SingularityNET’s Decentralized AI Marketplace Integrates with PayPal
A Gateway towards a Benevolent AGI Future
If you are a SingularityNET token holder, you share a vision with us. We believe in a world of interoperable AI services operating on a global, open, decentralized, and transparent infrastructure. Together, these services will interact with each other facilitating a benevolent artificial general intelligence that benefits humankind.
The vast multitude of micro-AI services will be priced and transacted in the native AGI token, ensuring that the value created is value rewarded.
Today, however, the data scientists and developers who are most capable of creating real value through AI face a tricky choice. Either they can go work at a big company with a big budget to help create and maintain closed, proprietary AI systems or they create open-source AI agents… and find their compensation for their efforts nonexistent or highly chancy.
The SingularityNET decentralized marketplace provides an alternative — a way for users and creators of AIs, and AIs themselves, to interact in a free digital environment not tightly controlled by any mega-corporation or government. But this alternative will only have real practical value after a critical mass of users is reached. Right now our path to realizing the SingularityNET vision is still in the early stages, though moving forward quickly.
The integration of SingularityNET’s decentralized AI marketplace with PayPal represents a significant step in the direction of wide adoption of the platform. It makes it easier for more AI users to leverage the platform, thus increasing the likelihood that data scientists and developers will feel incentivized to consider SingularityNET a viable alternative pathway to monetize their expertise. This integration represents a large opportunity for SingularityNET and our community.
By making our decentralized AI marketplace easily accessible to PayPal’s 286 million users, we will see an increase in the awareness and perception of SingularityNET. This awareness is particularly necessary for Without a significantly expanded awareness of both SingularityNET and our decentralized AI marketplace offering, it will be a big challenge to achieve our vision and enable an economy marked by massive AGI token utilization.
The PayPal integration arguably does more than any other relationship we have had thus far to generate sustained and meaningful usage of the SingularityNET decentralized AI marketplace. Growth in usage of the marketplace is the only way to tilt the odds in favor of a benevolent AGI.
You don’t need to be an AI market researcher at Gartner or Forrester to know that, right now, there is far more demand for AI services among people who aren’t (yet) familiar with the cryptocurrency ecosystem and don’t have AGI tokens than among those that do.
One day, that will change, but today isn’t that day. However, today is the day we pass a major milestone on the road to that future.
Theodore Woodward, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the 1940s, famously instructed his medical interns: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”. Since horses are common in Maryland while zebras are relatively rare, logically one could confidently guess that an animal making hoofbeats is probably a horse.
His cute aphorism was a reminder that, when diagnosing a problem, one should consider the obvious solution first.
So, as we look to propel SingularityNET forward on our path, we have diagnosed a few elements around the challenges of kick-starting a vibrant two-sided marketplace for decentralized AI services.
In our favor is the huge and growing demand for cost-effective AI services globally. Interest for these services, already big, is growing to include individuals, small businesses, non-profits, community organizations. Also, in our favor is that the needs of groups are not being met by the current set of offerings. The prevailing wisdom is that for AI to have value, it must be “big.” This perception intimidates people, fearing failure, and creates a fiscal barrier, thinking that budgets must be huge. As a result, the bulk of AI investment happens at the richest firms such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, or Microsoft, further expanding the chasm.
Working against us, at the moment, is the fact that most of these people do not have AGI tokens nor do they know about SingularityNET. What’s more, as we all know, obtaining crypto-assets is still not quite “plug-n-play.” By making the AI services that are available on SingularityNET payable via PayPal, we are consciously removing one of the biggest friction points for potential users to engage immediately.
We are better positioned to help millions of people and organizations sooner. Now, they can consider purchasing AI services that were previously only available to Big Tech.
It gets better…
Not only do we help the cohort of people who are willing to experimentally buy on our marketplace today, but we are positioning ourselves to catalyze future demand as the early adopters begin to see results. More demand brings more developers and data scientists into our community as they see revenue opportunities, who then create more solutions.
Though not ready immediately, we also intend to offer service providers to cash out of AGI via a crypto-fiat gateway. On the surface, this may feel counter-intuitive. However, we feel it is a thoughtful and appropriate step today because it removes another barrier to adoption, as many suppliers of AI services are not yet ready to commit to HODLing AGI.
Eventually, AI creators and users will become more comfortable with the native AGI token, but this greatly enhances the overall SingularityNET Contributor Experience today. It also sends an important signal to new members about the confidence in our network.
To understand the strategy we are following here more deeply, it’s worth reflecting on the general challenges involved in growing a two-sided marketplace.
Reading the early history of Airbnb and Uber is instructive — though note that SingularityNET is trying to pull off something similar without masses of VC money because we are aiming to do it in a decentralized and autonomous way. If you are interested in the topic overall, you should check out Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy — and How to Make Them Work for You.
Growing a decentralized two-sided marketplace, in particular, has additional unique challenges such as obtaining crypto-assets in the first place, enlarging the expertise required of key management, and fears around price volatility, just to name a few.
One day, in the future, getting crypto-assets will be as easy as ordering pizza. And it will be as obvious then that it’s the best method for transacting as cell phones are for communication (something that wasn’t at all obvious at one time).
Today, however, it’s not easy or obvious. So, we have to do what we can to meet people where they are.
Not only do future buyers and sellers need the capabilities that a PayPal integration brings today, but our larger purpose is also better served as well.
The world of Artificial General Intelligence is coming at a rapid pace — largely via narrow AI applications segueing into Narrow AGI systems, which build toward AGI while delivering practical value in diverse vertical markets.
Cisco’s recent partnership with SingularityNET is just one example of the attention that the industry is paying. At the same time, there is a growing awareness of the dangers of ceding control of our lives to private companies, whether it is AI, news, or personal information.
The PayPal integration with SingularityNET opens up vast amounts of new demand into the ecosystem and introduces millions of people to the important ideas behind why AGI must be decentralized
We are excited about this moment in our history and hope you are as well.
