 Sentient completes record 650K NFT mint for decentralized ‘loyal’ AI model 
2025-02-06
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Sentient has completed one of the largest non-fungible token minting campaigns in crypto history, with more than 650,000 participants securing fractional ownership of its decentralized AI model, Dobby.
Sentient’s campaign for the partial ownership of its decentralized, open-source AI model, Dobby, saw over 650,000 investors mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs) “fingerprints,” in one of the biggest minting events in crypto history.
Dobby’s mint required participants to prove their humanity by passing a randomized IQ test to mint a fingerprint that grants fractional ownership and access to the AI model in an effort to create a community-controlled AI protocol.
The first emerging artificial general intelligence [AGI] should be “community-controlled and community-owned to guarantee its loyalty,” according to Sandeep Nailwal, Polygon founder and Sentient core contributor. 
Sentient’s fingerprinting mechanism enables communities to “enforce ownership, control and alignment of open-source AI models,” Nailwal stated in an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, adding:

The minting event follows the launch of DeepSeek, an AI-powered chatbot built on a $5.6 million budget, far less than OpenAI’s reported $100 million for developing ChatGPT.
Previously, the largest NFT mint was Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed NFT mint, which sold over 55,000 units of virtual land, Cointelegraph reported in May 2022. However, the number of unique participants remains unclear.
Dobby’s decentralization addresses a “crucial problem” in AI industry
As opposed to OpenAI’s centralized mode, Sentient’s Dobby and DeepSeek are both open-source, meaning that their source code is publicly available for developers.
Dobby’s decentralized architecture addresses a “crucial problem in the AI landscape,” a Sentient spokesperson told Cointelegraph, adding:
Dobby’s “model alignment” enables the community to set the values and principles of the AI model as well as offering “granular control over which model behaviors can be activated.”
The renewed investor interest in AI agents was catalyzed by Luna, which executed an autonomous blockchain transaction without human input in early January, Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 2.
Dobby’s record mint comes a day after 0G Foundation launched an $88.88 million ecosystem fund to accelerate projects creating AI-powered decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and autonomous agents, also known as DeFAI agents.
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