The South Korean cryptocurrency market has reached an important moment — the leading decentralized AI project FLock has officially landed on the two major exchanges, Upbit and Bithumb. On its first day of listing, after the announcement of its launch in Korea, FLock's price surged by 70%, and the market response was enthusiastic. More noteworthy is that the Flock Foundation simultaneously announced the staking of 10 million FLOCK tokens, with a lock-up period of 365 days. This move is equivalent to the project party actively implementing a one-year lock-up, directly conveying a firm belief in long-term value to the market.
Currently, FLock has become the lowest market capitalization asset in the KRW trading zones of Upbit and Bithumb, indicating its potential growth space is significantly higher than that of other projects in the same track. Meanwhile, community participation continues to rise: the staking volume on the gmFLock platform has exceeded 40 million tokens, accounting for more than 21% of the total circulating supply of FLOCK, with an average staking period of 268 days (the upper limit is 365 days), reflecting holders' high recognition of the project's development. For miners and large holders, this is also a significant positive.
Technological breakthrough: The strategic cooperation with Alibaba Cloud reshapes the boundaries of the AI ecosystem
The news of FLock's strategic cooperation with Alibaba Cloud has caused a stir in the industry. As the first project to achieve deep synergy between decentralized AI (DeAI) and centralized AI (CeAI), the technical integration of FLock and Alibaba Cloud's open-source large language model Qwen is of milestone significance.
The cooperation focuses on three core directions:
1. Infrastructure integration: Combining Alibaba Cloud's computing power advantage with FLock's distributed training technology to develop vertical and general AI models, solving the data silo problem in traditional AI development;
2. Innovations in privacy protection: By combining federated learning and blockchain technology, a training environment with clear data sovereignty and privacy security is constructed. For example, enterprises in sensitive areas such as healthcare and finance can participate in model co-construction without sharing raw data;
3. Ecological synergy: Creating a hybrid AI ecosystem that combines centralized and decentralized architectures, providing developers with a more flexible toolchain.
This cooperation marks the recognition of FLock's technological route by the mainstream AI industry. According to CB Insights data, FLock is the only DeAI project selected in the global top 100 AI list for 2025, and it is also included in Grayscale's key observation list. Its technical barriers have received dual endorsements from traditional capital and crypto capital.
On-chain implementation: FLock model replaces Claude to connect to Base MCP
At the application layer of blockchain, FLock's collaboration with Base, a chain under Coinbase, further verifies its technological practicality. Base has announced the adoption of FLock's Web3 Agent model to replace the original centralized AI service Claude, becoming the core component of its MCP (on-chain interaction protocol). This upgrade addresses two key pain points:
Privacy protection: User data is processed locally throughout, avoiding uploads to third-party servers. For example, DeFi trading strategies or wallet management instructions can be executed entirely autonomously;
Operational efficiency: Automating complex operations such as smart contract deployment and gas fee optimization through AI agents. Practical testing shows that on-chain interaction speed has improved by over 50%.
Currently, FLock's Web3 Agent supports 80% of common interaction scenarios on the Base chain, allowing developers to quickly integrate AI functionality by calling its API. This case proves that the FLock model can not only serve decentralized training needs but also directly empower the practical process of public chain ecosystems.
Community-driven DeAI infrastructure: From training to ownership revolution
The core value of FLock lies in restructuring the AI development paradigm. As the first distributed training platform that integrates federated learning and blockchain, its technical architecture includes three major components:
AI Arena: A model competition arena where developers optimize algorithms through adversarial training, with winning models receiving token incentives;
FL Alliance: Privacy collaboration alliance, where enterprises or individuals contribute data features (rather than raw data) to participate in model iteration, and profits are distributed based on contributions;
Moonbase: A decentralized model hosting platform that supports model fine-tuning and inference services, where nodes contributing computing power share profits based on service volume.
This design makes FLock fundamentally different from traditional AI platforms in terms of data sovereignty, model ownership, and profit distribution. For instance, a medical research institution can collaborate with other institutions to train diagnostic models through FL Alliance without sharing patient data throughout the process. The final model ownership is jointly held by the participants and can be commercialized through Moonbase.
Dual advantages of token economics and market positioning
The economic model of the FLOCK token is closely tied to ecological development:
Staking rewards: Currently, the annualized yield of gmFLock reaches 18%, attracting long-term capital lock-up (over 35% of the 40 million staking volume is from institutions);
Governance weight: Stakers enjoy voting rights on model training direction, such as deciding whether to prioritize the development of financial or gaming AI tools;
Scarcity support: The project party's tens of millions in staking reduces market circulation, combined with new demand from exchanges (the daily trading volume of the Upbit/Bithumb KRW trading pairs has exceeded $2 million), the supply-demand structure continues to optimize.
From an industry perspective, FLock's competitors, such as Bittensor (TAO), have a market capitalization exceeding $5 billion, while FLock's current market capitalization is less than 1/10 of that. Considering its liquidity advantage on Korean exchanges, technological synergy with Alibaba Cloud, and the practical case on the Base chain, the valuation gap is expected to narrow rapidly.
Strategic value from an institutional perspective
FLock's unique positioning makes it a scarce asset in the intersection of Web3 and AI:
The Ethereum Foundation has listed it as a key case of 'Blockchain + AI';
CoinBase Ventures has marked FLock as the 'only DeAI training network' in its 2025 industry map;
In terms of academic influence, FLock is the first Web3 project to be showcased at top academic conferences such as the Royal Society and Web Summit, with its technical paper included in the WWW Conference.
These endorsements not only enhance the project's credibility but also mean that FLock has taken the lead in standard-setting. As regulations such as the EU's AI Act tighten data privacy requirements, FLock's compliance design may become an accelerator for its scaled expansion.
FLock's recent actions — exchange listings, tens of millions in staking, and partnerships with giants — have formed a coherent value transmission chain. For investors, the resonance between its short-term liquidity increase and long-term technological dividends has emerged. In the context of the certainty of the integration of AI and blockchain, FLock's distributed training architecture, validated commercial cooperation cases, and active community governance are defining a brand new asset class.
