Original author: Terry
The bull market is coming, and narrative comes first. So what narrative will be the hottest in 2024?
After the dust settled on the spot Bitcoin ETF at the beginning of this year, from Hong Kong to Dubai, the integrated narrative of AI+Crypto began to clearly take up the narrative banner of a new round of bull market. The most obvious trend is that decentralized AI projects continue to emerge, so numerous that they are like crucian carp crossing the river.
There are tens of thousands of crypto projects, and AI accounts for half of them. Against this backdrop, how to select the top players that truly fit the AI+Crypto narrative to reap the dividends of this cycle has undoubtedly become a core issue for market participants.
This article will focus on an old encryption project Marlin, and explore how the DeAI project, which hits the dual narrative of AI+Crypto and AVS, fits into the current AI craze, and whether it may bring new variables to the AI+Crypto track.
Marlin: Decentralized AI cloud computing infrastructure
The wind starts from the tip of the green duckweed, and the waves form between the ripples. The prosperous summer of AI and Web3 kicked off in 2023, and in 2024, the collision and interweaving of AI and Crypto narratives will undoubtedly pose a new challenge for practitioners to tell a good integrated narrative.
In line with the three major elements of data, algorithm, and computing power in the traditional AI field, there are currently countless DeAI projects targeting these three directions:
Among the current Alpha projects in the AI track, Bittensor (TAO) has become the leader in the decentralized algorithm track, and Masa Network is the number one player in the decentralized data field. However, the competition in the decentralized computing power market is still in a rough patch - io.net and others have not yet been launched or issued coins, and there are no phenomenal projects worth betting on.
From this perspective, Marlin, which has already received investment from Binance and has its token listed on Binance, seems to have caught this gap.
Marlin is positioned as a decentralized computing protocol based on scalable coprocessors, which means outsourcing computing to untrusted servers through a decentralized node network while ensuring the security and correctness of the computing results. From this perspective, it can essentially be regarded as a decentralized cloud computing infrastructure and container platform:
Any DePIN/Web2.5/AI application that requires low-latency and high-computing computing services can be deployed on Marlin to obtain the same general-purpose cloud computing solution as traditional cloud services.
That is, it is not just for Web3 or Web2 users, but allows all smart contract-based protocols, web or mobile clients, and enterprises to reliably and securely rent a single computing instance or deploy serverless functions on a decentralized pool of globally distributed nodes.
So what is the difference or advantage of Marlin compared to traditional centralized or decentralized cloud deployment solutions?
We can briefly review the operating mechanism of Marlin. In the entire Marlin network, entities that provide cloud computing resources and have cloud computing needs do not require permission, and smart contracts match computing tasks by publishing computing tasks on relay contracts.
Therefore, it is actually the network nodes that receive and entrust the Marlin network to perform the calculations. The calculation results will be transmitted back to the blockchain together with security verification or zero-knowledge proof to prove the correctness of the calculations. This enhances the functional area of the smart contract by utilizing off-chain computing resources:
Performance expansion: Marlin increases the effective throughput of the blockchain by allowing dedicated nodes to perform computations off-chain, which can still be verified on-chain to ensure correctness;
Off-chain data access and relay: Marlin allows programs to reliably use APIs to access off-chain data and expose HTTPS endpoints to operate Web2 services and call smart contract transactions based on defined events;
Chain abstraction: Marlin as a middleware is compatible with any blockchain as long as the relay and verification contracts are deployed on that chain. Since it supports code written in any language and can also host the backend, Marlin makes the blockchain transparent to users and developers;
In addition, since computing services are usually managed in a central manner, users lack autonomy over their personal privacy information. Cloud service providers frequently experience data leaks, causing serious losses to individuals and institutions. The transformation of confidential computing technology often faces high costs. Therefore, there has been no particularly good solution in the industry for how to quickly and securely deploy programs.
Marlin uses a trusted execution environment (TEE) and a coprocessor based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to isolate data and code from other processes at the hardware level, ensuring the confidentiality of the data and the integrity of the calculations running therein, while also ensuring the accuracy, verifiability and tamper-proof nature of the calculation results.
At the same time, unlike most ZK coprocessors that are designed for certain environments (RISC-V, WASM or MIPS) and can only process programs written in compatible languages, Marlins ZK proof market is circuit-based and therefore language-agnostic, allowing nodes to choose the circuits they want to support - they can directly port existing Python, C++ or Go applications or use zkVM.
In general, Marlin is committed to building a decentralized and trusted cloud computing service market, allowing more Web2 Web3 participants to easily obtain the required cloud computing resources, jointly promote the application of blockchain technology in all walks of life, and take solid steps towards a truly decentralized, secure and reliable future.
Marlins Troika
The overall Marlin network architecture can be divided into the three pillars of Oyster, Kalypso, and the relay network (Marlin Relay).
Oyster and Kalypso use trusted execution environments (TEEs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) respectively to ensure the correctness and security of computations, while the relay network is responsible for ensuring that untrusted nodes can contribute resources to the network without adversely affecting its security through built-in incentives.
Oyster: Off-chain services provided by TEE
As an off-chain service provided by TEE, Oysters core vision is to allow users to deploy their own backend or implement smart contract extensions on the Marlin cloud computing network with minimal changes.
Therefore, one of its biggest advantages is its serverless nature - users do not need to set up nodes and select specific nodes to use, and the results can be conveniently returned to users.
Each Oyster node runs as a secure zone, protecting data and computation from external threats, allowing TEE to ensure data confidentiality and computational integrity even in untrusted host networks.
On this basis, Oyster completely changes the management form of decentralized services (such as APIs and gateways), driving them from traditional infrastructure management to autonomous operation based on smart contracts. For this reason, Oyster is a better computing platform than other DePIN platforms - with the advantage of code verification when executed on third-party nodes.
The biggest advantage of this design is that it ensures that code execution is not affected by the hardware provider and prevents any tampering. In addition, Oyster also allows sharing of private data such as mnemonics, passwords, and API keys without having to worry about being stolen by the hardware provider.
In addition, Oyster also uses relay contracts to support AI coprocessors, enabling direct on-chain queries and interactions with on-chain contracts.
Kalypso: ZK Proof Trading Market
Kalypso represents Marlins flexible integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). Hardware optimization using FPGAs, GPUs, and ASICs can significantly speed up the generation of ZK proofs, thereby reducing time and cost.
The Marlin network relies on nodes with FPGAs to outsource ZK proof generation, which can efficiently process requests from clients and return generated proofs.
At the same time, it operates as an order book-based market, optimizing the matching of ZKP generation requests with available computing resources (matching the computing needs of a number of ZK networks such as Taiko, Scroll, and zkSync), thereby significantly improving efficiency and reducing costs.
In short, Kalypso’s design facilitates a competitive and censorship-resistant environment for proof generation, which is critical for applications that require privacy and scalability of blockchain computation.
At the same time, it is worth noting that EigenLayer has just launched 6 AVS services: including AltLayer (restaking Rollup), Brevis (ZK Coprocessor), eoracle (Ethereum native oracle), LAGRANGE (non-interactive cross-chain state proof), Witness Chain (DePIN coordination layer) and Xterio (game service).
Kalypso will make comprehensive use of EigenLayer AVS and Celestias data availability layer to provide performance upgrades and DA support respectively. This is also the earliest dual-line super narrative project in the pan-AI track that combines AVS. It can greatly reduce operating costs. At the same time, the consensus layer and settlement layer can share the economic security of Ethereum, providing cheaper and safer cloud computing service options.
Marlin Relay Network: Incentive Matchmaking Mechanism
Marlin Relay is a blockchain-agnostic, permissionless relay network with built-in incentives that can be integrated with multiple blockchains simultaneously.
This incentive structure ensures that trustless nodes can contribute resources to the network without adversely affecting its security. Specifically, the Marlin relay network consists of 4 entities:
Producers: Producers (i.e. ZK miners) introduce blocks into the network and hope to propagate their blocks to other miners in the network in the shortest possible time to ensure that the blocks will not become isolated. Therefore, essentially any user who is motivated to propagate blocks quickly enough can become a producer. They are responsible for propagating the validity of blocks, and the spam transaction prevention mechanism ensures that producers who introduce invalid blocks receive appropriate Slash penalties.
Receivers: Receivers subscribe to and receive blocks from the network. They can be miners, exchanges, block explorers, or any other full nodes that can benefit from receiving blocks as quickly as possible, and they all need to pay a subscription fee to the protocol to join the set of receivers.
Relays: Relays are nodes that relay blocks from producers to receivers with low latency. Relays are incentivized to propagate blocks quickly because receivers only pay fees to the subset of relayers that participate in the fastest propagation of blocks.
Clusters: A cluster is a collection of relayers that are collectively responsible for propagating blocks from producers to all receivers. Clusters compete with each other to deliver messages to receivers as quickly as possible. Clusters are expected to be distributed across the Internet to allow for efficient propagation to receivers.
Project team and investment and financing information
The founding team of Marlin is basically composed of veterans in the field of Internet and encryption development. Almost all of the core developers come from famous universities such as Stanford, MIT and Indian Institute of Technology. They all have good academic backgrounds and most of them have rich experience in blockchain development.
Among them, co-founder Prateesh Goya is a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT and has reached a cooperation with the Ethereum Foundation; co-founder and CEO Siddhartha Dutta was a core developer of the sharding expansion project Zilliqa and a former engineer in Microsofts cloud division; CTO Pratyaksh Sharma graduated from Stanford, interned at Facebook and Pinterest, and has work experience at the Python Software Foundation; the team also invited six consultants to join the advisory committee, including former BitTorrent CEO Rogelio Choy.
It is precisely because of the good technical background of Marlins founding team that it received investment from top institutions such as Binance, NGC Ventures and Arrington XRP Capital in its $3 million seed round of financing as early as 2019, and became one of the 13 startups in Binance Labs second incubation program in 2019.
Token Economics
In addition, the Marlin token is called POND, with a total supply of 8.087 billion (maximum supply of 10 billion). According to Coingecko information, the current POND price is about $0.022, about 8.087 billion POND has been issued and circulated, with a circulation market value of about $183 million. The utility of POND tokens includes:
Governance: POND token holders can vote on network parameters;
Protocol incentives: Users can earn POND tokens as rewards when protecting the Marlin network and running nodes;
Staking: Nodes need to stake POND tokens to join and participate in the Marlin network;
This also means that POND can be used directly in the entire Marlin ecosystem as a settlement token, thereby achieving comprehensive empowerment advantages - directly capturing the computing power and node growth dividends of the entire Marlin network ecosystem.
summary
In general, the AI+Crypto track is currently in the early stages of a long-term competition. Players like TAO, MASA, and POND are likely to change the DeAI competition landscape and bring new variables to the AI+Crypto track.
Backed by the dual-line top narrative of AI+AVS, Marlin has a grand vision. If successful, it is likely to become the core cloud computing infrastructure service component of the global application ecosystem covering Web2+Web3, thereby building a cloud computing ecosystem across Web2+Web3, which has great room for imagination, but is undoubtedly full of challenges.
The future is always beyond imagination, let us wait and see.
