What’s top of mind for you heading into 2025 Barnaby?
Well, funny you should ask… the short answer is the convergence of AI and Crypto. The longer answer involves what Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital calls “the Grids”1“Knowledge, money, and power are interconnected in ways that allow you to create use cases that we’ve never seen. AI agents are going to need access to money.” — Micky Malka, Invest Like the Best (Colossus)..
The Grids
The grid concept identifies three fundamental “grids”:
- Knowledge – the Internet, historical and current data and ideas, and underlying infrastructure
- Power – Energy grids from electricity generation to storage
- Money – infrastructures for value and wealth exchange including traditional payment rails and Crypto
The Grids evolve. AI, a new part of the Knowledge grid, only exists because we’ve digitised so much content over the last 30 years2“AI right now is the printing press moment, but it’s only possible because we have digitized every single piece of content for the last 30 years.” — Malka – which provides training data. In turn, much of this knowledge – especially that going back 1,000s of years was only available to be digitalised due to the advent of the printing press.
Examples of components of each grid are set out below.
At present, each grid stands fairly separate, but when grids converge, it can lead to explosive innovation and growth. This should lead to opportunity for forward looking people and organisations.
Convergence of Knowledge, Money, and Power
The knowledge, money and power grids seem to be converging.
Evidence of convergence includes:
- Power + Knowledge: the hyperscalers investing in energy (like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors) to power the mega data centers needed to for AI model training and inference.
- Knowledge + Money: AI agents are going to need to make payments and have access to your wallets to execute contracts autonomously on your behalf. I think they are likely to use Crypto rails to do this for technological reasons (push v pull payments), faster settlement, 2FA requirements in traditional payments break autonomous operations, etc
- Money + Power: Crypto miners, validators and decentralised physical infrastructure networks are increasingly locating themselves in places with cheap renewable power, to tap into and allow monetisation of this power during off-peak periods.
Why AI and Crypto convergence?
Many bright young engineers who started with crypto in c 2019, when they were in university have since switched their focus to AI in 2023/2024, because it’s where the attention went.3“Follow the young minds. A lot of the young engineers that started with crypto when they were in college are now moving to AI because it’s where the attention goes. But both of them combined have the knowledge now.” — Malka So we have a lot of intelligent brains with a thorough grounding in both disciplines and its logical they they should seek to join the two.
It’s also logical that decentralised crypto infrastructure would be fertile ground for open source AI movement (Llama etc). In addition, both AI and crypto rely on tokens – AI uses them as units of data for processing, while crypto uses them as units of value.
While crypto based AI Agents are currently primitive and speculative – i.e.. LLMs engaging with communities on twitter with an associated “memecoin” token – (@truth_terminal and its associated $GOAT token being the most notable) – the infrastructure network to support decentralised AI is evolving and every major blockchain is racing to support this.
