We are building Republic, a general purpose, permissionless economic platform for allocating and exchanging compute. Republic’s core tenets are shaped by our fundamental belief that compute will soon be the most valuable commodity ever seen by humanity, and that the economic structures of today are not ideal for ensuring that it is allocated properly for the net benefit of society as a whole.
Our primary goal is to be able to enable anyone, anywhere, to access compute freely and without restrictions. We believe that compute is indeed the currency of intelligence: as artificial intelligence systems become more ubiquitous, compute will be the primary way in which access to such systems is utilized. Current systems are too geared to support individuals who have existing financial or social capital, and are fundamentally anti-meriocratic. Republic is meant to be a way to allocate such compute in a distributed manner using a combination of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence systems.
The explosion of generative AI capabilities in the last 3 years has indeed been perhaps the most consequential period of economic opportunity since the industrial revolution. Never has creating ideas with technology been so easy; now, engineers without years of experience in software development can create applications with thousands of users by just prompting an LLM, while a designer can use an AI tool to create intuitive experiences from scratch. Yet, there is a fundamental limit to the proverbial commoditization of intelligence: compute.
Indeed, compute, and how it is allocated, is the fundamental delimiter of this new economic reality. Just as those who had access to capital controlled how we see, perceive, and work within the world after the industrial revolution, those who will have access to compute will control how we see it after the intelligence revolution we are going through today.
Compute is increasingly in the control of centralized corporations and providers who have the right to restrict or meter it for any reason. This puts a fundamental limitation on creativity, on the very ideas that intelligent systems defined by generative AI have enabled us to create. Indeed, a solution, one that allows for the unrestricted, verifiable consumption of compute is needed. Furthermore, such a solution should specifically have the economic capacity to support those with talent but without the proper access to resources, such as to enable the development of better technologies.
Blockchain and Web3 technologies have the capacity to enable permissionless innovation through socioeconomic alignment. Whether it is execution platforms such as Ethereum or Solana, or social tokenization markets such as Polymarket, web3 networks have proven to be able to accumulate communities and capital through shared incentives.
Republic is an implementation of a blockchain network, specifically designed for the allocation and production of compute. Our goal is to build a global community that is able to jointly consume and exchange computing resources with another, all for the purpose of building innovative products or engaging in frontier research. Republic has been implemented as a custom L1, built from first principles, and natively interfaces with AI tooling found in our developer documentation. The developer network is currently live at explorer.republicai.io and rpc.republicai.io. Republic will also be supported by external capital designed specifically for investment in talented researchers and entrepreneurs who want to build AI native products requiring compute. Examples of such products can be new foundational models built from scratch for specific use-cases, or agents using open source models for inference.
Republic’s key differentiator is that our core objective is not to create a blockchain, but rather leverage it to create a self-sustaining economy. This long-term objective allows us to focus on creating legitimate value via the projects that are building on our compute infrastructure, versus optimizing for short term price action.
Republic will have a native fund that will back and support projects building on the platform. This will include provisioning capital, allocating compute, and promoting projects that are either working on innovative AI tooling or creating better inference products.
This will eventually translate into a self-replicating economy, with successful projects building on Republic having enough incentives and power through the underlying native token to determine the future direction of both the underlying blockchain and new projects that are built on top of it.
We have been hard at work over the past year. Our whitepaper, released in August, details the core primitives behind our technology. We have implemented a developer testnet which we are currently validating with beta users, and have unveiled a research paper outlining how we plan to implement private inference on our platform. We will be soon announcing community incentives that will allow anyone to participate in our community early. These will include our points program, which is designed to incentivize early users to participate in our community, either by developing projects or by engaging with other, early contribution initiatives.
X: x.com/republicfdn
Discord: discord.com/invite/therepublic
Explorer: explorer.republicai.io
Points: points.republicai.io
Documentation: docs.republicai.io
RPC: rpc.republicai.io
Faucet: faucet.republicai.io
