Daniel Barabander

@dbarabander

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1105 Followers

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Daniel Barabander

Good crypto x AI projects leverage the features of crypto to overcome limitations faced by AI. Here are three examples of challenges of AI: 1. Resources. To be competitive as an AI company you need to aggregate significant resources (compute and data) and talent. 2. Composability. Agents cannot reliably chain actions together. 3. Native Payments. Agents, while nearly infinite in their ability to act on a web made up of natural language, remain restricted by the fact that payment rails do not exist on internet rails. These challenges can be solved through separate features of crypto: economic ownership, verifiability, and self-custody.

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Enhancing AI with crypto may also include: - Token rewards for quality data - Crypto-powered compute for decentralized AI - Zero-knowledge proofs to protect privacy - Blockchain for user data control & monetization - Crypto standards for AI interoperability - Micropayments for seamless AI-user interactions

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Daniel Barabander

Self-Custody The primary unlock of self-custody with AI is currently around agents. Giving an agent a wallet — integrating payment rails into internet rails — provides it with financial independence and therefore an unprecedented level of autonomy. This enables great UX, allowing a human to delegate to the agent (within set bounds) a complicated series of transactions without needing to put a human in the loop to pay each step of the way. The best examples of agents that utilize this feature are DeFi agents and services agents. Agents with something closer to true autonomy are also just entertaining (whether for the novelty or intrinsically). Examples: Wayfinder (DeFi agents), Olas (services agents), Truth Terminal (entertainment agents).

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Daniel Barabander

What am I missing? What are other limitations of AI we should be using crypto’s strengths to solve?

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Daniel Barabander

Verifiability Trust is inefficient: it requires further mechanisms to ensure the trusted party does not abuse that trust, like legal contracting/putting a human in the loop. With cryptographic verifiability, frictionless composability becomes possible. This will be particularly important in the context of agents who need to act autonomously to carry out various tasks, many of which are undetermined at the time the agent is spun up. Examples: Eigen (verifiable agents)

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Daniel Barabander

Economic Ownership (2/2) Aggregate Talent: Use ownership to aggregate talented participants to exert labor/skillset to a shared layer. There’s two reasons this matters. First, diverse talent at a shared layer leads to high variance — and when paired with composability (which is enabled by another feature of crypto, verifiability) can produce interesting emergent systems, like agent swarms. Second, this human labor can be used to refine data used by AI, like for data labeling or RLHF of taste preferences. Examples: Truffle (agent swarms), Sapien (data labeling), Botto (model taste via RLHF).

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Daniel Barabander

Economic Ownership (1/2) Crypto is amazing at using ownership to aggregate resources and talent. This is really just another way of saying crypto solves a coordination problem. Aggregate Resources: Use ownership to incentivize compute and data providers to contribute their resources. These resources can be used to build a shared data layer between siloed applications, bootstrap the high upfront costs of training, or attract new sources of supply for inference/training. Examples: Plastic Labs(shared data layer), Pluralis (training), Hyperbolic (inference/training).

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Daniel Barabander

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New issue of our newsletter is out https://blog.variant.fund/march-2025-newsletter

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Daniel Barabander

I was going to do a cast on my new article on Agents as NFTs but @atown did a better job of explaining what I'm trying to capture than anything I could write. Check out the article here: https://blog.variant.fund/agents-as-nfts

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fascinating article by @dbarabander from @variant on agents as NFT's, something I have been thinking about a lot lately. "The key insight is that agents have “memories” that allow them to record their experiences performing tasks for their principals. These experiences are unique, which makes them non-fungible. An NFT could represent an agent, and holding this NFT could provide exclusive read/write access to an associated memory slot in a trustless memory layer (functioning effectively as a “license” to these memories)." I love the concept of storing and updating an agents memories on-chain, perhaps on IPFS with encrypted memory files where a smart contract that validates NFT ownership provides decryption keys or letting NFT holders run the agent in a secure enclave like a TEE (trusted execution environment) where NFT provides authentication to access the enclave and its memories remains protected within the enclave https://blog.variant.fund/agents-as-nfts

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Daniel Barabander

I'm going to be at the Port next week - if you want to meet up or chat let me know my DMs are open.

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Daniel Barabander

I’m thrilled to announce our seed investment in Pluralis Research, which is building a decentralized AI training protocol. We are laser focused at investing in projects that use crypto ownership to solve coordination problems. Pluralis is a bullseye on that thesis, using ownership to solve the "resource problem" of training foundational AI models that are truly open. We couldn't be more excited to support Alex and the rest of the team. Full post here: https://blog.variant.fund/investing-in-pluralis-research

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Daniel Barabander

Crypto makes building open software with a resource problem possible. Check out the piece where I unpack why 👇 https://blog.variant.fund/using-crypto-ownership-solve-resource-problem

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Daniel Barabander

Greatly looking forward to joining @jchervinsky and the Exabits team for an AMA today at 12 PM ET! Going to cover some of the unique legal wrinkles at the intersection of crypto x AI. Join us soon! https://x.com/exa_bits/status/1900203369391591553

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Daniel Barabander

I shout out Warpcast/frames as a potentially great way to solve the "UI/contract problem" of agents 👀.

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Daniel Barabander

New article unpacks the unique liability considerations for agent developers. TLDR: agents introduce complexity but there are some common sense measures developers can take to reduce their liability exposure. Graphic below summarizing that. Check out the piece here: https://variant.fund/articles/liability-considerations-agent-developers-crypto/

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Daniel Barabander

I did not realize how motivated I was by a “limited time profile halo”. So excited to use my native social wallet.

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Daniel Barabander

PICKLEBALL DUPR SCORES https://www.dupr.com/

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Daniel Barabander

And @jhackworth!

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