Opinion by: Ram Kumar, Core Contributor at Openledger
The crypto industry has spent a decade evangelizing decentralization. At the same time, AI companies have amassed the most valuable monopolies from conventional oil, and they are data monopolies that make the dominance of the protocol pale by comparison. The AI industry is expected to evolve $300 Billions of revenue by 2025, primarily through training models in the trillions of tokens scrapped from researchers, writers and domain experts.
Bitcoin Maxis has fought the block size wars. Ethereum debated MeV extraction. Meanwhile.
Crypto’s response is to launch ten thousand defi forks as the most consequential infrastructure battle of the decade unfolds offchain.
Crypto needs a wake-up call. This is a doomed false uprising as AI companies perfectly centralized control over the intelligence itself, the ultimate network effect making liquidity pools like child’s play.
Monopoly data sets are permanently intervention-free
Defi has shown that financial infrastructure can be rebuilt. Financial railroads, however, are commoditized compared to knowledge monopolies. Each defi protocol competes in implementation, composability and user experience because the underlying assets such as tokens, stablecoins and liquidity are standardized and portable.
AI data sets are not portable. They are locked in a training run that cost $100 million and took months to complete. Once a foundational model reaches critical mass, it becomes prohibitively expensive to replicate. The first mover to gather a Training Corpus wins permanently unless new infrastructure changes the rules.
Google has 20 years of search query data. Meta has 15 years of social interaction data, and OpenAI has worked with publishers not to license the same content to competitors. These are permanent moats that compound on each new user interaction.
Crypto has built decentralized alternatives to centralized finance, so where is the decentralized alternative to centralized intelligence? It doesn’t exist because Crypto doesn’t treat ownership of data as an existing battle of worth.
Crypto founders don’t build data set protocols
The brutal truth is that data set infrastructure is less exciting than crop farming. Crypto founders pursue token speed, speculative upside and viral growth mechanics. Building construction layers for training data generates zero guesswork, requires years of ecosystem development and requires collaborations with slow-moving institutions.
However, boring infrastructure is certainly important. Ethereum wasn’t exciting when it launched; It was a slow, expensive computer valued by academics. The chainlink is not exciting; It was an Oracle network that took five years to gain adoption. The most critical crypto infrastructure often resembles homework compared to the casino next door.
Data set protocols are today’s homework. The market opportunity is greater than that Definetwork effects are more powerful than any protocol token, and regulatory pressure creates inevitable demand. But crypto capital is flowing into the next NFT market instead of the infrastructure that could prevent AI companies from becoming more powerful than nation-states.
The window closes quickly
AI companies don’t wait for permission. They train GPT-5, Claude 4 and Gemini Ultra now with data scraped from millions of creators who will never see a payoff. Each training run completed without an onchain claim makes the centralized control more controllable.
When these models reach sufficient capacity, they become self-reinforcing. Users generate data through interactions, which train the next version, and the next version attracts more users. The flywheel accelerates, and competitors cannot catch up because they lack both the initial corpus and the constant stream of data.
Crypto may have two years before this window closes permanently. After that, data sets become facts of nature that no amount of decentralized infrastructure can lose.
What crypto should build instead of more Dex
The crypto industry requires data set registries where contributors cryptographically sign data licenses before any practice begins. This requires recognition protocols that log data sets influence which model outputs, and micropayment rails that automatically split inference revenue with the original creators. It requires reputation systems that rank data that determine quality based on measured model performance, rather than subjective metrics.
The technology is simpler than most defi protocols. Data set registration requires cryptographic hashes, contributor wallet addresses, licensing terms in standard formats, and usage logs. The practice runs a record of the data used and when it is used – requests to the route route requests to the registered contributors proportionally.
This infrastructure does not require new consensus mechanisms or experimental cryptography, but rather developers who prioritize preventing monopolies over the rewards of farming liquidity.
Crypto’s mission or Crypto’s obituary
Crypto’s founding thesis prevents centralized control over important networks. Bitcoin prevented central banks from monopolizing money. Ethereum prevented tech companies from monopolizing computing. But if AI companies monopolize intelligence, those achievements are irrelevant.
What good is decentralized money if centralized models control what people think? What good is decentralized computation if centralized training data determines which ideas to reinforce? Intelligence is in the flow of everything, from finance and management to media and education. Whoever controls the AI training data controls the information environment of the future.
Crypto can build infrastructure that makes data sets impossible, or it can watch AI companies perfect the exact centralized control that blockchain was invented to prevent. There is no third option where crypto remains focused on the imaginary token while relating to the most important technological transfer of the century.
The industry needs to build a data set of infrastructure claims now, or write Crypto’s obituary as a movement that talks about decentralization. In contrast, centralized AI companies have built a permanent monopoly on human knowledge.
Opinion by: Ram Kumar, Core Contributor at Openledger.
This article is for general informational purposes and is not intended to be and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
