Artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency are two of the most exciting and rapidly-evolving technologies of our time. The intersection of crypto and AI is starting to gain traction, with a number of AI-related cryptocurrencies emerging in recent years. In the past number of months in particular, AI cryptocurrencies have received increased attention. In this article, we'll take a closer look at some of the top AI cryptocurrencies currently in the market. SingularityNET is a decentralized marketplace for AI services.

When Numerai launched in December 2015, it was a one page website that looked like a Kaggle data science competition except everything was black and more cinematic. We didn't want it to look like any other hedge fund in the world -- because we weren't. We spent all this time on design and shooting videos (like this and this), and it seemed like a big distraction. The core idea of Numerai was to give away all of our data for free, and let anyone train machine learning algorithms on it and submit predictions to our hedge fund. This was a very counterintuitive idea.

Numerai is a hedge fund that's using technology to create an unprecedented network effect, and transform the way money is managed. Crowdsourced investment strategies are many and varied, but Numerai crowdsources machine intelligence in a totally unique way by supplying its network of data scientists with encrypted data on which to test their machine learning models, thus removing any bias attached to the application of the algorithms. These models are entered into a monthly tournament and the best ones receive a pay-out. This was previously done using Bitcoin (because it was efficient and more anonymous than PayPal), but more recently Numerai launched its own token, Numeraire (NMR), on Ethereum, the public blockchain which has spawned a multitude of trustless, decentralized applications. The aim of the token was to create more value for Numerai's growing network of scientists, and further align them with the collaborative goals of the project.

Numerai, a hedge fund created by South African developer Richard Craib, has begun to incentivize its anonymous data scientists with Ethereum's native token Ether instead of Bitcoin. Earlier this week, Numerai migrated its platform and deployed the Numeraire smart contract to the Ethereum network, sending 1.2 mln tokens to 19,000 data scientists globally. However, because the Numeraire token and its smart contract are launched on top of the Ethereum network, the hedge fund struggled to create a practical and compatible way of incentivizing its data scientists. Ether, the native token of Ethereum, is compatible with the tokens of all decentralized applications launched on top of the Blockchain, which is why it is used as a currency peg for investors participating in initial coin offerings (ICOs).

With performance falling, investors fleeing and offices closing, hedge funds had a rough 2016. But San Francisco-based Numerai was just getting started. Instead of relying on the genius of a single person or small team, the firm uses encrypted data sets to crowdsource stock market prediction models built with artificial intelligence from 12,000 anonymous data scientists worldwide who compete to win bitcoin. And if that flew over your head, the main takeaways are that this hedge fund has orders of magnitude more data scientists trying to improve its investing strategy than the biggest name hedge funds today, and what makes the firm possible is a confluence of technologies that didn't even exist a few years ago -- primarily in cryptography and artificial intelligence. Now the one-year-old company, founded by 29-year-old South African Richard Craib (a Forbes 30 Under 30 designee) and funded by the likes of Union Square Ventures, is launching its own cryptocurrency, the Numeraire. It is the first virtual currency issued by a hedge fund and one of the first released by a company (rather than a group of developers or a non-profit).

Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures "the essence of the evolutionary spirit." A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders from joining the company next door. The big bucks lie in finding market inefficiencies no one else can, succeeding at the expense of others. But Richard Craib wants to change that.

With performance falling, investors fleeing and offices closing, hedge funds had a rough 2016. But San Francisco-based Numerai was just getting started. Instead of relying on the genius of a single person or small team, the firm uses encrypted data sets to crowdsource stock market prediction models built with artificial intelligence from 12,000 anonymous data scientists worldwide who compete to win bitcoin. And if that flew over your head, the main takeaways are that this hedge fund has orders of magnitude more data scientists trying to improve its investing strategy than the biggest name hedge funds today, and what makes the firm possible is a confluence of technologies that didn't even exist a few years ago -- primarily in cryptography and artificial intelligence. Now the one-year-old company, founded by 29-year-old South African Richard Craib (a Forbes 30 Under 30 designee) and funded by the likes of Union Square Ventures, is launching its own cryptocurrency, the Numeraire. It is the first virtual currency issued by a hedge fund and one of the first released by a company (rather than a group of developers or a non-profit).

Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures "the essence of the evolutionary spirit." A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders from joining the company next door. The big bucks lie in finding market inefficiencies no one else can, succeeding at the expense of others. But Richard Craib wants to change that.