SingularityNET, a provider of decentralized AI technology, announced today the successful integration of PayPal payments into their blockchain-based artificial intelligence (AI) marketplace.
The PayPal integration was first announced during the initial SingularityNET V2 beta rollout in September. By making its AI marketplace easily accessible to PayPal’s 286 million users, SingularityNET opens its doors to a much wider scope of customers.
Earlier versions of SingularityNET’s marketplace required customers to pay for AI services offered by AI agents in the network directly using the native AGI utility token. With this update, the marketplace is now more friendly to customers who have no experience with cryptocurrency.
“The integration of PayPal into the SingularityNET marketplace is a big and important step toward getting wider adoption for the network’s AI services. Going forward you’re going to see more integrations like this — we want to give various classes of users a variety of ways to secure AI services with fiat currencies or with other cryptocurrencies, and even via more creative mechanisms like multi-party barter exchange.”
– SingularityNET’s Chief AI Officer, Cassio Pennachin
Native AGI Token Usage
Users will be able to purchase AI services from the SingularityNET platform using funds in their PayPal accounts (which may have arrived there via their credit card or bank account or PayPal transfers). On the back end, the funds from the user’s PayPal account are automatically converted into the AGI utility tokens required by AI agents providing services on SingularityNET.
The AGI cryptocurrency needed for the transaction to complete is then transferred to the payment channel set up between the user and the AI agent on the platform. This cryptographic token processing happens entirely behind the scenes, the end-user doesn’t need to see any AGI tokens at all; they simply pay for AI services from an AI agent on the marketplace with PayPal, and receive the services requested.
“Our AGI token is used for internal economic exchange between AI agents in the SingularityNET, because it’s specially designed to encourage the AIs in the network to cooperate together in a beneficial ‘economy of minds’ that has its own emergent overall intelligence. But it’s also important for this AGI token powered network to interoperate richly with the rest of the world economy; otherwise, it won’t get the adoption it needs to grow and realize its potential for intelligence.”
– SingularityNET CEO, Dr. Ben Goertzel
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