The thing that nagged at me halfway through the OpenLedger $OPEN #OpenLedger @OpenLedger task was the word "collaborative." It's everywhere in the framing — collaborative datasets, collaborative model training, community-owned intelligence. And then you look at what's actually being built right now and it's a different shape entirely.
The recent activity is almost entirely bilateral protocol partnerships: DGrid for compute, Story Protocol for rights licensing, Chainbase for Web3 data, PublicAI for labeling, TheoriqAI for agents. Each one is a handshake between two teams, not open contributor activity. Meanwhile CoinMarketCap shows circulating supply has grown from 215.5M to over 290M OPEN, mostly through community reward emissions — yet annual protocol revenue sits around $693K with fees down 23% last week per DeFiLlama. Tokens out, usage not yet following.
I thought about this for a bit after finishing the task. The B2B partnership model might actually be the faster path to a real working AI pipeline. Maybe grassroots data collaboration needs enterprise scaffolding before it can function at scale. That's a reasonable design choice. But it does mean the "collaborative" in collaborative AI development is currently pointing at a very specific group.
Who actually shows up in the Datanets once the partnership infrastructure is in place… that part is still to be written.
The recent activity is almost entirely bilateral protocol partnerships: DGrid for compute, Story Protocol for rights licensing, Chainbase for Web3 data, PublicAI for labeling, TheoriqAI for agents. Each one is a handshake between two teams, not open contributor activity. Meanwhile CoinMarketCap shows circulating supply has grown from 215.5M to over 290M OPEN, mostly through community reward emissions — yet annual protocol revenue sits around $693K with fees down 23% last week per DeFiLlama. Tokens out, usage not yet following.
I thought about this for a bit after finishing the task. The B2B partnership model might actually be the faster path to a real working AI pipeline. Maybe grassroots data collaboration needs enterprise scaffolding before it can function at scale. That's a reasonable design choice. But it does mean the "collaborative" in collaborative AI development is currently pointing at a very specific group.
Who actually shows up in the Datanets once the partnership infrastructure is in place… that part is still to be written.