Why we invested in Altered State Machine (ASM)

Contents

The Frontier of AI

The ASM platform provides any application (eg: game, metaverse, financial) the ability to create AI Agents which are owned as NFTs. These Agents can be created and trained to compete against each other, interact, control human actors and support a variety of other use cases.

Each Agent is represented by a combination of a Brain, the core of the Agent; Memories, which store learned behavioral strategies of the Agent through AI model training; and a Form, which encodes physical attributes that include what it looks like and how it operates. With the records of AI progression stored in the NFT, users own their machine learning models and pair them with artwork to create their Agent.

A Team Second to None

When it comes to finding a team with experience as serial entrepreneurs and thought leaders to execute a revolutionary vision, it’s hard to find a team more complete and capable than ASM. ASM is led by CEO David McDonald, a tech leader with a diverse background having led a number of tech ventures across New Zealand, Japan and Australia. He began his career in geospatial tech and IOT then moved into blockchain with his most notable successes including the world’s first national primary industries blockchain consortium, spanning the entire value chain from government to consumer. ASM’s Chief Design Officer Phill Williams has led product teams at publicly listed technology companies, global digital agencies and founded his own startups holding a number of senior roles from Digital Art Direction to Innovation Programme Leadership. On the tech side, Hal Smith-Steven leads as CTO. Hal is a lifelong software engineer who has leveraged the power of AI across a number of industries such as healthcare and air traffic control where his impact spanned from drone deliveries in low level airspace to supersonic business jets in the stratosphere.
AL powered game arena

AI Powered Gaming

ASM’s first release is the Artificial Intelligence Football Association (AIFA) All Stars, a soccer-style P2E. To engage their AI in AIFA, ASM launched “AIFA Genesis” which are starter packs of NFTs containing an ASM Brain and four AIFA All Stars, the players that those Brains control. The Genesis mint launched on October 20,2021 and sold out at a cost of 0.09eth+gas. Users have the option to unlock their boxes at any point in time to reveal their Brain and AIFA All Stars. The floor for common Genesis boxes on the secondary market is 5.31eth ($18,000 USD) with rare boxes that contain better AIFA All Stars commanding a 6 eth ($20,300 USD) floor.

Ever-expanding utility

With a focus on interoperability, the functionality of the ASM AI will stretch far beyond the AIFA ecosystem, with applications of the agents as:

  • Game players/characters
  • Metaverse assistants 
  • DeFi trading bots 
  • Chatbots 
  • Digital twins (e.g. “Super Siri”) 
  • Advertising

So what does this mean? It means your Agent can play games for you across multiple platforms, it can be integrated into games as a powerup or assistant, it can be coded and trained to participate in crypto and financial markets, and it can participate in metaverses as a chatbot or AI assistant like Siri; just to name a few of the direct use cases of the ASM AI. There’s also special utility in the Fluf World Ecosystem.

Powered by $ASTO

As an additional layer of utility, the ASTO token will power the ASM ecosystem. ASTO utility ranges from DAO Governance to currency to mint NFTs and manage in-game transactions and asset creation. ASTO is needed to train your Brain, and is crucial in powering the economy of “gym owners,” which provide GPU cloud computing for every ML model. Early holders of ASM NFTs will receive substantial airdrops of ASTO and the community will determine the price of ASTO through a week-long price discovery auction.

The Intersection of NFTs, gaming, and DeFi

With AI-powered NFTs, a P2E game, and a token, ASM finds itself at the crossroads of three nascent industries. NFTs, gaming, and DeFi have reached valuations of $6 billion, $183.5 billion and $53 billion respectively in 2021, and ASM’s unique positioning will guide its ability to capture the attention of the market across these verticals.

A shared vision 

ASM envisions the metaverse growing from the bottom-up, “by a series of communities, based on ownership of shared IP, participating in experiences and growing valuing through attention and utility” (ASM). This vision is directly embedded in their growth strategies and is a vision that we also share at Outlier in our open metaverse thesis. To ASM, the metaverse will consist of mostly non-human participants, and their AI applications will prove essential for its development and customization.

As the world’s leading metaverse accelerator, we do not typically invest in companies directly, but the opportunity to work with the amazing team at ASM was one we could not pass up. Robin Janaway, our Head of NFT Strategy, puts it well when he says, “We look for category defining projects; projects that can revolutionize the NFT space. ASM is doing just that by redefining what interoperability and AI transferability look like.” Through their revolutionary take on tokenized AI, ASM is positioning themselves as leaders in charting the next iteration of virtual worlds.

 

Learn More about Altered State Machine

The Project         ▶   https://alteredstatemachine.xyz

The Community  ▶ https://discord.com/invite/alteredstatemachine


Listen to the Podcast with Altered State Machine (32 min mark) 


About Outlier Ventures

Outlier Ventures has been backing Web 3 founders since 2014 and is the world’s leading Open Metaverse accelerator program, and was one of the first VC firms dedicated to investing in the emerging crypto ecosystem. Their portfolio includes notable projects across DeFi, NFTs and blockchain infrastructure with a focus on emergent Open Metaverse use cases such as NFT-based play-to-earn games, augmented reality and more. Outlier Ventures portfolio can be found here.

Both Base Camp and Ascent are constantly looking for founders accelerating the open Metaverse thesis by launching token networks. We provide a proven framework for growth while weaving together a global network of over 1,000 of the world’s leading Web 3 founders, protocols, and VCs to form an ecosystem of mentorship and investment.

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