Cortex: Smarter Contracts

What is Cortex?

In 2009, Bitcoin launched its genesis block and established itself as the first self-sustaining peer to peer digital financial system which incentivized participants to maintain its operation and provided limited but highly disruptive functionalities. In 2015, Ethereum went live, adding Turing-Complete smart contracts to the blockchain, allowing for consensus on the execution of short programs.

Turing Complete smart contract blockchains have attracted a large number of decentralized application developers. However, due to the actualized high cost, smart contracts limit their capabilities at the design stage and do not fully exploit Turing Complete immense computational potential. As a result, developers are limited to write short programs and access only a very small amount of resources.

This article describes a new public chain, Cortex. By revising and extending the instruction set, Cortex adds AI algorithms inference support for smart contracts so that anyone can add AI to their smart contracts. At the same time, Cortex has proposed an incentive mechanism for collective collaboration that allows anyone to submit and optimize models in Cortex, and the contributors to the models can be rewarded. Thanks to Cortex’s transparent, open sharing features, Cortex is set to create many models that transcend human capabilities.

Cortex’s main mission is to provide the best in class machine learning models on the blockchain, letting users make inferences using smart contracts on the Cortex blockchain. The Cortex goal also includes implementing a machine learning platform that allows users to post tasks on the platform, submit models, make inferences by calling intelligent contracts, and create their own AI DApps (Artificial Intelligence Decentralized Applications), making the following applications possible:

Information Services: Personalized Recommendation System, Search Engine, News Writing Service;

Finance: Credit, Intelligent Investment Advisory;

AI Assistant: Automatic Q&A, Industry Knowledge Map, Speech Synthesis, Face Attribute Prediction;

Simulation Environment: Autonomous-driving, Go and other Reinforcement Learning Applications;