One of crypto’s earliest entrepreneurs is betting on something other than Bitcoin. Famous as an early advocate of “digital gold,” and for launching franchises like CoinDesk and Grayscale, billionaire Barry Silbert shared his newest passion at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah.
“I believe that the next big wave in crypto is going to be the convergence of AI and crypto,” said Silbert, who is the founder and CEO of crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group, on a Tuesday panel.
And it’s not just the intersection of two of the buzziest buzzwords in tech that has Silbert excited. It’s a project called Bittensor, a decentralized marketplace for AI founded by Jacob Steeves, a former Google engineer.
Silbert is so excited about Bittensor that he’s started a new company called Yuma that’s dedicated to the protocol and its associated cryptocurrency TAO. “I want to open up the development and the access to AI and Bitensor is enabling that,” he said. “It is the thing that I’ve gotten most excited about since Bitcoin.”
Bitcoin to Bittensor
Silbert isn’t your average crypto evangelist. The billionaire first obtained his stock broker license at the age of 17 and worked in finance after he graduated college, including on marquee bankruptcies like those of Enron and WorldCom. In 2004, he founded what would become SecondMarket, a trading platform where users could buy and sell alternative assets, which he would later sell to Nasdaq.
In 2012, Silbert discovered Bitcoin and soon spun up a new company called Digital Currency Group, which included subsidiaries like the popular crypto news publication CoinDesk, a crypto trading and lending arm called Genesis, and Grayscale, a crypto ETF issuer. Digital Currency Group eventually sold CoinDesk to the crypto exchange Bullish, and, in July, Grayscale confidentially filed to go public.
Silbert’s crypto empire suffered significant setbacks amid the “crypto winter” that followed the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, but he has since returned back into the public eye to boost Bittensor and Yuma, his new company dedicated to decentralized AI.
Major AI algorithms require mammoth amounts of computing power, and only large, centralized players like OpenAI, Google, or Amazon have the capital to compete. Bittensor tries to repurpose the same incentive mechanisms that power Bitcoin to encourage participants to lend their computing power to create a decentralized network of servers to power AI algorithms. Silbert’s Yuma helps different projects looking to make use of Bittensor’s network to power their AI applications.
“In the way that the internet was the world wide web of information, Bittensor is creating the world wide web of intelligence,” he said.
The protocol was especially popular in the first half of 2024, when its cryptocurrency TAO notched an all-time high in March 2024 of $757. The token now trades at nearly $360 as of Thursday afternoon.