Author: Umbrella, Deep Tide TechFlow
Recently, Sapien, a decentralized AI data project on Base, has shown strong growth momentum.
Since Sapien was listed on Binance Alpha on August 20, it first experienced a continuous decline, and then began to rebound strongly on September 1. As of now, its price has doubled. At the same time, its 24-hour trading volume has quadrupled from about US$5 million at the beginning of the month to exceed the US$20 million mark.
As prices and trading volumes rise, discussions about Sapien in the market are gradually increasing. Sapien's publicly displayed customer list includes several well-known traditional giants: Alibaba, Baidu, Toyota, Lenovo, etc., as well as Midjourney, a unicorn in AI mapping.
Obviously, using more data to train AI and serve traditional Web2 companies is still a missed opportunity in the last AI hype cycle; although the AI narrative in the current crypto market is far less FOMO-inducing than the previous wave, it is still a relatively attractive narrative when most AI crypto project tokens are more meme-oriented.
Project Background
In the current crypto community's comments on Sapien, "star team" has become a key word.
Rowan Stone, CEO of the Sapien project, was the co-founder of Coinbase's L2 network Base. This gene gives Sapien a natural advantage in the Base ecosystem.
Its Chief Strategy Officer, Trevor Koverko, is the founder of the early securities digitization project Polymath and one of the developers of the ERC-1400 RWA standard. His rich experience in asset tokenization provides important support for the Sapien project.
In terms of financing, Sapien disclosed two rounds of seed financing of US$5 million and US$10.5 million in April and October 2024, respectively. Investors in the October seed round included well-known institutions such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Yield Guild Games.
This round of financing not only provides sufficient operating funds for the project, but more importantly, verifies the market's long-term demand for decentralized AI data infrastructure and VCs' optimism about this narrative.
It is worth mentioning that Sapien’s initial token launch through Binance Alpha also represents its market popularity, and with the support of Alpha, the popularity of the Sapien project has also been enhanced.
Technological innovation
Sapien is committed to solving the current problem of scarcity of high-quality material resources for AI training. Although this is not a new narrative, Sapien has provided a brand new solution.
The traditional AI data field faces pain points such as opaque data sources, uneven data quality, and a lack of effective incentive mechanisms. Sapien's innovative PoQ (Proof of Quality) mechanism solves this problem through core components such as token staking, peer verification, reputation scoring, and token rewards and penalties.
Specifically, contributors who provide data to Sapien need to pledge their own Sapien tokens as collateral. After passing multi-party data verification, they will receive stablecoin and token rewards. At the same time, low-quality submitted materials will face a 25%-100% pledge loss penalty.
Under such a reward and punishment mechanism, it effectively prevents some users from using robots to increase traffic and the proliferation of low-quality data materials, ensuring that the data ultimately used must be high-quality and valuable data materials.
From an application perspective, Sapien has already proven its value in high-precision applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. According to a case study disclosed by the project, an oncologist can earn hundreds of dollars per hour by annotating cancer data. This example demonstrates the immense value of high-quality professional data and demonstrates the effectiveness of Sapien's PoQ mechanism in incentivizing professional contributors.
Market size
On the road to commercialization, Sapien's progress far exceeds that of other projects in the same field, and it has currently built a huge contributor network covering more than 110 countries around the world.
According to the latest data on the official website, the Sapien platform has over 1.8 million registered contributors and has completed a total of 187 million data labeling tasks.
Compared with the current scale, what is more worthy of attention is its growth rate: in 2024, the number of contributors on the Sapien platform increased by 50% per month on average. This sustained and substantial growth also demonstrates the market's recognition of Sapien's mechanism and brand.
Sapien has attracted market attention not only for its rapid user growth but also for its impressive portfolio of enterprise clients. Currently, Sapien serves 29 clients, including Toyota, Alibaba, Baidu, Midjourney, and renowned international organizations such as the United Nations. These clients cover a wide range of fields, including autonomous driving, e-commerce, AI mapping, and international organizations.
Of particular note is the collaboration between Sapien and Midjourney. As a leading project in the field of AI image generation, Midjourney has always been renowned for producing high-quality AI images. However, this also shows that it has extremely high requirements for the quality of image painting data. Only based on a large amount of high-quality material training can useful AI drawing functions be born. Its choice of Sapien as a data supplier also fully verifies the feasibility of Sapien's high-quality data collection mechanism.
At the same time, the participation of traditional giants such as Toyota and Alibaba also shows us that decentralized data services are gaining recognition from mainstream enterprises.
Support from the Base ecosystem
Sapien's current success is inseparable from Base's drastic reforms this year, and the two have formed a good growth cycle.
The current TVL of the Base chain has exceeded US$6.8 billion, surpassing Tron to become the fifth largest DeFi network. Among them, the TVL of AI-related protocols exceeds US$2 billion. From the information currently disclosed by the Base App, it can be seen that Base has made a heavy bet on the AI track, and it has also established Sapien's leadership in the field of Ai infrastructure.
Sapien is also highly likely to complement other AI projects within the Base ecosystem in the future. For example, Venice's DIEM project focuses on tokenizing AI computing power, while Sapien provides verifiable human data. Together, they offer a complete infrastructure stack for AI developers. This specialized division of labor and ecosystem synergy is Base's core competitive advantage over other L2 networks.
Coinbase's current strategy seems to confirm this trend. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that 40% of Coinbase's code is already generated by AI, with the goal of reaching over 50% by October 2025.
This dual-wheel drive combining internal applications with external trends provides strong strategic and resource support for the Base ecological AI project.
Market discussion and sentiment
Current social media and community discussions reflect the market's overall optimism towards Sapien.
The main narrative focuses on the huge value potential of AI data infrastructure in the current global wave of AI and encryption, the unique advantages of a global network of contributors, and the strategic significance of cooperating with world-renowned giants.
Although the listing method through Binance Alpha and the consecutive days of decline after the opening caused a small-scale controversy at the time, as its price has risen in recent days, the market has gradually discovered the unique charm and stable fundamentals of the Sapien project through in-depth exploration.
Before the Sapien price started to rise earlier this month, an overseas analyst named Game also expressed an optimistic view based on Sapien’s background and some data. Coincidentally, the price of Sapien started to rise sharply the day after he published this post.
The pros and cons of Sapien
Sapien's current performance is indeed eye-catching, but from an investment perspective, we still need to analyze it calmly.
On the bright side, the problem Sapien is committed to solving is a real need. High-quality AI training data is a demand that spans traditional and crypto industries, and the cooperation of major companies such as Alibaba and Toyota also shows that this mechanism is indeed effective.
In the AI training data market, Sapien boasts an earlier ecosystem presence and a massive scale compared to other similar products. More contributors also provide higher-quality data, creating a positive cycle and building competitive advantages. Furthermore, its backing in the Base ecosystem gives it a competitive advantage in resource integration and business expansion.
The risks faced by Sapien are also very obvious.
First, the sustainability of the PoQ mechanism. Just because the model is sound doesn't mean it can sustain this level of data growth indefinitely. Once most AI models are trained, will the ongoing data demand decrease significantly? Furthermore, as Sapien scales, the marginal cost of controlling the quality of contributors' content is likely to rise sharply. Managing such a massive user base is challenging.
Finally, there are the common challenges faced by a number of crypto projects - regulatory risks, cross-border data flow, privacy protection, and AI training compliance. Regulatory issues in any link may cause the entire chain to be paralyzed.
Overall, as an important part of the AI infrastructure in the Base ecosystem, Sapien has undoubtedly attracted widespread attention from the market both in terms of the project and the token price.
In the current context of rapid development of AI technology, growing demand for data, and the support of the Base ecosystem, Sapien's future performance may be worth paying attention to.
