AI Layer 1 Project Depth Analysis: Five Leading Platforms at the Forefront of New Technology Wave

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, traditional blockchain architectures can no longer meet the high-performance computing and complex data processing requirements needed for AI applications. This has led to the rise of Layer 1 blockchain platforms optimized specifically for AI, which exhibit diverse characteristics in terms of technical architecture, application scenarios, and business models.

This article provides a deep analysis of five leading AI Layer1 projects: Bittensor, Vana, Kite AI, Nillion, and Sahara.

1. Bittensor: Decentralized AI Network Infrastructure

Bittensor, as an early explorer in the blockchain AI field, is dedicated to building an open decentralized artificial intelligence collaboration network. Its goal is to break the centralized barriers in traditional AI research and development, allowing more participants to contribute and benefit together.

Unlike traditional centralized AI systems, Bittensor has created an open peer-to-peer ecosystem where participants can receive corresponding rewards based on their contributions to the network.

Bittensor's technical architecture adopts a dual-layer structural design:

• Root Network (Mainnet): Responsible for the coordination, verification, and issuance management of TAO tokens for the entire system, serving as the hub for resource allocation within the network.
• Subnet Ecology: Each subnet is like an independent AI laboratory, developing specialized solutions for specific AI application scenarios and proving its value in market competition.

This design allows Bittensor to balance the stability of the overall network with the expertise of various fields, providing a flexible infrastructure for the development of decentralized AI.

Ecological Development Progress

• The number of subnets has expanded from the initial 32 to over 64, covering various AI application scenarios such as text generation, trading signals, and data labeling.
• The number of active users has reached 140,000, doubling compared to the previous year.
• The total valuation of the subnet market exceeds 100 million USD, with a daily trading volume maintained at around 45 million USD.
• Institutional participation has significantly increased, with well-known funds incorporating TAO into their decentralized AI funds, adjusting its weight to 29.55%.

These data indicate that Bittensor is gaining recognition from an increasing number of market participants, and its ecosystem is entering a positive development track.

The recent dTAO (Dynamic TAO) system upgrade completed by Bittensor is a significant innovation in its economic model. The core of this upgrade is to optimize the distribution mechanism of the TAO token, shifting from a resource allocation method reliant on the subjective judgment of validators to a more market-oriented distribution mechanism, enabling resources to flow more accurately to those subnetworks that are truly competitive.

The original economic model of Bittensor has exposed several key issues during actual operation:

1. The evaluation mechanism lacks objectivity: As the number of subnets increases, it becomes difficult for validators to comprehensively and objectively assess the actual value of each subnet, and the allocation efficiency gradually declines.

2. Imbalance of Power Structure: Many validators are also subnet operators, and this overlapping role can easily lead to conflicts of interest. Validators may favor the subnet they participate in and even engage in private transactions.

3. Participation Barrier: Ordinary TAO holders find it difficult to directly influence the resource allocation decisions of the network, with power overly concentrated in the hands of a few validators.

To address these issues, the dTAO upgrade introduced a dynamic resource allocation system based on market mechanisms.

This system transforms each subnet into an independent economic unit, driven by users' actual needs for resource allocation. Its core innovation is the subnet token (Alpha token) mechanism:

• Operating Principle: Users can obtain Alpha tokens issued by various subnets by staking TAO, which represent the user's support for specific subnets.
• Resource allocation logic: The market price of Alpha tokens serves as a signal for measuring the demand intensity of the subnet. Initially, the price of alpha tokens is the same, with only 1 TAO and 1 alpha token in each pool. As liquidity of the two tokens in the subnet increases, the price of alpha tokens will also change accordingly. The emission of TAO is proportionally distributed based on the prices of subnet tokens among all tokens. Subnets with higher prices will receive a greater allocation of TAO, thereby achieving automatic optimization of resource allocation.

This mechanism significantly improves the efficiency and fairness of resource allocation, stabilizing the value of the TAO token and providing more avenues for ordinary users to participate in network governance.

The most active subnetworks currently include:

• Subnet Targon No. 4: Focused on AI inference services for text generation, characterized by fast response speed and low cost.
• Subnet 64 Chutes: Provides API interfaces for various LLMs, allowing developers to build and deploy AI applications on the Bittensor network.
• Subnet 8 PTN: Focused on the financial sector, incentivizing miners to generate accurate trading signals through a reward mechanism, covering various financial markets such as foreign exchange and cryptocurrencies.
• Subnet 52 Dojo: Perform data labeling and encourage users to earn tokens through data labeling.

2. Vana: Data Sovereignty and Value Reconstruction Platform

The Vana project focuses on solving a core issue in today's digital economy: the ownership of personal data and value distribution. In the current internet ecosystem, users' data is mostly monopolized and controlled by large tech companies, while the users who actually create this data rarely benefit from it. Vana's innovation lies in establishing an ecosystem where users truly own and control their own data, while also being able to derive economic returns from it.

As an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain network, Vana's technical architecture includes five core components:

1. Data Liquidity Layer: This is the core of the Vana network, enabling the incentivization, aggregation, and validation of data assets through the Data Liquidity Pool (DLP). Each DLP is a smart contract specifically designed to aggregate specific types of data assets, such as social media data, browsing history, etc.
2. Data Portability Layer: Ensures that user data can be easily transferred between different applications and AI models, enhancing the flexibility of data use.
3. Universal Connectome: Track the real-time data flow within the entire ecosystem, forming a data ecology map to ensure system transparency.
4. Non-custodial data storage: One of Vana's important innovations is its unique data management approach. Users' original data will not be on-chain but will be stored at locations chosen by the users, such as cloud servers or personal devices, ensuring that users have complete control over their own data.
5. Application Ecosystem: Based on the data, Vana has built an open application ecosystem where developers can utilize the data accumulated from DLP to create various innovative applications, including AI applications, while data contributors can earn dividend rewards from these applications.

This design enables Vana to create a fairer data value distribution mechanism while protecting user data privacy, providing an important data foundation for the development of decentralized AI.

Latest Development Trends

Vana's financing and partnership expansion is ongoing:

• In February 2025, an organization announced a strategic investment in Vana, and Binance founder CZ joined as an advisor.
• In terms of ecological construction, Vana has built multiple data projects covering various fields from social media data to financial prediction data, including: Finquarium (financial prediction data), GPT Data DAO (ChatGPT chat data), Reddit Data DAO (Reddit user data), Volara (Twitter data), Flirtual (dating data), etc.
• Recently, Vana organized a hackathon during Eth Denver, offering a prize pool of up to 50,000 USD to incentivize developers to build DataDAO and AI applications based on Vana data, further expanding its ecosystem.

These developments indicate that Vana is actively building a complete ecosystem around data ownership and value realization, and its momentum is worth paying attention to.

3. Kite AI: Technical Breakthrough of AI-Native Public Chain

Kite AI is a native Layer 1 blockchain project focused on the AI field, built on the Avalanche framework. It aims to address various challenges faced by traditional blockchains when dealing with AI assets, particularly how to achieve clear rights and incentives for AI data, models, and agent contributions. Kite AI proposes four core technological innovations:

1.PoAI Consensus Mechanism: Proof of Attributed Intelligence is a consensus mechanism pioneered by Kite AI, which accurately tracks the value contributions of data, models, and AI agents through an on-chain verifiable contribution record system. The project has designed a dynamic reward pool mechanism that allocates profits based on contribution proportions, effectively addressing issues such as "data black box" and "model plagiarism" in the traditional AI economy.

2. Composable AI Subnet: Kite AI adopts a modular architecture, allowing developers to build industry-specific AI collaboration ecosystems on demand. For example, in the healthcare subnet, patient data can be encrypted and selectively authorized to pharmaceutical companies for AI model development, with profits distributed among the data subjects, model developers, and subnet maintainers in a certain proportion, creating a win-win ecosystem for all parties.

3.AI Native Execution Layer: Kite AI is building an on-chain AI native execution layer specifically designed to handle AI computing tasks such as inference, embedding, and fine-tuning/training. Users can authorize smart contract wallets to execute inference calls and interact with models through this layer. This execution layer not only supports blockchain transactions and state changes but also integrates a confidential computing environment (such as Trusted Execution Environment TEE) to ensure data security and privacy protection during the computing process.

4. Decentralized Data Engine: Kite AI ensures that data creators receive fair compensation within the AI workflow. The platform includes compliance modules that adhere to regulations such as GDPR/CCPA, meeting data privacy requirements globally and reducing compliance costs for developers.

These technological innovations enable Kite AI to create a fairer and more transparent value distribution environment for AI developers and data providers, promoting the decentralized development of AI technology.

Development Status

Kite AI launched the incentive testnet on February 6, 2025, which is the first AI-native Layer 1 sovereign blockchain testnet. The testnet has performed well after going live:

• Less than 70 hours after the test went online, the number of connected wallets exceeded 100,000. As of now, a total of 1.95 million wallets have joined the incentive test network V1, of which more than 1 million wallets have interacted with AI agents, with a total of over 115 million calls.

• The project background is strong, built by an experienced Silicon Valley team, with co-founders having deep technical leadership experience in the field of artificial intelligence, having worked at top tech companies such as Uber, Salesforce, and Databricks. Core team members come from industry-leading companies such as Google, BlackRock, Uber, and the NEAR Foundation, possessing academic backgrounds from top institutions like MIT and Harvard.

• In terms of capital support, the project has received investments from top institutions such as General Catalyst, Hashed, Hashkey, and Samsung Next, and has established technical partnerships with Eigenlayer, Sui, Avalanche, and AWS.

• As a selection committee member in the Avalanche InfraBUILDL(AI) program, Kite AI plays an active role in promoting the development of the Avalanche artificial intelligence ecosystem, with the aim of making Avalanche a leading blockchain for AI applications.

• With the global data economy expected to reach a scale of突 by 2025