Opinion by: Felix Xu, co-founder of ARPA Network and Bella Protocol
AI has been a dominant narrative since 2024, but users and companies still cannot completely trust it. Whether it’s finances, personal data or healthcare decisions, hesitation around AI’s reliability and integrity remains high.
This growing AI trust deficit is now one of the most significant barriers to widespread adoption. Decentralized, privacy-preserving technologies are quickly being recognized as viable solutions that offer verifiability, transparency and stronger data protection without compromising AI’s growth.
The pervasive AI trust deficit
AI was the second most popular category occupying crypto mindshare in 2024, with over 16% investor interest. Startups and multinational companies have allocated considerable resources to AI to expand the technology to people’s finances, health, and every other aspect.
For example, the emerging DeFi x AI (DeFAI) sector shipped more than 7,000 projects with a peak market cap of $7 billion in early