Heurist Releases Whitepaper and 2025 Roadmap

Heurist
5 min readOct 24, 2024

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We’re delighted to announce the release of the Heurist whitepaper, marking a big milestone in our journey to revolutionize decentralized AI infrastructure. The whitepaper outlines our vision for a decentralized AI cloud, brining serverless capabilities and elastic scaling to DePIN. For those eager to dive in, you can find the details in our recent announcement.

While the whitepaper presents an exciting technical framework for Heurist’s future, we understand that its complexity might seem overwhelming at first glance. That’s why we’re sharing our roadmap, breaking down how we’ll bring this vision to life through clear, actionable milestones.

Q4 2024

Token Generation Event (TGE)

The launch of HEU token will be a crucial experiment in our dynamic emission mechanism. By introducing a tradable token, we’ll be able to observe how our supply/demand-based emission system performs under real-world conditions, including market price fluctuations. This data will be invaluable for tuning our long-term emission strategy.
Read the Tokenomics.

Season 1 Mining Airdrop

We’re celebrating our early community with an airdrop to 11k addresses, consisting of season 1 miners and some Zealy campaign participants. This reflects our commitment to building a truly community-owned ecosystem from day one.

API Key Payment System

We’re implementing our pay-by-developer model, allowing AI developers to acquire API keys with onchain payments with ETH/USDC/HEU tokens. This system will minimize onboarding friction and establish our first revenue streams.

Q1 2025

Staking and Voting

The introduction of stHEU will enable token holders to participate in governance and vote for AI models. This voting mechanism will directly influence resource allocation, marking our first step toward onchain elastic resource management.

Compute Reservoir Governance

Our dynamic emission mechanism means the difference between maximum and actual emission rates will accumulate in the Compute Reservoir. The community will gain control over these funds, and potential use cases include: staking rewards, fund grants, convert to ETH/stablecoins for future compute expenses, or even burn tokens.

Season 2 Mining Airdrop

Season 2 mining rewards will follow a 3-month cliff after TGE.

Season 3 Mining Launch

Some time after TGE, we plan to launch Season 3 mining, incorporating learnings from previous seasons. Season 3 emission mechanisms will be closer to the mainnet continuous emission mechanisms.

ZK Chain Testnet

We’ll launch community campaigns to test our Layer 2 chain, inviting users to experience the low-fee transactions and to test the smart contracts.

Q2 2025

ZK Chain Mainnet

The migration of our emission and payment systems to our own chain will bring remarkable benefits: dramatically lower fees, an isolated execution environment, and seamless interoperability with ZKSync Era and other ZK chains.

Pay-by-User System

We’re introducing direct, flexible payment options for end-users from frontends (apps). For example, if you want to chat with an AI agent for just 10 minutes or generate a single video, you don’t need to pay a monthly subscription like Web2 platforms. Pay directly from your crypto wallet, with fees flowing straight to the compute provider. This system will even enable autonomous AI agents to manage their own compute payments.

V2 Orchestration System

A major upgrade to our compute infrastructure will expand beyond LLM and image generation to support any GPU-intensive task, including video generation, Visual Language Models (VLM), or the latest AI innovations from Hugging Face.

Q3 2025

Season 3 Mining Airdrop

Season 3 mining will be the last snapshot-based mining before transitioning to continuous emission.

Continuous Mining Emission

Moving beyond periodic snapshots, miners will receive rewards in real-time based on their contributions. This will be a responsive system where the mining rewards accurately responds to actual network usage and demand for compute resources — an important property of the decentralized, elastic cloud.

Multi-dimensional Revenue Sharing

The alignment-centric economics will be fully live. We have multiple DeFi-inspired economic primitives, and these altogether creates multiple, interconnected value streams for ecosystem participants:

  1. Frontend & Compute Provider Revenue Sharing
    Taking inspiration from Liquity Protocol, everyone can build and host frontend interfaces for Heurist. Frontend operators can earn a share of compute payments processed through their interfaces. This model promotes maximum decentralization and censorship resistance by avoiding the pitfall of a single “official” interface.
  2. Compute Nodes & Pod Revenue Sharing
    Compute payment from users is split between the compute providers (miners) and the pod deployers (typically AI model developers). This incentivizes the provision of compute resources and the development of high-quality AI models.
  3. Compute Nodes & Voter Revenue Sharing
    Similar to Velodrome where token holders can vote for liquidity pools to receive fee share, Heurist token holders can vote for specific miners and receive a share of their protocol emissions.
  4. Pod & Voter Revenue Sharing
    Token holders can also vote for specific pods (AI models or compute jobs), receiving a share of that pod’s revenue. This mechanism helps direct compute resources to the most valuable and in-demand services.

Q4 2025

Validator System

Our validator system will introduce verification mechanisms for different types of workloads to ensure the correctness of compute.

Fractional GPU Support

We’re bringing enterprise-grade GPU optimization techniques to our decentralized cloud. We’ll enable fractional GPU allocation using NVIDIA’s Time-Slicing and Multi-Instance GPU technologies. This means more efficient resource utilization — a single GPU can be partitioned to serve multiple smaller workloads simultaneously, maximizing hardware efficiency.

Decentralized ZK Proving

Heurist can support any type of GPU-intensive compute, and we’re prioritizing ZK proving as our commitment to further decentralize the ZK Elastic Chain ecosystem. This also creates new revenue opportunities for compute providers as the demand for ZK proving is projected to increase over time.

Summary

Heurist is not another GPU marketplace. We’re creating a Web3 PaaS AI cloud:

  • Serverless is the core value proposition. Use AI with API/SDK with minimal friction.
  • GPU owners can maximize their hardware utilization and earn passive income. Join or leave the network any time just like POW mining.
  • Elasticity in the protocol emission and in the compute resources maintain a long-term balance of compute supply/demand.
  • HEU token accrues value from a complex web of interactions. The distribution of the token maximizes community ownership.

As we move forward with implementation, we’ll continue to share detailed updates and opportunities for community involvement.

Stay connected with our progress:

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Heurist

DePIN of serverless GPUs powering open source AI innovations