Crypto VC Polychain Capital joins Ritual as major investor
Polychain joins Ritual as a major investor, though the exact amount of funding was undisclosed.
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Polychain Capital, a prominent blockchain-focused venture capital firm, has made a significant investment in Ritual, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform aiming to decentralize AI systems. The undisclosed “multimillion-dollar” investment comes on top of Ritual’s $25 million funding round led by Archetype, Accomplice, and Robot Ventures in November.
Ritual’s mission is to address the centralized nature of AI systems and the growing concerns that Big Tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet will dominate the AI landscape, creating an oligarchy. By introducing decentralization into the storage of data and access to infrastructure, Ritual aims to provide a more open and collaborative environment for AI development.
“AI x Crypto represents one of the most exciting new areas for crypto technologists, with a near infinite design space for AI-enabled protocols to be built on top,” Ritual said in a blog post on the announcement.
The partnership between Ritual and Polychain Capital is built on a shared vision for accelerating the adoption of cryptocurrency and focusing on new technologies and their emergent use cases. Ritual’s technology includes a custom-built VM for AI operations and a decentralized oracle network called Infernet, which allows smart contracts to natively access AI models for various on-chain use cases and tasks.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes, who joined Ritual’s board of advisers in January, emphasized the need to “ensure the burgeoning AI economy has access to a more censorship-resistant, collaboration-powering technology than we currently have.”
Polychain Capital’s investment in Ritual comes at a time when AI has gained significant attention in the blockchain industry. Following the proliferation of AI-powered tools and their increased mainstream popularity over the last year, the collaboration between the two companies is positioned to enhance product development, expansion into new markets, and community growth.
Note: This article was produced with the assistance of AI, specifically Claude 3 Opus for text and OpenAI’s GPT-4 for images. The editor has extensively revised the content to adhere to journalism standards for objectivity and neutrality.
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