Sentient announces token economics, how will the market price it?

Original Title: “Sentient Announces Token Economics, How Will the Market Price It?”

Original Author: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

On January 16, the open-source AI platform Sentient announced the SENT token economics. The total supply of SENT tokens is approximately 34.3 billion, of which 44% will be used for community incentives and airdrops, 19.55% for ecosystem and R&D, 2% for public sale, 22% allocated to the team, and 12.45% to investors.

According to Polymarket data, the probability of the market betting that Sentient's FDV will exceed $200 million on the day after launch has risen to 99%, with an 87% probability for exceeding $400 million and an 83% probability for exceeding $600 million. Currently, the trading volume in this prediction market is about $330,000.

Distribution Rules Details

Within the entire ecosystem, SENT is used for agents, models, data services, and other products driven by Artifacts. SENT can also be used for payments between Artifacts, enabling a composable on-chain value flow between services. The official total supply of SENT is set at 34,359,738,368, which is exactly 2³⁵. The official team stated that they will share the complete story of how this number was chosen in the future; however, technically savvy readers may be able to infer the reasons behind it.

The distribution of SENT is divided into five main categories: community initiatives and airdrops, ecosystem and R&D, team, investors, and public sale.

Community Activities and Airdrops ------44.00%

This portion of tokens accounts for 44% of the total supply and is specifically allocated for airdrops, community funding, bounties, and incentive programs to reward users and developers for verifiable work done on GRID. To ensure broad ownership, 30% of this portion will be unlocked at TGE (Token Generation Event), accounting for approximately 13% of the total supply, while the remaining 70% will be unlocked linearly over four years. As designed, those who build, test, and share open-source intelligence and products will be eligible for the largest share of tokens. Airdrops will be fully unlocked at TGE.

Ecosystem and R&D ------19.55%

This portion of tokens accounts for 19.55% of the total supply and will be used to promote ecosystem development, R&D, growth, infrastructure building, and the operation of the Sentient Foundation. To ensure a stable long-term supply, 30% will be unlocked at TGE, and the remaining 70% will be unlocked linearly over four years.

Team --- 22.00%

This portion of the fund pool accounts for 22% of the total supply and is specifically for team members of the Sentient Foundation and Sentient Labs, including employees, founders, and key contractors. At TGE, the team fund pool will be locked for one year, after which the funds will be released linearly over six years, with a one-year freeze period.

Investors ------12.45%

This portion of tokens accounts for 12.45% of the total supply and is allocated to investors who supported Sentient in the private sale round. Investor tokens will be locked for one year and will unlock linearly over four years. This structure aims to reward the confidence of early investors.

Public Sale ------2.00%

This public sale accounts for 2% of the total supply and aims to encourage community members to participate more broadly at the project's launch. This portion will be fully unlocked at TGE. Specific details of the public sale structure will be announced soon.

By the end of November 2025, Sentient will launch an airdrop registration portal for community contributors, active users of Sentient Chat, social media Top Voices, and external open-source researchers.

The second quarter activities will be based on new roles for contributions, clearer upgrade paths, and various reward mechanisms. Rewards will include SENT tokens, NFTs, and merchandise. Specific details of the airdrop activities have yet to be announced.

AI Rising Star Raises $85 Million

Sentient is an AI research organization dedicated to building an open general artificial intelligence (AGI) economy. It is developing a platform and protocol that allows open-source AI developers to monetize their models, data, and other innovations, where developers can collaborate to build powerful AI reminders and become key stakeholders driving AI transformation and prosperity in the new open AGI economy.

Sentient has proposed the "OML" (Open, Monetization, Loyalty) model concept, hoping to promote a shared open AGI economy through the OML model, creating a shared open AGI economic system involving millions of AI agents and billions of users, providing inexhaustible momentum for innovation and development of downstream applications.

On the product and architecture level, Sentient's core is its intelligent network called GRID (Global Research and Intelligence Directory). The official description portrays it as a collaborative system composed of specialized agents, models, data, tools, and computing power: when a user initiates a query, the task is decomposed, routed to the appropriate agents/tools/data sources, and multiple results are aggregated into a consistent output.

For ordinary users, Sentient Chat is positioned as a unified entry point and distribution channel into GRID, emphasizing that users can see which capabilities and sources are invoked during interactions; for developers and ecosystem partners, GRID provides channels for usage, distribution, and future revenue streams, incentivizing contributors to integrate various Artifacts into the network through staking and usage signals to direct incentives toward more valuable modules.

To support multi-agent collaboration as a central capability, Sentient will launch and open-source the ROMA (Recursive Open Meta-Agent) framework in 2025, abstracting complex tasks into recursive hierarchical task trees: parent nodes are responsible for decomposing goals, issuing context to child nodes, and aggregating results after collection, making the context flow of medium to long-chain tasks more transparent, traceable, and debuggable, while also facilitating the replacement of different models, tools, or manual verification steps at the node level. In its product updates, Sentient describes ROMA as the backbone for building high-performance multi-agent systems and synchronizes it as an open-source base for community secondary development on GitHub.

Strong Collaboration Between Academia and Crypto Circle

In July 2024, Sentient announced the completion of an $85 million seed round financing, setting a record in the AI crypto field. This financing was co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, with participation from Ethereal Ventures, Foresight Ventures, Robot Ventures, Symbolic Capital, Delphi Ventures, Hack VC, Arrington Capital, HashKey Capital, and Canonical Crypto.

One of Sentient's core contributors is Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, while Sreeram Kannan, founder and CEO of EigenLayer, serves as an advisor to the project.

In addition, the team composition shows that the public personnel page of Sentient Labs lists two other co-founders: Pramod Viswanath (an engineering professor at Princeton University) and Himanshu Tyagi (an engineering professor at the Indian Academy of Sciences). Pramod Viswanath has long researched information theory and communication systems, leading Sentient's AI safety and theoretical foundation construction; Himanshu Tyagi specializes in privacy protection and decentralized learning algorithms, providing academic support for model training and privacy collaboration.

The core engineering and development team primarily consists of university professors and researchers in AI research lines, platform engineering, blockchain development, product, and operations, presenting a team structure that blends academic research, engineering implementation, and crypto-economic mechanisms.

Ecosystem Cooperation and Implementation Scenarios

The official disclosure indicates that the ecosystem scale has reached over 60 partners/integrators, covering model partners, agents, data providers, models, and verifiable reasoning types.

Overall, Sentient's differentiation lies in defining the path to AGI as a composable open network, attempting to solve the long-standing issues of funding, distribution, and sustainability faced by open-source AI through the incentive and staking mechanisms of SENT. Its key variables are thus more about system engineering and mechanism design rather than single-point model capabilities, including whether the quality of ecosystem access can continue to improve, whether incentives will lead to real usage value, and whether multi-agent systems can form replicable patterns in reliability and safety.