Sentient has completed one of the largest non-fungible token (NFT) minting campaigns in crypto history, with more than 650,000 participants securing fractional ownership of its decentralized, open-source AI model, Dobby.
The campaign saw investors mint NFTs “Fingerprints,” which required them to prove their humanity by passing a randomized IQ test to mint a Fingerprint that grants fractional ownership and access to the AI model, all in an effort to create a community-controlled AI protocol.
Dobby NFT mint. Source: Sentient
The first emerging artificial general intelligence (AGI) should be “community-controlled and community-owned to guarantee its loyalty,” according to Sandeep Nailwal, founder of Polygon founder and a core contributor to Sentient.
Sentient’s fingerprinting mechanism enables communities to “enforce ownership, control and alignment of open-source AI models,” Nailwal stated in an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, adding:
“This incentivizes communities to come together and build high-quality open-source models. In the long run, the goal is to make sure that instead of some large institution having exclusive control over a closed-source AGI, AGI is open-source and owned by everyone individually and collectively.”
Dobby Fingerprints NFT collection. Source: OpenSea
The minting event follows the launch of DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot reportedly built on a $5.6 million budget, far less than the $100 million it reportedly took OpenAI to develop ChatGPT.
Previously, the largest NFT mint had been for Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds, which sold over 55,000 units of virtual land, as Cointelegraph reported in May 2022. However, the number of unique participants remains unclear.
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Dobby’s decentralization addresses “crucial problem” in AI industry
As opposed to OpenAI’s centralized model, Sentient’s Dobby and DeepSeek are both open source, meaning their source code is publicly available for developers.
Dobby’s decentralized architecture addresses a “crucial problem in the AI landscape,” Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient, told Cointelegraph. He added:
“Dobby distinguishes itself through what we call ‘loyalty’ — a combination of ownership, alignment and control. The model’s ownership is placed directly in the hands of the community, who collectively govern its development trajectory.”
Dobby’s “model alignment” enables the community to set the values and principles of the AI model and offers “granular control over which model behaviors can be activated.”
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The renewed investor interest in AI agents was catalyzed by Luna, which executed an autonomous blockchain transaction without human input in early January, as Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 2.
Dobby’s record mint comes a day after 0G Foundation launched an $88 million ecosystem fund to accelerate projects creating AI-powered decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and autonomous agents, also known as DeFAI agents.
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