Another strong player joins the Base ecosystem? A detailed explanation of the AI infrastructure project Sapien.

Written by: San, Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, the decentralized AI data project Sapien on Base has shown strong growth momentum.

Since Sapien was listed on Binance Alpha on August 20, it first experienced a continuous decline, but started a strong rebound from September 1. As of now, it has doubled in value, and the 24-hour trading volume has also increased fourfold from around $5 million at the beginning of the month, breaking through the $20 million mark.

As the price and trading volume rise, discussions about Sapien in the market have gradually increased. Among the publicly displayed client list of Sapien, several well-known traditional giants have appeared: Alibaba, Baidu, Toyota, Lenovo, and the AI image generation unicorn Midjourney.

Clearly, using more data to train AI and serve traditional Web2 enterprises is still a leftover from the last AI hype cycle; although the narrative heat of AI in the crypto market is nowhere near as FOMO-inducing as the last wave, it remains a relatively attractive narrative, especially with most AI crypto project tokens leaning more towards Meme.

Project Background

The term “star team” has become a keyword in the current commentary on Sapien within the crypto community.

Rowan Stone, the CEO of the Sapien project, was a co-founder of Coinbase's L2 network Base, and this background gives Sapien a natural advantage within the Base ecosystem.

Its Chief Strategy Officer Trevor Koverko is the founder of the early securities digitization project Polymath and one of the developers of the ERC-1400 RWA standard. His extensive experience in asset tokenization provides significant support for the Sapien project.

In terms of financing, Sapien disclosed two rounds of seed financing of $5 million and $10.5 million respectively in April and October 2024, with the October seed financing investors including well-known institutions such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca Brands, and Yield Guild Games.

This round of financing not only provided sufficient operational funds for the project, but more importantly, it validated the long-term demand in the market for decentralized AI data infrastructure, as well as the optimism of VCs regarding this narrative.

It is worth mentioning that Sapien conducted its token launch through Binance Alpha, which also reflects its market popularity, and with the support of Alpha, it has enhanced the visibility of the Sapien project.

Technological Innovation

Sapien is committed to addressing the current scarcity of high-quality material resources used for AI training. Although this is not a new narrative, Sapien has presented a completely new solution.

The traditional AI data field faces pain points such as opaque data sources, uneven quality, and a lack of effective incentive mechanisms. The PoQ (Proof of Quality) mechanism innovatively launched by Sapien addresses this issue through core components such as token staking, peer verification, reputation scoring, and token rewards and penalties.

Specifically, contributors providing data for Sapien need to stake their Sapien tokens as collateral. After passing multiple data verifications, they will receive stablecoin and token rewards, while low-quality submissions will face a staking penalty of 25% to 100%.

Under such a reward and punishment mechanism, it effectively prevents some users from using bots to inflate volumes and the proliferation of low-quality data materials, ensuring that the final data adopted is of high quality and valuable.

From the perspective of application scenarios, Sapien has currently proven its value in high-precision demand fields such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics. According to the cases disclosed by the project party, an oncologist can earn hundreds of dollars per hour by annotating cancer data. This case not only reflects the enormous value of high-quality professional data materials but also verifies the effectiveness of the PoQ mechanism launched by Sapien in incentivizing professional contributors.

(Image source: Sapien project official website)

Market size

On the road to commercialization, Sapien's progress far exceeds that of other projects in the same field, and it has currently built a large contributor network covering more than 110 countries worldwide.

According to the latest data from the official website, the Sapien platform has over 1.8 million registered contributors, who have completed a total of 187 million data annotation tasks.

Compared to the current scale, what deserves more attention is its growth rate: in 2024, the number of contributors on the Sapien platform is expected to grow by an average of 50% per month. This sustained significant growth also indicates the market's recognition of the Sapien mechanism and brand.

The reason Sapien has attracted market attention is not only due to the rapid growth in user numbers but also because of its impressive lineup of enterprise clients. Currently, Sapien serves 29 enterprise clients, including well-known international organizations such as Toyota, Alibaba, Baidu, Midjourney, and the United Nations. These clients span multiple fields, including autonomous driving, e-commerce, AI drawing, and international organizations.

One of the key points to pay special attention to is the collaboration between Sapien and Midjourney. As a leading project in the field of AI image generation, Midjourney has gained a reputation for producing high-quality AI images. However, this also indicates that it has extremely high requirements for the quality of image painting data. Only with a foundation of large amounts of high-quality materials for training can a useful AI drawing function emerge. Its choice of Sapien as a data supplier fully validates the feasibility of Sapien's high-quality data collection mechanism.

At the same time, the participation of traditional giants like Toyota and Alibaba is also indicating that decentralized data services are gaining recognition from mainstream enterprises.

The support of the Base ecosystem

The current success of Sapien is inseparable from Base's bold reforms this year, and the two have also formed a positive growth cycle.

The current TVL of the Base chain has surpassed 6.8 billion USD, surpassing Tron to become the fifth largest DeFi network. Among them, the TVL of AI-related protocols exceeds 2 billion USD, and the information currently disclosed through the Base App also shows that Base has made significant investments in the AI sector, while also establishing Sapien's leadership position in the AI infrastructure field.

Moreover, Sapien is likely to form a complementary relationship with other AI projects within the Base ecosystem in the future. For example, Venice's DIEM project focuses on tokenizing AI computing power, while Sapien provides verifiable human data. The combination of the two can offer a complete infrastructure stack for AI developers. This specialization and ecological synergy is the core competitive advantage of Base compared to other L2 networks.

Coinbase's current strategy also seems to confirm this trend. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that 40% of the code at Coinbase has been generated by AI, with the goal of reaching over 50% by October 2025.

This dual-driven approach that combines internal applications with external trends provides strong strategic and resource support for Base ecosystem AI projects.

Market Discussion and Sentiment

Current social media and community discussions reflect an optimistic sentiment towards Sapien as a whole.

The main narrative focuses on the immense value potential of AI data infrastructure in the current global wave of AI and cryptocurrency, the unique advantages of a global contributor network, and the strategic significance of collaborating with world-renowned giant enterprises.

Although the method of listing through Binance Alpha and the continuous decline in price in the following days caused a small controversy at the time, as its price has risen in recent days, the market has gradually discovered the unique charm and stable fundamentals of the Sapien project from deep exploration.

At the beginning of this month, an overseas analyst named Game gave an optimistic view based on Sapien's background and some data before the price of Sapien started to rise. Coincidentally, the day after he posted this, the price of Sapien skyrocketed.

The pros and cons of Sapien

Sapien's current performance is indeed eye-catching, but from an investment perspective, we need to analyze it calmly.

The positive aspect is that the problem Sapien is dedicated to solving is a real need; high-quality AI training data is a requirement that spans both traditional and crypto industries. Additionally, collaborations with major companies like Alibaba and Toyota indicate that this mechanism is indeed effective.

In the niche of AI training data, Sapien has an earlier ecological niche and a large existing scale compared to other similar products, and more contributors will bring higher quality data, forming a positive cycle that creates competitive barriers. Additionally, being backed by the Base ecosystem gives it a competitive advantage in resource integration and business expansion.

The risks faced by Sapien are also very apparent.

First, regarding the sustainability of the PoQ mechanism, being reasonable in terms of model does not mean that such data increments can be maintained indefinitely. After most AI models are trained, will the continuous demand for data significantly decrease? Moreover, as the scale of Sapien continues to expand, the marginal cost of controlling the quality of the materials provided by contributors may also rise sharply. Managing such a large user base is not easy.

Finally, there is a common challenge faced by many cryptocurrency projects - regulatory risks, cross-border data flow, privacy protection, and compliance in AI training. Any regulatory issues in any of these aspects could potentially paralyze the entire chain.

Overall, Sapien, as an important component of the AI infrastructure within the Base ecosystem, has undoubtedly attracted widespread market attention in terms of both the project and the token price.

In the context of the rapid development of AI technology, the increasing demand for data, and the support of the Base ecosystem, the future performance of Sapien may be worth paying attention to.