'Software is doing the buying now,' say five AI crypto builders

Most investors are comfortable buying a story. AIcrypto has run almost entirely on one. AI is the future, crypto is the rails, buy the intersection. That story pushed the sector to $22.2 billion in combined market capitalization as of September 10, according to CoinGecko, led by Bittensor, NEAR Protocol and Render. Now the sector has to answer a harder question. Who pays, and for what? To find out, TheStreet Roundtable put that question to five founders and executives, each building a different layer of the stack AI systems actually run on. Storage, data access, verification, coordination and inference. They answered on the record, including the parts that don't flatter them. Four other big names, most of them in decentralized compute, declined or would have duplicated the five below. The stack, at a glance LayerProjectTokenWhat the token actually gets paid forStorage Filecoin FIL Hosting data across independent providers, with proof of integrity Data access The Graph GRT Queries against indexed, structured blockchain data Verification OriginTrail TRAC Publishing knowledge to a tamper-evident, checkable record Coordination AI Rig Complex ARC Settling fees when an autonomous agent buys a service Inference & settlement NEAR Protocol NEAR Staked access to attested private inference; agent settlement None of these tokens is equity. Depending on the project, it is closer to a metered access pass, posted collateral, or a claim on network usage. Filecoin (FIL) Filecoin is the oldest project in this group, and its pitch starts with concentration. "Today's internet is centralized," said Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation. "The vast majority of the data behind the websites we use every day sits in data warehouses owned by just three companies. When one of them goes down, vast swaths of the web go down with it." The concentration is measurable. Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure hit $143 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and Amazon, Microsoft and Google took 28%, 20% and 15% of it, respectively, according to Synergy Research Group. Filecoin's network spreads copies of data across independent storage providers, who are paid in FIL while cryptographic proofs continuously verify nothing has been altered or lost. "Storage location is becoming one of the biggest bottlenecks for AI. The datasets are enormous, and moving them across the world to wherever your cloud provider happens to keep them is slow and expensive. That's data gravity," Belcher notes. Past a certain size, datasets stop moving and everything else migrates to them.