What is Sahara AI (SAHARA)

I. Project Introduction

1. What Is Sahara AI?

Sahara AI (SAHARA) is a full-stack, AI-native blockchain platform where anyone can create and monetize AI models, datasets, and applications within a collaborative environment.

2. How Does Sahara AI Work?

The project's core products include: the Sahara Blockchain, the Sahara Data Services Platform (DSP), the AI Developer Platform, and the Sahara AI Marketplace.

Sahara Blockchain: The Sahara Blockchain is a Layer 1 Blockchain that employs a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and focuses on providing a suite of AI native features to support the application layer and work seamlessly with the execution layer. It is equipped with protocols to manage ownership, attribution, and various AI-related transactions across the platform. The Sahara Blockchain is pivotal in upholding the sovereignty and provenance of AI assets. The Sahara Blockchain distinguishes itself as an AI-Native blockchain through its integration of specialized Sahara AI-Native Precompiles (SAPs) and Sahara Blockchain Protocols (SBPs) that support essential tasks throughout AI lifecycle tasks.

Sahara Data Services Platform (DSP): DSP is how everyday people—not just developers—can participate directly in the AI economy by improving real-world AI systems. Users can join the platform and start completing tasks that help create the datasets needed to power tomorrow's AI models, agents, and research. Specifically, users can explore a variety of AI training tasks based on their qualifications and interests, taking short quizzes to verify their expertise and task eligibility. They can also contribute as annotators by sharing knowledge, experiences, or opinions, or reviewing others' inputs. Moreover, they can earn points and rewards for completing each task. As an enterprise or AI developer, users can use DSP to crowdsource custom data to train or fine-tune their models.

AI Developer Platform: This is a full-stack development platform for building, testing, and deploying AI models, agents, and pipelines. What you can do: Access verified data, models, agents, and pipelines from the project's AI Marketplace; chain models together into reusable, modular pipelines; fine-tune system prompts, model parameters, configs, and more using an advanced playground and flexible configurations; publish models, agents, and pipelines to the marketplace and start earning; etc.

Saraha AI Marketplace: The AI Marketplace is where developers and AI resource providers can buy, sell, and license AI assets, such as datasets, models, and agents. If users are looking to buy, the Marketplace makes it easy to discover high-quality assets to accelerate their AI development. Whether users need a pre-trained model, a clean dataset, or a ready-to-use pipeline, they'll find modular components built by other contributors across the ecosystem. If users are looking to sell, the Marketplace gives them a way to monetize their work. AI developers, dataset owners, and model creators can list their assets with flexible licensing and revenue sharing terms, track usage transparently, and retain ownership with on-chain attribution.

3. Who Founded Sahara AI?

Sean Ren: Co-Founder & CEO, former Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, Research Team Leader and Information Director at the Information Sciences Institute, and Director at Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Lab. He was previously a Data Science Advisor at Snap Inc. and was named to Forbes' Asia 30 Under 30 in 2019. He worked as a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University, a Software Engineering Intern at Pinterest, a Visiting Researcher at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, a Research Intern at Microsoft, and a Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft Research Asia. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Tyler Zhou: Co-Founder & COO, former Investment Director at Binance Labs. He also worked in investment at Gaw Capital, handled acquisitions at Ocean West Capital Partners, and interned at Wells Fargo. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lara Avedissian: Ecosystem Lead, former Ecosystem Lead at Stability AI, Head of Growth/Ops at Govrn, Chief of Staff at Comm, Head of Accelerator at Seed Club, and Founder of FormSpotter. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University.

Guang Han: VP of Engineering, former Co-Founder & CTO at Beijing Namek Technology Co. Ltd., Software Engineer at Microsoft, Senior Software Engineer at Autodesk, System Integration Engineer at Morgan Stanley, and Software Development Engineer at Autodesk. He graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology.

Funding:

- In March 2024, Sahara raised $6 million in a seed round led by Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung Next, Matrix Partners, Motherson Group, dao5, Geekcartel, Canonical Crypto, Nomad Capital, Dispersion Capital, Alumni Ventures, Tangent Ventures, Coho Deeptech, and angel investor Sandeep Nailwal.

- In August 2024, Sahara AI announced it had raised $43 million in a new round co-led by Binance Labs, Pantera Capital, and Polychain Capital, with participation from Samsung, Matrix Partners, Siam Commercial Bank from Thailand, Foresight Ventures, dao5, Alumni Ventures, Geekcartel, Nomad Capital, Mirana Ventures, among others.

4. Sahara AI Tokenomics

Total supply: 10 billion. Token allocation is as follows:

Ecosystem Development: 33.93%

Community Incentives: 20.75%

Airdrop: 8.15%

Buidlpad Community Distribution: 1.42%

Core Team & Contributors: 15%

Early Backers: 19.75%

Liquidity & Market Stability: 1%

5. Token Utility

$SAHARA is the native token of the Sahara AI ecosystem, powering all network interactions. Its core utilities include: 1) Data Access & Licensing: Accessing or authorizing the use of datasets required for AI model training. 2) Model Utilization: Gaining access rights to deploy and utilize existing AI models. 3) Compute Provisioning: Securing the computational resources required for AI model development, deployment, and inference. 4) Pay-Per-Inference: Facilitating micro-payments for AI services based on precise usage metrics. 5) Gas Fees: Paying for transaction and execution fees on the Sahara blockchain. 6) Staking: Staking tokens to secure and safeguard the decentralized network. 7) Governance: Voting on community and protocol governance proposals.​

II. Token Information

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