Model Marketplace

​

The IP Challenge

As AI models become increasingly valuable assets, there is a growing need for decentralized marketplaces that can:

• Uniquely identify and track models on-chain
• Verify model authenticity, provenance, and attest to correct inference execution
• Enable model monetization
• Protect intellectual property rights
• Reward model creators for their contributions
• Facilitate model fundraising, ownership, and trade

However, building such marketplaces presents significant technical challenges, particularly around model verification and IP protection.

​

Ritual’s Model Primitives

Ritual introduces foundational primitives that enable verifiable model marketplaces:

​

Enshrined AI Models

By natively enshrining AI models, we enable:

• Models to become first-class citizens on the blockchain
• Direct smart contract integration and ownership of models
• Seamless, verifiable inference execution without relying on off-chain services
• Native support for model versioning and updates, backed by blockchain provenance
• Decentralized model registration and tracking
• Model storage across multiple storage layers, ensuring consistency and accessibility
• Native fundraising and monetization mechanisms
• Enshrined fee distribution by model usage and ownership, with native DeFAI integration

​

Verifiable Model Execution

Via Ritual’s advanced research into architecture primitives like vTune and SVE, we enable verifiable model execution:

• Statistical verification of model inference, fine-tuning, and training
• Proof of model authenticity and provenance
• Protection against model forgery
• Preservation of inference quality

​

Model Monetization

Ritual introduces a new vault-like architecture for enshrining AI models and other IP primitives on-chain, in a way that is transparent, composable with DeFAI primitives, and builds an on-chain, verifiable tree of provenance and ownership:

• Purpose-built to support community-owned model fine-tunes and variants
• Trickle-up/down royalty distribution mechanisms from base models to child variants
• Automated usage tracking and payment distribution for models
• Enshrined representations of original models; prevents model piracy
• Model governance and treasuries built on top of DeFAI primitives

​

Empowering IP Protocols

Ritual’s architecture provides the foundation for next-generation IP protocols. Two examples of protocols that can leverage Ritual’s capabilities include Story Protocol and Sentient: