On November 14, 2019, SingularityNET Foundation announced its partnership and integration with Paypal within its decentralized Ai marketplace.

Ben Goertzel, Chief Scientist and CEO of SingularityNET, spoke excitedly about this on stage at Blockshow Asia 2019.

He said, “We are in the belief, from talking to many different potential users of Ai services, that this should allow us to drive utilization of services much more effectively and rapidly than has happened before. We need to grow traction on the network, thus this serves as a gateway to get more and more people into using our network.”

SingularityNET is one of the very few tech companies that use the powerful combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology, offering Ai services to enterprises in a decentralized framework. Both Ai and blockchain enact upon data in a unique way. Thus when combined, they are able to get data to a whole new level, providing insights that are deeper and more accurate than ever before. This makes the combination perfect to use for managing huge databases.

As more and more industries realize the potential and power of decentralized Ai technology, numerous organizations are able to upgrade their operational systems for enhanced efficiency and cost-effectiveness, be it supply-chain logistics, financial security, media royalties or healthcare records. This has been key to the growth of platforms like SingularityNET.

SingularityNET leverages on a full-stack, decentralized Ai-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform, and has secured partnerships with big companies such as Domino’s Pizza. During their early iterations, they have been using AGI as the proprietary cryptocurrency token for collecting payments for their Ai services.

According to Ben Goertzel, a major barrier they have been facing to adoption of their services is that a lot of companies that need Ai services are not into cryptocurrency. They do not have an ethereum wallet, and are not interested in dealing with setting up a connection between their bank account and a cryptocurrency exchange. Yet they do need Ai services.

Hence, they prefer going to AWS or Google Cloud, as these solutions provide them the feature to pay for Ai services with their credit card, without any involvement with the crypto ecosystem. Even if in principle they like the idea of decentralized Ai, it may just be too much of a pain for them in practice to deal with crypto payments to try Ai services. This has been an impediment for these companies to use what SingularityNET platform has been offering.

Thus the motive of this newfound Paypal implementation is to make it easier for these companies to get into the SingularityNet ecosystem, even if they are not involved in the crypto world.

The way the interface works is, if a customer has a Paypal account, they can use the money in their Paypal wallet to buy services on the SingularityNet network, using the fixed exchange rate to convert their fiat currency into AGI tokens. The system is not intended to be a cryptocurrency exchange mechanism. It is rather a way to buy services on the network using fiat currency from one’s Paypal wallet. Customers thus do not necessarily require any experience with cryptocurrency to be able to use SingularityNET platform anymore.

Unification of fiat currency with the cryptocurrency world was observed to be an evident trend at BlockShow Asia 2019.