Theoriq: Building the “agentic” base-layer where AI and Web3 meet

TL;DR: Born inside ChainML Labs in 2022 and publicly unveiled in May 2024, Theoriq is a decentralised protocol that lets swarms of on-chain AI agents cooperate, earn and evolve under community governance. By fusing large-language-model agents with blockchain incentives, it aims to push finance, gaming and data infrastructure toward a future where no single company owns the brains of the internet.

What problem is it solving?

Today’s AI services are mostly siloed APIs controlled by a handful of tech giants. Theoriq’s thesis is that decentralised AI agents, each specialising in a task and rewarded on-chain for useful behaviour, can:

• Remove platform lock-in by running inference and coordination on public blockchains

• Sharpen incentives—agents get paid for measurable outcomes (e.g., liquidity provision, yield optimisation) rather than opaque model calls

• Enable open, composable “agent economies” where anyone can combine agents into higher-level collectives without asking permission

In short, it wants to do for AI what Ethereum did for smart-contract logic: turn it into an open execution substrate that anyone can extend.

How does it work?

1. Modular base layer

Theoriq provides a “swarm kernel” that lets developers deploy individually upgradable agents (written in Python or Rust) which communicate through verifiable message passing on the chain. That base layer is deliberately narrow: governance, settlement and reputation scoring live on-chain; heavy ML inference can stay off-chain but must publish proofs or summaries back to the ledger.

2. Infinity Hub marketplace

Announced eight months ago, Infinity Hub is Theoriq’s upcoming on-chain AI-agent store. It packages swarms into mintable NFTs, handles royalties automatically and lets users compose them in a drag-and-drop UI—think “App Store for autonomous bots”.

3. Agent swarms for DeFi (AiFi)

Early reference swarms focus on on-chain liquidity provision (OLP), arbitrage and yield strategies. Because every trade and reward is transparent, users can audit exactly why an agent moved funds—a stark contrast to black-box quant funds.

Why does it matter?

1. Democratising AI talent & revenue – Anyone can publish an agent, stake reputation and earn, much like liquidity miners did for early DeFi

2. Transparency in automated finance – On-chain execution lets regulators and users inspect every model decision ex-post.

3. Composability super-charges innovation – Just as open-source libraries accelerated software, interoperable agent NFTs could cut the cost of building AI-powered products.

4. Checks on Big Tech concentration – By tying rewards to public smart contracts, Theoriq removes the implicit gatekeepers that today control model access.

   
   

The road ahead

With testnet usage growing and the ETHDenver spotlight still warm, Theoriq now needs to prove two things: security (guarding against malicious or hallucinating agents) and economics (ensuring fees don’t outweigh off-chain inference costs). The success—or failure—of its 2025 mainnet will be a bell-wether for the broader “agentic AI” movement.

For developers keen to experiment, the team keeps its Council framework open-source and runs weekly Discord office hours. And for the purely curious, the mantra on their homepage says it all:

“The AI revolution will not be centralised.”

Given the momentum around decentralised compute and the billions flowing into autonomous-agent research, Theoriq is a name worth bookmarking for the next chapter of AI-first Web3.

Source: https://www.theoriq.ai