Can Crypto Find Its Scale.AI Moment?
Meta just invested $14.8 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, one of the largest bets on AI infrastructure to date. The company’s data-labeling infrastructure powers everything from autonomous vehicles to AI copilots. But what if crypto had its own version of Scale.AI? Enter Sapien.io. The Web3-native data engine is designed to crowdsource human intelligence for training AI models, and it might be arriving just in time.
Founded by Trevor Koverko, a former professional hockey player and founder of security token pioneer Polymath, Sapien.io is positioning itself at the intersection of decentralized networks and artificial intelligence. With a Token Generation Event (TGE) expected within a month, the company is making a timely case for why AI infrastructure in crypto is more than just hype.
Who Is Behind Sapien.io?
Sapien.io is led by CEO Rowan Stone, a former Director of Onchain Business Development at Coinbase and one of the co-creators of Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase. Stone has spent years working at the intersection of onchain infrastructure and user adoption, giving him a grounded view of how decentralized protocols can scale beyond speculation. His leadership reflects Sapien’s intent to plug directly into the Web3 stack with practical, infrastructure-first solutions.
The company’s co-founder, Trevor Koverko, is no stranger to early adoption cycles. A former professional hockey player turned entrepreneur, Koverko previously founded Polymath, one of the first platforms to explore regulated tokenized securities. His background spans both early-stage crypto innovation and capital markets. While Stone handles the day-to-day operational leadership, Koverko remains instrumental in shaping Sapien’s long-term vision and external narrative, particularly around decentralization, incentives, and trust in AI systems.
“AI is one of the greatest transformations in technology since the internet,” Koverko said in a Beluga interview. “But it is only as smart as the data it is trained on. Sapien wants to make sure that dataset is global, diverse and economically inclusive.”
Joining Koverko is an executive from Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum L2 network, giving Sapien.io an inside track to real-world Web3 deployment. The founding team brings both startup and protocol experience, which may be critical as the company scales its contributor base.
What Does Sapien.io Actually Do?
Sapien.io enables users to train AI models and earn token rewards in return. Unlike centralized data labeling platforms, Sapien operates in a decentralized manner, using token incentives to scale a global workforce.
A user logs in, completes a task that may involve labeling data, verifying outputs, or even ranking AI responses. They are rewarded in Sapien tokens, which will be launched in the upcoming TGE. The model is similar to how Bitcoin bootstrapped a network of miners or how Helium tried to build a decentralized wireless network, only this time it is a decentralized data workforce.
The company describes its mission as a way to create “Reputation-Based AI.” Each contributor builds a score that reflects the accuracy and consistency of their training efforts. Over time, this reputation score feeds into the value of the model itself.
More detail is available in their recent post: Sapien: Train AI, Earn Rewards
Why Now? And Why It Matters
The timing of Sapien’s TGE appears intentional. Interest in AI is at an all-time high, and the infrastructure to support it is becoming a strategic asset. With companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta relying on high-quality human-labeled datasets, the question is not whether this work needs to be done but who gets paid to do it.
Sapien argues that crowd-sourced labor and decentralized quality control can be a fairer and more scalable solution than centralized vendors. By embedding a native token into the ecosystem, it is betting on the same incentive mechanics that powered early crypto networks.
What makes this different from other crypto-AI projects is that Sapien is not trying to be the AI. It wants to feed the AI, acting as the trust layer between models and the humans that train them.
How It Compares to Scale.AI
While Scale.AI built billion-dollar infrastructure by selling labeled data to enterprises and governments, Sapien flips the model by building a decentralized contributor economy. Scale’s value comes from partnerships and volume. Sapien’s value comes from decentralization and transparency.
The analogy is not perfect. Scale is centralized and heavily enterprise-focused. Sapien is community-driven and tokenized. But both operate on the belief that the future of AI depends on how well we train it. In that sense, Sapien is attempting to offer crypto’s response to the data bottleneck that defines AI’s current limits.
With Meta acquiring Scale, and companies rushing to build “sovereign AI” stacks, a protocol like Sapien could become a strategic part of the Web3 AI infrastructure.
Final Outlook
Sapien.io is not the first company to try merging Web3 with AI. But it is one of the few trying to do it at the infrastructure layer, instead of launching another chatbot. That matters.
If crypto is to remain relevant in the next tech cycle, it must plug into real-world data and offer alternatives to centralized monopolies. Sapien’s model is rough around the edges, but if it gains traction, it could set a precedent for how decentralized protocols support the AI supply chain.
With its TGE around the corner and a clear narrative linking it to the biggest news in tech (Meta’s acquisition of Scale), Sapien is one to watch.
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This author is an independent contributor publishing via our business blogging program. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYO
