The background of founding team members of the project is solid: all received at least M.S. in related field ( AI/ Mathematics/ CS/ Engineering) from well-known universities. The engineering solution they proposed in the whitepaper makes sense to the current blockchain tech environment. it's smart for them to not try to build/modify anything on the current Ethereum chain because the computational power of "world computer" is simply not enough to carry any complicated algorithm ex. AI models. Building a new chain from bottom up (Virtual machine level) is the right approach in my opinion.
I think the timing is right to start developing such platform to allow AI to play a part on blockchain: the current Ethereum smart contract is smart, but not intelligent; the cortex blockchain will be able to include live data parameters on to the blockchain. It's undeniable that the AI industry is evolving, tho most people don't feel the impact of how the AI technology has already permeated into our daily life, sooner or later the impact will become noticeable. It will be too late then to start developing such AI - enabled blockchain. The creation of Cortex will further the dimension of what AI technology can bring to us.
A healthy token economic model which leads to a long-lasting eco-system: similar to most of the popular public chains, the cortex blockchain dedicates more than 50% of the tokens to miners, who will be the fundamental 'workers" to keep the chain running. To break down the token business model in simple words, let's first take a look at who are the stakeholders: the miners, AI model providers, smart contract creators, and the users. Let's now give it an example to show the economics when a "transaction" happens. Say a marine biologist is collecting pictures of fish for his research study; he then initiates a smart contract on Cortex: for every fish picture submitted, the submitter gets 10 CTXC tokens as reward. He then goes to the cortex chain to find the best fish recognition AI model and includes it in his smart contract to help him filter the submissions he will be receiving. In this example, the fish recognition AI model provider has to pay a fee for storage on full nodes of the cortex blockchain, but gets paid "Endorphins" (in CTXC) every time when the smart contract (and AI model) is executed (at every submission to verify the picture to be a fish or not); the marine biologist is responsible to pay the model provider "Endorphins", and the real fish picture submitter in CTXC. The miner that packages the block to complete this transaction will get CTXC as reward. It is a fair and well-rounded economic cycle.
It's no harm to say that if bitcoin is blockchain1.0, ethereum is blockchain2.0, then cortex is blockchain 3.0
I will do an application use case of the Cortex chain in my next post.
Website:http://www.cortexlabs.ai/
Twitter:https://twitter.com/CTXCBlockchain
Medium:
https://medium.com/cortexlabs/Telegram:https://t.me/CortexBlockchain