AI-Powered Blockchain Ambient Set to 'Replace Bitcoin,' Claims Co-Founder

Key Points to Know:

• Ambient secured $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z's crypto accelerator program and Delphi Digital.

• The blockchain aims to provide super-intelligent AI in a fast, cost-effective, and transparent manner.

According to co-founder Travis Good, a new AI-powered blockchain backed by Andreessen Horowitz is "ultimately designed to replace Bitcoin."

The bold claim is based on what Good predicts as an inevitable reality: Bitcoin's encryption methods are "becoming outdated" and could be "completely obsolete within five years," which would pose a significant challenge for the miners who support it.

"People have invested billions of dollars in hash power and ASICs to secure the network," he explained at the ethDenver conference. "The question is, where do they go from here?"

Good's solution is Ambient, a blockchain with advanced AI capabilities — what he refers to as the "future economy" — that could evolve into a "decentralized competitor to OpenAI." Operating on a proof-of-work system, it would appeal to Bitcoin miners, offering them an easy transition.

"It's a functional proof-of-work network, which we don’t believe anyone has properly executed in crypto," Good stated.

Several crypto projects have tried to merge these two trending technologies, believing that decentralized blockchains and crowdsourced efforts can better guide AI toward benefiting humanity, rather than relying on private, centralized corporations.

One of the largest and best-funded projects in this space is Bittensor. However, Good contends that the market leader falls short because it doesn’t actually run AI models on the blockchain, despite its initial goal of becoming "a global computer." His alternative, Ambient, embeds AI directly into its foundation.

Whether Bitcoin miners—and users, for that matter—will adopt this radically new network depends largely on Ambient’s economic success. Good aims for Ambient to provide super-intelligent AI quickly, affordably, and transparently, ensuring users get the results they’ve paid for.

While Ambient’s security resembles Bitcoin’s, the network operates similarly to Solana.

Ambient secured $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z’s crypto accelerator program and Delphi Digital, one of the top VC funds focused on the intersection of crypto and AI technology.

"Currently, everyone in crypto is using centralized AI to power their applications and front-end features," said Alex Golding, a venture associate at Delphi. "This is problematic because it deprives users of visibility into how the models are trained and makes them vulnerable to misleading answers based on inferior models."

"Verified inference" by miners, which is central to their reward system, serves as a provenance fact-checker, making sure that the answers provided by Ambient come from the model that users paid to access.

"Without verified inference, you’re guaranteed to get scammed," Good warned, further emphasizing the risk with a stark statement: "Nation-state actors could poison your model and do malicious things, just like we saw with Lazarus, North Korea's hacking group."