Lilypad Announces Closure After Pioneering Work in Decentralised AI Compute

Today, after 2 years of pushing the boundaries of decentralised AI, we announce the closure of Lilypad.

We founded Lilypad to reimagine how artificial intelligence is built and accessed, and enabled developers to run AI models across a distributed network of global compute providers. Our mission was to make high-performance inference and training accessible, affordable, and auditable - all on decentralised infrastructure - and we did.

What we’re proud of

Over the past two years, Lilypad has built a powerful open-source framework, onboarded global contributors, secured partnerships with enterprise and Web3 leaders, and demonstrated real-world applications across deSci, Agents, distributed inference, AI APIs, and user-friendly UI. The platform served thousands of jobs and showcased a new model for trust-minimised AI compute.

We wrote cutting edge research papers (including this arvix-published verification in decentralised networks paper), collaborated with renowned researchers (such as Cedars-Sinai Oncology Researcher Vivek Pujara), unleashed new scientific discoveries (including a new heart medication in collaboration with Dr. Michael Levin and Amelie Schroder thats now in wet lab trials), launched cutting-edge AI Agents and teamed up with some incedible projects across the space including Morpheus, Hive, Baselight.ai, Recall, Chiper.ai.

We’re also proud of our committed dev community and their support over the past 2 years.

• Building a world-class team

• Being one of the first deAI projects in the space (Augment hackathon)

• Pushing the boundaries and having an ambitious vision

• Partnerships across the space with top-tier projects

• Top-tier research & research partnerships support.

• Our committed dev-first community

Why not just…

We know the market is on the rise and conditions are incredibly favourable to deAI projects currently. We want to assure interested parties that we have considered all the possibilities for continuation. This was not an easy decision to come to, and disappointing our committed community, supporters, partners, and stakeholders was not an announcement we ever wanted to make.

We put our blood, sweat and tears into building something we believed in; we were not a memecoin, a rugpull or a fake deal. We built real technology and provable infrastructure that pushed the deAI space forward.

However, 90% of startups fail, and unfortunately, alongside personal founder commitments, we weren't able to secure the support needed to continue to beat the odds.

We still believe wholeheartedly in the decentralised AI future and the vision of Lilypad continues to show that it is relevant and necessary - perhaps even more so than when we first set out to build it.

That’s why we are open-sourcing all of the code and guides to running it on the Github.

Open Sourcing Lilypad

While Lilypad will cease operations, the team is committed to ensuring that open-source components remain available to the community where possible. All support and further updates will be posted to Github.

We will continue to host the infrastructure while we can, alongside our personal GPUs to ensure continuity for our users and partners.

We’d love to see others continue the mission of decentralised AI, or even see a LilypadDAO form.

If you have ideas for the future of Lilypad, feel free to get in touch.

Closing

We set out to prove that open, verifiable compute could change how AI is built - and we showed that it can. From demos to research breakthroughs, enterprise collaborations to community-driven innovation, Lilypad wouldn’t have been possible without you.

Though Lilypad as a company is ending, the mission of decentralised AI is far bigger than us. We remain convinced that decentralised infrastructure, coupled with the primitives of crypto, offers a lasting competitive advantage - for businesses, developers, and end-users alike (We blogged about this here).

We are proud of what we built. We are grateful to everyone who joined us in believing in this vision. And we can’t wait to see where the community takes it next.

Thank you.

The Lilypad Team