The AI coin era is here — and these 3 projects are building its backbone

The AI coin era is here — and these 3 projects are building its backbone originally appeared on TheStreet .

AI isn’t coming. It’s already here. Everyone’s talking; soon, everyone’s using. The march toward mass adoption has tech giants frothing—scrambling to stake a claim before the gold rush turns to dust. Speculation is cheap. Projections are noise. Infrastructure is the only thing that leaves a mark.

And the ones building it? They’re wiring the future.

Because beneath the noise, something else is taking shape—intelligence that doesn’t just simulate thought, but acts, transacts, remembers. Not centralized. Not sandboxed. Autonomous by design.

This is where AI coins come in. They’re not just funding the future—they’re engineering it. Networks that render at scale. Agents that monetize themselves. Systems that ground machine learning in verifiable truth. Not smarter tools. Smarter infrastructure.

I’ll spare you the pun about “coining the future.” Instead, here are three projects actually doing the work—building at the edge where AI meets crypto, and turning infrastructure into opportunity.

Render Network

Cinematic power used to belong to studios. Now it lives on-chain. Render’s AI coin turns a decentralized swarm of consumer GPUs into a rendering superstructure—accessible, scalable, and owned by the people who use it. It’s not just compute. It’s creative equity.

“From the start, our mission has been to democratize the creation of cinematic-quality content,” says Trevor Harries-Jones, board member at the Render Network Foundation. That mission began with distributed rendering, but AI has pushed it into overdrive. “We combined this with a novel decentralized participation model (now known as ‘DePIN’), enabling individual artists to contribute and benefit in ways that centralized platforms simply couldn’t offer.”

Render’s network went live in 2020 and now spans thousands of GPUs powering over 50 million frames—making high-end graphics work faster, cheaper, and available to anyone with a machine and a vision. “It stands as a vital resource for motion graphics artists around the world,” Harries-Jones adds.

We exist in a world where visuals move faster than words. Render supplies the muscle—and cuts the creators in on the upside.

Saga

Saga doesn’t automate tasks—it builds economies for autonomous agents. This isn’t AI-as-assistant. It’s AI with agency. Whole societies of intelligent actors, each living on their own high-throughput blockchain, built to operate without permission or pause.

“We’ve built the infrastructure for agent societies,” says Rebecca Liao, co-founder and CEO. Saga’s chainlet architecture gives every AI-powered application its own dedicated chain, optimized for speed, scale, and smart execution. The goal? To create a world where agents do more than answer prompts—they transact, evolve, and generate value on their own.

Chrono Games, Saga’s AI launchpad, is already live—introducing branded, monetizable agents that can be owned, deployed, and interacted with by users and developers alike. “No other company turns beloved IP or indie characters into autonomous agents that can interact with consumers,” Liao explains. Supporting it all is the Liquidity Integration Layer (LiL), ensuring that every in-game or in-agent asset flows smoothly into the broader Saga economy.

The AI coin here isn’t decorative—it’s structural. It lets agents act, earn, and exchange. A full economy, coded and alive.

OriginTrail

AI can guess. OriginTrail makes it prove it. It’s building an intelligence system that knows the difference—one grounded in facts, not fiction. Its Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), live since 2018, anchors information on-chain with linked sources, verifiable context, and ownership baked in.

“We’re not just adding a token onto an LLM stack,” says Tomaz Levak, founder and managing director. “Every fact your AI uses can carry on-chain provenance and NFT-based ownership.” In other words: no guessing, no blind spots. Just verified data with receipts.

The AI coin behind OriginTrail powers this ecosystem—fueling access, coordination, and rewards. With the dRAG (Decentralized Retrieval-Augmented Generation) framework, agents can query across the DKG, retain semantic memory, and even share those memories across networks. It’s the spine of agentic AI—giving autonomous systems a way to learn from each other, not just from static files.

The AI coin era is here — and these 3 projects are building its backbone first appeared on TheStreet on Jun 10, 2025

This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jun 10, 2025, where it first appeared.