Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Building with AI: Revealing new Ontology projects
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 0:37:00Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into the exciting growth of the African crypto community, the upcoming launch of AI marketplaces by Ontology, and the emerging trends in AI integration within blockchain ecosystems, highlighting the increasing importance of identity and reputation systems in the crypto space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. how you doing buddy yeah i'm pretty good actually it's been a pretty crazy day but pretty good
i'm glad it's good not just crazy because just crazy would be exhausting
oh it's been exhausting.
I don't know if you have a similar thing in the U.S., right?
So when the kids finish their exams at 18, there's a day everybody gets their results at the same time.
And then we have this process for clearing.
So if you either didn't get the results you wanted or you've changed your mind on the course or something,
or you decide you want to do something different.
It's like everybody's on the phone.
Everybody's waiting.
Everybody's asking for a chance to go to a different university.
And it's absolute mayhem.
And that's been my day today with my youngest.
So it's been mad, but he got where he wanted to be.
to be so it's okay oh wait yeah definitely we don't have um we do not have a day where we all
So it's OK.
Oh, wait.
Yeah, definitely.
get assigned i guess it sounds like to your school because well i don't know about where you're at but
i do you guys have like is university covered so you get a loan from this from the government but you have to pay that
back when you start earning oh wow yeah um that's awesome no we don't get that kind of stuff here i
mean you you can apply for government kind of support but that's a very different process. It's not part of the testing or application process.
That happens, you know, separately.
Whole different system that you have to go through.
And you're lucky if you get it.
So everybody's allowed to loan, so that's great.
Everybody gets that.
But at 8 o'clock this morning, essentially,
all the kids going to university wake up and find out
if they got their first choice university
or if they need to start phoning universities to get a new place.
All the way across the UK, England, Scotland, Wales, the lot.
That's awesome, man.
Yeah, I mean, also also if you're canadian which is kind of the closest here to
the u.s in terms of countries that supports their citizens in terms of education you get
your university covered from what i hear which i think is pretty great. Who doesn't want an educated populace?
Yeah, so when my wife went to university, it cost her £1,000.
Now it costs nearly £10,000, so it's got more expensive.
That's, yeah, unfortunate, I guess. But let's see.
Cool.
Well, we have a few folks popping in my guess is probably a few more as the space
continues we are missing a few of the harbingers that i've seen but who knows maybe something's
changed uh and they don't feel like they they need to be here
how are you doing barnabas i i i'm pulling you in because the last time I was on a spaces I forgot
to talk to you um so uh I thought I'd just say a quick hello yeah Jim Jim everybody
yeah Barnabas you are the celebrity in ontology uh and I actually love to hear from you like your thoughts in terms of the
growth of the African community
because that to me was, you know,
when Jeff shared it with us at our team call,
sounded, you know, both inspiring
but also encouraging to see
that there's still such a demand
for education, crypto education in particular,
in the communities that you're a part of.
Yeah, so the whole thing has been great because we started from the grassroots.
grassroots, like there was no any partnership with any community.
There was no any partnership with any community.
We just started like, well, I in question started talking to people about
ontology, what ontology can offer.
And people were excited about the whole thing.
They were like, okay, I need to get on board.
That was how I was able to convince a lot to come into the community, get them to talk about
like Ant ID, Orange Protocol reputation and the Ant Oalate as well.
I think we were both too polite there, Humpty.
I took my mute off and you did the same
and then you put yours back on.
But I think that's excellent, Bon.
I mean, we've spoken, worked together a lot on this as well.
And I noticed some familiar names actually in the audience
as well from the community.
And so Humpty's the guy behind the Ontology account tonight.
He's one of our oldest serving people around Ontology.
Not old in age.
He's younger than me.
He looks even younger than he is.
But he sort of looks after a lot of ecosystem stuff.
He talks to developers.
He talks to other partnerships.
He does lots and lots of things.
He's a great advocate for creators in general across...
Did I lose you there, Geoff?
Oh, did I disappear? Am I back?
Yeah, you were speaking and then just suddenly cut off.
I didn't know it was just me.
Hopefully we're not about to get rugged.
It's been a while, though.
But, yeah, Jeff, I think you were alluding to kind of the community that has been built
around ontology.
For me in particular, around identity and privacy, which is my interest.
And one of the main reasons why I joined ontology as a contributor, you know, a couple of years back, I was a builder on ontology.
I see, you know, but never saved in the audience.
He knows.
He also comes from the community that I originally connected Ontology with,
which was a multi-chain validator at work.
And yeah, but for me, the thing that really just kept me around was
the identity and privacy tech that ontology is building i still think to this day there isn't a
better project that's building in that space um there's a lot of talk in fact jeff and i had a
conversation last week uh we have a document that we started working on together in terms of the
products and platforms and companies that are building Web3 identity privacy tools.
However, like others, you know, that's, by the way, a handful. It's not a lot. But others really love to talk about identity and privacy, but very little do anything about it. And that's the handful of projects that I've mentioned that are building in this space.
I think that it's important to note that even those who build identity tech
many times is restricted to a single chain,
which kind of goes against the ethos of your portable identity.
It should not work just in one chain.
Otherwise, might as well just use a wallet.
Your Ethereum wallet
allows you to interact on chain, but in a way that is restricted by that chain
in terms of what that wallet is able to let you do. And again, it's also purely transactional.
There isn't any value beyond your fees that you pay and selectables that you buy, tokens that you trade.
It's purely financial play.
Identity, obviously, is a much richer kind of grouping of data.
And that's why, for me, it's always just been very interesting and why I'm still here.
You know, many, many years, as Jeff was saying, one of the oldest contributors to Ontology.
Jeff, are you back?
I'm afraid we lost Jeff.
Can anybody else hear me?
Like, is there an emoji react?
I want to make sure it's not me.
Yeah, I can hear you.
Okay. Oh, sad. Maybe it's just Jeff.
I would actually be curious to hear your own story in regions that, you know, I personally have
never been a part of and I would love to.
You know, what is it that, like, how do you introduce Ontology?
Yeah, I think the first, we had a first meeting, right, before I came into ontology and I was telling you that in terms of the education right we need to educate people on on blockchain on what
ontology is and let where we should simplify the terms or should I say the
language for them to understand so when I when I came in and I started building
the whole community I just simplified everything to
them i told them that yeah so many big corporations are having control over your data you register
and then you don't have control over what you share on the internet and ontology is here to
change that you are in total control of your identity you are in total control of your identity, you are in total control of your
data and then you get to share what you want people to see. And then also I talked about the
reputation aspect, Orange Protocol, that whatever they do on chain is going to follow them everywhere
they go. And those were I think the ways I follow in order to convince others
to join. And they saw the vision that what we are trying to achieve here in Africa, and
they get on board. So for me, in terms of convincing people and bringing people in,
I think is the educational aspect. I totally educational aspect. I completely explained to them about what ontology, the mission,
and for developers, they were really excited to get onboarded.
But we only have a few developers, and I'm looking to onboard more
so that they will come in and then build ADID platforms.
You bring up a good point.
I wonder, when you say you don't have a lot of developers,
I remember meeting you for the first time through one of our hackathons.
This was last year, I believe, early in the year.
We were hosting a hackathon with the DIF, if I'm not mistaken.
How do you think, and this doesn't just relate to ontology, just generally,
how do you think Web3 companies can do better to engage communities like the ones that you're building?
like the ones that you're building?
Yeah, so I think it's like the language barrier
and to simplify everything to people's level.
When we tend to use the Web3 languages,
it might be complex to some,
while it might be easier for the people
that are in the Web3 space already.
But if you are trying to get everybody to go along, I think we need to simplify everything.
And in terms of the hackathon, yeah, I think maybe we are planning to host our own hackathon here in the African continent.
But it is something that we look forward to.
We just launched a bounty hunt. Was it two days or three days ago and we only had four submissions till date so I talked with one of
a developer that is building a community probably or hopefully they should I'm guessing they are
they are going to participate
but it's something that I look forward to seeing
their participation and submission
so that I can forward everything to Joff.
Hopefully I'm back now.
Nobody can hear me.
Sorry about that.
I kept dropping in and out and losing everything.
I think Barnabas, the thing is,
I think these mini little hackathons,
like the one we've just launched,
this bounty to have a look at the documentation
and provide some videos for developers to make it easier.
This goes to what you were just saying, I think,
about trying to make it as easy as possible for people,
whether that's the language we use for our communities,
the documents and the videos we have available for developers.
I think making it easy, removing those barriers is absolutely essential to building that development
community and the education community and the broader community in general. And it's something
myself and Humpty have been pushing for a long time is improving that documentation,
improving those videos. And so I hope to see us do many more of these small bounties
where we just say, this is something we need improving.
Let's go.
And yeah, we've got four entries so far.
But you know what?
Six months ago, we had no entries doing this.
So four entries is a positive step forward.
We've now got some videos.
We've got some gift submissions on there.
We've got things that people can use.
So it's a brilliant step forward. And it will just get better. And there will just've got things that people can use. So it's a brilliant
step forward and it will just get better and there will just be more and more people taking part. So
I'm really confident and positive about this.
One of us, I wonder if you could explain a little bit about the type of hackathons that you think
would perform while you were saying how your community is considering running their own hackathons. What are some of the things that are
of interest just generally in terms of development? Maybe if you have insights in terms of
what kind of coding proficiency, like are they Rust developers? Are they, you know, Solidity developers? And then what are some of the actual tools that are interesting to them that you think your community would be interested in participating in and hacking?
as here they prefer Solidity, that's the smart contract,
but as Ontology supports three other smart contract
environments like NeoVM, Wasm,
and then the Ethereum virtual machine.
So like Geoff said, we need more Solidity developers.
So they can actually get on board
as if we want to host that hackathon.
They can develop on like using Solidity,
that's the smart contracts for the front end and back end.
They can choose any language they want.
But like I said, it's about the education.
We had four entries so far and we want more developers as
possible so that they should get familiar with with the ontology tech
stack SDK so that if we are if you want to host a hackathon it won't be an issue
for them because I can't I see in so many instance where developers want to
build but they have no idea they have no clue
on which language they should use which way forward they should go and and yeah that's that's
something that we i'm really looking forward to trying to onboard more developers explain okay
this is what you can do and if they have any idea. Like I was talking with one Ethiopian
that just joined our community today.
So he was telling me he had a platform where,
I think it's a gamified platform on Telegram.
And he wants to integrate ontology's ont ID regarding the identity aspect.
So that's something that I really love to hear. And he said
the platform is in the MVP stage right now and he's looking forward to integrating the Ont ID
into his platform. So for me, I think is the educational aspect. Yeah, let's simplify everything for them so that they will be confident to come in and build.
And on the subject of simplification on there, Barnabas, as well, I mean, I'm going to drop a bit of a, we've not mentioned this really out there yet, but we're very close to releasing account abstraction for ont.id as well. So that will,
I think, make things easier for people. And I think that's going to be a big deal for people
being able to use it, being able to use something like jeff.ont.id will be useful. And being able
to use pass keys and things like that,
I think will be useful.
And so lots of simplification come in very soon as well.
So I think that's going to be a bit of a watchword
for us moving forward,
is keeping things as simple as possible.
Am I allowed to say that, Homte?
I've said it now anyway.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with it.
Look, if there was anything that I learned
when my days of contributing to Tron
was that an announcement to an announcement
is always a good thing.
Nobody does it better than Justin.
He definitely is the king of announcements of announcements.
So it's been a really interesting couple of weeks.
You know, we sort of, myself and Barnabas has been talking about this and how we do
it better and how we build these communities.
And I know, I don't want to repeat too much of what might have been said by Barnabas earlier,
because I know the African community had a call earlier as well.
But I think what's really interesting is is and anybody who's not from that community who's tuning in what we're
trying to build is not just this community that works one it's Bamba said this earlier as well
it has been built from the ground up and we intend to keep that going this should be a grassroots
ground up led community across the board with people making decisions with our support and our backing
and that's really important to me that we keep that going and keep that moving and then of course
on top of that this is a beautiful template that can then be rolled out in other places
you know it can be rolled out in different regions different parts of the world where we can say this
is what good looks like this is how we built a great community that have all benefited,
that have had great success.
And we want to see people build careers in Web3, you know,
whether you're a writer, a communicator,
whether you're an educator or a developer.
What we want to see is you build those careers out
and build that forward and actually have a career
that is meaningful and works for you as well.
And then we can push that out and all of a sudden we've got ontology communities around the world building great things helping
each other and it's all led from the ground up and that that is my vision moving forward with this um
taking a lot of advice from Humpty he's he's done a lot of really cool things with communities he's
doing a lot of cool things with projects and so I will push things to Humpty as well's done a lot of really cool things with communities. He's done a lot of cool things with projects.
And so I will push things to Humpty as well.
I'm going to get him doing more work for me than he will for himself, hopefully.
He might have something to say on that.
But, yeah, you know, look, he's a great resource.
And the reason I mention that is because I will be asking people on that development side who have a project,
who want to build a project out and link that with a community and link that with funding and link that with opportunity. Humji's going to be a great resource for you. He's going to be somebody
who's really important to talk to about how you launch or expand those projects that you have.
those projects that you have. So I think that'd be really cool.
So I think that'd be really cool.
Thanks, Jeff. That's very kind of you. I wonder, I mean, since Jeff has already started to like
reveal some of the stuff, the conversations that are happening inside of Ontology,
I don't know how much of this has been shared, Jeff, but do you want to talk about AI?
This has been shared, Jeff, but do you want to talk about AI?
So, yeah, I mean, we've got a big launch.
Again, we've got a big launch around AI coming up with AI marketplaces,
with decentralized instant messaging linked to this new account abstracted version of OntID.
There's lots of things coming in.
You'll be able to have your own ai to do things you'll be able to ask it to send tips and do things like
this on our roadmap there's a big thing around ai and the need for identity and the need for
reputation and so this is sort of the groundwork to getting that all built in and developers in ai
people developing ai projects
will be able to launch those ais in the marketplace they'll be able to and get those out there for
people to use and to make life easy so all that is coming very very soon in terms of the the first
beta version um as with all beta versions the point of this is to have a look see what works
see what doesn't work see what's um useful the community, and then build upon it and build upon it. And so we'll
be looking for lots of people to use it and to say, this is really cool. This needs tweaking.
So obviously, as always with these releases, a bit of patience is always appreciated. But I think
there's a real opportunity to launch and have something out there that's really cool.
And, you know, you guys will be amongst the first to use it.
And so you'll be able to have a look and feedback.
And then if you are a developer,
start thinking about how you can develop those AI apps
to launch in the marketplace and things like that as well,
which I think will be really exciting.
Hopefully that's what you meant, Humpty,
and I've not just dropped that bombshell
and Randy's going to tell me off tomorrow. know it's funny I could have really just mentioned
anything you just you're a very excitable character so I think you would have just said it
anyways I like to be excited no you are I love that because that's a very contagious thing I
promise you if you were a dud I would be taking a nap right now, but I'm not. I'm smiling from ear to ear.
And some of the tooling that you've seen that really draws you and calls, you know, or just gets your attention in terms of like its usability, like what makes it fun?
If you're a developer, like what really attracts you about a platform to build on it?
Because, you know, I mean, a platform is only as good, especially nowadays with this isn't even a Web3 thing. Like a lot of apps are successful only because of the developer ecosystem that
they're able to grow because of the composable nature of a lot of these tools.
Like in a lot of them, primarily through marketplaces like the App Store, for
instance, or Google Play.
You know, you're playing video games, you probably know that there is a pretty large kind of thing, collectible and tools and power-ups that you can buy and skins.
And many of these things are contributed by the community and built and they're rewarded
accordingly for the work that they put in.
So, you know, it's no surprise that it's whatever you're building should have in mind the community of developers that could build upon it to kind of scale the opportunity for a new person
or groups of people to find interest in it and to, you know, to find a shared identity
in, because that's a big thing about the things that we use, the communities that we associate
with. So I'd like to know if you're in the audience or Barnabas or Jeff, like what are
things that you've seen in the AI space that totally draw you and things that you would say,
oh, I'd like to build on that. And I can start and maybe someone else can follow up after that. But for me,
GPT was kind of my first foray into being a quote unquote developer. And I put myself in quotes
because I am not proficient, but I'm just enough of a tinkerer or hacker, if you will,
to find a way to make something work for me. And then I'll put it in the marketplace and say,
well, if somebody sees value in it, great, they can use it. If not, then it doesn't matter.
But I was able to build upon GPT and create my own agents that enabled me as a creator to scale the distribution of my work.
So for instance, these spaces that we host, there is an agent that is constantly listening to the
content that I create. Now, the tricky part is this one here, I'm from the ontology accounts,
it's going to be a little harder to do that because it's usually tracking what I'm saying for my personal accounts and what I'm tweeting or casting of your own Farcaster.
And then it takes that information and creates content from it that can be redistributed across X and other social platforms like LinkedIn and Farcaster. And then if it's, for
example, a space like this, turn it into a newsletter and then becomes content that someone
else who chooses not to log into these can access them. Because say, how many of us are here? 4, 8, 16 people are live in this space. Maybe after this space is done, another 50 people or 80 people will tune in. But let's still say that there's like less than 100 people that will listen to this space, both live and in the recording.
However, as social media goes, there are people who connect to your content in different ways.
Like my newsletter is close to 3,000 people, right?
And I'm growing several newsletters at a time, people who have different interests.
If I can distribute this content to them through those channels, then this content lives a little longer. For me to be able to find ways to easily take the content that I create and distribute it across different channels without having to add extra work to myself, that's a plus.
And so the first platform that I leveraged for that, and it took me almost a year to get something that actually worked well enough where I could let it do that work on its own without too much babysitting you know it you know gets me close
to maybe 80 90 percent of the way there i'm able to use my own agent which is built upon gpt so i
think platforms like that are really cool i would love to see how this new platform that jeff so
kindly revealed to all of us right now that's built by ontology will allow me or any developer do the same jeff you're laughing why
are you laughing it's like you know oh yeah making sure that you have that in there that jeff reveal
to everybody um yeah i know randy listens to these after the fact so just making it clear
no i love gpt as well i am going to say that I have to nip out, unfortunately.
I've got to go and pick up my son.
He's celebrating his exam results, so I have to go and pick him up and bring him home.
So this has been my last contribution today.
But I love a project called VentureMind.
If you've not seen it, go and check it out on X.
VentureMind is an exciting and brilliant project.
and brilliant project.
I love it because it's a lot of fun.
You can build your own AI Twitter agent
that can come on to Spaces on X
and actually talk on these Spaces
and has a conversation with you.
You can ask it something, you can say something
and it will reply in quite a sensible way.
It will, they have a roast setting
so it can be quite mean and quite brutal.
They did that with me on the spaces
with them which was quite fun and but it's a lot of fun and it's uh well worth checking out i i
think there's potentially you know this space for these ai agents to be part of spaces to be part of
the conversation um so that could be interesting i'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out.
So have a great rest of spaces, everybody.
And great to see so many people here again.
As always, Barnabas, by the scene of it,
from the African community.
Great to see everybody else there first.
I see you in there and a lot of other people from our communities as well.
So thank you for being here.
Hungty, I shall speak to you very soon.
Have a good evening.
Thank you, sir.
Have a good evening. Thank you, sir. Have a safe trip.
Well, that leaves Barnavas and I. I'm the kind of person I do not like to belabor a good point,
so if we're having a good conversation here, that's great. If there's not a terribly active
chat, I'm fine with cutting it early, too. Barnavas, anything else that's caught your mind
in terms of what's happening in the ecosystem right now?
Or maybe just something else that you've seen
your community talking about?
Yeah, I think I'm going to talk about the AI part.
And yeah, it's something that I really love ontology to start
since when I came in.
So hearing it from Jeff, I think I'm really happy about that.
And for the whole marketplace,
so I don't know how it's gonna work,
but for other ecosystem,
I can see that you have your own AI model or AI agent,
and then you get to onboard that agent in the marketplace
and if someone wants to use the model you've developed they will pay in in
that native token of that ecosystem so maybe I don't I don't know if it is
something similar or the AI agent will be free for everybody to use.
So I think we just have to keep an eye out and see how it will go.
But in terms of what the community is talking about,
yeah, some of them are here.
They are just bullish on the project
and putting out content every day,
some two or three times a day.
And yeah, I'm really happy to see their contributions
and inviting people in.
Some of them are really putting out contents,
like video content, explaining what Anthology Netop is,
or they can pick a topic and just talk about it.
So it's a good thing to see.
And I'm really happy that they are doing something like that.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I am too, you know.
I mean, I feel like it's the new frontier for businesses
who are just generally building products in any direction, to be honest.
But for me, the most, I guess, thing that excites me about this
new venture, new product, is a new platform in which we can test how identity and reputation
can be built on agents that are non-sentient, right? Or not human, probably better said.
Because we've talked about this here at length
for over a year.
I know Jeff and I predated a lot of the AI identity chat
like over a year ago here,
where a lot of these tools,
this AI is being trained on data that might be biased or altogether wrong.
And those who use it, whether it's the tool itself, the AI itself, or anybody who might produce something from that training model,
we need some sort of attribution in terms of whether that is a good result,
whether that's a bad result, whether it has aged terribly,
or was the agent hallucinating the whole time and just speaking garbage.
There needs to be a kind of a record of attribution so that we can keep improving upon systems that are good and rewarding them, right?
Rewarding their builders. And so I think this new product, I hope, is going to be a great opportunity for us to test that theory,
because it is a theory still in terms of will it work.
And if so, present this product for an entirely new market,
one that for the foreseeable future is quite infinite in its potential and its distribution.
Because I think this is no secret, but
it is predicted that agents will outnumber real people on the internet before too long. So
to be able to recognize these sectors, and to be able to recognize their reputability in terms of what they share or what they build, I think it's good.
So yeah, I would love to see how that works. And obviously for those who build it, a way to earn
rewards as well, passively, which I think for most developers is always a nice goal,
to be able to create some sort of like passive income stream with what they've built.
And with that, I'm okay with putting a pin on it here and maybe picking it up next week.
Hopefully there's more information that's revealed in terms of what this new product
is and what the go-to market strategy will be.
And we can keep tackling AI and identity, and I'll bring some smart people, smarter
than me, to come and join us and I'll bring some smart people, smarter than me,
to come and join us and have that discussion with us.
Parnavas, that's okay with you?
Yeah, and in terms of the developer onboarding,
I'm going to reach out to you on Telegram,
and then we get to talk more on that.
Sounds great. Thank you so much.
To everybody else, thank you for joining us this has been a fun chat uh talking a little bit about what's happening not just in ontology but in general
with ai and identity and we'll see you again next week same time have a great weekend everybody Thank you.
