AIKON is a company dedicated to empowering software developers by building the blockchain infrastructure, tools, and services needed to build a decentralized future. ^{[1] [3] [2]}

AIKON was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur and encryption software pioneer Stefan Roever, former political campaign manager, technology entrepreneur Marc Blinder, and global banking and fintech executive Betsabe Martinez. Prior to launch, the company raised $2 million from the Palo Alto, California based OVO Fund and various angel investor from the United States, Japan, and Europe. In March 2018, Tray Lewin became the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and in July 2018, Gretchen Fox joined AIKON as their Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). ^{[3] [1] [13] [17]}

AIKON built the Open Rights Exchange (ORE) Protocol, an open source, shared infrastructure that offloads identity, rights management and payment to the blockchain, allowing software services to be quickly and seamlessly tied together - unlocking the potential for thousands of new business models to bloom. ^[7]

In August 2018, AIKON released the first application powered by ORE: API.market, a decentralized marketplace for blockchain-enabled application programming interfaces. API.market's simple front-end user interface allows developers to use cryptocurrency and smart contracts as easily if they were shopping on Amazon.com. The API.market provides a suite of decentralized services (dServices), the building blocks for developers to easily use build the decentralized ecosystem without having to deal with the crypto-world’s complexity. Developers can use the suite of AIKON-created dServices or create, operate and monetize their own dServices. ^{[9] [10] [8] [13]}

In September 2018, AIKON released ORE ID, a dService that allows decentralized application developers a tool for giving their users one click sign up with Google, Facebook, GitHub and other standard logins — as easily as the standard centralized apps. ORE ID is already used to login to the API.market. ORE ID also allows any app to add their own cryptocurrency and airdrop tokens to their users. ^[7]

In July 2018, AIKON announced the release of CPU tokens, a new stable cryptocurrency designed to be exchanged between API consumers and API providers to access their services. It is the default clearing currency for transactions under the Open Rights Exchange Protocol and works anywhere on the globe. Each API provider in the API.market prices their API in CPU, to make it easy for buyers to buy their services and allowing AIKON to send invoices and receipts to their business customers with a market value attached to processing power. ^{[11] [17]}

The first real world use case for CPU Tokens will be categorizing deep space exploration photos for researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (or STScI), the organization that manages astronomy with the Hubble Space Telescope. Working with their platform partner HADRON, AIKON will be helping STScI astronomers leverage cryptocurrency to better understand the universe, with a process that’s about 10 times faster and 90% less costly than typical cloud computing platforms. ^[11]

The first step of the process involves researchers at STScI buying non-inflationary CPU Tokens from AIKON.

This is possible through AKOIN's decentralized marketplace, which is designed to facilitate real money payments for blockchain-based services.

AIKON processes these CPU Tokens for pay-as-you-go access to the HADRON platform.

This processing is conducted on a pay-per call architecture, so that researchers from organizations of all sizes can conduct small experiments on demand, then eventually ladder up to conduct very large tasks.

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HADRON gives micropayments to users who help process Hubble Space Telescope data.

AIKON's partner HADRON connects large organizations which have major computation tasks to million of users around the world who want to sell the computing power of their devices to help complete these tasks.

^[11]

HADRON users will help categorize millions of Hubble space photos at high speeds and low costs.

Users will run HADRON’s image recognition artificial intelligence in their everyday web browser to automatically categorize millions and millions of deep space images. HADRON then documents the completed tasks on its blockchain. ^[16]

Josh Peek, an associate astronomer with the STScI likened the network to the SETI@home program, which helps researchers attached to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project similarly crowdsource computing power. In effect, the researcher is doing the same thing, but using a blockchain platform. ^[16]