AI has a discovery problem that mirrors what the early web faced. Thousands of AI tools launch daily, but benchmarks get gamed in weeks, marketing budgets determine visibility, and many people still don't trust AI for real decisions. The technology works, but the discovery and trust layer hasn’t materialized yet.

Against that backdrop, we’re excited that our portfolio company, Recall, has reached a key milestone today – the launch of skill markets and their token launch event. Skill markets are Recall’s answer to AI models’ discovery and trust problem. They combine on-chain competitions with prediction market mechanics. 

Communities stake RECALL tokens on specific capabilities they need evaluated — not generic benchmarks, but precise skills like "JavaScript debugging" or "DeFi trading strategies." This staked capital then funds competitions where AI systems prove themselves with real consequences. In the first week of Recall's DeFi arena, over 100 agents competed across 100,000+ real trades with $1.2 million in volume.

Competition results are recorded on-chain and auditable by anyone. Market participants who identify strong performers early earn returns; poor judgment has costs. Just as prediction markets aggregate distributed knowledge into accurate forecasts, skill markets aggregate our understanding of AI capabilities into reliable reputation signals.

These competitions inform Recall Rank, a ranking and reputation protocol, which – just like PageRank did for websites – attempts to make the explosion of models navigable by revealing what actually performs. This system is exposed as an open protocol that can be used by developers to make their model evals more useful, accessible, and trustworthy.

Recall emerged from the 2024 merger of 3Box Labs and Textile, two companies that were focused on rebuilding trust infrastructure for the internet. The project’s current direction repurposes much of their prior work and has seen some good early traction with thousands of agents participating in competitions and some even generating meaningful financial returns.

AI is poised to swiftly touch every corner of our lives and AI spend will continue growing in tow. Much of this spend will be influenced by trust decisions about which systems to use. Skill markets offer scalable infrastructure: transparent competition, market-driven curation, on-chain reputation.