Navigating the Sahara AI Ecosystem: What We're Building and How You Can Get Involved
May 19, 2025
The Sahara AI ecosystem has grown quickly with multiple product launches, new reward systems, and the rollout of our public SIWA testnet. To make it easier for everyone to understand where they fit in, we’ve created this guide to explain what each product does, who it’s for, and how to get involved.
We believe the future will be AI-driven, with AI powering meaningful progress and redefining how people work, solve problems, and engage with the world around them. Sahara AI is building the tools and infrastructure to accelerate that future. Whether you’re here to contribute data, develop AI agents, or simply explore what’s possible with decentralized AI, there’s a place for you in our ecosystem.
The Sahara Application Layer
Sahara AI isn’t just infrastructure; it’s a growing suite of products anyone can use to build, contribute to, or interact with AI. This section covers the core platforms in our ecosystem today, from accessible experiences for everyday users to purpose-built products for data contributors, creators, and developers, to community-driven applications.
Data Services Platform (DSP)
The Data Services Platform (DSP) is how everyday people—not just developers—can participate directly in the AI economy by improving real-world AI systems.
For Anyone Looking to Participate in the AI Economy and Earn Rewards
Whether you’re a student, freelancer, gamer, or just AI-curious, you can join the platform and start completing tasks that help create the datasets needed to power tomorrow’s AI models, agents, and research. These tasks (called data annotation tasks) might include anything from:
Reviewing or labeling images, text, or audio
Giving advice on what makes a good or bad date
Creating prompts that jailbreak common AI models
Screen-recording yourself using everyday applications like Word or Powerpoint
You’ll earn Sahara Points for your efforts. No technical background is required, and everything happens through an easy-to-use interface. Currently, only whitelisted users can access the platform, but Open Beta is launching shortly after SIWA Testnet so anyone can soon access the platform and participate in the AI economy.
For AI Developers and Enterprises Looking to Source Custom Datasets
As an enterprise or AI developer, you can use DSP to crowdsource custom data to train or fine-tune your models. The Call for Data Services feature (coming soon) will let you:
Post jobs for specialized data
Get results fast from a growing network of global annotators
Track submissions and quality from within the platform
It’s a practical solution for teams that need to collect high-quality, labeled datasets at scale without relying on traditional, centralized vendors. You maintain control over your criteria while benefiting from decentralized reach and lower costs. Everything is logged on-chain for transparency and compliance.
Until the Call for Data Services feature is integrated into the platform, AI developers and enterprises interested in Data Services can reach out here.
AI Developer Platform
The AI Developer Platform (formerly AI Studio) is a full-stack development platform for building, testing, and deploying AI models, agents, and pipelines.
What you can do:
Access verified data, models, agents, and pipelines from our AI Marketplace or import your own
Chain models together into reusable, modular pipelines
Fine-tune system prompts, model parameters, configs, and more using an advanced playground and flexible configurations
Publish models, agents, and pipelines to the marketplace and start earning
Track performance, usage, and monetization over time
The Developer Platform is tightly integrated with the Sahara Blockchain and will become progressively more powerful as we release new features during various phases of our open testnet. Early testers can earn Sahara Points, compute credits, and exclusive benefits for their contributions and feedback.
The AI Developer Platform is currently whitelist access only. The SIWA testnet launch will also mark the Open Beta launch of the AI Developer Platform with limited access. New features will be released to the public in phases. If you’d like to become an early beta tester, you can sign up by filling out this form: https://hi.saharalabs.ai/dev-early-access
AI Marketplace (coming soon)
The AI Marketplace is where developers and AI resource providers can buy, sell, and license AI assets, such as datasets, models, and agents.
If you’re looking to buy, the Marketplace makes it easy to discover and license high-quality assets to accelerate your AI development. Whether you need a pre-trained model, a clean dataset, or a ready-to-use pipeline, you’ll find modular components built by other contributors across the ecosystem.
If you’re looking to sell, the Marketplace gives you a way to monetize your work. AI developers, dataset owners, and model creators can list their assets with flexible licensing and revenue sharing terms, track usage transparently, and retain ownership with on-chain attribution.
The Marketplace is deeply integrated with the Sahara Blockchain, providing secure ownership, verifiable provenance, and transparent usage tracking. Whether you're building something new or turning your AI assets into revenue-generating infrastructure, this is where creators and builders connect.
Ecosystem Applications Across Various Blockchains
Ecosystem applications are built independently by developers using our infrastructure, and tooling. Because Sahara AI is chain-agnostic, these apps can be deployed on any chain (or even off-chain) but are powered by assets and services from the Sahara AI ecosystem.
Some apps may use datasets sourced through the Data Services Platform, others may rely on models or agents published in the AI Marketplace, and many are built directly on the AI Developer Platform. These ecosystem apps demonstrate what’s possible when decentralized AI infrastructure is accessible to builders across Web2 and Web3.
Whether you're looking to build your own or try what others have created, these applications represent the first wave of real-world use cases built with Sahara AI.
Sahara Legends
Sahara Legends is our gamified testnet experience, designed to make it fun and easy to explore the Sahara lore, explore our community, and interact with various aspects of our platform. It’s ideal for anyone new to Web3, decentralized AI, or the Sahara AI ecosystem.
Here’s what you can do:
Claim testnet tokens via our faucet
Send your first testnet transactions
Interact with our lore and AI-themed storylines
Complete missions tied to ecosystem tools and partners (coming soon)
Earn Shards, our reward mechanism for Legends participants
This isn’t just for fun! Sahara Legends helps users build confidence, understand how our ecosystem works, and earn rewards while doing it.
Sahara Infrastructure Layer
Sahara AI is built on a two-part infrastructure stack: an on-chain layer for registering and monetizing AI assets, and an off-chain layer for running agents and services. Together, they power everything across our ecosystem.
The Sahara Blockchain and SIWA Testnet (On-Chain Infra)
The SIWA Testnet marks the first public rollout of the Sahara Blockchain: our core infrastructure layer that supports every product and on-chain interaction across the ecosystem. While our private testnet already recorded activity and assets on-chain, SIWA introduces an open, permissionless environment designed for public participation and phased public feature releases.
Our blockchain powers every core product in the Sahara AI ecosystem:
Data Services Platform: data tasks, achievements, and rewards are recorded on-chain
AI Developer Platform: models, agents, and pipelines can be registered on-chain
AI Marketplace: listings and transactions are tracked with on-chain provenance
Sahara Legends: interactions and achievements are tied to smart contracts and reward logic
Most users will access the testnet through these applications. For Web3 developers, SIWA will also open up access to:
Deploy custom contracts on the Sahara Blockchain
Build integrations using our SDKs and APIs
Monitor network and asset activity in real time
Sahara Blockchain Protocols
At the heart of the Sahara Blockchain are the Sahara Blockchain Protocols (SBP)—a suite of AI-native smart contracts designed to bring structure, transparency, and enforceability to every stage of AI development. These protocols enable on-chain asset ownership, provenance tracking, and monetization.
Core SBP Modules include:
Global Asset Registry: Verifiable registration and identification of datasets, models, agents, and pipelines. Phase 1 of SIWA focuses on dataset registration, with support for additional asset types rolling out in subsequent phases.
Ownership Protocols: Immutable on-chain proof of who created or owns what.
Attribution & Contribution Tracking: Transparent links between assets and the people who helped build them.
Licensing Modules: On-chain access controls to govern how assets can be used.
Revenue Sharing: Protocol-based mechanisms to fairly distribute income to contributors.
Execution Attestations: TEE-generated proofs anchored on-chain for tamper-proof verification of every agent run.
New protocol features and contract modules will roll out in phases throughout the Open Testnet, leading up to the full Mainnet launch.
AI Execution Protocols (Off-Chain Infra)
While our blockchain handles on-chain registration, licensing, and ownership, the AI Execution Protocols power what happens when AI agents actually run.
This off-chain infrastructure supports how agents are created, configured, and executed in real-time—whether that’s responding to a user, pulling from a database, or running a scheduled automation. It ensures every agent has the tools, compute, and structure it needs to function reliably and efficiently. This includes:
AI Services: Agents need access to models and tools to function. Our infrastructure manages those connections—including LLM endpoints (like OpenAI, Claude, or local models), vector databases, and other cloud services—so agents can easily use the tools they need without complicated setup.
Agent Hosting: When an agent is triggered, it’s deployed and run automatically based on its configuration. This includes hardware settings (like memory or CPU), lifecycle behavior (e.g. stateless vs persistent), and any specific requirements. Cold-start delays, resource limits, and runtime injection are all handled under the hood.
Agent Monitoring: Every time an agent runs, our system records key details like usage stats, runtime logs, and cost estimates. This makes it easy to debug, track performance, and ensure transparency, whether you're testing a new model or managing a high-traffic production agent.
Agent Collaboration: Multiple users or teams can now co-develop, fine-tune, and serve AI models together without giving up control of their own assets. Whether through decentralized training (sharing compute to collectively train a model), model aggregation (combining multiple proprietary models), or collaborative serving (hosting different parts of a model across participants), our protocols make joint AI development seamless, privacy-preserving, and scalable.
To ensure trust in this off-chain execution, Sahara relies on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to verify what actually happens during agent runtime. These environments generate cryptographic proofs of execution, which are then pushed on-chain to provide tamper-proof provenance records. This brings an additional layer of security and auditability to every interaction, ensuring that what was supposed to happen, did happen.
These AI Execution Protocols will roll out progressively as the SIWA Testnet advances and new features of the AI Developer Platform are made public.
Where You Fit In: A Recap
The Sahara AI ecosystem is designed for a broad range of participants. Whether you’re an AI-curious consumer, an experienced AI developer, a Web3 builder, or part of an enterprise AI team, there are meaningful ways for you to engage, from hands-on contributions to building full-scale applications.
Consumers and non-technical users
You don’t need to be an AI engineer to participate in Sahara AI. Consumers can:
Join Sahara Legends, our gamified experience that introduces Sahara AI, our lore, and our platform in a fun, interactive way
Contribute to AI development by completing data tasks in the Data Services Platform, earning Sahara Points and other rewards for accurate submissions
Use real AI apps built on Sahara AI infrastructure, whether on our chain or others powered by our tools. From personal assistants to automated research tools, these ecosystem apps will be accessible across multiple chains and platforms
Explore the AI Marketplace to support, buy, or invest in AI assets—like datasets, models, or agents—backed by verifiable provenance and ownership.
As the ecosystem matures, you’ll have even more ways to explore, contribute, and benefit from decentralized AI, no coding required.
AI Developers (App and Agent Builders)
Whether you’re a Web2 developer exploring AI pipelines or a Web3-native builder deploying agents on-chain, Sahara AI gives you a decentralized development stack without compromising flexibility.
Web2 Developers
Build and optimize models, chain them into composable pipelines, and list or purchase assets directly through the AI Developer Platform and AI Marketplace. If you need tailored datasets, you’ll soon be able to request specific data collection and annotation tasks from contributors via the Data Services Platform, unlocking access to high-quality, custom datasets at scale.Web3 & DeAI Developers
Tap into our smart contract layer to deploy dapps, agents, and decentralized protocols. Build your project directly through the AI Developer Platform, monetize it on the AI Marketplace, or crowdsource high-quality training data (coming soon) via Data Services Platform. Our platform supports cross-chain deployment, modular AI tooling, and protocol-level access for building interoperable, on-chain AI experiences.
Enterprises
Sahara AI provides Web2 and Web3 enterprises with customizable, end-to-end infrastructure for AI development and deployment. Whether you're building new AI applications or enhancing existing systems, Sahara AI offers full lifecycle support, from sourcing high-quality data to deploying and scaling production-ready models and agents.
Enterprises can source large-scale, high-value annotated datasets in two ways: leverage our Data Services Platform to tap into decentralized, crowdsourced data collection through a global contributor network, or work directly with us to generate domain-specific, bespoke datasets that meet specific business requirements. Sahara AI is designed to handle the most demanding data needs with a human-in-the-loop, privacy-preserving approach.
Enterprises can also access our AI Developer Platform to build, test, and deploy models and agents within a flexible development environment. For more tailored solutions, Sahara AI supports secure, on-premise deployments of custom Sahara Agents—intelligent, enterprise-grade agents that integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure. These agents are purpose-built to reduce operational costs, automate workflows, and power business-specific use cases.
In addition, the AI Marketplace allows enterprises to list proprietary datasets, models, or agents as tokenized assets, enabling new monetization opportunities while helping others build on top of their innovations. Enterprises can also explore and license verified third-party assets to accelerate their own AI initiatives.
AI Resource Providers and Creators
If you’re building or managing the core infrastructure of AI—like models, datasets, compute, or data services—Sahara AI offers you new ways to register, monetize, and grow your impact across the decentralized ecosystem.
Dataset owners and data service providers can register assets on-chain, tokenize them, and offer them in the AI Marketplace with built-in licensing and attribution mechanisms.
Model owners and AI development teams can publish models for use or fine-tuning, and earn revenue through structured licensing or per-inference pricing through the AI Marketplace.
Compute providers can offer GPU access or AI hosting services as a compute listings in our AI Developer Platform, allowing agents and apps to deploy workloads directly through your infrastructure.
Looking Ahead
The launch of SIWA is a major milestone in our journey to build an open and equitable AI ecosystem. From data tasks and agent pipelines to smart contract deployment and ecosystem exploration, Sahara AI is designed to bring together the full spectrum of AI innovation under one decentralized roof.
In the coming weeks, we’ll roll out more developer documentation, onboarding guides, and ecosystem maps to help every type of participant find their place.
We're just getting started.
