Is it a good idea to hire an AI Agent as a personal tutor for learning, given the rapid rise of PNET?

Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

Welcome to a day of ecological revival on the Solana chain.

With Solana officially announcing the AI hackathon event, ai16z has rebounded and surpassed GOAT in market capitalization, and funds are starting to flow into AI Agent-related projects again.

If you take a closer look at the hackathon event's introduction, the goal of the event is very clear --- Build the best AI Agent products.

The official support implies that, to some extent, the broader environment will favor those AI Agents that can solve real problems or target specific directions in the coming period.

Such expectations may have already been priced in.

Today, a project called Principals Network, with its token $PNET (note it’s not PNUT the squirrel), saw its market cap rise from around 200k to 15M within 24 hours of the token launch. There has been some scattered discussion, but it remains outside the mainstream narrative.

The goal of this project is very clear: to create a decentralized education network using AI agents.

From a narrative perspective, this is very important.

Creating a personalized education assistant and private tutor using AI agents seems to be a first. Coupled with the support from the AI hackathon for discovering practical projects, the expectations for PNET have been further elevated.

We took a look at its design document and will share more information with everyone.

AI as a Personalized Private Tutor, with On-Chain Proof of Learning

Before diving into PNET, we need to understand the core problem it aims to solve.

Traditional online education platforms often face a contradiction between standardization and personalization: either they offer uniform course content or charge exorbitant one-on-one tutoring fees. In the realm of AI Agents, this problem seems to have found a new solution.

AI itself can become a personalized tutor.

The core design of PNET revolves around three key elements:

1. AI Teaching Agents

These are not simple Q&A machines but specially trained domain expert AIs; each agent focuses on a specific subject area, such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, or personal development. At the same time, they can understand the learner's cognitive level and create personalized learning paths.

AI continuously optimizes teaching strategies through ongoing interaction with learners, making the teaching process itself a form of training and tuning.

This functionality is integrated at the AI Engine layer, coordinated by the Headmaster module. (See the architecture diagram below)

1. Decentralized Knowledge Graph

This layer is built within Academies and connects knowledge points across various subject areas. It is continuously expanded and optimized through community contributions, helping AI agents understand the interconnections between knowledge.

This design provides learners with multidimensional knowledge exploration paths, supporting interdisciplinary learning and knowledge integration.

1. On-Chain Proof of Learning

This feature is built on the EDU Chain layer, recording every step of the learner's progress while generating verifiable skill proofs. Most importantly, upon completion, it will be combined with the $PNET token incentive mechanism, providing learners with additional external motivational rewards.

Theoretically, these three points can form a self-sustaining cycle: AI teaching agents acquire teaching content and related information through the knowledge graph, the learning process is recorded through on-chain proof, and feedback is provided to AI agents for teaching optimization; the knowledge graph is continuously enriched and validated during the learning process.

Delving into the project's architecture, we can see that PNET's core is a decentralized education network built on the Solana ecosystem, employing a three-layer design: AI Principals, Academy System, and EDU Chain.

The AI Principals layer is the core of the entire system, with specially trained AI Agents serving as personalized tutors. These AI Agents can customize learning paths based on the characteristics of learners and provide real-time tutoring and Q&A. The Academy System layer manages educational content and resources, constructing a dynamically evolving curriculum while coordinating interactions between learners and AI Principals. The bottom layer, EDU Chain, is built on Solana and primarily handles core functions such as educational certificate verification, credit management, and token incentives.

The more detailed division of labor in the above architecture can be summarized as follows:

Infrastructure Layer

1. EDU Chain: The underlying public chain infrastructure of the entire system
2. $PNET: The native token of the ecosystem, used for incentives and governance

Core Layer

1. AI Engine: The core engine responsible for intelligent teaching
2. Headmaster: The central scheduling module of the system
3. Partners: The partner access module

Subject Content Layer (Academies)

This layer is particularly interesting, encompassing multiple professional fields such as Personal Development, Artificial Intelligence, Trading, and Blockchain, among various in-circle and out-circle subject directions.

Currently, PNET has launched its testnet, but we have not yet seen the full scope of its product; the market's optimism about this project is more about the expected price in, but it is undeniable that this attempt to deeply integrate AI, Web3, and education represents an innovative direction for online education.

Potential Connection with Open Campus

The market cap of PNET skyrocketed from 200k to 15M within just 24 hours, and besides the innovative narrative of AI Agent education, there is a deeper reason ------ its potential connection with Open Campus.

Reviewing the project's documentation reveals that there is an ecological support relationship between Principals Network and Open Campus: the former, as a recipient of the Open Campus accelerator program, has confirmed that it will integrate the EDU Chain's SSO (Single Sign-On) and certification mechanism into its platform. This seemingly ordinary technical integration actually implies a larger imaginative space.

Open Campus, as Binance's important layout in the Web3 education field, received a strategic investment of $3.15 million from Binance Labs in 2023, which the market generally understood as Binance's optimism about the Web3 education track.

Through this relationship, PNET's valuation story seems to become more three-dimensional.

The project may no longer be just an educational innovation project riding the Solana AI wave, but could become an important node connecting the Binance ecosystem.

This dual-layered benefit may explain why funds are pouring into PNET. Investors seem to have started to buy into the background of a "Binance-affiliated Web3 education AI project."

Of course, whether this expectation can be fulfilled will depend on the project's subsequent actual progress.

However, one could argue that the best speculative space for a project is when its expectations are fully realized but not yet fulfilled; of course, for Degen, it is best if the expectations never come to fruition.