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Happy 2020: An Important Update from the Raven Team

Raven Protocol
RavenProtocol
Published in
6 min readJan 11, 2020

Dear Raven Protocol Community,

2019 was an important year of building and strengthening the AI+Blockchain ecosystem. Looking back over the past year, the team at Raven is proud of our accomplishments. We made a ton of real progress in building out the foundational layers of the protocol in a short amount of time.

As we are building a distribution framework from scratch, we needed to first complete the foundational implementations. This felt a lot like building an operating system from scratch. Who remembers the importance of these building blocks when you wrote your own Operating System in Computer Science class? Things we take for granted such as file systems, memory management, and scheduling had to be built from scratch. We needed to build the foundational implementations of the distribution framework. Both the Raven team and the community executed on that successfully.

There were challenges along the way as well. Please don’t think that ground-breaking technology is easy and can be built over night. Many companies burned through their runway and shut down. The market is especially tough and we are fighting every single day to push through the noise. We made very tough decisions to stay lean so that we can execute for a long time.

Before jumping into 2020, let’s have a look at what we accomplished in 2019.

Community Support

We went from being an unknown project (unless you were working specifically in AI/ML frameworks) to being recognized by industry leaders, research groups, influencers, and even book publishers. Only a few people in the world are crazy enough to attempt to increase the speed of AI training. We’re on to something big and this is a very rare opportunity.

One of our favorite memes created by Kamal (one of our earliest community supporters). It’s our favorite because it’s true.

Customer Development

Talking to real people who will be using our product is one of our key cultural values. The blockchain industry is filled with beautifully written white-papers that work on technically challenging problems. We can’t push this industry further without real adoption of the technology that is built.

  • One advantage we have is that we’ve been in the space doing AI/ML training for so long that the problem is super close to our heart.
  • The challenge we had in 2019 was how to work closely with other customers that had the same problem as us. It took a lot of meetings and demos, but we have support from fast growing companies in China, Africa, and India. They want to make sure they’re the first to utilize our fast AI training.
  • It is clear that we have product-market fit. Companies are increasingly working with larger and larger datasets. Their compute costs are rising with cloud services and it could take them weeks to train a model.
  • The value proposition at Raven Protocol is to perform AI training where speed is the key. Bringing each training run down to a few hours will allow companies to iterate incredibly fast. They see this as a competitive advantage.
  • Thus, VCs and funds did deep DD on the tech/project/team and invested in our strategic and private sale.

Foundational Implementations

As laid out in our 2019 roadmap, the major part of our development was to focus on foundational layers of the protocol. We completed all of our stated milestones and even had our technology reviewed by some of the best technical people in the industry that really understand what we’re building.

  • Development of functions such as Back-Propagation (Back-prop) and several activation functions that are used to train vanilla Neural Network models have been completed
  • Convolution Layer implementation
  • RNN unit implementation
  • Launch of RAVEN utility token on Binance Chain and accidentally invented the IDO: https://community.binance.org/topic/860/12-things-you-should-know-about-idos
  • Technical review of Raven Protocol by Crypto Calibur dives into the latest advancements we’ve shared with them.
  • Overview and technology breakdown from Grand Nagus
  • We have purposely not open-sourced any parts of the code yet. We will. We’re just taking measures right now to safeguard our technology and distribution approaches.

2020 and beyond

With all the progress we made in 2019, we are ready to leverage all the work we’ve done as building blocks in 2020 and beyond.

Development

  • Open-sourcing the first set of Function Implementation on Github
  • Laying the foundation for a group of open-source contributors around the world, and kick-starting the evangelist community
  • Strengthening the CNN and RNN implementation
  • Staking and launching a liquidity pool (hint: Thorchain team has done amazing work)
  • Opening a dev center in Bangalore, India

Business

  • We have partnerships in place. As mentioned in an AMA, we can’t announce it yet, but we’re working with companies on very interesting use-cases like building trust models in Africa and chain analysis in China.
  • We will start doing active pilots after initial tests are done on the test net.
  • 3 companies have agreed to be our Pilot customers
  • We are actively speaking with exchanges to expand the reach and utility of RAVEN
  • We are working closely with research groups and media outlets who are truly excited about the pure technology of Raven. Expect things coming up on Crypto Differ, Stacking Ventures, and Good Audience.

Please imagine the kind of value we can unlock as we build case studies with pilot customers. Power that was once typically only in the hands of giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc., will now be in the hands of the AI community. We are part of a rare opportunity to enable innovations unimaginable. And of all this starts with the core problem of speeding up AI training. 2020 will be an exciting and big year. Thank you to all of our supporters and community members. We wouldn’t have come so far without you. Let’s keep the momentum going!

Want to talk to the founders of Raven?
Drop us an email: founders@ravenprotocol.com

Join us on Telegram: t.me/ravenprotocol
Join Official Announcements: t.me/raven_announcements
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/raven_protocol
Get RAVEN on Binance DEX: binance.org/en/trade/RAVEN-F66_BNB

Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Technology

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Raven Protocol
RavenProtocol

Written by Raven Protocol

1.1K Followers
Editor for

www.RavenProtocol.com is a decentralized and distributed deep-learning training protocol. Providing cost-efficient and faster training of deep neural networks.

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