do you think deep and decentralized AI are currently being driven by genuine market demand or just by me speculation?

No, no, there's definitely huge market demand, right? We see how much money is being spent in AI, right? And that is flowing into blockchain as well. So blockchain and AI are are natural fits, right? AI runs on on three things, right?

There's data, compute and storage. And all of these uh three things are can be provided through blockchain and in in a better way. If you think about data, right, the problem with models today is that they hallucinate a lot. That is often because the data is not trustworthy on which they're trained on. With blockchain you can provide provenence so the origin of data and and you can make the data immutable on chain and the same for compute in a deep network you can have decentralized compute and and and storage and so blockchain is is married into this and and then we know that the agentic agent economy which going to automate your life and going to increase commerce is going uh run on stable coins and other crypto assets uh just because it's it's much more efficient uh uh you know agents can't open bank accounts right but it's easy for them to to open a wallet and so this whole uh everything is basically married blockchain and AI and so of course there's always speculation you know ups and downs you know I'm in blockchain since 2013 and there has been a lot of ups and downs But uh we persist right and and and we grow and I think it it's going to happen here as well and quite explosively probably.

All right. Thank you very much Marcos. This next question is a general question for all of my panelists. Right. So can each of you give us one deepin product that an ordinary person could use or contribute to today?

So you want to Okay.

I I would say um H AI.

H AI.

Yeah. All right. How about taking notes of these products to mention it? Um, pardon me.

I would say I mapping cuz you can actually use it like I said.

Can you come again?

I I'll say I mapping.

I mapping.

I mapping. Yeah. Is a deep in like technology that allows you to like record the footage of your movements like the road signs and all that stuff and keeps it in storage. And I also see there's also an app I'm not sure about but it records the like weather maybe like a sun shades where you wear it's also part of the deep technology whereby it records the like concentrated amount of how like the weather rotates in that day and stuff like that. Thank you.

All right. Thank you very much. I'm going to do some shameless self advertising here and

of course XYO, you know, because it's easy. You can uh you know, just download the coin app on coinup.co and participate. And if you're not in crypto yet, it's an easy way for you to get some free crypto and just, you know, try it out. And we built it in a way that you don't need even need to understand crypto.

So you can uh you know like send your tokens to a wallet, but you also can send it for example to a Coinbase email address and you just open an exchange account and and that's a way you know to get new people in. Uh as a matter of fact like 80% of our new users in our network are non-crypto users but 95% of them convert their points to XYO. So we onboard millions uh into crypto and and and we make it easy that way. So it's a good way for you to get started in deepin and it can be quite lucrative. Our top 500 users earn together $14 million.

And of course it's like you don't earn that much in deepin networks, right? Usually they give you a few dollars a day, maybe maybe a $100 a day one day or or a few cents a day. Yeah, it goes up and down, right? depending on the on the demand of the technology. But they allow you to earn an asset.

And for most people in the world, it's really difficult to accumulate assets because they live paycheck to paycheck, right? You need to buy food for your family, you need to pay your rent, you know, you need to put gas into your car and and so you spend most of us spend the money, right? We have and deepen allows you to accumulate an asset. And if you're lucky, it goes up in price. it might go down as well but you know you have something there uh which is an investment and and that's really really cool and if you're lucky as as some of our users right it goes up in price and and you you earn a lot you know I was in Australia uh at the conference there I spoke there and old elderly gentleman sat in the front row and as I came down from the stage uh he g he came to me and gave me a hug and he said he was a retired drug driver and was able to earn XYO was there when we hit our our big highs, was able to cash out and even put $400,000 into his friend's business.

And those are the story I I really really love. So, of course, that doesn't happen to most of us, right? You need to be lucky here. But once you participate in in deepin or in crypto or in any other assets and and you start investing and and you know just keep it there you know maybe you're lucky and hit a good bare market you know uh sorry bull market you sell some uh keep some and and life might be good.

Thank you very much Marcus that was amazing. Uh so this is going to be my final question to the panelist and it's also going to be a general question. Realistically for someone in this room who has become interested in deepening or decentralized AI during this conversation what is one thing they can actually do this week to participate build contribute hardware learn or exper experiment or join a network in the pin or the central AI industry. M

um one thing I would just say is um learn before you end basically um understand the technology understand what is required and start as soon as you can whenever you can basically so don't be so focused on earning that you don't want to understand what exactly this particular tech, this particular infrastructure is all about. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Trey B.

Sorry, what was the question again?

Okay. Um, what is one thing that someone in this room who has gotten interested in being a decentralized AI can actually do this week realistically, right? To participate, build, contribute hardware, learn, experiment or join the NEO. Anything in

Yeah. So, I'd say no knowledge is too small. First of all, go online, look for where you can find a probable place where you could seek like the knowledge cuz you never know what knowledge could impact another infrastructure or what input it could act upon. So, I'd say just seek and you'll find it's out there. It's online.

I do not know like a specific place, but you'll find it clearly on Telegram. You find it on Twitter. you you find an X sorry and you find it on all these social media and you can just kickstart from there but like he said you have to learn to earn you don't need to like just rush into it you find it and you you build on it

amazing thank you very much by the way Marcus

um yeah so there's uh some websites for example uh which uh have most projects listed and and rated There's one called Deepenhub for example deepenhub.io io I'm not affiliated and uh they list the most deep in projects they have categories they have ratings they let you know how much you can earn there and and how you can participate and uh it's it's a really easy easy way to get started even if you're not a developer and and on the decentralized AI side uh that's more tricky I think you need to contribute to a data or compute project but you find it on on the dpinhuba website.

Thank you very much, Marcus. And that brings me to the end of this panel session. Can you please give a round of applause for my wonderful panelists?