Sahara AI reconstructs the production and distribution order of AI.
Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
Interviewee: Sean, Co-founder of Sahara AI
Since the establishment of smart contracts on Ethereum, countless project protocols have emerged, giving rise to various tracks, narratives, and exaggerated wealth effects. However, in this cycle, we seem to be facing considerable difficulties, as the current lack of innovation in the crypto industry has made confusion and anxiety the norm. From the past concept-driven approach to money-burning expansion, and from the business validation phase to the structural sedimentation period, the history of blockchain development seems to be a complete replication of the past development process of the internet. Where is the future blockchain world headed? What kind of applications or protocols will stand out?
Some entrepreneurs are looking to AI. In recent years, the explosion of AI has caused profound changes in various industries around the world, and has become one of the most trendy technology waves. At the same time, what kind of chemical reaction will occur when AI and Crypto are combined has become a common topic for entrepreneurs. Can the "chemical reaction" between the two make up for each other's shortcomings, or will it give rise to new application scenarios and business models that have revolutionized the industry?
In this wave, Sahara AI, as the world's first AI-native blockchain platform, is trying to further deepen this integration through technological innovation. Sahara AI is not only committed to building an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem, but also solves the problem of registration, licensing, and monetization of AI assets through a transparent and verifiable on-chain protocol, establishing a new paradigm of "right confirmation + vesting + income" for AI contributors. In April 2025, Sahara AI was named one of the 100 most promising AI startups in the world by CB, the world's top market research organization, which is rare in Web3 and AI convergence startups.
In this time, we invited Sean, co-founder of Sahara AI, to talk about his thoughts on AI, Crypto, and Sahara AI. Sean holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and is a research contributor at the Allen Institute for AI, one of the world's most influential nonprofit AI research institutions. His research and achievements have also won a number of international awards and honors in the industry, including: WSDM Test of Time Paper Award, Samsung Artificial Intelligence Research Award, MIT Technology Review Global 35 Under 35 Technology Innovators, Forbes 30 Under 30 Elites, the following is the full interview:
Foresight News: As a post-90s, you are the youngest AI tenured professor at the University of Southern California. You have impressive qualifications and a deep industry background in the field of computer science. The hottest tech trend in recent years is undoubtedly AI, with large models and various practical AI applications gaining widespread market attention. As an expert deeply engaged in the field of artificial intelligence, how do you view the rapid iteration of AI over the past year? What does the future of AI look like in your eyes? What trends are currently emerging?
Sean: Personally, I enjoy being the Co-founder and CEO of Sahara more than all these academic titles. My entrepreneurial direction also largely indicates that the future of AI is to use blockchain technology or decentralized economic collaboration to address one of the most important issues of AI: the issue of "ownership."
The development of AI in the past two years is quite similar to the pace of the explosion in computer vision a few years ago. We can now see several obvious trends.
The first is "resource concentration." In other words, large data centers and an increasing number of high-performance GPUs are controlled by a few large companies. These resources enable them to continuously train larger models and enhance AI capabilities.
The second is "Talent Concentration." Big companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI can recruit the top PhDs, engineers, and architects from around the world, which further widens the gap with other companies.
The third is "data acquisition capability." These companies have money and can spend a lot of funds to buy training data, such as hiring professional companies like Scale AI for data labeling, or even directly inviting experts and PhDs to help select data and train models.
Driven by these conditions, the capabilities of AI models have advanced very rapidly. Behind all this is a repeatedly validated principle: as long as you have more data, larger models, and stronger computing power, the performance of AI will improve. This principle is known as the "Scaling Law."
Of course, the design and architecture of models are also being improved, but the main driving force behind the rapid development of AI is still the continuous accumulation of data, models, and computing power, and this direction currently seems far from reaching its limit.
The future of AI is not just about stronger technology, more applications, and increased efficiency for everyone. You can draw an analogy to the development of the Internet back in the day — it sparked a revolution not just because of the invention of technologies like DNS and browsers, but because it allowed everyone to participate in content creation, turning their ideas into products, ultimately forming a complete ecosystem.
AI is actually following a similar path. In the future, AI agents will be able to help anyone—regardless of whether you know programming or have a technical background—to quickly turn their ideas and expertise into AI-driven content or applications, and even make money. Everyone will be able to find their place in the AI world and quickly spread their ideas.
This goes back to the future that AI wanted to talk about earlier, not only because AI is capable, but also because the problem of "ownership" of AI can be solved. For example, how is a model trained? Whose data is used? If an AI agent is continuously iterated through different data and developers, how can it automatically, fairly and transparently distribute the revenue to these contributors when it makes money in the future? These issues are rarely seriously discussed these days, but I think they are just as important.
These issues, although not yet fully addressed in the current AI industry and academia, are equally important as the capabilities of AI itself. Blockchain has a great opportunity to solve this problem, which is also one of the core directions that Sahara AI is currently focusing on. Therefore, SaharaAI not only solves problems for AI but also uses AI to solve problems for blockchain.
Foresight News: The industry has been paying attention to what kind of chemical reaction AI will have in the cryptocurrency field, with a batch of new projects emerging continuously over the past year or two. Some are focused on various types of DePIN, some are focused on computing power, but very few are dedicated to AI platforms in the blockchain field. Why did you consider exploring this direction at that time? Some people scoff at the combination of AI and cryptocurrency, believing it is just riding the wave of popularity and cannot withstand the test of time. What is your opinion on this? What problems do you think the combination of AI and blockchain still faces and need to be solved?
Sean: In the past two years, I've often seen people discussing "blockchain + AI," and many of them approach it from the three modules of AI: data, computing power, and models. As a result, a bunch of projects have started to research how to handle data, train models, and provide computing power in a decentralized way. It sounds quite logical, but this is just using blockchain as a tool to piece things together, without truly integrating blockchain and AI. And the inability to integrate also means that it cannot truly support the development of AI blockchain.
Let's think about a question together: Can blockchain and encryption technology really change the way AI develops?
The biggest role of AI now is to enhance the productivity of individuals and organizations; while the essence of Crypto is redefining "who owns what" and how much return each person should receive. It provides a public and transparent way for us to quantify a person's contribution to a system and the corresponding rewards. This means that we can use blockchain to redefine "ownership" and "profit-sharing mechanisms" in the world of AI.
This is what Sahara aims to create - a truly fair, open, and transparent AI ecosystem. Everyone can turn their ideas and creativity into AI applications using the tools provided by Sahara, whether it's tools that enhance work efficiency, fun entertainment products, or becoming part of other AI systems. As long as it is valuable, one can participate, be recognized, and earn income.
To achieve this goal, there are two core technical and system-level challenges:
How does AI "run off-chain" while protecting privacy? We hope that most of the AI operations can be completed safely and efficiently offline, but its results and important information can still be stored on the chain, achieving the best combination of "off-chain computing + on-chain trust". How to establish a complete "economic closed loop"? Nowadays, many AI projects generate revenue from the application layer, but it is difficult for upstream model developers, data contributors, and computing power providers to be reasonably divided. We hope that through smart contracts, these benefits will be distributed to all participants in an automatic and transparent way, rather than relying on people to make decisions. This is the true meaning of "decentralized production relations".
We believe that only in this way will the combination of AI and blockchain be more than just a "stack of fun", but a truly user-driven, participatory, and incentivized AI future. Using AI to improve efficiency is just the beginning, and we want to redefine how AI is produced and how everyone participates through the "transparent, fair, and motivating" characteristics of blockchain. What we hope to build is a new AI ecosystem, where developers and communities participate, collaborate, build, and govern together, not by large companies. In this way, the development of AI is no longer just an exclusive stage for Web2 giants, but a new path that is more open and fair.
Foresight News: What role do you think Sahara AI plays in today's blockchain world? As the founder, what do you envision Sahara will look like in the next 5 years?
Sean: The AI future world I imagine should be open, democratic, and inclusive, allowing everyone to participate. In this world, everyone can use AI to create content, develop their own applications, express creativity, share ideas, and even turn their knowledge and creativity into income.
What Sahara aims to do is to provide everyone with a "golden shovel" — that is, tools and infrastructure, so that everyone can get hands-on to create their own AI content and applications, and continuously earn profits in an open and transparent manner.
In the next five years, Sahara will focus on two things:
Propose a brand new technical architecture that makes AI development and collaboration more efficient.
Redesign the "production relations" and "value distribution mechanism" in the AI ecosystem.
In simple terms, we not only help everyone create AI applications faster, but more importantly, we ensure that every participant in the creation process is seen, recognized, and fairly compensated.
For example, the birth of an AI agent may involve three types of people: those who provide data, those who provide computing power, and those who design the agent. How should these three parties reasonably divide their labor and profits? These are not decisions that can be made off the top of one's head; they require technical support and mechanism design.
So in the future AI world, Sahara is not just a tool provider; we want to be a "builder of new rules" that helps the entire ecosystem establish a truly fair, transparent, and collaborative way of operating.
Foresight News: What milestones has Sahara AI completed in order to build an AI blockchain platform?
Sean: Sahara AI's mission has been very clear from the beginning: to reconstruct the production and distribution order of AI on the blockchain.
Sahara has generated over 3.2 million on-chain accounts during the private testing phase, with daily active accounts stabilizing at over 1.4 million. Among them, more than 200,000 users have actively participated in our data service platform, completing tasks such as labeling, training, and validation, while receiving corresponding on-chain incentives. Even before the system is fully open, there are still millions of users waiting in line to join, which itself is a strong validation of our vision.
Recently, we officially launched the first phase of the SIWA testnet. This is the first official on-chain entry of the Sahara ecosystem for the public, and it is an important milestone on our path to the mainnet launch. The core function of SIWA is to provide a foundational protocol for rights confirmation, authorization, and monetization of AI assets such as datasets, models, and agents, establishing asset ownership and profit-sharing logic in a transparent and automated manner on-chain. This provides developers, data providers, and model builders with unified and publicly verifiable collaboration rules.
We hope that through this test network, more developers and ecosystem contributors can participate personally, gain a deeper understanding of the architecture of Sahara, and help us improve the protocol. The next goal is to accelerate the deployment of the mainnet, making this truly open, fair, and participatory AI future a reality from concept.
Foresight News: The SIWA developer testnet of Sahara AI has been launched. In actual deployment, what is the cost-effectiveness performance of AI and blockchain? You mentioned in a tweet that a complete AI developer platform and AI marketplace will be released soon. What is its significance? Will the mainnet launch proceed as originally planned in Q3? Developers are crucial for the platform. How does Sahara AI attract these AI developers?
Sean: The best way to attract is when they desperately need us, and maybe only us. Rather than creating demand, we are better at using technical product capabilities to meet the massive needs that objectively exist. The demand for AI capabilities from developers is growing rapidly. This is not only because AI is a hot topic of technology, but also because developers need AI to improve creative efficiency, accelerate product iteration, and reduce operation and maintenance costs. This is a structural trend, not a short-term topic. Nowadays, almost every public chain is trying to find a way to attract AI developers, which also shows the real demand of the market.
Sahara is responding to this huge market that already exists. What we provide is not a single function, but a complete tool stack covering data confirmation, model hosting, and revenue distribution to the Agent. That's why we launched the SIWA Developer Testnet, and it's the strategic significance of the upcoming AI development platform and AI market. The current real-world use of SIWA has been very positive. Many early developers reported that the billing model designed according to the on-chain usage requirements has excellent cost-effectiveness and a stable and reliable deployment experience, which can support application-level agent invocation and model services.
The launch of the AI development platform and AI marketplace will allow Sahara to truly move from a "platform that provides tools" to a "platform for value participation". When developers can register all assets such as data, models, and agents on the chain, and obtain long-term profit sharing through the licensing mechanism, the entire AI supply chain will be truly activated. This will be one of Sahara's most disruptive values. The mainnet is still progressing as planned, and the official launch is expected in the third quarter. We are also launching more development tools, incentive programs, and ecosystem cooperation programs to further attract AI developers from different on-chain ecosystems and industry fields to join.
For us, developers are not just users of the platform, but the core drivers of the AI collaborative economy. Sahara will continue to provide them with resources, structure, and incentives to support them in playing a truly leading role in the next generation of the AI economic order.
Foresight News: What is the biggest insight (experience or lesson) in the entrepreneurial process? Is there a moment that made you feel "we are on the right track"?
Sean: Sahara AI is not just a team that develops products; it feels more like a social experiment pushing the entire new era of AI forward together with all friends interested in AI. I truly feel that—** the community is driving us forward. ** Especially when more and more developers actively come to us, saying they want to participate and use Sahara to realize their ideas, at that moment we realize: this vision is no longer just our own, but a collective call of the entire era.
In this wave, Sahara's role is that of a platform, providing tools and infrastructure to help more people participate in the creation of AI. But we are not just a platform; we are also a vessel—carrying a decentralized, open, community-driven future of AI.
We are very grateful for the culture and strength of this community. It is global, without borders, and everyone can freely share their thoughts and challenge each other's viewpoints. Starting a business in such an environment is actually a privilege and a responsibility. Sahara is not moving forward alone, but together with the entire community, slowly shaping a new era of AI + blockchain.
Foresight News: We all know that the economic cycle of a crypto project is very important, so how does Sahara AI ensure that the AI economy it aims to build can maintain a positive cycle?
Sean: As you can imagine, if you are a developer of an AI project, you may use the underlying infrastructure provided by Sahara at the beginning, such as deploying agents and invoking models, and these operations are like handing over gas on other public chains to drive the system to run. Then you definitely want your model to work better, right? At this time, you may be able to access Sahara's data annotation marketplace to obtain better and more relevant data from annotators around the world to help you optimize the performance of your model. What's even more interesting is that these annotated users are not only helping you train your model, but many times they will also become early users of your product, and the whole ecosystem is naturally connected.
For users, every participation is actually creating value, whether it's labeling data, providing feedback, or helping to test the model. All of this will be automatically recorded by the system, and they will receive on-chain rewards based on their contributions, which is the true "earn while you use" model. Unlike before, where once the data was used, it had no further relation to you.
What I just mentioned is just a very typical use case. In fact, from a broader perspective, we believe that a healthy economic system must be based on genuine demand and usage behavior. What Sahara wants to do is not just to be a tool provider, but also to participate in the reconstruction of the rules: to build a truly fair, verifiable new AI order that everyone can participate in and benefit from. The "virtuous cycle AI economy" that we have been promoting ultimately means that everyone's contributions are meaningful and rewarded.
Foresight News: What is the biggest insight (experience or lesson) during the entrepreneurial process?
Sean: Over the past few years working on Sahara, my biggest realization has been that the power of the blockchain community is truly immense and completely without borders. People from all over the world, whether they are developers, users, or even critics, provide us with feedback and suggestions, all of which have become an important driving force for our continuous progress.
From the very beginning, we have regarded ourselves as "listeners." Whether it is technical advice or user experiences and complaints after using the product, we listen attentively and make improvements diligently. We always maintain a "state of learning"—even though Sahara is now rated as one of the top 100 most promising AI startups in the world, we know that AI and Web3 are still in their early stages, and many things still do not have standard answers.
So we don't feel that we have succeeded, but we are very sure: continuous learning and continuous improvement are the most important things. Our team often studies the successes and failures of other projects, constantly adjusting product direction and optimizing business strategies. Every time we encounter a critical decision point, our attitude is: stay open and keep iterating.
This is also why we have been able to persist until now and continue to move forward.
**Foresight News: Some investors in the cryptocurrency circle seem to have a lot of grievances about Professor Coins, some people think that many Professor Coin is just a platform, or their product technology is far away from users, just talk about how powerful their technology is, how do you evaluate this view? What is different about Sahara AI launching a token? **
Sean: I manage almost 10 different product lines at Sahara every day, and I need to know who is doing what and what the progress is. I also have to constantly coordinate and communicate with different departments, attending more than a dozen meetings daily is the norm, and I often test products on weekends as well. When it comes to "platform", I might be the one working the hardest, haha. Although I am a professor, I am also a 90s kid, and like most entrepreneurs, I spend more than a dozen hours daily on my startup projects.
In addition to being a co-founder of Sahara, I am also the CEO. I have been involved in everything from product design, technical development, and scientific exploration, to business cooperation and ecosystem building. Particularly in terms of product positioning and development roadmap, I have invested the most effort. We have been thinking about how to position Sahara in the AI ecosystem of Web2 and the crypto world of Web3 to find a truly valuable place—finding the right users and solving their real pain points, which is something I ponder every day.
As for our Sahara token, my understanding is that it is the "golden shovel" of the AI world. We hope that everyone can use Sahara to create their own AI applications and content, turning their ideas into reality and together building a richer AI future.
The main functions of Sahara Token are several:
User Incentives: Encourage everyone to use AI to create truly valuable content and tools.
Platform settlement: For example, when you create an AI agent, buy and sell datasets, or trade models, you use Tokens to pay fees.
Participate in the ecosystem: In the future, Tokens can also be "staked" in your favorite AI projects, becoming a "co-owner" of these AI assets, and then sharing profits proportionally.
In simple terms, we hope that the Sahara Token will truly become the golden shovel for everyone to access the AI world, rather than just a bunch of concepts floating in the air.
The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
Exclusive Interview with Sahara AI Co-founder: From Concept to Leadership, How Sahara Builds an AI Blockchain that Everyone Can Benefit From
Written by: 1912212.eth, Foresight News
Interviewee: Sean, Co-founder of Sahara AI
Since the establishment of smart contracts on Ethereum, countless project protocols have emerged, giving rise to various tracks, narratives, and exaggerated wealth effects. However, in this cycle, we seem to be facing considerable difficulties, as the current lack of innovation in the crypto industry has made confusion and anxiety the norm. From the past concept-driven approach to money-burning expansion, and from the business validation phase to the structural sedimentation period, the history of blockchain development seems to be a complete replication of the past development process of the internet. Where is the future blockchain world headed? What kind of applications or protocols will stand out?
Some entrepreneurs are looking to AI. In recent years, the explosion of AI has caused profound changes in various industries around the world, and has become one of the most trendy technology waves. At the same time, what kind of chemical reaction will occur when AI and Crypto are combined has become a common topic for entrepreneurs. Can the "chemical reaction" between the two make up for each other's shortcomings, or will it give rise to new application scenarios and business models that have revolutionized the industry?
In this wave, Sahara AI, as the world's first AI-native blockchain platform, is trying to further deepen this integration through technological innovation. Sahara AI is not only committed to building an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem, but also solves the problem of registration, licensing, and monetization of AI assets through a transparent and verifiable on-chain protocol, establishing a new paradigm of "right confirmation + vesting + income" for AI contributors. In April 2025, Sahara AI was named one of the 100 most promising AI startups in the world by CB, the world's top market research organization, which is rare in Web3 and AI convergence startups.
In this time, we invited Sean, co-founder of Sahara AI, to talk about his thoughts on AI, Crypto, and Sahara AI. Sean holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and is a research contributor at the Allen Institute for AI, one of the world's most influential nonprofit AI research institutions. His research and achievements have also won a number of international awards and honors in the industry, including: WSDM Test of Time Paper Award, Samsung Artificial Intelligence Research Award, MIT Technology Review Global 35 Under 35 Technology Innovators, Forbes 30 Under 30 Elites, the following is the full interview:
Foresight News: As a post-90s, you are the youngest AI tenured professor at the University of Southern California. You have impressive qualifications and a deep industry background in the field of computer science. The hottest tech trend in recent years is undoubtedly AI, with large models and various practical AI applications gaining widespread market attention. As an expert deeply engaged in the field of artificial intelligence, how do you view the rapid iteration of AI over the past year? What does the future of AI look like in your eyes? What trends are currently emerging?
Sean: Personally, I enjoy being the Co-founder and CEO of Sahara more than all these academic titles. My entrepreneurial direction also largely indicates that the future of AI is to use blockchain technology or decentralized economic collaboration to address one of the most important issues of AI: the issue of "ownership."
The development of AI in the past two years is quite similar to the pace of the explosion in computer vision a few years ago. We can now see several obvious trends.
The first is "resource concentration." In other words, large data centers and an increasing number of high-performance GPUs are controlled by a few large companies. These resources enable them to continuously train larger models and enhance AI capabilities.
The second is "Talent Concentration." Big companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI can recruit the top PhDs, engineers, and architects from around the world, which further widens the gap with other companies.
The third is "data acquisition capability." These companies have money and can spend a lot of funds to buy training data, such as hiring professional companies like Scale AI for data labeling, or even directly inviting experts and PhDs to help select data and train models.
Driven by these conditions, the capabilities of AI models have advanced very rapidly. Behind all this is a repeatedly validated principle: as long as you have more data, larger models, and stronger computing power, the performance of AI will improve. This principle is known as the "Scaling Law."
Of course, the design and architecture of models are also being improved, but the main driving force behind the rapid development of AI is still the continuous accumulation of data, models, and computing power, and this direction currently seems far from reaching its limit.
The future of AI is not just about stronger technology, more applications, and increased efficiency for everyone. You can draw an analogy to the development of the Internet back in the day — it sparked a revolution not just because of the invention of technologies like DNS and browsers, but because it allowed everyone to participate in content creation, turning their ideas into products, ultimately forming a complete ecosystem.
AI is actually following a similar path. In the future, AI agents will be able to help anyone—regardless of whether you know programming or have a technical background—to quickly turn their ideas and expertise into AI-driven content or applications, and even make money. Everyone will be able to find their place in the AI world and quickly spread their ideas.
This goes back to the future that AI wanted to talk about earlier, not only because AI is capable, but also because the problem of "ownership" of AI can be solved. For example, how is a model trained? Whose data is used? If an AI agent is continuously iterated through different data and developers, how can it automatically, fairly and transparently distribute the revenue to these contributors when it makes money in the future? These issues are rarely seriously discussed these days, but I think they are just as important.
These issues, although not yet fully addressed in the current AI industry and academia, are equally important as the capabilities of AI itself. Blockchain has a great opportunity to solve this problem, which is also one of the core directions that Sahara AI is currently focusing on. Therefore, SaharaAI not only solves problems for AI but also uses AI to solve problems for blockchain.
Foresight News: The industry has been paying attention to what kind of chemical reaction AI will have in the cryptocurrency field, with a batch of new projects emerging continuously over the past year or two. Some are focused on various types of DePIN, some are focused on computing power, but very few are dedicated to AI platforms in the blockchain field. Why did you consider exploring this direction at that time? Some people scoff at the combination of AI and cryptocurrency, believing it is just riding the wave of popularity and cannot withstand the test of time. What is your opinion on this? What problems do you think the combination of AI and blockchain still faces and need to be solved?
Sean: In the past two years, I've often seen people discussing "blockchain + AI," and many of them approach it from the three modules of AI: data, computing power, and models. As a result, a bunch of projects have started to research how to handle data, train models, and provide computing power in a decentralized way. It sounds quite logical, but this is just using blockchain as a tool to piece things together, without truly integrating blockchain and AI. And the inability to integrate also means that it cannot truly support the development of AI blockchain.
Let's think about a question together: Can blockchain and encryption technology really change the way AI develops?
The biggest role of AI now is to enhance the productivity of individuals and organizations; while the essence of Crypto is redefining "who owns what" and how much return each person should receive. It provides a public and transparent way for us to quantify a person's contribution to a system and the corresponding rewards. This means that we can use blockchain to redefine "ownership" and "profit-sharing mechanisms" in the world of AI.
This is what Sahara aims to create - a truly fair, open, and transparent AI ecosystem. Everyone can turn their ideas and creativity into AI applications using the tools provided by Sahara, whether it's tools that enhance work efficiency, fun entertainment products, or becoming part of other AI systems. As long as it is valuable, one can participate, be recognized, and earn income.
To achieve this goal, there are two core technical and system-level challenges:
How does AI "run off-chain" while protecting privacy? We hope that most of the AI operations can be completed safely and efficiently offline, but its results and important information can still be stored on the chain, achieving the best combination of "off-chain computing + on-chain trust". How to establish a complete "economic closed loop"? Nowadays, many AI projects generate revenue from the application layer, but it is difficult for upstream model developers, data contributors, and computing power providers to be reasonably divided. We hope that through smart contracts, these benefits will be distributed to all participants in an automatic and transparent way, rather than relying on people to make decisions. This is the true meaning of "decentralized production relations".
We believe that only in this way will the combination of AI and blockchain be more than just a "stack of fun", but a truly user-driven, participatory, and incentivized AI future. Using AI to improve efficiency is just the beginning, and we want to redefine how AI is produced and how everyone participates through the "transparent, fair, and motivating" characteristics of blockchain. What we hope to build is a new AI ecosystem, where developers and communities participate, collaborate, build, and govern together, not by large companies. In this way, the development of AI is no longer just an exclusive stage for Web2 giants, but a new path that is more open and fair.
Foresight News: What role do you think Sahara AI plays in today's blockchain world? As the founder, what do you envision Sahara will look like in the next 5 years?
Sean: The AI future world I imagine should be open, democratic, and inclusive, allowing everyone to participate. In this world, everyone can use AI to create content, develop their own applications, express creativity, share ideas, and even turn their knowledge and creativity into income.
What Sahara aims to do is to provide everyone with a "golden shovel" — that is, tools and infrastructure, so that everyone can get hands-on to create their own AI content and applications, and continuously earn profits in an open and transparent manner.
In the next five years, Sahara will focus on two things:
For example, the birth of an AI agent may involve three types of people: those who provide data, those who provide computing power, and those who design the agent. How should these three parties reasonably divide their labor and profits? These are not decisions that can be made off the top of one's head; they require technical support and mechanism design.
So in the future AI world, Sahara is not just a tool provider; we want to be a "builder of new rules" that helps the entire ecosystem establish a truly fair, transparent, and collaborative way of operating.
Foresight News: What milestones has Sahara AI completed in order to build an AI blockchain platform?
Sean: Sahara AI's mission has been very clear from the beginning: to reconstruct the production and distribution order of AI on the blockchain.
Sahara has generated over 3.2 million on-chain accounts during the private testing phase, with daily active accounts stabilizing at over 1.4 million. Among them, more than 200,000 users have actively participated in our data service platform, completing tasks such as labeling, training, and validation, while receiving corresponding on-chain incentives. Even before the system is fully open, there are still millions of users waiting in line to join, which itself is a strong validation of our vision.
Recently, we officially launched the first phase of the SIWA testnet. This is the first official on-chain entry of the Sahara ecosystem for the public, and it is an important milestone on our path to the mainnet launch. The core function of SIWA is to provide a foundational protocol for rights confirmation, authorization, and monetization of AI assets such as datasets, models, and agents, establishing asset ownership and profit-sharing logic in a transparent and automated manner on-chain. This provides developers, data providers, and model builders with unified and publicly verifiable collaboration rules.
We hope that through this test network, more developers and ecosystem contributors can participate personally, gain a deeper understanding of the architecture of Sahara, and help us improve the protocol. The next goal is to accelerate the deployment of the mainnet, making this truly open, fair, and participatory AI future a reality from concept.
Foresight News: The SIWA developer testnet of Sahara AI has been launched. In actual deployment, what is the cost-effectiveness performance of AI and blockchain? You mentioned in a tweet that a complete AI developer platform and AI marketplace will be released soon. What is its significance? Will the mainnet launch proceed as originally planned in Q3? Developers are crucial for the platform. How does Sahara AI attract these AI developers?
Sean: The best way to attract is when they desperately need us, and maybe only us. Rather than creating demand, we are better at using technical product capabilities to meet the massive needs that objectively exist. The demand for AI capabilities from developers is growing rapidly. This is not only because AI is a hot topic of technology, but also because developers need AI to improve creative efficiency, accelerate product iteration, and reduce operation and maintenance costs. This is a structural trend, not a short-term topic. Nowadays, almost every public chain is trying to find a way to attract AI developers, which also shows the real demand of the market.
Sahara is responding to this huge market that already exists. What we provide is not a single function, but a complete tool stack covering data confirmation, model hosting, and revenue distribution to the Agent. That's why we launched the SIWA Developer Testnet, and it's the strategic significance of the upcoming AI development platform and AI market. The current real-world use of SIWA has been very positive. Many early developers reported that the billing model designed according to the on-chain usage requirements has excellent cost-effectiveness and a stable and reliable deployment experience, which can support application-level agent invocation and model services.
The launch of the AI development platform and AI marketplace will allow Sahara to truly move from a "platform that provides tools" to a "platform for value participation". When developers can register all assets such as data, models, and agents on the chain, and obtain long-term profit sharing through the licensing mechanism, the entire AI supply chain will be truly activated. This will be one of Sahara's most disruptive values. The mainnet is still progressing as planned, and the official launch is expected in the third quarter. We are also launching more development tools, incentive programs, and ecosystem cooperation programs to further attract AI developers from different on-chain ecosystems and industry fields to join.
For us, developers are not just users of the platform, but the core drivers of the AI collaborative economy. Sahara will continue to provide them with resources, structure, and incentives to support them in playing a truly leading role in the next generation of the AI economic order.
Foresight News: What is the biggest insight (experience or lesson) in the entrepreneurial process? Is there a moment that made you feel "we are on the right track"?
Sean: Sahara AI is not just a team that develops products; it feels more like a social experiment pushing the entire new era of AI forward together with all friends interested in AI. I truly feel that—** the community is driving us forward. ** Especially when more and more developers actively come to us, saying they want to participate and use Sahara to realize their ideas, at that moment we realize: this vision is no longer just our own, but a collective call of the entire era.
In this wave, Sahara's role is that of a platform, providing tools and infrastructure to help more people participate in the creation of AI. But we are not just a platform; we are also a vessel—carrying a decentralized, open, community-driven future of AI.
We are very grateful for the culture and strength of this community. It is global, without borders, and everyone can freely share their thoughts and challenge each other's viewpoints. Starting a business in such an environment is actually a privilege and a responsibility. Sahara is not moving forward alone, but together with the entire community, slowly shaping a new era of AI + blockchain.
Foresight News: We all know that the economic cycle of a crypto project is very important, so how does Sahara AI ensure that the AI economy it aims to build can maintain a positive cycle?
Sean: As you can imagine, if you are a developer of an AI project, you may use the underlying infrastructure provided by Sahara at the beginning, such as deploying agents and invoking models, and these operations are like handing over gas on other public chains to drive the system to run. Then you definitely want your model to work better, right? At this time, you may be able to access Sahara's data annotation marketplace to obtain better and more relevant data from annotators around the world to help you optimize the performance of your model. What's even more interesting is that these annotated users are not only helping you train your model, but many times they will also become early users of your product, and the whole ecosystem is naturally connected.
For users, every participation is actually creating value, whether it's labeling data, providing feedback, or helping to test the model. All of this will be automatically recorded by the system, and they will receive on-chain rewards based on their contributions, which is the true "earn while you use" model. Unlike before, where once the data was used, it had no further relation to you.
What I just mentioned is just a very typical use case. In fact, from a broader perspective, we believe that a healthy economic system must be based on genuine demand and usage behavior. What Sahara wants to do is not just to be a tool provider, but also to participate in the reconstruction of the rules: to build a truly fair, verifiable new AI order that everyone can participate in and benefit from. The "virtuous cycle AI economy" that we have been promoting ultimately means that everyone's contributions are meaningful and rewarded.
Foresight News: What is the biggest insight (experience or lesson) during the entrepreneurial process?
Sean: Over the past few years working on Sahara, my biggest realization has been that the power of the blockchain community is truly immense and completely without borders. People from all over the world, whether they are developers, users, or even critics, provide us with feedback and suggestions, all of which have become an important driving force for our continuous progress.
From the very beginning, we have regarded ourselves as "listeners." Whether it is technical advice or user experiences and complaints after using the product, we listen attentively and make improvements diligently. We always maintain a "state of learning"—even though Sahara is now rated as one of the top 100 most promising AI startups in the world, we know that AI and Web3 are still in their early stages, and many things still do not have standard answers.
So we don't feel that we have succeeded, but we are very sure: continuous learning and continuous improvement are the most important things. Our team often studies the successes and failures of other projects, constantly adjusting product direction and optimizing business strategies. Every time we encounter a critical decision point, our attitude is: stay open and keep iterating.
This is also why we have been able to persist until now and continue to move forward.
**Foresight News: Some investors in the cryptocurrency circle seem to have a lot of grievances about Professor Coins, some people think that many Professor Coin is just a platform, or their product technology is far away from users, just talk about how powerful their technology is, how do you evaluate this view? What is different about Sahara AI launching a token? **
Sean: I manage almost 10 different product lines at Sahara every day, and I need to know who is doing what and what the progress is. I also have to constantly coordinate and communicate with different departments, attending more than a dozen meetings daily is the norm, and I often test products on weekends as well. When it comes to "platform", I might be the one working the hardest, haha. Although I am a professor, I am also a 90s kid, and like most entrepreneurs, I spend more than a dozen hours daily on my startup projects.
In addition to being a co-founder of Sahara, I am also the CEO. I have been involved in everything from product design, technical development, and scientific exploration, to business cooperation and ecosystem building. Particularly in terms of product positioning and development roadmap, I have invested the most effort. We have been thinking about how to position Sahara in the AI ecosystem of Web2 and the crypto world of Web3 to find a truly valuable place—finding the right users and solving their real pain points, which is something I ponder every day.
As for our Sahara token, my understanding is that it is the "golden shovel" of the AI world. We hope that everyone can use Sahara to create their own AI applications and content, turning their ideas into reality and together building a richer AI future.
The main functions of Sahara Token are several: