Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
D A R K [product talk]
Recorded: May 6, 2025 Duration: 0:18:59Space Recording
Short Summary
Dark, an innovative AI infrastructure project, is making waves in the crypto space by focusing on hosting solutions for AI tooling. As the demand for AI capabilities surges, Dark's strategic partnerships and market positioning are set to capitalize on emerging trends, promising growth and new opportunities in the Web3 ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. All right guys, good morning, good afternoon, good evening.
Perpetually excited about the Twitter space music.
I just learned last time we were in spaces, I learned that there was music when you start a space.
This time I learned that there are different types of music.
So that's pretty exciting.
Feel free to drop speaker requests anytime throughout this space. I'm generally
approving people as they come up. I think as the queue grows, we'll approve people
kind of a few at a time so that we can have order. My name is Edgar. I'm the founder of Dark and a bunch of other things in the Solana space.
Wanted to get a space up and running for Dark today to talk, you know, give new folks an introduction, you know, about Dark's direction, about what we're building towards, and give kind of an update towards product direction that I'm
thinking about, kind of things that we're seeing in the market. At a high level, Dark is an AI
infrastructure company, particularly focused on hosting infrastructure for AI tooling. So if
you've been following this explosion of agents, LLMs, et cetera,
that has grown over the last few years.
One of the most recent kind of opportunities
that has opened up in the space
is a way to make agents smarter and more capable
through extension tools.
Model context protocols, if you've seen the acronym MCP, have been super popular on this front, initially developed as a framework by the AI giant Anthropic and now used around the world.
MCPs are tools that agents can connect to to do more.
tools that agents can connect to to do more. We spend a lot of time on MCPs, but more broadly,
we're thinking about solving for hosting infrastructure that developers need as they
build their AI agents. Cool. So actually, the way I think I'll start as people are funneling in, we have a couple people have requested speakers,adiq. I'll give you the acceptance here as a
speaker, and then we'll see kind of where Sadiq's head is at, and then we'll kind of,
as more people flow in, we'll get back to some of the main topics.
See, it's like we need music in between all of the connecting down periods of spaces. There's all these awkward silences while Twitter figures their thing out.
Come on, Sadiq, I believe in you, man.
Okay.
He dropped.
That's a bummer.
Awesome.
Well, I'll keep talking as people come in. We'll see who's up next for being a speaker.
Cool. So like I mentioned, Dark is building hosting infrastructure for AI tooling.
The last few weeks, I've been traveling a lot, spent time in Turkey and Istanbul at Solana Crossroad, spent time in Dubai at Token.
I'll be at Solana Acceler, I believe, in a couple of days.
But I think the team's trial schedule is just too chaotic at this point, so we're going to miss it.
One of the things that I've been, probably the thing that's been most on my mind with respect to Dark,
given it's a new project, has been figuring out its go-to-market, right?
For those of you who remember how Dark kind of broke out onto the scene, Dark was a project
I was working on in stealth.
Actually, I didn't even have a name for it, was just thinking about AI tooling and the hosting
problems that exist for developers when it comes to AI tooling today, and had an opportunity to
kind of go public with it when an old test token that I launched on PumpFun was found,
test token that I launched on PumpFun was found, you know, through the Web3 community,
through the trenches, and, you know, kind of picked up decent virality, right? And so I decided
to build Dark, the AI company, alongside the token. A lot of interesting thoughts about how it makes sense for companies to coexist with tokens, what tokens are actually
good at, which I think a major piece of it being distribution and attention capture.
And I think Dark ended up being early to this wave of companies and projects launching alongside tokens that are variably
specific to Web3, right? We saw this with Believe App, for example, Launch a Coin,
right? A lot of tokens being launched alongside pure Web2 projects, right?
And all of the trade-offs that come with that.
I think there's a lot of upsides there.
You know, there's definitely some concerns that need to be managed.
But at a high level, you know, Dark's focus is on hosting infrastructure for AI tooling that is, you know, agnostic to its focus on crypto, which I think is really,
really fascinating, right? And so that means that it's relevant for us to understand
how AI tools are being used, not just in Solana, not just in crypto, but,
you know, across the tech space more broadly. And, you know, that's led me to
spend time with customers and partners, both in Solana, you know, in Web3, and then, you know,
completely outside of it, right? I also think there's this really fascinating kind of juxtaposition
in perception around, like, you know, Web3 startups or startups with tokens.
I think a lot of Web2, you know, has a pretty bad perception of crypto.
And that's made for some interesting conversations when we've kind of, you know, brought dark up to folks outside of crypto.
brought dark up to folks outside of crypto. But nonetheless, been doing a ton of traveling
over the past few weeks. Very, very tired of traveling. Very, very happy to be in front of a
computer in the Mountain Dental office here in Salt Lake City for the next couple of weeks,
just locked in. I have absolutely no plans other than to wake up, go to the office, walk my dog, go to the gym, go home, repeat.
both users, developers, right,
were at when it comes to AI tooling,
what they were thinking about,
and then, you know, which partnerships made sense
for us as a project to kind of figure out
how to more properly set our product foundation
as a company, right?
And that's been, you know, I'd say that's been fruitful.
It's highlighted, I think there's some pretty, pretty fascinating challenges that come with building in public and navigating, you know, early startup kind of difficulties, right? If you think about like brand building or partnership development,
right, a lot of those things tend not to happen in public. And so it's been interesting to,
you know, talk to a bunch of potential partners, which I'll kind of, you know, I'll go through kind
of the classes of partners that we're thinking about. But it's been interesting to talk to,
you know, kind of different partners across the space
and understand, okay, how do we, you know,
how do we take these conversations
that are less tangible
and, you know, kind of both bring them
to some kind of actionable conclusion
and then eventually, like,
take these partnerships public, right?
I think, you know think to that extent,
I think what we're seeing is a couple of things.
One, I think that in the broader tech community,
model context protocol servers continue to be super,
super popular with anyone working in AI
and hosting those servers continues to be like super difficult, right? And what that means is,
you know, a server can live in lots of different ways, right? Usually when you like go on a website,
can live in lots of different ways, right? Usually when you like go on a website,
you're accessing that website, you know, through, you know, I don't know, your browser,
right? You're on the internet and that website is hosted by some kind of hosting provider that offers hosting services, right?
So that might be something like Vercel.
That might be something like Cloudflare.
It might even be some legacy providers like GoDaddy or similar.
Model context protocol servers don't exist that way, even though
it would be really obvious for them to. If you've ever tried building a website or hosting a website,
you know that Vercel these days is the king of hosting infrastructure. Everybody ships their
website to Vercel and it solves a lot of developer problems that you'd otherwise have to deal with
And it solves a lot of developer problems that you'd otherwise have to deal with if you weren't using them.
The reason that model context protocol servers are not hosted in these really standard ways is pretty basic.
It's literally just that there are a couple additional problems that need to be solved for when it comes to hosting.
And because these standard hosting providers haven't solved for those few problems, what everyone's doing is they're just shipping their server code to GitHub repos.
GitHub repos and they're hoping that developers are going to clone those repos locally, run
those servers locally.
And if you've seen tutorials on how to do this with Claude or something like that, then
you kind of know what I'm talking about.
If you're sitting on the space and you're like, man, this is like super, super deep, like,
you know, dev stuff that I don't understand that I don't want to understand, right? And it sounds
super confusing to you, then that feeling is what highlights like a huge opportunity in the space,
right? Because at the end of the day, these tools are valuable to anyone who's using ChatGPT,
because at the end of the day, these tools are valuable to anyone who's using ChatGPT,
right? Anyone who's using Claude. And these tools in theory could let you do anything,
right? They could make it easier for you to order DoorDash or Grab, right? They could make it easier
for you to shop. They could make it easier for you to travel. They could, you know, make it easier for you to do your work when you're at work.
The reality is that you don't want to deal with all of the, you know, difficulties of
managing servers and hosting and all that shit that developers deal with because you're
probably not a developer, right?
And that goes for like the vast majority of people on this earth, obviously. Now,
the opportunity there, right, is on the hosting infrastructure side, right? And, you know,
that's an infrastructure problem to solve. So, you know, it's good to see that the internet more broadly continues to worry
about hosting MCP servers, trying to figure this out. There's a couple players that, you know,
Dark is competing with. The major one, I think, is Cloudflare. If you guys are familiar with
Cloudflare, they were campaigning a ton, you know, across the internet last week with Stripe, with Anthropic, with a bunch of other tech companies building these MCP partnerships.
Stripe is another really interesting one. AI tooling, right? This idea that like AI agents, you know, will need to eventually pay for usage,
right? When they're using AI tooling, like nothing gets used for free, right? When you go to
Starbucks, you buy coffee, you pay for that coffee. Agents are going to need to pay for tooling usage the same way, right? And so, you know, fire emoji guy, I don't know how to say your handle, but I didn't forget your speaker request.
I also think that there's a good chance X spaces are kicking people out because I keep seeing people leaving and coming back in.
And I just got some pings from friends saying that they're getting kicked out.
So that's super fascinating.
We're going to keep talking.
Let me, let me pings.
And I think if, if we keep seeing difficulties here, um, we'll move to other
spaces in the future, but give me a second. Let me make some people.
Okay. Um, all right. Well, we'll hope that fire emoji guy comes back.
Yeah, I noticed people keep joining and keep leaving.
That's fascinating.
Interesting.
Okay.
What the fuck?
All right. I'm going to end this space. space i'm gonna start another one we're
gonna see if it's more stable give me a sec
