Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Author: Wenser ( @wenser 2010 )
The tortuous and magnificent 2024 for cryptocurrency is coming to an end, and 2025 is already beckoning us. Many crypto institutions including Coinbase, a16z, VanEck, and Messari have bet that AI will become one of the main themes of next year.
In addition to AI Agent and AI Meme coins, which have been the hot topics in the market in the second half of the year, a series of high-quality AI projects have also gradually attracted great attention from the market. Among them, Sahara AI, which has previously raised a total of US$43 million and recently launched the first phase of the test network, has become the focus of the market recently. According to the latest official news , the 2024-2025 roadmap was released today, and the main network will be launched in Q3 2025.
Odaily Planet Daily will systematically introduce the project in this article to help readers understand this star project that is positioned as a decentralized AI blockchain platform and is committed to building AI Chain.
Sahara Project Profile: Raised $43 million, Star Team + Well-known Capital
According to previous introductions, Sahara AI is a decentralized artificial intelligence network that allows everyone to leverage their own knowledge capital to explore monetization and automation opportunities through artificial intelligence. The initial basic products include Sahara Knowledge Agent (KA) and Sahara Data.
In August this year, Sahara AI announced the completion of a new round of financing, led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Siam Commercial Bank, dao 5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures, etc. The new funds will be used to further expand the global team, improve the performance of its AI blockchain, and accelerate the construction of its developer ecosystem. It is reported that this is Sahara AIs Series A financing, with a total financing amount of approximately US$43 million. At that time, due to the early stage of the project, we also briefly introduced its potential interaction methods in the article Hand in Hand with You to Interact with Binance Labs Five Major Projects Invested in August .
The team behind Sahara: the industrys top lineup in the crypto and AI circles
According to information on the official website , the team behind Sahara AI includes Sean Ren ( @xiangrenNLP ), professor of AI at the University of Southern California and chairman of the Viterbi Center, who previously worked at Ai 2, Snapchat, Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Tyler Zhou ( @tz_sahara ), former investment director of Binance Labs , and several key members with backgrounds from prestigious universities who are responsible for product, operation, ecosystem construction, and community work.
Sahara AI Team
After the financing was completed in August, Binance co-founder He Yi directly expressed her expectations and optimism for Saharas subsequent development. She mentioned: I look forward to Sahara AI as a pioneer to build a decentralized AI blockchain platform and reshape the future of AI, making it more transparent, secure, and accessible to everyone.
It is worth mentioning that Sahara AI held an AMA with the technical staff of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, on the 20th of this month, and talked about some topics related to the development prospects of AI in 2025. The content was biased towards technical discussion + industry research, and the attributes of Crypto were relatively light, which also highlighted the marketing route that was different from other DeAI projects from the side, giving people a feeling that we are very serious about doing AI+Blockchain things, not just telling stories. Previously, the project also officially announced that it had achieved SOC 2 (SOC 2 Type 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification) compliance certification, emphasizing the importance of enhancing the security, availability and confidentiality of AI development .
Sahara AIs recent AMA
Enter Sahara AI: Building a Human-AI Collaborative Network
According to the information in Sahara AIs official white paper and official documents , the main focus of the project is on the following aspects:
Self-positioning: A decentralized blockchain platform for an open, fair, and collaborative AI economy;
Key concepts: “AI assets,” which are the ownership and management protocols of private AI resources such as personal data and proprietary models;
Target audience: AI developers, data providers, and other stakeholders, including C-end and B-end users, as well as AI asset traders;
Services include: data collection and labeling, model training and serving, AI agent creation and deployment, multi-agent communication, AI asset trading, and AI resource crowdsourcing.
Sahara Chain User Life Journey
At this stage, Sahara AIs main focus is on data among the three elements of AI (computing power, algorithms, and data), that is, completing the basic task of enhancing the performance of AI models by collecting, improving, and labeling data sets; subsequently, through the continuous improvement and development of developer tools and data service platforms, Sahara AI will launch AI assets and AI markets to facilitate developers, users, and enterprises to form an AI economic closed loop.
Project progress: The first phase of the test network has been launched, and the main network will be launched in Q3 2025
On December 19, Sahara AI officially announced that the first phase of the test network was officially launched, and 10,000 participants were selected from nearly 800,000 applicants. The main task was to participate in the construction of the data service platform through sign-in, data labeling, etc. The official explanation is that this move is for users to participate in knowledge contribution and early reward acquisition.
This afternoon, Sahara AI officially released a document announcing the 2024-2025 project roadmap. The main information includes:
Q4 2024: The first phase of the test network will be launched through the data service platform, which is now online; the second phase will start in Q1 2025.
2025Q1: Launch AI marketplace, introduce limited access to developer tools, and expand data services platform.
Q2 2025: Launch Sahara Studio, a comprehensive tool to simplify AI development, including model training toolkit, model deployment toolkit, and model orchestration toolkit.
Q3 2025: Sahara Chain mainnet is launched, providing the on-chain infrastructure required to support large-scale decentralized AI.
Sahara AI latest roadmap
Regarding Sahara AIs specific product route, its official website also has a detailed plan description, as shown below:
Sahara product roadmap
According to its official website , the Sahara AI ecosystem currently includes 200,000 AI trainers, more than 35 corporate customers, and more than 3 million data annotations.
Current data on the official website
Latest interactive tutorial: Testnet interaction + Testnet second phase application
Currently, early participants who have been selected for the first phase of the Sahara AI testnet can interact in the following ways to exchange for corresponding points rewards:
Log in to http://app.saharalabs.ai and create a profile;
Log in to https://faucet.saharaa.info to receive SAH test tokens;
Complete various tasks on the data service dashboard to obtain corresponding Sahara points (SP) or experience points (EXP).
For more details, see the task requirements for stability: https://docs.saharalabs.ai/data-services-page .
It is worth mentioning that since the data labeling issues involved focus more on quality, if the user answers randomly, resulting in multiple task failures, they may be restricted from answering questions or even disqualified from the test network, so be sure to pay attention.
Data service page display
Also attached is the application website for the second phase of the test network waitlist: https://hi.saharalabs.ai/get-started .
Summary: Can Sahara AI build an “AI oasis” in the Sahara Desert?
Finally, Sahara AI has mentioned many times that it is committed to building an AI Chain with AI economy as its core. At a time when countless crypto projects regard AI as a meme label, it is undoubtedly a manifestation of courage and exploratory spirit. Whether it can build an AI oasis for AI users and developers on the crypto soil that is now a desert, perhaps Sahara AI will give its own answer in the future.
Odaily Planet Daily will continue to pay attention to the subsequent development of Sahara AI and make a more in-depth introduction to its ecosystem when the opportunity arises, so that readers can have a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of its value.
