0G Labs, or Zero Gravity Labs, a Web3 and blockchain firm said Monday that the company raised $35 million in a pre-seed funding round to build a modular distributed ledger blockchain network aimed at large-scale storage for decentralized artificial intelligence systems.

The colossal pre-seed round attracted investments from over 40 Web3 venture firms including Animoca, Hack VC, Stanford Builders Fund, Alliance, Orange, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Digital, No Limit Holdings, Arca, NGC, Paramita, Foresight, Crypto Banter, Joe Takayama, Santiago Santos and Abstract Ventures.

0G Labs said that it has achieved high scalability for decentralized data by providing what it calls the first “data availability system with a built-in general purpose storage layer.” It does this by separating the workflow of data availability into a publishing lane and a storage lane. Since the blockchain system, which provides the decentralized publishing and tracking capability only handles a tiny amount of data, it avoids broadcast bottlenecks and storage can remain decentralized to wherever it rests.

“Data storage is an integral part of data availability because it must answer the question of where the data is published,” 0G Labs wrote about its system. “The ZeroGravity Data Availability system is a scalable data availability service layer which is directly built on top of a decentralized storage system and addresses the scalability issue by minimizing the data transfer volume required for broadcast.”

Blockchain networks operate by distributing data across numerous ledgers and cryptographically protecting transactions, this makes it less likely for the transactions across the network to be error-prone or tampered with.

0G said that its modular blockchain design combined with decentralized storage also makes it able to support a large number of different data types which makes it ideal for decentralized AI scenarios. According to the company, by embracing this modularity it can achieve greatly increased transaction speeds and lower transaction speeds than bigger blockchains such as Ethereum, the most popular programmable blockchain.

“0G is positioned as the premier modular data availability solution for web3, including the next frontier of crypto-powered AI networks,” Ed Roman, managing partner at Hack V. “Their data availability technology has shown to achieve speeds 1000x+ faster and cheaper than [Ethereum Layer 1], which is simply phenomenal.”

By separating the decentralized publishing and storage lanes, 0G said, it allows for almost infinite scalability for on-chain AI storage, across the data storage layer. That means the new blockchain system can readily support decentralized storage for models, training data, user requests, real-time retrieval augmented generation or RAG data, and any other data that AI models might need to continue operating properly.

Image: Nepool