SingularityNET raises $36M in 60 seconds in an ICO to build out its decentralized blockchain-based marketplace for AI algorithms
SingularityNET — an ambitions project to create a decentralized marketplace for AI — has raised a lot of money in its token sale.
Context & Ripple Effects
SingularityNET's token sale is the founding capital event for one of the first attempts to route AI algorithm discovery through a blockchain marketplace rather than a big-tech platform — part of a cohort including Ocean Protocol, Oasis, and Enigma explicitly aimed at decentralizing AI research infrastructure.
The sale's afterlife is what makes it worth revisiting: seven years on, SingularityNET is reportedly in talks with Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol to merge their tokens into a single ASI token at roughly $7.5B fully diluted value (reported merger talks), meaning this 60-second raise seeded what became the largest consolidation move in crypto-native AI.
First-order effects
- SingularityNET banks $36M of development runway in under a minute, with no equity sold and no board to answer to — the token structure itself is the product design, since the marketplace runs on its own currency.
- Token buyers gain direct exposure to a decentralized-AI thesis that at the time had no comparable listed vehicle, pricing demand for 'AI on-chain' before any marketplace exists.
Second-order effects
- A raise this fast validates the ICO-as-funding model for adjacent blockchain-AI teams like Ocean Protocol and Fetch.ai, who become both competitors and — eventually, per the ASI talks — merger partners rather than rivals.
- Centralized players face a framing problem: the pitch is explicitly anti-big-tech, forcing incumbents to argue distribution and compute advantages against a marketplace whose supply side is open by construction.
Third-order effects
- If the ASI merger pattern holds, crypto-AI consolidates around fewer, larger tokens — a structural convergence toward the same concentration the movement was founded to prevent, just outside big tech's ownership.
- The episode marks token sales as a parallel capital stack to venture funding for AI infrastructure — the same era in which OpenAI pursued investor meetings for tens of billions in US compute spending (OpenAI's infrastructure push) — leaving AI's financing split between equity-backed centralization and token-backed networks.
The trend: Crypto-native AI projects are moving from independent token-funded marketplaces toward consolidated tokens and shared infrastructure, forming a parallel capital stack to venture-funded centralized AI.