Opinion: Ram Kumar, lead contributor at Open Ledger
The crypto industry spent a decade promoting decentralization. At the same time, AI companies have amassed the most valuable monopolies since Standard Oil, and they are data monopolies that make protocol dominance look trivial by comparison. The AI industry is expected to generate over $300 billion in revenue by 2025, primarily through training models on trillions of tokens derived from researchers, authors, and domain experts.
Bitcoin Maxis Fought the Block Size Wars. Ethereum debated on MEV extraction. Meanwhile, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have siphoned off the entire store of human knowledge, locking it up inside proprietary training and creating a chasm that no amount of capital or talent can overcome.
Crypto’s response was to launch the ten thousandth DeFi fork while the most consequential infrastructure battle of the decade occurs offchain.
Crypto needs a wake-up call. This is catastrophically distracting, while the AI companies themselves maintain centralized control over the intelligence, the ultimate network effect that makes liquidity pools look like child’s play.
Data set monopolies are permanent without interference
DeFi shows that financial infrastructure can be rebuilt in a transparent manner. However, financial rails are more commoditized than knowledge monopolies. Every DeFi protocol competes on execution, composability, and user experience because the underlying assets like tokens, stablecoins, and liquidity are standardized and portable.
AI data sets are not portable. They are locked inside a training run that costs $100 million and takes months to complete. Once a foundation model reaches critical mass, it becomes extremely expensive to replicate. The first mover to collect the training funds wins permanently unless new infrastructure changes the rules.
Google has 20 years of search query data. Meta has 15 years of social interaction data, and OpenAI has partnered with publishers who will never license the same content to competitors. These are permanent moats that are added with each new user interaction.
Crypto created decentralized alternatives to centralized finance, so where is the decentralized alternative to centralized intelligence? It doesn’t exist because crypto hasn’t deemed data ownership worth an existential fight.
Crypto Founders Are Not Building Data Set Protocols
The brutal truth is that data set infrastructure is less exciting than yield farming. Crypto founders pursue token velocity, speculative upside, and viral growth mechanics. Building attribution layers for training data generates zero speculation, requires years of ecosystem development and partnerships with slow-moving institutions.
However, boring infrastructure absolutely matters. When Ethereum launched it wasn’t exciting; It was a slow, expensive computer that was appreciated by academics. Chainlink wasn’t exciting; It was an Oracle network that took five years to adopt. The most important crypto infrastructure often resembles homework compared to the casino next door.
Data set attribution protocols are homework right now. The market opportunity is bigger than DeFi, the network effects are more powerful than any protocol token, and regulatory pressure creates inevitable demand. Yet crypto capital flows to the next NFT market rather than the infrastructure that could prevent AI companies from becoming more powerful than nation-states.
the window is closing fast
AI companies are not waiting for permission. They’re currently training GPT-5, Cloud 4, and Gemini Ultra using data from millions of creators who will never receive compensation. Each training completed without onchain attribution makes centralized control more robust.
Once these models reach sufficient capacity, they become self-reinforcing. Users generate data through interactions, which trains the next version, and the next version attracts more users. The flywheel accelerates, and competitors cannot catch up because they lack both the initial corpus and the ongoing data stream.
Crypto probably has two years before this window closes permanently. After that, data sets become facts of monopolistic nature that no decentralized infrastructure can overthrow.
Which crypto should build more DEX instead
The crypto industry needs data set registries where contributors cryptographically sign data licenses before any training begins. This requires attribution protocols that log which data sets influence which model outputs, and micropayment rails that automatically split estimated revenues among the original creators. This requires reputation systems that rank data set quality based on measured model performance rather than subjective metrics.
This technology is simpler than most DeFi protocols. Data set registration requires cryptographic hashes, contributor wallet addresses, licensing terms in standardized formats, and usage logs. The data used in training is recorded and when it was used – estimates request payments to registered contributors proportionately.
This infrastructure does not require new consensus mechanisms or experimental cryptography, but rather builders who prioritize preventing monopolies over farming liquidity rewards.
Mission of Crypto or Obituary of Crypto
The founding thesis of crypto was preventing centralized control over valuable networks. Bitcoin prevented central banks from having a monopoly on money. Ethereum prevented tech companies from monopolizing computation. But if AI companies monopolize intelligence, those wins become irrelevant.
What is the use of decentralized money if centralized models control people’s thinking? What is the point of decentralized computation if centralized training data determines which ideas are amplified? Intelligence is upstream in everything, from finance and governance to media and education. Whoever controls AI training data controls the information environment of the future.
Crypto could either create the infrastructure that makes data set monopolization impossible, or it could see AI companies accomplishing the exact centralized control that blockchain was invented to prevent. There is no third option where tokens remain focused on speculation while still being relevant to the most important technological shift of the crypto century.
The industry now needs to build data set attribution infrastructure, or write crypto’s obituary as a movement that talks about decentralization. In contrast, centralized AI companies created a permanent monopoly on human knowledge.
Opinion: Ram Kumar, lead contributor at Open Ledger.
This article is for general information purposes and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, opinions and opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
