5 Innovative DeFAI Projects That Are Bridging Decentralized Finance and Artificial Intelligence

What do you get when you combine DeFi and AI? Why, DeFAI of course. But beyond a new acronym, you get a whole lot more. Fusing artificial intelligence with decentralized finance enables automated decision-making across blockchain networks. It supports yield optimization, code-free token deployment, dapp creation, and much more. Anything you can do in DeFi today, DeFAI will be able to do on your behalf tomorrow – just more efficiently and more profitably. That, in a paragraph, is the bull case for DeFAI.

But as you would expect of a sector that combines two transformative and highly versatile technologies in the form of blockchain and artificial intelligence, there are many strands to DeFAI. From onchain agents to natural language interfaces, projects operating under the DeFAI banner are targeting users ranging from consumers to app builders. But these projects share this much in common: they’re laser-focused on reducing DeFi’s complexities through intelligent use of AI, enabling better outcomes for everyone. The following five projects are at the top of their game when it comes to marrying the best elements of DeFi and AI. 

0G Labs

0G Labs is the developer of 0G, the largest Layer 1 network that’s poised to power a wave of fully composable and highly scalable AI applications. It’s a DeFAI behemoth, with more than 22M active accounts who’ve accrued over 650M transactions on its testnet. Next up is the 0G mainnet which will form an ultra-fast yet highly decentralized network that serves as the de facto jumping-off point for DeFAI. With throughput of up to 11,000 TPS, 0G can claim benchmarks that put other Layer 1s in the shade – perfect for hosting data-hungry AI applications.

Lately, 0G Labs has been focused on finding new ways to squeeze greater performance out of AI models when working with decentralized clusters – and it’s just struck gold. DiLoCOX is an innovative solution designed to train large language models with over 100 billion parameters in a decentralized environment. The 0G Labs team believes it to be the first decentralized training framework capable of working at this sort of scale, which has been achieved by breaking learning models into multiple parts. With efficiency improvements of up to 350x greater than previous decentralized models, it’s easy to see why DiLoCOX has been turning heads.

SingularityNET

SingularityNET is in the AI agents game – and it’s way ahead of the competition when it comes to developing a self-organizing network in which agents can work as one. The SingularityNET platform enables agents to collaborate on different tasks, be it payments, reputation management, or data exchange. This is achieved through AI-DSL, which forms an interoperable framework for AI services. By allowing workflows to be combined, AI-DSL allows agents to work more efficiently, enabling users to get tasks done through a single point of access rather than having to juggle multiple workflows.

When it comes to LLMs, SingularityNET is also on the case with Zarqa, a large language model whose modular design makes it ideal for large-scale training and processing. It’s part of SingularityNET’s efforts to make AI not merely more efficient but also more ethical. Working with a model configured to the AI’s own personality, Zarqa is capable of evolving and adhering to a moral and ethical framework, resulting in better predictability and system security.

Virtuals Protocol

Virtuals dubs itself as “The Wall Street for AI agents” and is intent on bringing the benefits these onchain entities can engender to ordinary users. It allows anyone to build and deploy an autonomous agent using its GAME framework. And once deployed, there’s a lot that can be achieved with those agents because Virtuals has a veritable ecosystem that’s coalesced around it. To get a feel for what Virtuals is all about, check out its agents marketplace. The top agents, which are tokenized and thus fully tradable, have multi-million dollar market caps.

There’s a lot of moving parts to Virtuals, whose “society of AI agents” has rapidly gained traction with devs and onchain users alike. More than 17,000 agents have been deployed, resulting in total trading volume of more than $7B. Cos that’s the beauty of Virtuals: you don’t have to be a builder to recognize the upside in further expansion of the agentic economy. Back the right agents and you’ll prosper as their market cap soars, rewarding astute traders for being early. 

Griffain

Speaking of onchain agents, no examination of DeFAI would be complete without the inclusion of Griffain. The Solana-based project supports two types of agents: Personal and Special. The former can perform tasks on behalf of the user such as retrieving data and interacting with onchain dapps. The latter, meanwhile, is capable of performing more sophisticated tasks such as providing in-depth market analysis and conversing in multiple languages. 

What’s cool about Griffain is that its agents work with natural language prompts, making it easier to get up and running. Whether you’re looking to deploy your first memecoin or participate in a spot of copy trading, with Griffain there’s an agent for that. There’s a one-time setup fee of 1 SOL required, but once paid for you’ve got an agent for life. Use it to its full capacity to get more done onchain, whether that’s optimizing yield or identifying new tokens that are on a tear.

Chromia

Chromia’s Layer 1 blockchain is built differently from the rest. Specifically, it’s built with native support for vectorized data, which makes it ideal for hosting AI-powered applications. Because of Chromia’s highly efficient use of data, builders are able to store AI agent memory onchain. This allows for the creation of highly intelligent AI applications that are fast, lightweight, and fully decentralized. Chromia’s long on DeFAI – so much so that it’s created a $20M data and AI ecosystem fund to accelerate development.

Because it’s naturally proud of the capabilities of its Layer 1 in supporting AI projects, Chromia wants to kickstart a flurry of development activity, which its ecosystem fund will enable. To further help AI-focused devs, it’s lately been building out its tooling, adding new plugins and complementing these with detailed tutorials on creating AI agents and other applications that leverage artificial intelligence. If you’re looking for a performant and low-cost chain on which to tinker with DeFi applications that are fused with AI, Chromia is a compelling choice.

DeFAI Is Very Much Alive

In less than two years, DeFAI has gone from a bold idea into a working reality. Not only has the range of tooling and dedicated networks expanded dramatically, but the learning curve has been virtually flattened. Anyone working with little more than a few text prompts can now deploy their own agent and set it to work onchain. DeFi users with basic developer experience, meanwhile, can go further and incorporate sophisticated workflows to create AI-powered applications that are capable of operating across numerous networks simultaneously while drawing data from on- and offchain sources.

Within the field of decentralized finance, AI is popping up everywhere, doing everything from automating trading to rebalancing portfolios. And thanks to the use of natural language, much of the underlying complexity has been eliminated. DeFAI is here, it’s accessible, and it’s doing cool stuff on demand. As the five projects profiled here prove, when decentralized finance is judiciously combined with artificial intelligence, anything is possible.