Ethereum co-founder supports TiTok AI for efficient on-chain image compression

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is supporting TiTok AI, a groundbreaking method for compressing images for blockchain storage.

Indeed, TiTok AI focuses on reducing image sizes to make them more feasible for on-chain storage. This is unlike the popular social media platform TikTok.

Researchers at ByteDance and the Technical University of Munich had developed TikTok AI, with the new technique compressing images into 32 small data pieces (bits) without losing quality. This makes it highly efficient for blockchain applications.

TiTok AI was hailed by Butrein on the decentralized social media platform Farcaster, who noted that “320 bits is basically a hash. Small enough to go on chain for every user.”

The new compression method has significant implications for storing profile pictures (PFPs) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the blockchain.

It uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to tokenize images, breaking down traditional 2D grid constraints into a more flexible 1D format. This results in faster processing speeds and better image quality.

TikTok AI capitalizes on region redundancy, identifying and utilizing repetitive information within different parts of an image to reduce data size.

Researchers also stated that TiTok can compress a 256×256 pixel image into just 32 discrete tokens, and this makes it 410 times faster than some existing methods while maintaining competitive generation quality.