AI Chain or AI Claim? Decoding True On-Chain Intelligence and the Web3 Cost Crisis

The AI narrative is everywhere in crypto right now -but how much of it is real? In this episode of The Intelligence Layer - Deep Dive, we cut through the hype to examine why most so-called “AI chains” are really just AI-adjacent.

We explore:

• The Web2 AI cost crisis, from $10B+ inference bills to trillion-dollar data center build-outs.

• Why tokenizing API calls to OpenAI or NVIDIA doesn’t solve the underlying economics.

• The three pillars of true AI-native blockchains: memory, reasoning, and action, all on-chain.

• A reality check on big names like Bittensor, Render, NEAR, and the ASI alliance.

• The “Intelligence Trilemma” intelligence, interpretability, interoperability as the new benchmark for the next decade of Web3.

Our thesis: The winning chain won’t just be fast, it will be able to think.