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Daniel Barabander

@dbarabander

125 Following
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Daniel Barabander pfp
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
Probably nothing https://x.com/PluralisHQ/status/1928119140830613731
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Daniel Barabander pfp
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
💯- 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
@dbarabander
Look ma I made it
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
If you care about the future of crypto - SIGN THE PETITION
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
AI AND CRYPTO AT VARIANT GREAT FOUNDERS GREAT PROJECTS ME AND @jhackworth JOIN US
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Daniel Barabander pfp
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
Let’s pregame this shindig together.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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 pfp
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
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
@dbarabander
I shout out Warpcast/frames as a potentially great way to solve the "UI/contract problem" of agents 👀.
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Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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 pfp
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
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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