Digital Currency Group’s Barry Silbert Bets Big on AI Blockchain Bittensor

Digital Currency Group (DCG), an early champion of cryptocurrencies and the digital asset industry, is now turning its attention to AI as well. Not just any artificial intelligence, but a decentralized version that drives the Bittensor ecosystem.

The conglomerate led by Barry Silbert has unveiled a new company, Yuma, focused on incubating and building new businesses that use decentralized AI to perform tasks and earn rewards.

At its core, Bittensor is a decentralized network for AI that creates incentives for people to contribute data and computing power for activities ranging from text translation and data storage to predicting the structure of complex protein chains.

“If you ask five people: ‘What is Bittensor?’ You will get five different answers,” Silbert, a cryptocurrency OG investor and evangelist, said in an interview. “If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it’s money, some people would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain […] The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.”

There’s no doubt AI is a foundational technology with all sorts of possibilities, but it also has the potential to hand way too much power to the Microsofts, Facebooks and Googles of this world as users shovel their data in the corporations mighty computers. Decentralized AI may help avoid that, not only when it comes to harnessing vast untapped computational resources, but also removing some of the tech’s opaque and creepy reputation.

Bittensor’s native cryptocurrency, $TAO, is used to incentivize an army of decentralized workers: either miners contributing advanced computing services to certain tasks or validators assessing contributions for quality and allocating rewards.

This interest in AI didn’t happen overnight. DCG made its first investment into Bittensor in 2021. More recently, DCG’s asset management firm, Grayscale, added funds dedicated to AI including the $TAO token. Underscoring his belief in the project, Silbert will step into the CEO position at Yuma, which will have some 25 employees on day one.

In some respects, the Yuma incubation and design studio is to Bittensor what Joe Lubin’s Consensys model was to Ethereum. But rather than owning 100% of the subnets grown under Yuma’s auspices, it’s more like the Y Combinator model of a venture capital firm mixed with an accelerator, Silbert said.

“There are two flavors of subnet partnerships,” Silbert said. “We are doing an accelerator, so if you are a startup or an enterprise who has an idea and wants to explore the world of Bittensor and launch a subnet, we will help you. Then we have a subnet incubator, where we will partner up with somebody to build from scratch a new subnet.”

So far, Yuma has five subnets that are live. Four went through the accelerator program and one through incubation. Another nine are in development and should go live in the coming weeks, one of which is in incubation and rest in the accelerator. The current roster constitutes a good mix of use cases, said Evan Malanga, Yuma’s chief revenue officer.

“We’ve got human detection, like bot detection subnets,” Malanga said in an interview. “We have time series prediction subnets coming online. We’ve got a few academic ones as well; AI research, leveraging the miners in the subnets to go do that work for them, some security ones, and a role-play one. And sports predictions. Lots of sports predictions.”