Why Cross-chain AI Inference?
Most blockchains today are not designed to support large-scale AI inference. They lack the compute capacity, execution environment, and cost structure required to run modern language, vision, and multi-modal models directly on-chain. As a result, AI capabilities are typically accessed through centralized APIs, which breaks composability and introduces trust, availability, and control risks for on-chain applications.
Cross-chain AI inference addresses this gap by decoupling where AI inference is executed from where applications live.
Bringing AI Capabilities to Any Chain
Cross-chain activity is no longer a niche use case in Web3. In late 2024, total monthly cross-chain transaction volume grew from approximately $18.6 billion in September to $50 billion by November, a ~188% increase in just two months, and remained at elevated levels into 2025 .
At a broader scale, industry analyses estimate that cross-chain bridges have facilitated over $680 billion in crypto-asset swaps, reflecting how central cross-chain infrastructure has become to the crypto economy .
AI Link builds on this existing multichain reality, extending cross-chain connectivity beyond asset transfers to AI computation itself.
AI Link allows applications on external blockchains to access Nesa’s decentralized AI execution layer without migrating users, assets, or contracts to the Nesa chain. From the perspective of an application developer, AI becomes a chain-agnostic capability rather than a chain-specific feature.
This design gives developers immediate access to a very large and diverse model ecosystem. Nesa currently maintains over 120,000 AI models across language, vision, audio, and multi-modal tasks in its global model repository, all of which can be invoked through the same inference interface .
For application teams, this means:
No need to deploy or maintain models per chain
No need to rebuild AI infrastructure for each ecosystem
AI features can be added to existing contracts and workflows with minimal friction
Preserving On-chain Activity and Composability
A critical requirement for Web3 applications is that new functionality should increase on-chain activity, not bypass it.
AI Link is designed so that inference requests are still initiated, recorded, and settled in a way that remains meaningful to the originating chain. Rather than pulling users into off-chain systems, cross-chain AI inference allows AI-powered logic to be embedded directly into on-chain flows.
As cross-chain usage grows, transaction values are also increasing. While the number of cross-chain transactions has remained relatively stable, the average value per transaction more than tripled in 2024, rising from roughly $1,051 to $3,489, indicating deeper, higher-value usage . AI-enabled applications benefit directly from this shift toward richer on-chain interactions.
For partner ecosystems, this means:
AI-enhanced applications still drive native on-chain transactions
Usage and fees remain attributable to the original chain
AI becomes a catalyst for broader protocol activity rather than an external dependency
AI as Shared Infrastructure
By exposing AI inference as a cross-chain capability, Nesa treats AI as shared infrastructure rather than a siloed service. Chains do not need to reimplement AI execution, host large model libraries, or fragment users across specialized AI chains.
Instead, Nesa acts as a neutral execution layer that any chain can interface with, allowing innovation to happen at the application level while AI execution scales independently.
Summary
Cross-chain AI inference makes advanced AI capabilities accessible to any blockchain application, without compromising decentralization, composability, or ecosystem activity. By separating AI execution from application deployment, AI Link enables AI to function as a first-class, chain-agnostic primitive—bringing access to a large global model ecosystem while strengthening, rather than diluting, on-chain activity across Web3.
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