Imagine a world where you get funded automatically as you build something users want. In this world, your track record of ideas, execution, hard work, and ecosystem impact would automatically bring you the funding and opportunities needed to take your startup to the next level.
Currently, this vision is still far from reality. Major grant programs spend 10 - 20% of their budget on operations, amounting to billions in the crypto industry. Adding to this burden, Web3UX often increases the workload for these programs when it should be reducing it.
Crypto and AI need each other: Crypto needs AI to improve user experience, while AI needs crypto for payments, transparency, data for training, and governance. In Web3-based public goods funding, we can see who funds what through on-chain data (like metrics, attestations, profiles, voting preferences, etc.) and refine these insights with reputation intelligence to build auto-funding mechanisms. This is why, at Potlock, we are building an open funding stack focused on funding public goods.
As ardent supporters of growing the NEAR ecosystem, the leading AI chain, we champion user-owned data and truly open-source AI. On the public goods side, we are committed to fostering innovation and spreading novel funding implementations.
We are proud to announce the intersection of the two worlds with AI-PGF, artificial intelligence-enabled public goods funding. AI-PGF is a movement, an upcoming set of products, and proactive grants for open-source AI to advance public goods funding. We aim to generate, streamline, and manage funding programs.
This is the catalyst for qualified ecosystem teams to build chain-abstracted funding agents and AI stack primitives exportable to a modular stack. This movement will drastically cut overhead and speed up autonomous funding so builders can focus on scaling.
We encourage builders to ship workflow-specific agents within the grant lifecycle that work in multi-agent systems, leverage Potlock's contracts, and create unique front ends to manage and train agents. After the first iterations of this program, with a cohort of project MVPs live, we will help scale them into products and integrate them into the open funding stack. This will allow us to use them in our pilot AI grant programs and export them to the rest of Web3 as chain-abstracted agents and building blocks to fast-track the NEAR × AI ecosystem. For more information on funding and ideas on what to build, check out aipgf.com. If you are a funder and want to contribute to the AI-PGF movement, contact us.
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