The partnership between EigenLayer, the largest restaking protocol on Ethereum, and community-owned AI network Ritual aims to bring AI-powered decentralized applications (DApps) to the Ritual network while introducing Ethereum-level restaking security. This collaboration will enable the development of smart agents, AI-powered decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, and autonomous media generation within DApps. Sreeram Kannan, the founder of EigenLayer, believes that crypto-economic, AI-powered coprocessors can enhance blockchain networks and create economic incentives. He expresses excitement about bringing Ethereum staking security to the nascent AI space and establishing a decentralized and transparent AI ecosystem.
This partnership comes at a time when there is growing interest in AI crypto solutions. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, expressed his enthusiasm for AI-powered smart contract auditing, which can address the issue of buggy code, considered the biggest technical risk for the Ethereum network.
Ritual’s first product, Infernet, will be the first to enable smart contracts to access AI models cost-efficiently and natively. Through this integration, new Actively Validated Services (AVS) will be developed to support Ritual’s infrastructure, allowing GPU-capable EigenLayer restakers to provide decentralized inference, fine-tuning, and proving in its on-chain economy.
Ritual, founded in 2023, operates a network of computing devices for hosting, inference, and fine-tuning AI models. Additionally, it provides an API layer for AI model accessibility and security mechanisms to ensure computational integrity.
Niraj Pant, co-founder of Ritual, believes that this integration will enable more efficient AI-enabled DApps.
The AI-crypto sector experienced significant growth following GPU producer Nvidia’s impressive fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed a 265% year-on-year increase in revenue. As a result, Nvidia surpassed Tesla as Wall Street’s most-traded stock in the past 30 trading sessions leading up to February 22.
In the 24 hours preceding 1:30 pm CET on February 22, the market capitalization of AI tokens rose by 11.2% to $25.4 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. AI-based crypto tokens have also doubled in market cap over the past month.
In related news, EigenLayer has become the fourth-largest restaking protocol, nearing a total value locked (TVL) of $7 billion.