Theta Labs, the leading decentralized cloud for AI, media and entertainment, is excited to announce that AIX Lab at Seoul Women’s University has signed a multi-year agreement to utilize Theta EdgeCloud, joining KAIST AI and Yonsei University to leverage Theta EdgeCloud for advanced AI research.

Theta EdgeCloud, known as an innovative hybrid cloud-edge computing AI platform, is powered by the Theta Edge Network with over 30,000 distributed edge nodes, and cloud partners including Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services offering over 80 PetaFLOPS of always available distributed GPU compute power. This partnership is poised to significantly enhance the research capabilities of SWU’s AI to Everything Lab.

The partnership between Theta Edgecloud and SWU is yet another example of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) solving real-world problems, leveraging web3 infrastructure and token incentives to improve and augment already existing technologies.

Seoul Women's University (SWU) is a prestigious private university in Seoul, South Korea, consistently ranked among the top institutions for women's education in the country. The AI to Everything (AIX) Lab is dedicated to applying artificial intelligence across various domains, including healthcare, bioinformatics, and industry-specific innovations. The lab focuses on integrating AI with real-world applications to address complex challenges in various fields, utilizing cutting-edge techniques in machine learning, deep learning, and data analytics.

The collaboration between Seoul Women’s University’s AIX Lab and Theta will be led by Professor Minseo Park, assistant professor at SWU’s Department of AI and an adjunct professor at the College of Business of KAIST, a prestigious South Korean research university.

Professor Minseo Park's research focuses on applying artificial intelligence in healthcare, bioinformatics, marketing, and industry-specific applications. She specializes in leveraging machine learning and deep learning to develop innovative solutions for complex challenges, particularly in medical AI, chronic disease management, and bioinformatics, as well as exploring AI's potential in education, marketing, real estate, finance and sports industries.

This partnership is particularly significant as it follows recent multi-year agreements with KAIST and Yonsei University, highlighting Theta EdgeCloud's competitive advantage providing cost-effective, easy to use, high-performance distributed GPU computing.

Academia AI research labs tend to be cost sensitive and often build in-house GPU server clusters utilizing NVIDIA 3090/4090s. These homegrown infrastructures are typically costly to maintain and manage, difficult to scale over time, and distracts current PhD research students with DevOps and IT infrastructure responsibilities. Additionally, these research labs utilize cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure for time critical AI training in order to meet research paper deadlines, and pay premium pricing for on-demand GPU, in many cases 2-3x the price offered by Theta EdgeCloud.

Academic institutions also gravitate towards using publicly available datasets for training open source AI models, leveraging for example, Meta’s latest Llama 3.1 large language model, Stable Diffusion’s genAI text-to-image, text-to-video models and more. They in turn share their contributions, fine-tuned models and open-source datasets with the wider research community. This research community driven, sharing philosophy matches Theta’s decentralized, open-source blockchain approach perfectly, with over 30,000 community members sharing their desktop and gaming PC GPUs forming the Theta edge network collective.

"The partnership between AIX Lab at Seoul Women's University and Theta Labs represents a significant step in democratizing AI research," said Professor Park. "As the Web3 ecosystem evolves, platforms like Theta EdgeCloud are bridging the gap between academic ambitions and practical constraints. Our work at AIX Lab, which spans healthcare to finance, demands substantial computational power that was previously cost-prohibitive. Theta's decentralized GPU network not only provides the scalability we need but also aligns with the open-source ethos of academia. By tapping into this shared resource, our students and academic team are able to focus on pushing the boundaries of AI applications without restraint.”

“We're thrilled to welcome Professor Minseo Park and the AIX Lab at Seoul Women's University to our growing network of academic partners," said Mitch Liu, co-founder and CEO of Theta Labs. "This collaboration exemplifies how DePIN platforms like Theta EdgeCloud with thousands of desktop NVIDIA 3090/4090 GPUs can deliver tangible benefits in the real world. By leveraging EdgeCloud, academic labs like AIX can compete head-to-head with commercial AI powerhouses, dramatically reducing costs while accelerating their research in big data analytics, machine learning, and deep learning. It's not just about technology; it's about democratizing AI research and ensuring that brilliant minds in academia have the tools they need to push the boundaries of innovation.”

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It’s well known that the Banque de France is a fan of wholesale CBDC and tokenization. It started running wholesale CBDC trials in 2020. In a speech yesterday, Governor François Villeroy de Galhau outlined his vision for a Capital Markets Union (CMU) and a Banking Union within Europe. An EU Unified Ledger is one of his strategies to improve payments.

He described the Unified Ledger as “a new public-private infrastructure built around a distributed ledger that would include a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), tokenised commercial bank money and tokenised financial instruments, and potentially the digital euro later on. This shared infrastructure would streamline transactions, reduce risks and costs, and thus foster CMU, while preserving the two-tier financial system.”

Rather than a “big-bang” migration he suggests a phased approach targeting specific market segments. Those that currently involve manual or domestic processes might be at the front of the queue. However, he envisions it expanding to a range of tokenized assets and cross border functionality.

While that’s on the wholesale side of payments, he also discussed retail payments. He noted that TIPS is a good backend solution, but that Europe lacks a common front-end payment solution such as in Brazil and India. He hopes that a digital euro might fit that role and envisions eventually integrating the digital euro with foreign faster payment systems.

Meanwhile, the Banque de France is one of the seven central banks involved in the BIS Project Agorá, the proposed unified ledger for cross border payments. Separately, the Banque de France’s DL3S wholesale CBDC platform is the only CBDC amongst three payment options in the European Central Bank’s current wholesale DLT settlement trials in central bank money. It was used to settle the first sovereign digital bond issued in EMEA by Slovenia.

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Japan’s big 3 banks, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho are involved with with a cross border payment system, Project Pax, that aims to use stablecoins instead of correspondent banks. However, in order to ensure that corporate customers can trigger trade payments in the conventional manner via their banks, Swift payment messages will be integrated with the stablecoin system, which is based on Progmat. Hence, the clients don’t touch the stablecoins.

Given the efficiencies of stablecoin payments, the aim is to support 24/7 payments to address the G20’s goals for faster, cheaper, more transparent cross border payments. The total market capitalization of stablecoins has reached $170 billion with cryptocurrency as the primary use case, although they are also used for P2P payments.

Meanwhile, Progmat is a DLT-based tokenization network founded by MUFG, in which Mizuho and SMBC are joint venture partners alongside other institutions. Additionally, there’s a Progmat Coin solution which is primarily used for trust-based stablecoins, which have ring-fenced assets.

Progmat has been working with Datachain for some time on interoperability solutions to connect the permissioned Progmat network that uses the Corda enterprise blockchain with various permissionless networks. Those include Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon and Cosmos. Additionally, Datachain founded TOKI a cross chain bridge that will run DeFi style liquidity pools for exchanging different currency and blockchain stablecoins. These solutions will be used as part of Project Pax, which is a joint venture between Progmat and Datachain.

Given the work that’s already been done, they aim to start testing a prototype ‘shortly’. The Pax members also plan to collaborate with other financial institutions in Japan and elsewhere, looking to go live by 2025.

Regarding the Swift integration, the messages will instruct payments to settle via blockchain networks. This is seen as addressing bank operational issues and removes the need for corporates to deal with the unfamiliar concepts of wallets and keys. Plus, it addresses AML and other compliance concerns.

Other stablecoin and DLT initiatives

Progmat already has several collaborations for stablecoin payments. Last year MUFG and DRW Cumberland started exploring JPY and USD stablecoins for institutional crypto settlement. This will involve the Japanese wallet provider Ginco issuing XJPY and XUSD stablecoins.

It also has a partnership with existing Japanese stablecoin JPYC and with Standage, a Japanese specialist in export settlement.

Stepping back, other DLT initiatives are targeting cross border payments. Of course, there is Ripple On Demand Liquidity solution that uses XRP as an intermediate currency and is used by remittance companies.

On the institutional side, JP Morgan, DBS Bank and Standard Chartered are involved in Partior that uses DLT to smooth the correspondent banking payment process. This enables banks that connect to the network to make cross border payments 24/7. While the client banks can make instant payments, the settlement banks still have to settle up between themselves, which they do in the conventional manner. Both SMBC and Mizuho have done some work with Partior.

More recently, the BIS launch Project Agorá which has similar goals to Partior. Its major advantage is the involvement of seven central banks that can provide wholesale CBDCs. This would sidestep Partior’s issue of the settlement banks needing to settle between themselves conventionally.

Project Pax is one of an ever expanding range of projects in the realm of stablecoins, tokenized deposits and DLT payments.

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