Happy Birthday, iNFTs!
Join us in celebrating our one year anniversary at Alethea AI
One Candle On The Cake For Intelligent And Interactive NFTs
Time flies when you’re building an Intelligent Metaverse, and these past 365 days have been nothing short of an adventure. Our team and community at Alethea AI have pushed the boundaries of our own expectations, and it’s incredible to think of what we’ve set out to do and accomplished. It’s even more thrilling to ponder what’s next on the horizon, as we innovate on the tech, scale up our team and products, and embark on the next stage of our Alethean journey. Help us celebrate the first birthday of iNFTs, and let’s review how we got here!
In the summer of 2021, we kicked off our roadmap by creating and selling “Alice,” the very first AI powered virtual being as an intelligent and interactive NFT (iNFT) at the Sotheby’s auction house, for almost half a million USD. What makes Alice unique is that she is powered by artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, making her able to hold a live conversation with life-like animation.
Following this event, we set out to deliver on a plethora of products and services designed to build an ecosystem around iNFTs in the Metaverse, virtual assets on the blockchain that can be trained, evolved, and interacted with by owners of these iNFT assets and the users they invite to engage with them.
From The Protocol Layer Up
We started by creating the iNFT Protocol, the technological substrate of smart contracts that define the infrastructure of Alethea AI’s assets, interface, and Metaverse. We then produced the world’s first Intelligent Metaverse dApp, Noah’s Ark, a virtual hub for engaging this ecosystem and the on chain assets within.
We then launched the world’s first full collection of Artificial Intelligence powered NFTs (iNFTs) - a curated set of 100 iNFT avatars of historical and literary figures that have left lasting cultural marks on humanity itself, “The Revenants.” From Cleopatra to Dracula, Joan Of Arc to Winston Churchill, we brought these legendary humans and fictional characters back to life as intelligent and interactive iNFTs that carried their personalities into fully functioning conversational digital beings in an easy to use Metaverse platform. Our Revenant minting shattered the sales records on the OpenSea NFT marketplace within a week, raising the bar for what AI can bring to the NFT space.
Next, we launched the world’s first collection of AI powered on-chain Intelligence NFTs - 10,000 iNFT Personality Pods, a collection of composable and upgradable intelligence assets that captured the training and data traits that their owners embedded using our no-code AI user interface. Our community was rewarded for bootstrapping the ecosystem with an Intelligence Staking and Shared Intelligence Training event , further evolving the intelligence of these Pods, enriching the datasets and personalities throughout the collection.
Behold The Utilitarian!
As the pages turned to 2022, we delivered on the promise of our ALI Utility Token (Artificial Liquid Intelligence), which fuels the ecosystem by providing a fungible economic backbone to produce Personality Pod upgrades and reward owners of these intelligent assets by those who used and interacted with them.
This new economic system kickstarted the beginning of our first “season,” what we Aletheans call “EPOCH 1.” This marked the beginning of a series of technological upgrades to our ecosystem, incentivizing the creation of more rich and diverse iNFT assets with far reaching capabilities. Epoch 1 started with the launch of a collection of iNFT assets called ARKIVS, which contain 11assets designed to further develop the iNFT ecosystem and innovate on traits and capabilities of the iNFTs themselves. As EPOCH 1 comes to a close, the unboxing phase of ARKIV assets is growing closer at hand.
Finally, we delivered on the Beta version of the much anticipated Fusion product, a V2 of the iNFT Protocol which allows owners of Personality Pods to fuse their Pods with any NFT from one of the supported NFT collections. As more collections are onboarded and ready for Fusion, we are only growing and expanding the Noah’s Ark Intelligent Metaverse with more users and iNFT owners. Since then, owners of Personality Pods have fused over 250 iNFTs from 4 supported collections - Fame Lady Squad, Dogepound, Pudgy Penguins, Uninterested Unicorns - and we’ve just launched support for the Boss Beauties collection. We’re just getting started!
Turning Heads In The Space
Throughout the last 12 months, we’ve managed to pique a fair amount of interest among a large handful of journalists and media outlets. Our CEO and Founder, Arif Khan also met face to face with leading blockchain powerhouses and personalities to share our vision of an Intelligent Metaverse filled with iNFTs. Here’s an abridged list of interviews and coverage worth taking a look and listen.
Claire Silver on NFT Now podcast
Mark Cuban on Cointelegraph, Bloomberg, NY Post, Fast Company, Business Insider, and VentureBeat
We’re so humbled by the love and support of our Alethean community.
There’s no question that we wouldn’t be where we are today without the incredible support and resourcefulness of our community. Throughout the last year, we knew it was vital that our early adopting Aletheans felt rewarded and engaged. As our Protocol and ecosystem has grown, we’ve endeavored to reward them during our many events and development milestones, and we will continue to do so for years to come.
In December, we launched masterclasses to help teach our community the fundamentals of AI Character creation, storytelling logic, and how to train and evolve the intelligence of their Personality Pods. We archived a series of recordings in a playlist on our YouTube account for everyone to utilize those educational tools.
Throughout the last year, we have continually engaged with our community through webinars, AMAs, Twitter Spaces, State Of The Ark addresses, and have recently begun surveying and running focus groups to gather feedback and suggestions on how to better everyone's experience. We also started “Alethea University” to further provide an ongoing educational platform for Aletheans to learn more about the iNFT Protocol and technology, and will continue to find ways to break down walls between the team and the community.
We’ve listened to feedback and incorporated it into our products and events, increasing the credits awarded during Intelligence Training and updating both our desktop and mobile website and experience to make learning easier for new people discovering Alethea AI on their phones. We have implemented upgrades to our Discord, shared new forms of media across social platforms, and we will continue to reward and foster special connections with those who stand out exceptionally in our community - through the Ark Builders program, our Crown Alethean awards, and our periodic contests. We are proud to say that many of our hires have come from within our community!
“To Everything, There Is A Season…”
As EPOCH 1 comes to an end we’re looking over the horizon - furiously building and innovating on the tech stack, finding new applications for AI and NFTs, and growing our ecosystem so that we achieve the goals we set out to accomplish from the start.
Over the next few months, and into 2023, Alethea AI has big plans, including expanding our support for many more NFTs, upgrading the user experience in Noah’s Ark, and multiplying our iNFT Protocol’s use cases through increased development. Come learn more about what we’re up to in our weekly Twitter Spaces and stay tuned for another State Of The Ark Address in the near future, as we launch Epoch 2 and share our next steps with the world!