2 AI Cryptocurrencies Worth Adding to Your Watch List Right Now

Bittensor (CRYPTO: TAO) and Chainlink (CRYPTO: LINK) are both cryptocurrencies that stand to benefit substantially from the expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI). While Bittensor aims to be a place where people can purchase AI training services and adjacent offerings, Chainlink is positioned largely as a blockchain-based source of real-time market data.

These two coins probably belong on your watch list if they aren't already. Here's why.

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Bittensor's utility is only starting to be revealed

Bittensor is a chain with 128 active subnets, each of which is a specialized market for one kind of machine learning or artificial intelligence work, like inference, training, compute, or data storage. Its miners produce outputs, its validators score the quality of the outputs, and the native token, TAO, is automatically disbursed to whichever actors and subnets deliver value -- and TAO is also required to pay transaction costs as well as to participate in the ecosystem.

So if its subnets are providing services that the market judges to be valuable, it should drive more demand for TAO. And there's a recent piece of confirming evidence that Bittensor is capable of coordinating such valuable activities at scale.

In March, the network marked an important technical milestone when about 70 of its independent contributors executed a fully decentralized training run of a 72 billion-parameter large language model (LLM). That's a highly valuable activity that usually requires renting resources from a data center. But it's important to note that one successful training run, despite being an impressive technical accomplishment, does not necessarily mean that every single one of Bittensor's subnets is capable of doing similarly useful things.

On the other hand, because Bittensor subnets can be freely created by whoever is able to pay the start-up fees in TAO, it's obvious that this chain has a lot of potential. Even if its ecosystem only has a couple of subnets offering services that drive significant demand for TAO today, that could increase in the future as more participants join, seeking to cash in on the AI gold rush.

Add this coin to your watch list today; it could become a vibrant pillar of the crypto sector during the next few years, and once it's clear that there's enduring activity on its network, it could be worth buying.

Chainlink wants to be the trust layer for where AI touches crypto

Chainlink occupies a very different corner of the AI intersection, as its objective is to make AI outputs reliable enough for regulated institutions to act on them.

Chainlink's flagship AI pilot closed its second phase in September, in which two dozen major financial institutions used LLMs to extract structured data from filings and unstructured documents on dividends, mergers, and other stock data. Chainlink's oracle network sifted the outputs of the different AI models in the pilot and converted them into a consensus, which it then delivered as a set of validated records on-chain with a very high degree of accuracy.

Another facet of the AI play for Chainlink is the Chainlink Runtime Environment, which is an orchestration layer for autonomous AI agents that execute on-chain transactions. When agents handle real capital, they will need a verification layer they cannot bypass, and Chainlink wants to be it.

As nice as those AI initiatives are, Chainlink isn't exactly an AI-first coin. Its main line of business, providing oracles that deliver real-time information for smart contracts and blockchain applications, isn't really related directly to AI at all, although certainly AI-powered agents or other autonomous platforms could make use of its data feeds for their own purposes. And financial institutions, especially major ones, are fully capable of developing their own technical infrastructure for data feeds, so they don't necessarily need to buy or hold any of the coin.

Thus, it's somewhat questionable whether Chainlink's AI plays will add value for its holders. It's very possible that they will. So put this coin on your watch list, and follow up in a couple of quarters to see if its AI plays are leading to more traction. If they are, it will be worth getting some exposure to this coin.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bittensor and Chainlink. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.