Daniel Barabander

@dbarabander

125 Following

1099 Followers

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Daniel Barabander

Uber’s driver network is closed. That’s what makes it so hard for new entrants - a competing ridesharing app without supply can’t offer a useful experience. That’s the cold start problem created by closed supply. Now imagine if Uber’s supply were open: - A new app could piggyback on it, solve the cold start problem, and compete on the demand side. - Eventually, it could aggregate so much demand that it could vertically integrate and attract its own drivers. - At this point, it could sever its relationship to Uber and siphon away riders and drivers from these incumbents. That’s crypto. Supply is open by default. New apps build on top of incumbents, win users, and then launch their own stack - only to be disrupted the same way. This recursive loop defines crypto’s competitive dynamics. @jacklongarzo and I call it the fractal pattern. Here’s how it works - and how to defend against it: https://blog.variant.fund/fractal-protocols-strategies-defending-against-open-supply-in-crypto

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J Hackworth pfp

Bitcoin showed us how to coordinate resources at massive scale. Now Decentralized AI can leverage that playbook to unlock an even bigger opportunity: Collective Intelligence. Here’s why I'm excited & the principles Decentralized AI can borrow from Bitcoin. https://blog.variant.fund/building-collective-intelligence-systems

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Daniel Barabander

New piece: Agents in a Bazaar A no fluff view of the bull case of agents and crypto infrastructure. Check it out: https://blog.variant.fund/agents-in-a-bazaar

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Daniel Barabander

If you're attending Accelerate, Variant is hosting co-working with Phantom on May 21 at our office Ship code and meet other amazing builders Space is very tight, sign-up here: https://lu.ma/xqouspi6

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Daniel Barabander

Ok how do I get a shirt.

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Daniel Barabander pfp

Daniel Barabander

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Daniel Barabander

💯- and I think it primarily takes two forms: 1) founders who are thinkers and see the world differently 2) founders who are executors and have data to share about what they tried/learned since we last spoke Either way the privilege of this job is getting to learn from these amazing founders

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Daniel Barabander

You’re too kind! Love quotient!

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Daniel Barabander

Look ma I made it

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Daniel Barabander

If you care about the future of crypto - SIGN THE PETITION

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Daniel Barabander

AI AND CRYPTO AT VARIANT GREAT FOUNDERS GREAT PROJECTS ME AND @jhackworth JOIN US

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Daniel Barabander

1. Focus on parts of AI systems that are more easily verifiable with cryptography like a zk proof showing you contributed compute. 2. Come up with new ways to provide for fuzzy verifiability through crypto economics, like using AI itself as a neutral fuzzy arbiter. There’s no other way to do it.

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Daniel Barabander

One way to think about the case for crypto x AI is it’s a bet on horizontal v vertical scaling. Big tech has mastered vertical - hoard compute, data ,and buy out competitors and vertically integrate them - form a monopoly. Crypto horizontally scales - high variance in contributions, massive consumer compute, data, etc. Bitcoin as the largest compute network shows horizontal can outcompete vertical. But the contributions are relatively deterministic (does this nonce hash). When things are deterministic it’s easier to scale infinitely horizontally: determinism —> easy verifiability —> permissionless —> anyone can contribute. That’s how you get anyone with a GPU to contribute compute. The hard part about AI is a lot of useful work in the real world that needs AI is not so cleanly verifiable. So we have two options to make this scale:

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Daniel Barabander

Let’s pregame this shindig together.

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Daniel Barabander

Happy to connect you with the team so you can hear what they’re cookin’

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J Hackworth pfp

Thrilled to back Plastic Labs Beyond crypto, the modular vs. monolithic debate rages on in AI Today, OpenAI announced a monolithic memory approach. We believe that a modular approach like Plastic Labs could offer greater personalization & flexibility for agents. Learn more 👇

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Daniel Barabander

Could not be more excited to announce our pre-seed investment in Plastic Labs, which is solving personalization for any LLM app. So excited to back Vince, Courtland, Vineeth and the rest of the team as they tackle this enormous problem. Check out the full announcement here: https://blog.variant.fund/investing-in-plastic-labs cc: @jhackworth

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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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