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 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.

  • Poor Model Discoverability & Bootstrapping Even the best models languish unseen: without a clear on-chain marketplace or incentive to spotlight high-quality work, providers won’t host them and developers can’t find or use them.

  • Unsustainable Hosting Costs Serving inference at scale requires complex orchestration or costly cloud GPUs, putting small teams and individual creators out of reach and stalling innovation.

Our Solution: Democratize AI with Function Network

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Sharded Inference 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.

  4. Managed Infrastructure & SLAs 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

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 downloads into recurring income.

The Function Flywheel

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