iExec Protocol: The Decentralized Market for AI

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a significant moment in the AI space, propelling AI from a relative niche tech subsector into the global spotlight.

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a significant moment in the AI space, propelling AI from a relative niche tech subsector into the global spotlight. OpenAI's conversational AI application quickly gained traction all around the world, amassing one million users within just five days of its public release. This placed ChatGPT as one of the fastest-growing applications of all time, only behind Meta's Threads.

ChatGPT remains one of the fastest applications to reach a million users

ChatGPT's intuitive user interface democratized access to sophisticated AI capabilities, empowering anyone and everyone to generate content, solve problems, and automate their daily lives. What began as a viral sensation evolved into a technological revolution, with their user base expanding to approximately 400 million weekly active users today.

Alongside this adoption, tech giants accelerated their AI development and deployment, venture capital raced into AI startups, and organizations across sectors scrambled to push for the integration of AI into their operations and products.

The cryptocurrency sector was no exception, and sought to integrate AI and crypto. Some common use cases included the decentralization of a currently highly centralized AI industry, the provision for decentralized compute, which became a highly sought-after commodity, and projects focusing on data privacy in the AI age.

One such crypto project building on the intersection of AI and Crypto is iExec.

iExec is focused on two main products: the iExec Protocol and iExec tools. The iExec Protocol is a decentralized resource marketplace to facilitate the provision of valuable resources to their respective users at a fair price, while the iExec Tools are a suite of tools to enable the processing and monetization of data while protecting their data’s privacy. In short, iExec is a one-stop shop for blockchain-based cloud computing.

Let’s dive into how this works.

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What Is iExec?

The iExec protocol is an open-source, decentralized project built on the Ethereum blockchain. The protocol was founded in October 2016 by Giles Fedark and Haiwu He in Lyon, France. The project sought to provide decentralized cloud computing services, competing against the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The Trust Layer for DePIN and AI:

Today, iExec enables confidential computing and trusted off-chain execution with its decentralized TEE-based CPU and GPU infrastructure.

Confidential Computing and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs)

Further supporting the iExec marketplace is iExec’s trusted execution environments (TEEs). TEEs are an isolated environment within a computer as a form of “safe space” for sensitive information or operations. This protects applications being executed and data being processed from even privileged access users, ensuring that only authorized code can run within this environment.

This is enabled through Intel’s Software Guard Extension (SGX), which utilizes a special portion of the computer’s memory, known as the “enclave”. Within the enclave, data is completely unreadable and unalterable from the outside, hence preventing any form of data tampering and unauthorized data access.

Beyond protecting the execution and the dataset used, the result can also be encrypted, fully completing the end-to-end flow.

In late 2024, iExec also integrated Intel’s (Trust Domain Extensions) TDX into its workflow. Much like the SGX, it seeks to enhance security and privacy. Instead of enclaves, TDX uses an isolated virtual machine to conceal its data and executions.

Within TDX, developers no longer have to rewrite their code for compatibility with the original SGX, greatly improving the ease of integration and compatibility with other leading AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

iExec Tools

iExec also provides a suite of tools to support the developers of decentralized applications.

Today, the iExec ecosystem has expanded to include more than 50 different partners, industry leaders such as Nvidia and Microsoft, accelerators, institutions and projects building on iExec across AI, DeFi, DePIN, payments and more.

The RLC Token

The majority of the tokens were sold in their ICO at 69% of the token supply, with the remaining distributed across founders and the team, research & development, and future development of the project.

The main use case of the token is to serve as a medium of exchange within the iExec ecosystem. The token is used to pay for services on the iExec marketplace while also serving as a reward token for users on the platform.

RLC and The iExec Ecosystem Fund

In 2025, iExec announced the launch of a 1,000,000 RLC Ecosystem Fund, focusing on the development of projects that further blockchain technology, confidential AI and