Introduction to ASI:Chain
The Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance has announced the launch of ASI:Chain public DevNet, providing early access to developers interested in building autonomous systems on a Layer 1 blockDAG designed specifically for AI-native decentralized applications.
The ASI:Chain architecture directly addresses multiple concerns that have arisen in the tech industry generally due to the extremely rapid expansion of the AI sector: constraints in infrastructure quantity and capability, security vulnerability due to excessive centralization, and data privacy and sovereignty issues. Blockchain-based infrastructure in principle provides routes around these issues via enabling new forms of decentralized AI compute, however in practice, historical blockchain platforms have suffered from their own severe limitations. They were architected for token transfers and basic smart contracts, not for the complex coordination, reasoning, and concurrency requirements of autonomous AI systems.
Existing blockchains lack native support for high-performance agent orchestration and dynamic reasoning patterns. They also lack the modular infrastructure needed for decentralized AI services at scale. ASI:Chain has been purpose-designed to address these limitations.
Core Technology and Architecture
ASI:Chain addresses these gaps by combining a blockDAG architecture with MeTTa, a programming language specifically designed for advanced cognitive functions essential to AGI development. Developed over years by SingularityNET and ASI's CEO Dr. Ben Goertzel as part of the Hyperon AGI framework, MeTTa enables developers to implement complex reasoning patterns and agentic logic directly onchain.
MeTTa smart contracts on the backend are compiled largely into Rholang, a language pioneered in the Rchain blockchain, and mathematically optimized for concurrent processing and distributed systems. Rholang ensures that autonomous agents can execute coordinated actions at scale. MeTTa contracts also compile into large-scale graph operations executed against MORK, the MeTTa Optimal Reduction Kernel, which is in many ways the most efficient in-RAM graph database technology currently available. Together, these tools form the core of ASI:Chain's AI-native infrastructure, which allows developers to build intelligent, reasoning-capable systems that existing blockchains cannot support.
The platform's sharded architecture enables customizable consensus mechanisms and modular execution layers tailored for different AI workloads. Dr. Goertzel notes that “The ASI:Chain architecture provides a novel approach to solving the “blockchain trilemma” – the seemingly unsolvable conundrum of having scalability, security and decentralization all in one compute network. ASI:Chain solves this by baking decentralization and security into the universal infrastructure, and then achieving scalability via using different consensus mechanisms on different shards of the network as appropriate for their purpose. So a shard doing high-frequency trading gets one consensus mechanism, a shard running a mesh network for use in the developing world in regions with unreliable Internet gets another, etc.”
Industry Context and Developer Access
This new chain emerges at a critical moment where autonomous agents are transitioning from research projects to production systems. Most major enterprises have already deployed agentic solutions for production workflows across finance, supply chain, and operations. Gartner forecasts that within the next 36 months, enterprise software incorporating agentic AI will rise to 33%. Yet today's blockchain infrastructure remains fundamentally misaligned with these requirements.
The DevNet phase offers early-stage developer access where the ASI:Chain team can gather real-world feedback before advancing to its testnet phase. Rather than relying on simulations, developers can deploy applications in a live environment. They can validate the blockDAG consensus model, stress-test infrastructure under genuine workloads, and provide critical feedback to refine the ecosystem.
Developer Resources and Participation
To further support developers building on ASI:Chain, the alliance has taken several steps. They have published comprehensive documentation and opened the GitHub repository. A block explorer provides transaction visibility, and a faucet distributes test ASI tokens. The dev portal provides API access and integration guides. Validator node setup and shard configuration tools are available for those interested in participating as network operators.
Developers and node operators interested in exploring these capabilities can view the ASI:Chain webpage here or jump right in and join DevNet as a validator starting here.
About Artificial Superintelligence Alliance
The Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) Alliance is a collective formed by Fetch.ai, SingularityNET, and CUDOS. As the largest open-sourced, independent entity in decentralized AI research and development, this alliance aims to accelerate the advancement of decentralized Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and, ultimately, Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).