In recent days, the crypto community has been buzzing with a new spoken-language practice trend.

Poseidon, an AI-powered voice input platform, has officially launched. Users can currently earn daily points by submitting voice recordings, and these points will determine future airdrop allocations.

With backing from Story Protocol and a16z as its lead investor, Poseidon addresses the shortage of high-quality, clear AI voice data. The platform aims to train AI systems to better understand speech across various languages, dialects, and environments.

After testing the platform, the author believes Poseidon may represent the next major "zero-cost airdrop" opportunity and has outlined the project's background and how to participate.

Project Background

According to the official website, Poseidon's leadership team brings strong academic and industry credentials:

Sandeep Chinchali, Chief Scientist, holds a PhD from Stanford University and currently serves as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His expertise spans edge computing, artificial intelligence, and generative AI.

Sarick Shah, Product Manager, previously worked as a software engineer at LotusFlare and Roadz. A Johns Hopkins University graduate, he handled AI engineering at Story Protocol before joining Poseidon.

LJW, Head of Operations, formerly co-led Harvard's Crypto Lab and worked as a senior research fellow at Harvard Business School. He brings deep experience in AI and Web3 business operations.

SY Lee, Project Lead, also founded and leads Story Protocol. His previous startup, Radish, a mobile serialized fiction app with millions of downloads, and was acquired by Korean tech giant Kakao for $440 million in 2021. He subsequently became Chief Global Strategy Officer at Kakao Entertainment and serves as a venture partner at Hashed, Korea's largest blockchain fund.

Poseidon's rise is closely connected to Story Protocol, the on-chain IP ecosystem. Story's incubation provides Poseidon with substantial resources and growth momentum. This relationship runs deeper than typical incubation. Story Protocol co-founder SY Lee serves as Poseidon's project lead, highlighting its strategic importance within the Story ecosystem.

The project gained further market attention when it announced its funding on July 23. Poseidon secured a $15 million seed round led by prominent crypto venture firm a16z.

Why would a16z invest in a voice data collection project?

The answer lies in a fundamental challenge facing today's AI industry: usable data. As a16z partner Chris Dixon noted in Poseidon's investment thesis, the AI sector faces a "data drought." This creates a critical bottleneck where high-quality, diverse training data cannot keep pace with growing demand. Poseidon directly addresses this problem.

More specifically, AI training today faces three major data challenges:

• Slowing data growth: The pace of internet content creation lags far behind the speed at which AI systems consume and learn from data. A shortage of fresh training material may soon become reality. In 2024, former OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever noted that the growth rate of online content (the "fossil fuel" that once powered AI breakthroughs) is gradually declining.

• Scarcity of high-quality data: Clear and well-structured multilingual speech data is even rarer than text data. High-quality voice data enables AI systems to better understand human speech in conversations, significantly improving interaction efficiency.

• Lack of diversity: Most available speech datasets focus on "standard Mandarin." Dialects, accents, and varied real-world environments remain severely underrepresented.

Poseidon's solution directly addresses these issues. By incentivizing users to contribute authentic, multilingual voice recordings from real-life contexts, the project provides AI models with richer and higher-quality training material.

This "data-for-rewards" model creates a win-win scenario where everyone contributes and everyone benefits. It not only meets AI companies' urgent demand for data but also allows everyday users to share in the value created by AI development.

Participation Guide

In addition to its web platform, Poseidon has launched a mini-app within the World Coin App's marketplace. Users can access the project by adding the mini-app in World Coin App, though this method is more complex than using the official website. This guide focuses on the web-based participation process.

Poseidon Official Website Access

Visit the project's official website and complete registration with an email address. At this stage, there is no requirement to connect a crypto wallet, making the onboarding process highly beginner-friendly. On first login, users must grant microphone access. The platform will then prompt users to read a few English words aloud for voice verification.

Once the initial setup is complete, users can access the main interface of the project. In the left navigation bar under the "Home" tab, users can select their preferred input language. Currently, Poseidon supports 16 languages, including English, Chinese, German, and Japanese. English has the highest participation, with over 24,000 users already contributing.

After selecting a language, users are directed to the reading interface. Clicking "Start Recording" begins the reading session. Users must record a minimum of 10 seconds of voice input before clicking "Submit" to earn 10 points.

Once submitted, the recording undergoes AI-based voice review. If the audio passes this quality check, users can earn an additional 50 to 250 points as a reward.

Point Earning Strategy

According to Poseidon's current reward structure, the English track with the highest participation offers the lowest rewards: 10 points for submission plus 50 points for successful review. Other languages, including Chinese, provide significantly higher rewards of 10 + 250 points. This means Chinese-speaking users earn more by contributing in Chinese rather than English.

The daily submission limit is five recordings. However, users can unlock up to 20 daily submissions through active engagement, such as submitting higher-quality recordings.

Testing shows that unclear or blank recordings will not earn the full reward and still count against the daily submission quota.

The "Profile" section in the left navigation bar displays detailed point breakdowns and personal referral links.

The "Leaderboard" section shows current rankings. With participation still relatively limited, competition remains moderate. For example, after two days of participation, the author accumulated 3,985 points and ranked 435th. As more users join, the leaderboard will likely become more competitive.

Airdrop Expectations

Although Poseidon has not announced a token launch date, the official website indicates that interaction points will be converted into rewards or token airdrops once tokenomics are finalized.

With AI development accelerating rapidly in recent years, crypto projects linked to AI have multiplied. Meanwhile, the foundational resource powering AI development (high-quality real-world data) is being rapidly consumed. Authentic voice data is particularly in demand, creating favorable conditions for Poseidon's growth.

From a user perspective, this presents a low-risk, high-potential early opportunity. Currently, only time and voice input are required, with the possibility of future airdrop rewards in return.