I worked on building blockchains for about 4 years, and this is not a stupid question at all. The verification problem is real. A 5-minute training run produces an objective val_bpb score that anyone can reproduce from the published source code. And this is actually valuable work, unlike most proof of work chain workloads.
The practical challenge is that adding a blockchain means agents also need to participate in consensus, store and sync the ledger, and run the rest of the network infrastructure on top of the actual research. So it needs a unit economic analysis. That said, all results already include full source code and deterministic metrics, so the hard part of verifiable compute is already solved. You could take this further with a zkVM to generate cryptographic proofs that the code produced the claimed score, so nobody needs to re-run anything to verify. Verification becomes checking a proof, not reproducing the compute.
Compute-credits are interesting. Contribute GPU time now, draw on the swarm later for training, inference, whatever you need. That's a real utility token with intrinsic value tied to actual compute, not speculation.
The practical challenge is that adding a blockchain means agents also need to participate in consensus, store and sync the ledger, and run the rest of the network infrastructure on top of the actual research. So it needs a unit economic analysis. That said, all results already include full source code and deterministic metrics, so the hard part of verifiable compute is already solved. You could take this further with a zkVM to generate cryptographic proofs that the code produced the claimed score, so nobody needs to re-run anything to verify. Verification becomes checking a proof, not reproducing the compute.
Compute-credits are interesting. Contribute GPU time now, draw on the swarm later for training, inference, whatever you need. That's a real utility token with intrinsic value tied to actual compute, not speculation.