How do artificial intelligence and Web3 combine into new business models?

Artificial intelligence and Web3 combine when AI models start operating on decentralized networks, where data, services and rewards flow through a blockchain instead of being locked inside a single company. The most concrete cases are in digital identity, data markets, decentralized finance (DeFi) and content creation, with projects such as SingularityNET, Ocean Protocol and Numerai.

Have you ever imagined how AI and Web3 could reshape the world we live in and transform business as we know it? These technologies are converging to create innovative opportunities and revolutionize the digital economy. In this article we explore real cases and concrete examples of how this union is already having an impact on society and the economy.

Web3, the next generation of the internet, is focused on decentralizing and democratizing the web through technologies such as blockchain and cryptographic protocols. At the same time, artificial intelligence is advancing fast with language models. The models used in ChatGPT, such as GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, understand and generate text with impressive accuracy. Llama and Alpaca also understand and generate text like a chatbot; they are not as powerful, but they let you run the model on a local machine.

Note (Oct 2026): GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Llama and Alpaca were the reference points in June 2023. Several new generations of models, open and closed, have appeared since, and Alpaca was an academic experiment from Stanford, not a maintained product. The core idea still holds: today you can run capable open models on your own infrastructure.

The convergence of these two fields has the potential to transform the digital landscape and open the way to new solutions and business models, and that is already happening.

Applications built on LLMs or AI can help verify and manage digital identities on decentralized platforms, giving users more security and privacy. Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) are an example: digital identity tokens that represent the traits, attributes and achievements of a person or entity. SBTs use the blockchain to represent someone's identity, including medical records, work history and any information that makes up a person or entity.

Machine learning models can also analyze, classify and assign value to data in decentralized markets, letting users buy and sell data fairly and transparently. A good Brazilian example of AI applied to market data is the work of Filipe Lauar, from UFMG.

With Cristiano Arbex Valle, Lauar published the paper Detecting and Predicting Evidences of Insider Trading in the Brazilian Market at the European conference ECML PKDD. The authors built from scratch a dataset of evidence of insider trading on the Brazilian stock exchange, matching relevant news with suspicious trades that preceded it, and trained a machine learning model to recognize those trades before the events were disclosed. The dataset is public on GitHub.

By making data more open, work like this shows the potential of these algorithms to change how we deal with data in the Web3 world: fairer and more transparent markets in finance, health, education and many other areas. Worth noting: Lauar's research did not use any LLM, which did not even exist at that scale at the time.

DeFi, or decentralized finance, is a set of internet protocols that aims to democratize and reinvent traditional financial services through blockchain. Imagine an open, transparent financial system accessible to everyone, with no banks or intermediaries, where people lend, invest, transact and manage assets at a speed never seen before, all through blockchain-based applications.

AI can make DeFi services such as lending and insurance more efficient, with credit analysis, fraud detection and risk management. Deep learning algorithms for market forecasting and portfolio optimization can help investors make better-informed decisions. Process automation and service personalization also make the user experience more efficient in the DeFi ecosystem.

AI can automatically generate articles, music and art and distribute them on decentralized platforms, rewarding creators with tokens or cryptocurrencies. And, as we already know, whenever you read a "furthermore" in a text, be suspicious.

SingularityNET. A decentralized platform built to change how AI is developed, shared and monetized. Through its blockchain protocol, it forms an open ecosystem where developers offer AI services and algorithms and users combine those services into their own solutions. Its native token was AGI, used for transactions and as an incentive for those who provide services.

Note (Oct 2026): in 2024 SingularityNET joined Fetch.ai and CUDOS in the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, and the AGI token became part of the unified ASI token.

Ocean Protocol. A platform focused on changing how data is shared, with decentralized data markets integrated with AI services. Ocean Protocol lets data owners keep control and privacy while giving researchers secure access, using the OCEAN token for data exchange.

Numerai. An investment fund that brings together data scientists from around the world, who compete to build the best predictive models from encrypted data provided by Numerai. The best models are rewarded with the NMR token, and Numerai uses those models to manage the fund.

"Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don't think AI will transform in the next several years," said Andrew Ng, Stanford professor and co-founder of Google Brain, in a talk covered by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Do AI and Web3 already work together today? Yes, in projects such as Ocean Protocol and Numerai, which use blockchain to reward data and AI models.

Do I need an LLM for this? No. Many cases, like Lauar's, use classical machine learning.

Integrating AI into Web3 can transform how we interact with the internet and create opportunities in every sector. The combination has the power to build a more decentralized, fair and inclusive digital world, as long as companies and developers integrate these technologies efficiently and ethically. So, are you ready to embrace the future that AI and Web3 have to offer?

Douglas Henrique, DOUVRAS Labs. Originally published on LinkedIn on June 26, 2023.

Ng, A. Andrew Ng: Why AI Is the New Electricity. Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2017. Link.

Coursera. Andrew Ng, instructor. Link.

Lauar, F.; Arbex Valle, C. Detecting and Predicting Evidences of Insider Trading in the Brazilian Market. ECML PKDD 2020, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12461. Springer, 2021. Link.

ASI Alliance (SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, CUDOS). Link.

Ocean Protocol. Link.

Numerai. Link.

Buterin, V. Ethereum Whitepaper, 2013. ethereum.org.