Onchain Gaias Explained: Base's Fun AI Play
The Base NFT scene is still wide open. It’s a ripe time for an NFT collection to rise up and become the L2’s dominant profile picture (PFP) project.
The collection with the best prospects for this ascendancy over the next six months? In my opinion, it’s Onchain Gaias.
Onchain Gaias isn’t just a plain old PFP project—it’s already got the makings of a cult following, and it’s working at the crossroads of AI, games, and Farcaster in a way the crypto space hasn’t seen before.
As the collection’s art reveal is nearing and with its AI efforts ramping up, it’s an interesting time to take a closer look at these uber-PFPs.
Here’s everything you need to know about these promising Base NFTs! 👇
What Are Onchain Gaias?
Spearheaded by Ciniz and artist Anton Marrast, Onchain Gaias launched via Warpcast in March 2024 as a free mint of 5,556 passes dubbed “Degen’s Golden Tickets.”
The plan? These passes will be redeemed 1:1 for Onchain Gaias PFPs when the art is finalized, which is coming soon.
Initially, people were mainly excited about the prospects of a new premier Base collection, but anticipation grew fast as the creators started teasing gaming developments early on.
One month after launching, the Gaias floor price peaked at 1.25 ETH right after the team published its initial whitepaper, confirming gaming plans and an ambitious decentralized AI training system centered around games.
The collection has cooled off some amid a pre-reveal lull and in the wake of Base’s mini NFT bullrun this spring. Nevertheless, so far it boasts the most all-time volume of any NFT collection on Base, with +4k ETH worth of trades facilitated and counting, and it remains one of the top traded projects on the L2.
How Onchain Gaias Works
While Onchain Gaias is still early on in its development, the project has already published two whitepapers that illuminate its plans going forward.
The first whitepaper, published in April 2024, introduced the foundational concepts of Onchain Gaias and outlined the project's core vision and mechanisms, centered around General Artificial Intelligence Agents (GAIAs) and their role in decentralizing AI development.
In short, the paper proposed a network where AI models could be trained through gaming, leveraging blockchain tech for transparency and security. It also outlined the basics of a modular gaming engine system and a marketplace for AI models.
The second whitepaper, published in May 2024, built upon these initial concepts and introduced more detailed plans and innovations like the Onchain General Intelligence Network plus the Armory Marketplace (Intelligence-as-a-Service) and Foundry Marketplace (Transfer Learning as a Service) platforms.
The second paper also explained incentives and governance plans and clarified that only Onchain Gaias NFT holders would be able to create and earn from cloning AI agents within this new ecosystem.
What Is the 1st Onchain Gaias Game?
Currently, the Onchain Gaias team is in the initial “experiment and see what works” phase of its gaming ecosystem. Toward that end, it has already rolled out its first initial training title in Henlo Kart.
Deployed entirely within a Farcaster Frame on Warpcast, Henlo Kart is a racing game designed to train primitive AI agents onchain through user interactions.
Simply put, players place wagers, gain experience points (XP), and earn levels, all of which help improve the capabilities of AI agents beneath the surface. Additionally, players are set to receive an allocation of a presently undisclosed token upon its future release.
As the Onchain Gaias team continues to iterate, expect more optimized versions of Henlo Kart to roll out, plus more sophisticated and community-built games to emerge, further expanding the capabilities and possibilities around GAIAs.
What to Watch Going Forward?
Onchain Gaias is a one-of-a-kind project right now, but it’s also just beginning to dig into its ambitious development plans, so there’s lots of work left to do for the project to actualize its full vision.
That said, if you’re interested in tracking the team’s progress, some big outstanding questions will be worth monitoring going forward. 10 of the main ones that come to mind presently are as follows:
- How will the community and market react to the final art reveal of the Onchain Gaias PFPs?
- How effective will Henlo Kart and subsequent games be in engaging players and training AI agents?
- What other projects might integrate GAIAs once there are many trained and more sophisticated agents?
- Is the upcoming unnamed token that has been hinted at a new fungible utility token for the wider Onchain Gaias ecosystem?
- How will any added tokenomics influence player participation, agent training, and overall market dynamics?
- How will continued advances around Farcaster tooling impact the overall growth and innovation around the platform?
- Will the planned reward mechanisms be sufficient to maintain long-term engagement and participation?
- How will the Armory and Foundry Marketplaces develop, and what kinds of AI models will gain the most prominence?
- Will Onchain Gaias release its own Layer 3 (L3) on top of Base as its onchain infra demands increase?
- Can Onchain Gaias achieve or surpass the training efficiency and intelligence levels of well-known AI agents in the public domain?
Why Onchain Gaias Matters
Onchain Gaias has the potential to become the most dominant PFP project on Base for the foreseeable future, yet its prospects are bigger than vanilla PFP projects. The fusion of AI, Farcaster, and gaming creates a unique value proposition that extends beyond plain digital collectibles.
Long story short, by enabling everyday users to participate in AI training through engaging games, Onchain Gaias is not just building a collection of digital art but fostering a community-driven platform that could have a big influence on the crossroads of AI and blockchain tech. If you’re hunting for Base projects to explore, this is certainly one for your shortlist!