The initiative will award $3,000 each to five projects.
The well-known cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has revealed a cutting-edge grant program for artificial intelligence accelerators.
The initiative will award $3,000 each to five projects that explore the integration of AI with cryptocurrency wallets.
CEO Brian Armstrong emphasized that if equipped with cryptocurrency wallets, large language models (LLMs), the technology underlying AI systems such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could handle financial tasks.
“LLMs should have crypto wallets. Let’s help AI agents get work done (on your behalf) and participate in the economy,” he wrote in a recent tweet.
Coinbase Demonstrates Potential of AI in Financial Transactions
Coinbase’s engineering lead, Yuga Cohler, showed off the capabilities of AI in financial transactions on August 12 by posting a demonstration of the “AI Wallets” feature on X (previously Twitter).
Cohler illustrated a scenario in the demonstration wherein participants receive compensation for their efforts towards training an image recognition model.
The system automatically transfers money to the user’s cryptocurrency wallet after choosing the best picture out of three, demonstrating how AI could manage such transactions on its own.
The concept mirrors platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where users are compensated for completing simple tasks.
LLMs should have crypto wallets. Let's help AI agents get work done (on your behalf) and participate in the economy.
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) August 16, 2024
Reach out and let us know what you're building.
Side note: every checkout experience will need to support AI agents buying things soon. https://t.co/d9u1RQBBRJ
But there are enormous ramifications for conducting and receiving wallet transactions with AI, which could completely transform a range of economic endeavors.
This idea is being supported by Coinbase’s Developer Platform, which is offering a $15,000 accelerator grant program to investigate these AI-driven economic applications.
The company is encouraging developers to create useful “bots” that integrate LLMs with Coinbase’s MPC wallets.
Coinbase’s endeavors to break down barriers in AI and finance, especially the difficulty of empowering AI agents to handle payments on their own, include the grant program.
Developers interested in participating have until September 5 to apply.
AI and Crypto Represent New Opportunities
A research report published by Coinbase in June of last year stated that there is a significant business opportunity at the nexus of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence.
The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the US at the time emphasized the advantages of fusing the two technologies to develop fresh approaches to the problems AI was posing to society.
According to David Duong, head of research at Coinbase, “as applications within AI and blockchain mature, the disruptions these technologies represent may lead to areas of collaboration and the emergence of new use cases for crypto to help address specific societal challenges posed by AI.”
The report mentioned several potential use cases that combine both AI and blockchain technology.
Firstly, it stated that generative AI could be assisted by decentralized data marketplaces in satisfying the need for a diverse and validated dataset for model training.
In a similar vein, incentive systems based on tokens may raise the caliber of data obtained from those markets.
Additional use cases include enhancing data authenticity, increasing the auditability of the opaque decision-making process of AI algorithms, and supplying computational power from decentralized networks that employ graphics processing units for AI projects to train their models.
Additionally, the report asserted that the fusion of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence could potentially tackle problems like digital identity verification and algorithmic bias.
It is worth noting that blockchain technology also has the potential to address issues like disinformation risks.
Blockchain and non-fungible tokens can be used to establish the provenance of images, video, music, and other media.
Furthermore, blockchain can aid in generative AI models’ decision-making processes becoming more transparent, enabling users to examine the consistency and logic of the results the AI generates.