The project

C ortex’s main mission is to provide the state-of-the-art machine-learning models on the blockchain in which users can infer using smart contracts on the Cortex blockchain.

One of Cortex’s goals also includes implementing a machine-learning platform that allows users to post tasks on the platform, submit AI Dapps (Artificial Intelligence Decentralized Applications).

The blockchain wants to make AI consensus available for contracts. Traditional EVM is not able to run a smart contract on full nodes with complex inference computation since the computational load is too heavy on CPU for a full node. Applications computing with AI cannot develop on existing smart contracts. The Cortex Virtual Machine(CVM) enables those inference instructions running on GPU/FPGA and the fee for a contract using those inference instruction set is designed for GPU / FPGA.

Cortex, focusing on the capacity expansion and model storage of smart contract computing, allows more progress to be made for developers within the ecosystem.

Token Model

The Cortex blockchain will operate in an Autonomous AI self-governed system and serve as a model zoo on blockchain where more than 50% of the Cortex tokens come from mining.

Similar to Ethereum’s Gas mechanism, “Endorphins” are used to execute the AI contract and to reward the miners who help package the block on the full node and also to the model providers.

Storage fees are charged to ensure better quality models are submitted and to prevent storing attacks.

You can refer to our whitepaper for a more in-depth description of the token model.

The Team

Chen Ziqi — Founder & CEO

B.E. in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University. M.S. in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and M.S. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ziqi has experience and achievements in machine learning and various algorithm application. He has a solid understanding and first-hand experience in mining, digital wallets, consensus algorithms, public blockchain ecosystem.

Wang Weiyang — Founder & CTO

B.E. in Aerospace Engineering and minor in Economics from Tsinghua University. M.S. in Statistics from the University of Chicago.

Weiyang was co-advised by Prof. Peter McCullagh, Logistic Regression inventor winning 1990 COPSS Presidents’ Award. He is an expert in OCR, image classification, and NLP with deep learning. He had won the silver medal winner with Top 1% grade in the Kaggle Contest and the Awesome MXNet projects.

Yan Xiao — The Chief Engineer of Deep Learning

National Olympiad in Informatics(NOI) winner to be a recommended student enrolling in Tsinghua University. B.E. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University. Currently 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Tsinghua University.

Xiao is proficient in OI coding competition, research, and development in CUDA GPU, FPGA hardware programming, cryptography.

Yang Yang — The Chief Engineer of Blockchain

B.E. in Computer Science from the Dalian University of Technology, and M.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

Yang has excellent achievements and a strong understanding of distributed databases and Hyperledger/EEA.

Early Backers & Supporters

Cortex has teamed up with well-known strategic partners and top crypto funds like Bitmain, FBG Capital, Danhua Capital, and ZhenFund.

We are working closely with top institutions like Tsinghua University and the University of California — Berkley. We are honored to have world-renowned cryptologist and 2015 Turing Award winner, Dr. Whitfield Diffie, to join us as our academic advisor.