The Graph Foundation has announced a $60 million eight-year funding grant to Semiotic AI in a bid to expand the start-up software firm’s research and development capacity in sectors of cryptography and artificial intelligence.
Specifically, the partnership will focus on building the architecture required for automated and verifiable indexing and querying on the Graph, in addition to developing micropayments functionalities utilizing zero-knowledge proofs such as ZK-SNARKs.
Over the course of 2021, Semiotic AI have worked alongside the Graph to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem with a litany of initiatives, such as the construction of a beta query prediction service, serving in an indexing operation role, supporting zero-knowledge proof infrastructure design, as well as receiving an initial grant in March this year, among others.
With this news, Semiotic AI follows in the footsteps of two infrastructure platforms in becoming a core protocol developer on the network. StreamingFast acquired a $60 million funding grant from the Graph in June, while blockchain service provider Figment were granted $48 million in late-July.
Co-founder of the Graph, Brandon Ramirez, shared insights into how Semiotic AI will pursue greater economic efficient and scalability on The Graph through the usage of artificial intelligence and cryptography, stating:
“They specialize in the same AI toolkit Google Deepmind used to beat the world’s best Go player and to then solve the age-old protein folding problem. The Graph is all about data, and just as AI plays a central role in all web2 products, this partnership will contribute to the convergence of AI and the decentralized internet.”
Incepted on mainnet in December 2020, the Graph quickly gained prominence as one of the leading indexing and query platforms in the Web3 sphere. At the time of writing, the network supports indexing data from 22 networks, including Ethereum, Arbitrium, Avalanche, as well as facilitating over 22,000 subgraphs including ENS Domains, Compound V2, and Uniswap V2, among others.
In early September, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin touted ZK-SNARKs as a potential major technological adoption over the coming decades.
I expect ZK-SNARKs to be a significant revolution as they permeate the mainstream world over the next 10-20 years.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) September 2, 2021
Related: The Graph explores integrations for Bitcoin, Polkadot, and other Layer-1 blockchains
Co-founder and CTO of Semiotic AI, Sam Green, also commented on the recent partnership, using telephone and web search as prime examples of how a plethora of innovations can blossom from foundational technologies, stating:
“R&D efforts on these utilities resulted in countless inventions that improved communications and access to knowledge for the entire world. As a result of this collaboration, we will similarly invent new, open-source technologies that will benefit both users of The Graph and the larger web3 community.”
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