The Road to Revenue

The Spaces centers on Tig’s path from state-of-the-art (SOTA) proof to revenue and adoption. Host Evan and John address recent market concerns, explaining fundamentals have only improved and a price dip was likely driven by an early miner’s exit rather than insider knowledge. They clarify the halving’s mechanics and its practical impact lag due to a four-week lock on minted rewards. A major transparency step is the open-sourced SOTA benchmarking tool, enabling anyone—especially enterprises—to independently verify Tig algorithms against baselines. On revenue, Tig expects license sales where some clients may remain undisclosed until on-chain flows hit the foundation and trigger buybacks, reflecting corporate legal/bureaucratic timelines. Business development is led by Tig’s researchers, ensuring technical rigor in enterprise conversations. Tig’s model is a marketplace for algorithmic innovation: the protocol provides incentives and infrastructure, allowing global contributors (including future AI agents) to scale SOTA creation beyond the size of Tig’s team. Sectors include finance, cryptography, AI, and biology; Celo’s ZK-related challenges are live, with more sponsors in discussion. They plan to lower Uniswap pool fees (from a legacy 1%), with no liquidity pull surprises. An AMA is scheduled next week, and new challenges—hypergraph partitioning and non-convex optimization—signal a deeper push into AI.

TIG Community Call Summary

Participants and context

• Host: Evan (aka "Sparta"). Not a TIG team member; serves as community moderator/interviewer.
• Guest: John (TIG Labs/research lead). Technical authority and spokesperson for protocol and BD progress.
• Focus of this call: revenue path, enterprise traction, fundamentals vs. market price action, SOTA verification tooling, BD approach, token liquidity/fees, and upcoming AI-focused challenges. Also: AMA to be announced next week and community lottery winners.

Fundamentals vs. recent market price action

• Fundamentals unchanged or improving:
  • TIG recently achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Quadratic Knapsack Challenge, validating the core innovation pipeline.
  • Additional challenges being added (hypergraph partitioning live; non-convex optimization on testnet) signal expanding scope and momentum.
• Price decline explanation (non-fundamental):
  • Early mining distribution context: four early large miners accumulated material supply. Two remain aligned, one exited early months ago, and a fourth (unconfirmed, ~90% confidence) appears to have exited rapidly and without coordination.
  • No evidence of insider information; likely a non-fundamental exit (e.g., portfolio management/personal liquidity). The seller was not engaged with the protocol and reportedly has many positions.
  • Broader market weakness also contributed. Team views the move as unrelated to TIG’s technical or BD trajectory.

Emissions halving and supply dynamics

• What halving means:
  • Protocol emissions are cut in half on schedule (e.g., 100k to 50k per round), then remain fixed until the next halving (next slated for August 2027).
• Practical effect timeline:
  • Mining rewards have a four-week lock-up before transferability. Any reduction in miner sell-pressure from halving cannot manifest on-chain earlier than ~4 weeks after the event (though markets can price expectations sooner).

Open-sourced SOTA verification tool (benchmarking transparency)

• What was released:
  • TIG open-sourced its internal benchmarking harness so anyone can test TIG algorithms against state-of-the-art baselines independently.
• Why it matters:
  • Radical transparency: source for TIG algorithms is public; now the validation layer is too. There’s “nowhere to hide”—run tests locally or in your environment.
  • Enterprise diligence enabler: prospects can verify claimed performance gains on their hardware, against their baselines, without waiting on TIG to facilitate access.
• Contrast with opaque compute markets:
  • John noted shortcomings in some crowdsourced GPU networks (unreliable availability, poor interconnect/latency) that make them unsuitable for major workloads, often not evident from marketing claims. TIG’s model avoids such pitfalls by letting anyone validate algorithmic performance directly.

Revenue model, disclosure, and enterprise motion

• How revenue will work:
  • Enterprises license high-performance algorithms. Revenue flows to a foundation-controlled wallet; buybacks of TIG are funded from this revenue (observable on-chain).
• Disclosure constraints:
  • Many large enterprises require legal clearance and may prefer anonymity. Deals may become visible only when funds arrive on-chain and buybacks commence.
  • Apple/ARM analogy: ARM couldn’t market Apple’s use without Apple’s permission for years—expect similar patterns with TIG’s licensees.
• BD approach and why it’s researcher-led:
  • TIG is selling cutting-edge algorithms into highly technical buyers. Generic BD can’t credibly address technical depth (problem classes, complexity regimes, scaling limits, trade-offs).
  • TIG researchers who built the algorithms handle enterprise conversations, accelerating cycles and establishing credibility.
  • BD is active now; TIG is not waiting passively for inbound. Team avoids vanity/low-substance “partnership spamming.”

TIG’s product architecture and scalability

• TIG is an incentive layer, not a single-product software company:
  • The core product is the protocol that crowdsources algorithmic innovation. Algorithms are the emergent output of the incentive system.
  • This introduces a lag between protocol readiness and marketable outputs (SOTA algos), but it delivers unique scale: unlimited parallel R&D unconstrained by TIG headcount.
• AI agents as contributors:
  • Over time, more code contributions may come from AI agents than humans, accelerating throughput beyond any centralized R&D team.
• Challenge curation and anti-Sybil role:
  • TIG only lists known, important problems in science/technology (e.g., cryptography, finance, AI, simulations, biology). This helps prevent adversarially crafted challenges/backdoors and maintains integrity.
• Who brings challenges:
  • Any qualified party can propose; focus areas include finance, cryptography (e.g., ZK proofs), AI, and biology/medical applications. A publicly disclosed partner is contributing ZK-proof-related challenges; more sponsor-backed challenges are in discussion (names undisclosed pending permissions).

Why open SOTA algorithms still benefit enterprises

• The dataset advantage:
  • Algorithms are more valuable to those who own proprietary datasets. Even if an algorithm is open, firms with unique data extract outsized benefit.
  • Hence enterprises often want open innovation to move faster; they need the best algorithm to exist, not necessarily to be exclusive.

Case studies, markets, and vision

• Finance precedent: Renaissance Technologies/Medallion Fund transitioned to algorithmic methods as early as 1988, and the industry followed—illustrating how algorithmic advances transform entire sectors.
• Broader impact:
  • Apollo-era missions required dozens of critical algorithms; future space missions, drug discovery (non-convex optimization, docking, generative design), logistics, and AI training/inference all stand to benefit from faster/better algorithms.
  • TIG is explicitly ramping into AI-heavy domains now.

Protocol roadmap and recent technical updates

• Recent/near-term challenge status:
  • Hypergraph partitioning: live (recently launched).
  • Non-convex optimization: live on testnet; mainnet timing TBD.
• Expect a “next-level” AI-focused push and a major announcement soon (teased as forthcoming “alpha”).

Liquidity, fees, and operations

• Uniswap pool lock-up expiry and fee tier:
  • Background: The initial Uniswap pool was bootstrapped by third parties (early miners) at the maximum 1% fee tier. When the TIG Foundation added and locked liquidity for a year, it had to match that pool to avoid fragmentation.
  • Status: The foundation’s lock has now expired. They do not plan to withdraw liquidity. If any changes are made, they will be pre-announced.
  • Next step: Reduce the trading fee (move off 1%). This may involve a same-pool parameter change or migration to a new pool; either way, changes will be communicated in advance to avoid surprises.
• Miner reward lock:
  • Reminder: newly minted rewards are subject to a four-week lock before they can be sold/transferred.

Community and comms

• AMA next week:
  • An open Q&A will be scheduled; tough questions encouraged. Expect an announcement with date/time.
• Lottery winners for this call: ABS and Hamille (contact Evan via Twitter/Telegram/Discord to claim TIG tokens).

Key takeaways

• Fundamentals are strong and improving; recent price pressure was likely a non-fundamental large holder exit plus broad market weakness.
• TIG’s open SOTA benchmarking harness is now public, enabling no-trust-required validation of performance claims.
• Revenue will come via enterprise licenses; due to legal and confidentiality constraints, some deals will only be apparent when funds arrive on-chain and buybacks occur.
• BD is active and researcher-led; TIG avoids vanity partnerships and focuses on high-value, technically grounded engagements.
• TIG’s incentive architecture allows effectively unbounded scaling, including AI agent participation, across critical problem classes.
• Immediate operational improvements include lowering Uniswap fee tiers and continued challenge expansion into AI and biology.

Near-term expectations and actions

• Watch for the AMA announcement next week; prepare questions (tokenomics, deal structure, roadmap, challenge curation, enterprise pilots, etc.).
• Try the open-sourced SOTA benchmarking tool to validate algorithms locally.
• Track new challenges: hypergraph partitioning (live), non-convex optimization (testnet), and forthcoming AI-focused work.
• Monitor on-chain foundation wallet activity for signals of licensing revenue and buybacks.