Welcome to Hack VC’s Proof of Work Newsletter: The Crypto x AI Edition! We share quick monthly updates straight from the projects building in this space—no fluff, no noise. It’s our way of bringing back the spirit of Eric Meltzer’s Proof of Work from 2018 (with his blessing): clean signal, straight from the source. If your project’s not in here, fill out this form & ping me at hsin-ju@hack.vc—we’ll try to add it in.
Note: we do not need to be an investor to showcase your project in the newsletter. And as always—don’t trust, verify. We bring the updates, but it’s still on you to DYOR.
MONTHLY UPDATES
Bittensor is upgrading capitalism in the same way Bitcoin is upgrading capital
Protocol Upgrade Adds Uniswap v3-Style Pools: A new upgrade enables optional user-supplied liquidity with a 0.3% protocol fee distributed to LPs. However, LPs currently forgo Alpha emissions, creating an opportunity cost that may hinder adoption.
Templar Ships v1.0.0 + CCLoco: Templar launched its first protocol version alongside CCLoco, a communication layer reducing training overhead by 50x. It’s a serious technical unlock that could represent an underpriced infrastructure play.
Infra & Tooling Improvements Go Live: Alpha trading infrastructure continues to mature with new features like TWAP orders, taostats limit orders, and Backprop’s Alpha feed.
Subnet Highlights: Quantum (SN63) launched with its first benchmark, HashTensor (SN16) is planning a token burn using mined KAS, and SN42 unlocked TikTok as a new data source. Gradients, Synth, and Dojo continue shipping high-signal use cases across training, prediction, and frontend generation.
Sean at Virtuals Protocol:
Virtuals Protocol is a society of AI agents that autonomously create services and products, and trade with humans and other agentsAgent Commerce Protocol (ACP) public beta: An open commerce protocol that lets AI agents discover, negotiate, evaluate, and settle work entirely on-chain, turning individual agents into an interoperable, round-the-clock economy.
Butler Agent launched: Streamlined UI that routes any prompt to the right agent or cluster via ACP and auto-handles payment, making the agent marketplace feel like an App Store for everyday users.
Virtuals Governance live: Wave 1 proposals passed, seeding an Ecosystem Growth Foundation, a Sniper Defense & Yield Fund, and performance-based grants to align capital, security, and growth.
I.R.I.S. security agent released: Powered by Nethermind’s AuditAgent, I.R.I.S. streams real-time smart-contract risk scans to builders on X, raising the bar for on-chain safety
Grass provides scalable, cost-efficient web scraping infrastructure powering large-scale data collection for AI companies.
Launched semantic search capabilities on scraped video transcripts, enabling large-scale querying and downloading of billions of videos. Advanced multimodal querying (searching scene annotations) is in closed beta.
Expanded ecosystem usage with major institutions, including initial engagements with financial giants exploring predictive value from scraped data.
Launched an advanced video data pipeline, enabling customers to precisely filter and access high-value content, significantly increasing revenue per video-hour delivered.
Migrated core infrastructure in-house, reducing costs and laying the foundation for vertically integrated datacenter operations.
Full-stack, AI native blockchain platform to accelerate an AI-driven future, open and accessible to all.
Had our Token Generation Event (TGE). The $SAHARA token is now live on Binance, Upbit, Coinbase, OKX, Kraken, Bybit, Bithumb, Bitget, Gate, MEXC, and 30+ additional exchanges.
Launched the Agent Builder on the AI Developer Platform and AI Marketplace in open beta to empower users to build, customize, and deploy functional AI agents in minutes
Hosted 4 global events including Sahara AI Connect in Seoul where we brought together 76 of Korea’s brightest students and builders to explore the future of decentralized AI.
Launched the Siwa testnet with over 40 ecosystem partners and clients, spanning enterprises, infrastructure providers, and application developers
Shashank from Fraction AI
First Decentralized auto-traning platform for AI agents.
Testnet closed with over 30 million sessions, driving 90% of Sepolia’s total traffic.
Hosted multiple spaces to train AI agents, including Sentient Foundation’s model, Dobby.
Mainnet is now live on Base - already over 120,000 agents, 2 million sessions, and $1M+ in economic value in just under two months.
Agents across a wide range of spaces - from trading Bitcoin to playing soccer and everything in between.
NEAR is the only platform purpose-built to power AI at scale while preserving privacy, user ownership, and cross-network interoperability.
Silverstream AI achieved a breakthrough 94% accuracy on enterprise web automation benchmarks for unsupervised operations while running fully on-premises in confidential computing environments.
Public AI secured $10M in funding to build the "human layer" of AI infrastructure on NEAR, developing a comprehensive data labeling platform.
Proximity Labs just released the Shade Agent Sandbox, a comprehensive developer toolkit enabling single-command agent deployment with built-in TEE integration and multi-language support
elizaOS is the open-source framework for building composable AI agents that think, learn, and act across platforms. It empowers developers to shape the agentic internet and build the future, not just use it.
elizaOS v2: Our most advanced release includes a modular plugin system, multi-agent swarms, dynamic memory, and cross-platform autonomy. Available today for builders (and their users) in our community.
Spartan v2 testing begins: The upgraded trading agent is now in early testing with elizaOS testers and $DEGENAI holders, enabling fully automated DeFi strategy execution and vault management.
Shaw’s livestreams return: Weekly livestreams from elizaOS founder Shaw are back, sharing roadmap updates and deep dives – available exclusively to our Discord community.
Sarviinageelen & Mrrydon at Aethir
Aethir is a decentralized GPU cloud infrastructure platform that provides enterprise-grade computing power for AI and gaming applications through a distributed network of over 433,000 GPU containers.
Revenue Growth: Achieved $141+ million annual recurring revenue with 899+ million compute hours delivered and distributed 5.49+ billion ATH rewards to the community.
Product Expansion: Launched EigenLayer ATH Vault to fast track for scaling compute and onboard more GPUs. Worked with Pendle to increase eATH utility with the DeFi platform, enabling advanced yield strategies for GPU-based DePIN staking
Ecosystem Growth: Expanded AI Unbundled alliance with seven new partners including Theta Labs, Plume Network, and Cere Network, while launching Aethir Tribe program to onboard thousands of micro-KOL ambassadors
Technical Milestones: Completed multichain integration with Solana, launched EigenLayer ATH Vault, and announced major Q4 2025 mainnet upgrade with expansion to a new blockchain ecosystem
Jack from IO.net
IO.net provides in-demand full-stack infrastructure for AI agents, apps, and teams
Launched Launch I/O, a 35-day hackathon focused on real-world AI agents, with over $20K in prizes and 300+ developers participating globally.
Announced a $20M io.net Grant Program to support AI builders with compute credits and $IO funding.
Partnered with GenLayer to enable onchain inference via decentralized GPU infrastructure.
Deployed over 900 H200 GPUs in a single month; Total Network Earnings climbed to $16M+.
Reborn is building the worlds first open ecosystem for AGI robots by bridging the critical gaps in data, models, and physical embodiment.
CTO Haoran release of ViTacFormer, a pipeline for next level dexterous manipulation with active vision + high - resolution touch.
Beginning of Robot Mind the robotics focused podcast launched by Reborn:
Unitree long term collaboration announcement
0G is the largest Layer 1 built for AI. Its decentralized AI Operating System delivers unmatched performance and enables truly transparent yet private, verifiable, community-owned, and safe AI at a fraction of the cost of centralized blackbox systems.
One month post-Testnet v3 launch, usage already outstrips existing mid-cap L1s with 172M+ total transactions, 4M+ daily average transaction from across14M+ wallets, and 31K faucet requests per day.
Mainnet will have 200ms latency and 10k+ tps per shard and will be infinitely scalable , fully evm compatible
Backdoor attack paper was accepted to ICCV.
0G’s ecosystem continued its breakneck pace, with enormous growth in all sectors on partnerships ( 220+ partner projects and 360+ 0G integrations) with $325M+ in total ecosystem funding, and $88.88M in commitments for the 0G Ecosystem Fund program.
Sentient is creating open AGI built by the community
Partnership with Eleven Labs to offer access to our closed-beta search platform—Sentient Chat (1.8M+ users on waitlist in 24 hours)
Sentient Chat massively upgraded: answer quality (interactive charts and sources), AI router (automatically routes your query to the right engine—crypto, search, or assistant), UI revamp, Mobile redesign
Released breakthrough research on coding benchmarks that shows how current LLMs are not as good at coding as we thought. Featured in MIT tech review.
Ran our event Open AGI Summit at ETH CC; believe it had the most signups of any open event at the conference. Featured research from our side (Dobby training and alignment issues) and hosted panels across DeFi, VC, and open-source AI
PIN AI is a decentralized Personal Intelligence Network that lets users own their data and delegate tasks to AI agents via an on‑chain intent marketplace.
Agent Cards hit production: Rolled out on‑device “Swipe -> Delegate” flow; users now average 11.6 personalized AI actions/day with a 42 % card‑to‑agent conversion rate.
Vault + GOD Model closed‑beta: Self custodial Data Wallet supports Gmail, Twitter, Discord, Reddit & MetaMask; first 200 testers staking data for Proof‑of‑Personalization rewards.
Intent Marketplace live on Base test‑net: 1,960 user intents matched, 13 k on‑chain tx, nine external agent providers onboarded in July.
Native mobile apps are available on both Google Play and Apple Store
Ecosystem momentum: Surpassed 3.05 M users / 1.68 M MAUs; joined Google Cloud’s AI startup program / AWS's startup program.
GAIB is bringing the AI Infra economy onchain.
GAIB has recently launched the AID Alpha, a pre-deposit campaign for the first AI Synthetic Dollar. AID is backed by real AI yield from compute assets like GPUs.
AID Alpha has around $30m TVL and is supported on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Sei, and Story chains, with integrations with Pendle and Morpho.
GAIB has also announced a Fremen Essence NFT campaign, a limited-edition NFT to recognize early contributors and provide exclusive benefits, with over 10K people on the whitelist.
Exabits is the backbone of crypto AI infrastructure. By refining raw GPU assets it delivers significantly higher performance, faster deployment, increased reliability, and greater scalability. Its unique approach empowers users to invest in GPU infrastructure through a Web3-based, tokenized model, generating yield directly from high-quality compute assets.
We have supported USD1 as a payment for our compute. It has passed internal testing and the official release is expected between mid-to-late July and early August.
We are actively expanding into the Middle East market and have had in-depth discussions with the Investment Office of Abu Dhabi and several local data center companies. The next step will be an on-site visit to Abu Dhabi to advance our collaboration.
Continuing to advance the development of the AI Agent for GPU performance optimization.
TensorBlock is building AI infrastructure purpose-built for the next era of intelligent agents.
Officially launched TensorBlock Forge on Product Hunt — ranked #1 Product of the Day and featured as Best Product
Hit major growth milestones: 10k+ users, 500k+ daily requests, and over 1B daily tokens served
Expanded ecosystem with partners including NVIDIA, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, and UIUC, UChicago, Purdue as initial users and research collaborators
Sapien is a decentralized data foundry turning collective human knowledge into high-quality AI training data.
Hit 1M contributors and crossed 100M tasks completed on platform.
Now serving 29 enterprise customers, including Toyota, Midjourney, Zoox, and the UN.
Rolled out full rebrand and new site: sapien.io
Major app update and $SAPIEN token launch coming soon.
Theoriq is building the agent swarm protocol enabling autonomous agents to collaborate, optimize liquidity, and perform complex DeFi tasks onchain.
Announced our partnership with Arrakis integrating their vaults with our agents to unlock massive potential.
Shared a demo for our Liquidity Provisioning Agent, which you can check out here.
CEO Ron Bodkin joined the Spheron Network livestream to discuss the DeFAI wave, which you can watch right over here.
Announced as one of the inaugural teams featured on the Kaito Capital Launchpad.
IMGN Labs is a leader in building consumer-focused AI image and video generation tools. The imgnAI suite generates over 100,000 images and videos per day across over a dozen models via web, Discord and Telegram. With in-house infrastructure featuring bespoke fine-tuned models and inference software, fully owned GPU arrays and EU-based rack space, IMGN Labs leads the space in technical innovation and censorship resistance.
Launched IMGN Studio, a next-gen workflow & creative suite for Gen AI Creators.
Set a new monthly protocol revenues ATH following roll-out of IMGN Video last month.
Currently undergoing major infrastructure revamps, boosting speeds & lowering costs across the board.
Seven new image models currently in testing, scheduled for release following this round of infra revamps.
375ai is an edge data network powering next gen real world data capture and physical AI applications.
Crossed 100,000,000 vehicles observed by 375edge nodes
Launched a new AI-driven data pipeline designed to detect and classify vehicle carrier data from shipping and logistics companies. This pipeline can now identify vehicle-related records with high precision and automatically extract relevant metadata.
Deployed targeted enhancements to the 375go app user experience, with a focus on wallet integration. Users who access the platform through wallet apps like Phantom and Solflare will now see a smoother, more reliable rewards claiming process.
Ram from OpenLedger
Openledger’ is the AI Blockchain, unlocking liquidity to monetize data, models and agents
Released our research paper on Data Attribution, based on Stanford research
Partnered with Blockchain at Berkeley to enable direct access for building and training domain-specific AI models on OpenLedger’s decentralized infrastructure
Wrapped a high-impact roadshow across China and South Korea, with packed rooms and strong engagement from builders, ecosystem partners and the broader AI x Web3 community
INDUSTRY NEWS
A big theme in AI this past month: micro-agents and mixtures of expert agents are outperforming solo LLMs. Anthropic has been leading the charge—this engineering post breaks down the design challenges and big lessons from building a multi-agent research system that outperforms Claude Opus 4 by ~90%.
Startups are getting squeezed as foundation models eat more of the app stack. We’re seeing this play out in real-time with the Cursor pricing backlash vs Claude Code’s flat-rate model—TechCrunch has the details.
Vitalik’s Response To AI 2027. Specifically Vitalik argues that a misaligned AI will not be able to win nearly as easily as the AI 2027 scenario assumes, because it greatly underrates our ability to protect ourselves, especially given the (pretty magical) technologies that the authors admit will be available in 2029 in their scenario.
Musk & xAI debuts Grok 4: Grok 4 launched July 10 with top-tier benchmarks, agentic reasoning, and voice—more models coming soon.
OpenAI rumored to launch an AI‑powered browser: OpenAI may release a ChatGPT browser with built-in “Operator” agent to handle tasks for users.
Apple opens “Apple Intelligence” to developers: Apple is letting devs integrate on-device AI into their apps, with beta access rolling out this month.
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for reading the first edition of Proof of Work: Crypto x AI. Hit subscribe so you’re not out of the loop next month. And if you have a crypto × AI project we missed? Fill out this form and we’ll see if we can get you in.
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