AI Alliance Merger Delayed for a Month As Token Prices Fall

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance has pushed back the date of its proposed token merger, the group announced on Tuesday. The merger of AI-themed coins FET, AGIX, and OCEAN into a new ASI token will now take place on July 15.

The alliance—a consortium of AI-focused blockchain developers SingularityNET, Fetch AI, and Ocean Protocol—announced the merger in April, and set the date the following month for June 13. However, it will no longer take place on Thursday.

"Due to technical constraints and the demanding regulatory environment, we recently became aware of the need to delay the merger to ensure we meet the exacting processes required for our tokenholders,” Fetch AI CEO Humayun Sheikh told Decrypt via Telegram.

Sheikh, who also serves as the chairman of the board of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, said the group is working with centralized exchanges to finalize the remaining steps.

“The finalization of the three-way tokenomic merger on July 15 will be a major milestone,” SingularityNET founder and alliance CEO Ben Goertzel said in a statement. “We anticipate a series of progressively more exciting milestones after that as we leverage our $ASI token-based network to move toward increasingly capable AI systems and, in time, actual superintelligence.”

Its unclear whether the merger delay had an immediate impact on the price of the three coins involved, as AI-related tokens overall have been in the doldrums—along with the rest of the crypto market.

The market capitalization for AI tokens in general is down 8.7% for today, according to CoinGecko. The individual tokens of ASI members are similarly in the red: SingularityNET (AGIX) is trading at $0.67, down 6.6% for the day; Fetch AI (FET) is $1.58, down 7.4% for the day, and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) is $0.69, down 5.5% for the day.

Over the last seven days, the three are all down over 20%: FET is down 25.8%, AGIX by 24.0%, and OCEAN is down 23.5%.

It's a far cry from March, when allliance member tokens surged following the initial merger announcement. If it goes through, the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance will have a combined market capitalization of $5.5 billion, based on their current token values.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.