Opinion: Ram Kumar, OpenLedger Core Contributor
The cryptocurrency industry has spent a decade decentralizing itself. At the same time, AI companies have created the most valuable monopoly since Standard Oil, but they are data monopolies, by comparison of which their protocol advantages seem trivial. The AI industry is expected to generate over $300 billion in revenue by 2025, primarily through training models based on trillions of tokens collected from researchers, authors, and domain experts.
Bitcoin largest fought a block size war. Ethereum discussed MEV extraction. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have scraped the entire body of human knowledge and locked it into their own training runs, building a moat that no amount of capital or talent can overcome.
As the most significant infrastructure battle in a decade takes place off-chain, Crypto’s response was to launch its 10,000th DeFi fork.
Cryptocurrency needs a wake-up call. While AI companies have perfected centralized control over intelligence itself, this is the ultimate network effect that catastrophically misallocates attention and makes liquidity pools look like child’s play.
Data set exclusivity is permanent without intervention
DeFi has demonstrated that financial infrastructure can be restructured transparently. However, financial rails are commoditized compared to knowledge monopolies. All DeFi protocols compete on execution, composability, and user experience, as the underlying assets such as tokens, stablecoins, and liquidity are standardized and portable.
AI datasets are not portable. They are locked into a training that costs $100 million and takes months to complete. Once the basic model reaches critical mass, replication becomes prohibitively expensive. Unless new infrastructure changes the rules, whoever assembles the training corpus first permanently wins.
Google has 20 years of search query data. Meta has 15 years of social interaction data, and OpenAI partners with publishers who never license the same content to their competitors. These are persistent moats that grow with each new user interaction.
Cryptocurrency has created a decentralized alternative to centralized finance. So where is the decentralized alternative to centralized intelligence? It doesn’t exist because cryptocurrencies don’t treat data ownership as a worthwhile struggle for survival.
Cryptocurrency founders are not building dataset protocols
The brutal truth is that data set infrastructure is not as exciting as yield farming. Cryptocurrency founders are chasing token velocity, speculative upside, and viral growth mechanics. Building an attribution layer for training data doesn’t involve speculation, it takes years of ecosystem development, and it requires partnerships with slow-moving institutions.
But boring infrastructure is what matters. Ethereum wasn’t exciting when it launched. It was a slow and expensive computer that was highly valued by academics. “Chain Link” was not interesting. It was an oracle network that took five years to be adopted. The most important crypto infrastructure often resembled homework compared to the casino next door.
The dataset attribution protocol is the current homework. The market opportunity is bigger than DeFi, network effects are stronger than any protocol token, and regulatory pressures create inevitable demand. But crypto assets will flow into the next NFT market, not the infrastructure that could prevent AI companies from becoming more powerful than nation-states.
windows close early
AI companies aren’t waiting for permission. They are currently training GPT-5, Claude 4, and Gemini Ultra using data collected from millions of creators who will never receive compensation. All training runs are completed without on-chain attribution, further increasing central control.
Once these models reach sufficient functionality, they become self-reinforcing. Users generate data through their interactions, which trains the next version, which attracts more users. The flywheel accelerates, but the lack of both an initial corpus and a continuous data stream prevents competitors from catching up.
It will probably take two years for cryptocurrencies to fully close out this period. Data set monopoly then becomes a fact of nature that no amount of decentralized infrastructure can remove.
Which cryptocurrencies should you build instead of more DEXs?
The crypto industry needs a dataset registry where contributors cryptographically sign data licenses before training begins. You need an attribution protocol that records which datasets influenced which model outputs, and a micropayment rail that automatically splits inference revenue between original authors. We need a rating system that ranks the quality of datasets based on measured model performance rather than subjective metrics.
This technology is simpler than most DeFi protocols. Dataset registration requires a cryptographic hash, contributor wallet addresses, standardized format license terms, and usage logs. Training runs record the data used and when it was used. Inference requests route payments proportionally to registered contributors.
This infrastructure does not require new consensus mechanisms or experimental cryptography, but requires builders who prioritize preventing monopoly over securing liquidity rewards.
Cryptocurrency Mission or Cryptocurrency Obituary
Crypto’s founding theme was to prevent centralized control over valuable networks. Bitcoin prevented central banks from monopolizing money. Ethereum stopped tech companies from monopolizing computing. But those victories will be meaningless if AI companies monopolize intelligence.
What’s the point of decentralized money if a centralized model controls what people think? What good is decentralized computing if centralized training data determines which ideas get amplified? Intelligence is upstream in everything from finance and governance to media and education. Those who control AI’s learning data will control the future information environment.
Cryptocurrencies can build infrastructure that makes monopolizing data sets impossible, or watch AI companies perfect the precise centralized control that blockchain was invented to prevent. There is no third option for cryptocurrencies to continue to focus on token speculation while relating to the most important technological changes of this century.
The industry needs to build an attribution infrastructure for datasets now or write the obituary for cryptocurrencies as a movement that speaks of decentralization. In contrast, centralized AI companies have established a permanent monopoly on human knowledge.
Commenter: Ram Kumar, Core Contributor at OpenLedger.
This article is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be, and should not be taken as, legal or investment advice. The views, ideas, and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.