Crypto wallet adds pay-per-use access to premium subscription AIs

The popular crypto wallet, Cake Wallet, has added support to a pay-per-use artificial intelligence (AI) platform that allows access to premium APIs like ChatGPT-4, Dall-E 3, Claude 3 Opus, and more. Finbold exclusively talked to the companies’ founders about using cryptocurrencies for payments in their services.

Vik Sharma, founder of Cake Wallet, announced the implementation of NanoGPT in a post on X on May 12. The AI application is available on Cake’s Marketplace, below the Cake Pay service for pre-paid gift cards.

Now, Cake Wallet users can pay-per-use premium AI chatbots directly from their cryptocurrency self-custody address with Nano (XNO). Moreover, it is possible to swap other supported cryptocurrencies in-app, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Monero (XMR), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Polygon-based USDT, USDC, and others.

“AI chatbots have become very popular and, in Cake Wallet, we believe cryptocurrencies like the ones supported by the app can be a great way to open up access for them [AI chatbots], more efficiently and privately – as we are fully committed to these attributes as a company. Also, nano is perfect for this micropayment use case due to having zero fees.”

– Vik Sharma, for Finbold

What is NanoGPT?

NanoGPT is a cryptocurrency service connected to multiple artificial intelligence APIs bridging crypto payments to a pay-per-use model. This allows users to avoid keeping numerous premium subscriptions to access different AIs according to their specific needs.

Notably, Finbold reported about the tool when it was first launched as a simple Telegram bot that supported only ChatGPT-4. Thus, we again talked to NanoGPT’s founder, Mira Hurley, about the recent partnership with Cake Wallet.

“NanoGPT has improved a lot since it was a simple Telegram bot. We’ve moved from a single model to users being able to select from a range of text and image models; you can continue any old conversation at any time; users can now track their usage to see to what extent our service is cheaper than subscription; we’ve added support via discord, email, and Twitter; and have added just a ton of quality of life improvements.”

– Mira Hurley, for Finbold

As of this writing, Hurley was giving away small amounts of XNO for new Cake Wallet users to try the tool for free.

Subscriptions vs. pay-per-use services using crypto wallets

Interestingly, pay-per-use services are increasingly becoming preferred alternatives to the popular subscription models broadly used by many industries. This model looks at feeless and instant crypto payments as a natural way to make it possible.

In particular, access to premium AIs like ChatGPT-4, Dall-E 3, Claude 3 Opus, and others has earned the attention of developers and companies like Cake Wallet, NanoGPT, and PayPerQ. The latter offers a similar pay-per-use service while taking Bitcoin payments via the Lightning Network, as reported by Finbold in April.

Should users start preferring this new model, companies will need to adjust their offerings and payment options to adapt. However, it is still soon to tell where the pay-per-use concept will lead the AI industry and if crypto payments will be part of that change.