Overview
AI today sits behind closed doors: proprietary models, scarce compute, and centralized control leave creators uncompensated and users locked in. Function Network tears down these walls with a blockchain-powered protocol that makes AI open, decentralized, and permissionless, so anyone can contribute, anyone can consume, and no single entity can censor or gate access.
The Problem: Open-Source AI Isn’t Accessible for All
Zero Creator Revenue Open source model authors publish to the world yet earn nothing. Every dollar goes to the hosting or application layer, leaving open-source contributions undervalued and unsustainable. As costs go up, there becomes an increasingly pressure to find private funding and ultimately close sourcing their model to fund their development.
Poor Model Discoverability & Bootstrapping Even the best models languish unseen: without a clear on-chain marketplace or incentive to spotlight high-quality work, infrastructure providers won’t host them and therefore, developers can’t find or use them.
Centralized Infrastructure & High Barriers to Entry Without a direct path to monetization, only large players backed by deep private funding can afford the massive investment in large datasets and compute fleets required for AI at scale. This centralizes control and stifles innovation due to more models becoming closed source.
Our Solution: Democratize AI with Function Network
Tokenized Model Marketplace A unified, onchain registry where creators publish model metadata, weights, and transparent pricing for their IP. Community ratings and usage statistics surface the best models and drive quality improvements.
Onchain Monetization Usage fees and royalties are settled instantly in FUNC tokens. Fine-grained payout rules let creators set per-model or per-endpoint rates, while providers earn proportional to compute delivered.
Distributed infrastructure Break large inference jobs into parallel shards distributed across any GPU provider (from RTX 30-series to datacenter GPUs). Dynamic load-balancing and redundancy guarantee low latency, high throughput, and resilient uptime. End-to-end orchestration, monitoring, and failover are enforced by smart contracts. Providers commit SLAs onchain: missed targets trigger automated penalties and re-allocation.
Incentive Alignment: How the Network Works
The best-performing models attract developers, who pay compute providers to use them. In turn, compute providers share a portion of their earnings with the model creators. This creates a sustainable flywheel: developers get access to top-tier AI, compute providers earn by supplying the necessary infrastructure, and model creators are funded to continue innovating. This virtuous cycle encourages the creation of more high-quality, open-source models.
Every protocol action is powered by FUNC:
Developers deposit FUNC to reserve inference capacity and pay per request.
Compute Providers stake FUNC to signal reliability, host models, and collect fees for each inference shard served.
Model Creators receive an onchain royalty split every time their model is invoked, turning traffic into recurring income.
The Function Flywheel
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