Luxurious team + top VC, how should the star project Sahara AI interact?

Sahara AI has launched its public beta network SIWA, enabling AI creation, collaboration, and monetization for Web3 developers. The platform focuses on verifiable ownership and licensing for AI assets like datasets and models.
The SIWA testnet rollout includes four phases, starting with decentralized data rights confirmation (ERC-721 certificates) and expanding to revenue sharing and open-source testnets.
Sahara AI plans to launch its mainnet in Q3 2025, aiming to support large-scale decentralized AI. During private beta, it attracted 3.2M+ accounts and 200K+ data-labeling participants.
The team is led by co-founder Sean Ren (USC professor, MIT TR Innovator Under 35) and Tyler Zhou (ex-Binance Labs), backed by $49M funding from Polychain, Binance Labs, Samsung Next, and others.
Interaction Guide:
- Register AI assets (datasets/models) on SIWA via the developer platform, requiring 0.1 SAH from a faucet.
- Complete data annotation tasks on the Data Service Platform (DSP) to earn points (public beta opens May 27, 2025).
- Participate in Sahara Legends gamification missions (e.g., daily check-ins, social tasks) to collect shards and unlock NFTs.
Rewards include guardian NFTs for completing desert missions and a Bitsy Soulbound NFT for collecting all five.

By KarenZ, Foresight News

This Monday (May 19), the AI-native full-stack Web3 platform Sahara AI officially launched its public beta network SIWA, opening AI creation, collaboration and monetization channels to all chain developers.

Sahara AI stated that SIWA is the first public entrance to the Sahara blockchain. As the underlying infrastructure, its core function is to provide verifiable ownership, licensing management and on-chain monetization capabilities for AI assets such as data sets and models, and to establish trusted and traceable AI collaboration standards.

The SIWA testnet will be rolled out in four phases:

Phase 1 (current): Focusing on "decentralized data rights confirmation", supporting users to register their own data sets on the chain, minting data ownership certificates in the ERC-721 format, and giving data traceable, valuable, and divisible asset attributes.
Subsequent stages: Gradually launch licensing and revenue distribution mechanisms, permissionless open source testnets, automatic revenue sharing pipelines and other functions.

In the roadmap released in December last year, Sahara AI stated that it will launch the Sahara Chain mainnet in the third quarter of 2025 to provide the on-chain infrastructure needed to support large-scale decentralized AI.

During the private beta phase, Sahara AI has achieved remarkable results. The total number of accounts has exceeded 3.2 million, with more than 1.4 million daily active accounts, of which more than 200,000 users have participated in data labeling tasks, fully demonstrating the market's attention to Sahara AI.

What is the background of Sahara AI?

In terms of the team, Sahara AI co-founder and CEO Sean Ren is also an associate professor at the University of Southern California. He has won honors such as MIT TR Innovator Under 35 (Asia Pacific) and Forbes Asia Under 30. Another co-founder and COO Tyler Zhou once served as the investment director of Binance Labs.

In terms of financing, Sahara AI has raised a total of US$49 million, building a luxurious investment matrix from "traditional capital + crypto native". Among them, in March 2024, Sahara AI announced the completion of a US$6 million seed round of financing, led by Polychain Capital, and participated by Samsung Next. In August 2024, Sahara AI announced the completion of US$43 million in financing, led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital and Polychain Capital, and participated by Samsung, Matrix Partners, Siam Commercial Bank, Foresight Ventures, dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures, etc.

Interaction strategy

Currently, only tokenized AI models, datasets, and agents are supported in the Sahara AI public beta network SIWA. Later, AI agent construction will be opened up and support for buying and selling AI datasets, models, and agents in peer-to-peer markets will be supported.

1. AI Asset Registration Guide:

1. Open https://app.saharalabs.ai/developer-platform/main/explore and connect to your wallet.

2. Create a profile, upload your profile picture, and fill in your year of birth, gender, and country.

3. Collect 0.1 SAH from the faucet (https://faucet.saharalabs.ai/). This faucet requires the Ethereum mainnet balance on the wallet address used to be at least 0.01ETH.

4. Click to register AI assets, fill in the name, details, language, comments and other information and upload the data set (the file format must be csv, json or txt) for minting. The minted assets are in ERC721 format.

5. In the My Asset column on the left, check the minted assets.

2. Data Service Platform (DSP) Tasks

Whitelist permissions are currently required, but Open Beta will be available on May 27, 2025. Select a data annotation task (such as classification, annotating images or text) on the DSP and earn Sahara points when completed.

3. Sahara Legends Gamification Mission (launched on January 30)

1. Open https://legends.saharalabs.ai/, connect your wallet, and then explore 5 desert missions.

2. Earn shards by completing daily check-ins and social media tasks in Gobi Desert (no need to claim them in Galxe);

3. Complete the data service platform registration in Sahara Desert. Other tasks need to apply for whitelist. Currently, I cannot unlock other desert tasks.

The rewards center shows that by collecting enough fragments in each desert, you can awaken its guardian and claim a soul-bound NFT on the Sahara testnet to commemorate the achievements and contributions made in the early development of the Sahara AI ecosystem. Once all five desert guardian NFTs are collected, you can create an exclusive Bitsy Soulbound NFT on the Sahara testnet.

refer to:

https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/84439

https://saharalabs.ai/blog/navigating-the-sahara-ai-ecosystem

https://x.com/SaharaLabsAI/status/1924465527503937646