Galxe Joins Growing List of Crypto Startups Pivoting to AI

Looking to give its loyalty platform an edge, crypto community Galxe announced on Tuesday the launch of Galxe AI, an interactive assistant to help users navigate the often confusing world of Web3 projects.

"We provide an infrastructure for brands to launch their loyalty programs and their growth campaigns easily so users can engage with the brands," Galxe co-founder Charles Wayn told Decrypt. As Wayn explained, Galxe aims to build an open and collaborative credential data network that is accessible to all blockchain developers.

Generative AI has made sorting through large and complex datasets easier than ever. These AI assistants range from simple explanations of technical topics like "what is a blockchain" to how to create a smart contract.

To launch its new AI initiative, Galxe partnered with AI developer Alva to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 turbo into the Galxe platform, allowing users to ask the chatbot questions about the various projects and NFT collections supported by the network. Galxe AI is scheduled to launch in December.

“We’ve built a network of on-chain credential data, which users would have to check off-chain, and then users verify themselves,” Wayn said. “We have about 120,000 credential data sets created on our credential network.”

Launched in 2021, San Francisco-based Galxe is a blockchain-based site that gives businesses and users the tools they need to build online communities through loyalty programs. In January 2022, Galxe raised $10 million in funding led by Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital. Galxe's ERC-20 GAL token was launched on the Binance Launchpool in April 2022.

As Wayn explained, the Galxe credential data network is the underlying infrastructure of the Galxe platform. Projects can create a curated list such as “top 10 traders of Uniswap,” “users who staked at least 1 ETH.” and so on, and verify if users hold credentials in the respective loyalty programs.

Wayn said the team turned to AI to provide a more convenient model for businesses to connect and expand their services to crypto investors and professionals.

“Hopefully, this feature can replace the existing Web3 research products in the market,” Wayn said.

Earlier this year, Mysten Labs co-founder and CEO Evan Cheng predicted that investor money would shift from blockchain applications to AI due to its broader use case.

“ChatGPT came out, and [developers] are building products and applications for consumers and for developers—widespread, large-scale use cases are immediately possible," Cheng said. "In crypto, the industry has been building products for crypto people.”

The shift into AI is a sign crypto companies have seen the writing on the wall and are changing course to utilize generative AI.

Other blockchain companies using AI for blockchain analytics include social analytics site LunarCrush, Arkham Intelligence, blockchain security app Cube3, and blockchain software developer Alchemy.

"We've used machine learning and AI from the start," LunarCrush co-founder and CEO Joe Vezzani previously told Decrypt. "We use things like Google TensorFlow and OpenAI's ChatGPT and trained [the AI] on different social media posts that came in for sentiment, from bullish to bearish, focused on financials."

Cube3, CEO Einaras Gravrock told Decrypt, mixes AI with cybersecurity and cloud engineering to build supervised and unsupervised machine learning models for Web3.

“We recognize that we are only at the beginning of this journey, and we will continue to improve our existing models, as well as introduce new models as threats evolve,” said Gravrock. “This process allows us to pick up exploits on newly deployed contracts or fresh wallets and stop the transaction before the exploit happens.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.