SingularityNET launched in 2017, founded by Ben Goertzel, one of the most recognized researchers in the artificial general intelligence (AGI) community. Goertzel had been working on AGI since the 1990s and saw decentralized networks as the right coordination mechanism for a project as ambitious as creating general intelligence. The AGIX token powered a marketplace for AI services where developers could publish, discover, and pay for AI algorithms.
For years, SingularityNET occupied a strange position in crypto: deeply respected by AI researchers, almost entirely ignored by crypto traders. Goertzel gave TED talks and published papers. The protocol hosted real AI services including natural language processing, computer vision, and data analytics tools. But the crypto market didn’t care about AI services until 2024, and AGIX traded at modest valuations through multiple cycles.
The breakthrough came with the ASI Alliance merger in March 2024. SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol announced they would merge their tokens into a single ASI (Artificial Superintelligence Alliance) token, combining their communities, treasuries, and technical roadmaps. The merger created the largest decentralized AI entity in crypto by market cap and gave each project access to the others’ user bases and technology.
Goertzel’s vision — that decentralized AI will ultimately produce artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity rather than a small number of corporations — is the most ambitious thesis in all of crypto. Whether it’s achievable is questionable. Whether it’s necessary is debatable. But the fact that someone has been working on it consistently since 2017, through multiple bear markets and cycles of irrelevance, commands respect. SingularityNET is the project that kept the faith in decentralized AI alive long before it was fashionable.
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