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User-Owned AI & the Role of NEAR Protocol in Web3 Innovation
Recorded: March 24, 2025 Duration: 0:36:19Space Recording
Short Summary
At the forefront of blockchain innovation, the Paris Blockchain Week is set to showcase groundbreaking projects and partnerships, including Nia's user-owned AI initiatives and the launch of Infinex, a decentralized exchange. With 2 million daily active users, Nia exemplifies the growth potential in the blockchain space, emphasizing the need for user-centric solutions and effective regulatory frameworks.
Full Transcription
Yn ystod y cyfle hwn, mae'r cyfle hwn yn ystod y cyfle hwn.
Mae'r cyfle hwn yn ystod y cyfle hwn.
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Mae'r cyfle hwn yn ystod y cyfle hwn.
Mae'r cyfle hwn yn ystod y cyfle hwn. Mae'r cyfle hwn yn ystod y cyfle hwn. Hello. Hello, Chris. Nice to have you here. Yeah, no, likewise. Nice to be here.
Thank you very much for the invitation.
No worries.
We'll just give it a couple of minutes, fill up a little bit, and then we'll get started.
That sounds great.
Can you hear me all right, by the way?
Yeah.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Okay. That sounds great. Can you hear me all right by the way? Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Yn ystod y cyfle, mae'r cyfle yn ystod y cyfle. Mae'r cyfle yn ystod y cyfle.
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Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle. Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle. Let's just give it another minute for some more people to join and then we'll get the
ball rolling.
Sounds great. Yn ystod y cyfle, mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle. Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle.
Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle.
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Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle.
Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle. Mae'r cyfle wedi'i ddod yn ystod y cyfle. All right, let's get started.
Hopefully the room will fill up a little bit more as we continue.
Welcome everyone to this X Spaces event hosted by Paris Blockchain Week.
I'm Mike, your host, and today we're digging into the mix of blockchain, AI, and the open
web, one of the brightest minds in the field.
For those new here, Paris Blockchain Week is a place for blockchain enthusiasts and
builders linking up the sharpest minds and biggest innovators. It's all about teamwork, fresh ideas
and shaking things up. Our sixth edition is set for April 8th to the 10th of the incredible
Carousel de Louvre in Paris. So let's get the ball rolling and I'm thrilled to introduce Chris Donovan,
COO of the Near Foundation. Chris swaps law for leading ops at the Near Foundation,
pushing a future where users own their data and AI. Chris, it's great to have you here.
Thanks Mike, great to be here, appreciate the invite.
No worries. So let's start, Chris, if you could snap your fingers and fix one thing
about blockchain today, speed, cost, whatever, what's it going to be?
blockchain today? Speed, cost, whatever, what's it going to be?
Oh it's a great question. I think I would say
I would ask the industry to focus less on infrastructure and more on
products and unique product experiences. I think we've built a ton of
amazing infrastructure and we love to talk about infrastructure
and we love to talk about how innovative and powerful it is.
And it absolutely is. It's definitely the case.
But actually, in terms of driving adoption, what we really need to have more of is killer products and killer experiences
for people using those products that only blockchain based implementations are able to deliver.
So I think that's what I'd say.
Exactly. And then that's when mass adoption will gradually start to happen over that course.
Absolutely. I think if we want, mass adoption will not necessarily happen
purely through infrastructure. It will happen through great products and great product experiences
that give people a reason to want to use this technology
over existing solutions. If you want people to change the status quo,
change the way they do things, you have to give them a really good reason to
do it and infrastructure isn't the reason why people make those types of changes.
For sure. So you're big on user-owned AI. What does that look like
for regular folks and how is Nia pulling that off?
Yeah, absolutely. So user-owned AI is all about having AI that is effectively on your side.
So AI that you actually own and control and is operating to maximize outcomes that are in your best interest. That might be economic outcomes,
but it also might be broader outcomes around flourishing,
getting the right information,
expanding your knowledge base,
bringing about good outcomes basically.
So that's what at a high level user in AI means,
but more specifically and more practically,
what it means is taking
the various guarantees that blockchain technology can provide, and
these are things around censorship resistance, around lack of central points of failure and
control, and actually importing those into AI implementation.
Right now, the most successful AI products and services, they are made available
to the world by closed, centralized, for-profit, in most cases, corporations. And the incentive
models which drive those organizations, those corporations, is of course they have a profit-making
motive. And historically, most of the most successful kind of internet-based businesses you know they
have created an incentive cycle which is linked to attention so they realized
that the best way to monetize their products and services was to capture
people's attention and then make profit in monetizing that and so the more
attention they capture the more profit they make and they've become really good
at capturing attention and therefore at making profit. And the existing most successful
web-based organizations are some of the most valuable and pervasive ubiquitous organizations
in the history of mankind. So it's clearly a very effective business model, but from an outcomes perspective for individuals
and for users, but also more broadly
from a kind of economic and societal perspective as well.
The outlook isn't quite so rosy.
I think from a user perspective,
we don't have control over the platforms that we use.
We don't understand how our data and information
is being used.
It is being used to make these organizations enormous amounts of money, but we don't tend
to get to see any kind of compensation from it. And more worryingly, it's very hard for
us to understand or to make any kind of changes as a result of that. And then more broadly,
because these platforms are optimized for attention and profit, we see the proliferation of things like misinformation and
disinformation. We see that a lot of these platforms are designed to capture attention
and generate controversy, not to, for example, share information that is highly accurate,
highly truthful, lots of integrity, all of the rest. But again, because the models just aren't
incentivized to do that. And if you introduce AI into that paradigm with all of those potential issues,
really you're accelerating the development speed and the power and
ubiquity of the platforms, but you're not solving those root cause problems.
So you're actually going to grow also by orders of magnitude, those root problems.
And we believe that it's fundamental that AI is user owned and not corporate owned
because the AI implementations that exist and are the most successful today, they are not on your
side. They are not optimized for the best possible outcomes for you. They are optimized to make the
corporations that make them available as much money as possible. And we think that is a fundamental
problem and will lead to a bunch of potentially very negative
outcomes. And so we have an opportunity to take, as I said, the kind of the unique guarantees that
blockchain technology can provide and actually bring them into the AI sphere and bring about
much better outcomes across a bunch of different metrics, both for users but hopefully also for kind of society and the internet as a whole.
Absolutely. So with Nia, co-founder Ilya Polosukin's background in AI research,
like EG the attention is all we need paper, how is Nia like uniquely positioned to integrate
great AI and blockchain and what excites you most about this convergence?
AI and blockchain and what excites you most about this convergence?
Yeah, sure. So the way that we think about the kind of intersection of blockchain and AI
in the near ecosystem, there are kind of three key pieces. So the first piece we talked about
already, which is the core layer one blockchain, which was launched back in 2020 and has been live, never had
any downtime. One of the most reliable blockchains in the industry, but also crucially, it's
the most scalable blockchain in the industry. It is a sharded blockchain, which means that
the blockchain and the processing and storage of state that happens in a blockchain is split
up into a bunch of different pieces that are run in parallel, which makes it much more scalable than other kind of monolithic blockchains.
And actually recently, in fact, just over the weekend, the network was increased from six
shards to eight shards. And there are some really cool visualizations that are doing the rounds on
Twitter and that show that the movement of data and information
across all these different charts,
it's really quite incredible to see.
And so we believe that the scalability that that affords
puts Niren in a very unique position
because in a world that is powered by AI and AI agents
where you've got millions,
but actually maybe even trillions of transactions,
you have to have a substrate, in this case,
a layer one blockchain that is capable of handling
all of that traffic.
And we believe that there is no better positioned blockchain
than NIR to do it because of that kind of unique
sharding implementation as well as stateless validation,
which I think we might talk about a little bit later.
So that's the first piece.
You need that substrate.
And AI already benefits from blockchain
because not just because of the scalability,
like I mentioned, but also because it allows agents
to actually interact and transact in a way
that is not possible in kind of a web to your off chain world.
So that's the first piece.
The second piece is that if you have a highly scalable
blockchain, which is great, and we do,
you also need to make sure that anything that is running on that blockchain or utilizing some of
that stack, it needs to be able to also interact with any other piece of technology, and in
particular any other piece of blockchain infrastructure out there. And so we have something
called the chain abstraction stack, which effectively extends the core
protocol to function on a seamless cross-chain basis. So basically you can interact with
and manage and transact across any piece of blockchain infrastructure when you use this
stack. And there are two key pieces of technology in there. The first is called chain signatures,
and that effectively allows you to interact with and manage and transact on any blockchain
through a near account.
And then the second is a cross-chain liquidity
and swapping protocol called near intents.
And that effectively allows you to seamlessly swap
between any digital asset and then also
on an off-chain basis seamlessly across any
piece of infrastructure and across any asset. So that means that actually, for example, agents or
other implementations and projects that are building on are able to seamlessly interact with
any other piece of blockchain infrastructure and also in some cases also interact in an off-chain
basis as well, which makes it extremely powerful and therefore allows
agents in particular to interact anywhere and therefore be particularly
effective and optimize outcomes. And then the third kind of the third piece of the
puzzle is what NearAI is building, which is a separate initiative that Ilya is also
running.
And you mentioned Ilya, he has an incredible amount of pedigree in the traditional AI space.
He's one of the co-authors of the paper, Attention is All You Need, which actually pioneered
the creation of transformers, which power all of these large language models that have become so incredible and can really produce
some really magical outcomes. He is taking a bunch of AI innovations and as I said, importing
many of the guarantees that blockchain enables specifically in the AI context. So we have, for example, a verifiable inference and training.
So this allows you to ensure that you can actually see and
validate how different models were trained,
what the different weightings are,
what data was put into them.
You can even validate and confirm which type of model is being
used when you're, for example,
interacting with
a service that's powered by AI. Right now, when I log into ChatGPT, for example, and
it tells me that I'm using the 4.0 model, for example, but I have no way of validating
that. I also have no way of actually seeing into the model itself and interrogating the
weightings, making changes if I wanted to, understanding, for example, if any of my information
is in the datasets that OpenAI is using, which it almost certainly is because they've pretty much
scraped the entire internet. So they're working on a bunch of different products and implementations
that are very powerful and enable both individual developers but also founders and businesses to
get the incredible benefits of AI,
but to do it in a way that preserves privacy,
is censorship resistant, and as I said,
is set up, designed to bring about the best possible outcomes for users.
Absolutely.
So moving on to making this adoptable, like community and adoption.
So last I read, Nia has around 2 million daily active users
and is attracting both web 2 and web 3 projects.
So what strategies have been most effective
in driving this growth?
And how do you plan to onboard say the next million users?
Cool, so yeah, we do.
We have second highest number of daily
and monthly active users in the industry,
which we're very proud of and is a great achievement. In terms of effective strategies,
there are a few different things that we've found have been particularly effective. One of the
strategies is enabling businesses to integrate and get the benefits of using blockchain, but without it being
necessarily obvious to the end user.
We have, for example, one of the largest projects actually in Web3 is a project called Kaikai,
Cosmos Kaikai, which is a shopping loyalty ecosystem and platform.
It runs on the Neoprot Protocol and they have tens of millions of
monthly active users.
And the interesting thing is that from a product experience perspective, very few of their
users know or certainly need to know actually that the technology is running on the basis
of a blockchain stack.
And that means that actually the user experience is seamless.
And we talked about at the top, the need to have unique and exciting product user experiences that
aren't difficult to understand or with lots of barriers to entry or requiring people to learn a
whole bunch of new things because they just won't do it, right? And you won't get adoption. Enabling
large scale businesses to integrate the technology
without compromising on the user experience,
and maybe even better, just giving them great outcomes
powered by blockchain technology.
This has been a very powerful kind of growth tool
and acquisition tool in terms of getting users engaged
in the ecosystem.
So that would be one.
Another I think is leaning on some
of the unique traits or characteristics of the protocol and the kind of the near technology
stack that I mentioned. So we have another project called HOT, which is a gaming and
DAO ecosystem. And they've enabled, using the chain signatures and intense chain abstraction
stack that I mentioned, they've enabled a number of really interesting and unique cross
chain experiences that are very difficult or in some cases even impossible to replicate
in other ecosystems.
And so they've also generated an enormous amount of activity and growth from a user
acquisition and participation perspective just by giving
users unique experiences that they can't find anywhere else.
Exactly. So with moving from one buzzword like adoption to another like regulation,
it's always in the news and on social media. So what's the hardest part for regulators to wrap
their heads around with blockchain and AI
and how do we help this situation? So I think it's been the same for many years. I think one of the
biggest challenges for lawmakers and regulators in general to grapple with when it comes in
particular to blockchain technology or more specifically when it comes to kind of permissionless public blockchain
technology, is that traditionally if you are a regulator wanting to bring about certain
outcomes. So often if you're a financial regulator, for example, you want to create healthy markets,
you want to protect investors, you want to encourage capital formation, for example.
And that's for example, that's kind of a TLDR of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Financial Regulator in the United States, their kind of stated policy outcomes.
And what they normally do is that they find responsible persons or organizations that
are considered to be providing access to certain types of goods and services that they think
should be regulated because they have the potential of impacting the policy outcomes that they are trying to achieve.
Now when you look at blockchain implementation and blockchain technology more broadly, it
can be very hard when you're looking at a public commissionless piece of infrastructure
to actually apply that same framework and that same kind of approach because in the
case of, for example, the N protocol you know this is not run by any
single individual or organization you know there are
many thousands of of community members there are a whole bunch of validators and other
kind of network participants that allow this entire
piece of infrastructure to function and function to a very high standard and so
you can't really apply that traditional approach to this technology
because they just aren't responsible people. And in the past, regulators have tried to
select or make certain categories of people responsible, even if in practice they're not,
because they're trying to sort of shoehorn the approach into this more traditional way
of thinking about regulating and regulating technology. And I think that's often been where some of the biggest sources of tension have been.
And we've seen, for example, relatively recently, there was a decision regarding tornado cash,
which is the kind of privacy mixer tool that was sanctioned by OFAC in the United States,
which offers a foreign asset control,
which deals with things like sanctions
on the basis that it was a tool that was being used
by, you know, to further crime and in particular,
to transfer illicit funds
and to obfuscate the transfer illicit funds.
And actually the developers that had deployed
and maintained that protocol were also implicated and actually had criminal charges brought against them.
And so, from our perspective, developers themselves, in the context of deploying open source permissionless public technology,
they should not be responsible or face severe liability, even criminal liability.
This is the wrong way to be trying to think about regulating the technology, the better way and frankly the more sustainable way and the way that doesn't just throttle innovation and lead to bad outcomes for developers and founders and people who are trying to promote the technology, is to recognize that the technology is fundamentally different to anything that has come before, and that it is important for regulation to actually embrace as opposed to try and undermine those
unique features. So again, the fact that a public permissionless blockchain does not have a specific
centre of control, for example, is a very powerful and a very good thing. The fact that it is
censorship resistant is also powerful and a good thing, a good attribute.
And so regulation should, and regulators should think through how they can rely on those unique features
to help them get to the policy outcomes that they want, rather than trying to shoehorn the technology
into how they've previously thought about regulating these types of processes or pieces of technology.
And the best way to do that is with education,
is helping the people making these decisions,
trying to craft these laws and regulations,
to understand actually how the technology works,
why it's very kind of uniquely different,
and therefore what a sensible and proportionate regulatory framework
would look like.
And my belief is that we do need something
fundamentally different, fundamentally new
for it to be effective and to kind of meet the needs
of the technology and the people working
and building with the technology,
but also to bring about the outcomes that we want,
which is for the technology to flourish
and to kind of be globally adopted.
I mean, I only talked really about blockchain there.
I think AI has a lot of similar challenges for regulators. But again, one of the good ways to make the
argument is if you believe that AI should be open source and permissionless and it should be capable
of being validated, et cetera, and interrogated. Yeah.
Linking all of these kind of unique features of blockchain and building them into AI products and services is a great way to do that, right?
And it actually brings about better policy outcomes as a result.
And so when we go and have these conversations with lawmakers and regulators, you know, this is how we try and kind of tile the different pieces together.
And then, like I said, generally, we try and educate and support their decision making as much as possible.
100%. So, first Superchain Week 2025 is focusing on tokenization, deep in, regulation, and way,
way more. So, how is NIR fitting in and what should people look forward to hearing from you there?
Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, well, a bunch of different, I think, reasons
why Neera is contributing to these trends.
So I think, first of all, AI is kind of overhauling
how everything is being done.
And it has so many different applications,
not just in Deepin and not just in RWA and tokenization,
but kind of more broadly as well.
And so a lot of the tools, for example,
that Neera AI has recently been bringing to market, WA and tokenization, but kind of more broadly as well. And so a lot of the tools, for example, that Near AI
has recently been bringing to market,
including, for example, agents that
can kind of work seamlessly across chains
and private and verifiable inference and compute.
These are things that would be enormously powerful for RWAs,
for Deepin, and a bunch of other things as well.
So I think from that perspective on the AI side,
where we're extremely excited, I think for the reasons
that I mentioned that the NIR protocol itself is very well
placed to kind of power this AI revolution from a scalability
and reliability perspective, equally applicable, again,
if you're trying to run a large-scale D-PIN project that
is, for example, handling a really large number of,
I don't know of cellular network and
cell phone kind of activity. Again, Neera is very well placed and very reliable and cost effective
for those types of projects. So I think a lot of different reasons why Neera is well placed for a
number of these different trends and looking forward to diving into the specifics.
And we have, as I understand it, a bunch of activations lined up with you guys as well,
just to showcase the latest and greatest on what has been happening in the ecosystem,
particularly on the product and technology front. So yeah, really looking forward to that.
Amazing. Can you share a specific example of a project or a data
on there that's leveraging user-owned AI or chain
abstraction to solve a problem, like something
our audience could relate to in their own lives or businesses?
Yeah, OK.
So I think a good one to mention,
which is a new launch that's actually coming up
in the next couple of weeks, is a project
that we've been working with called Infinex. And Infinex is a project that's been founded by
Kane Warwick, who is a big OG in the DeFi space and also a fellow Australian. And so he started
Synthetix and a bunch of other very substantial, very successful
DeFi protocols. And Gain's vision basically is to build an experience for users which would be
indistinguishable from a user experience perspective, the centralized crypto asset exchanges
and the ones that many folks will have heard of, places like Coinbase, Binance, OKX, Kraken, etc.
To mimic and to match the user experience of those trading venues, but actually make
it self-sovereign, self-custodial.
In other words, you will always control the assets that are actually stored in these platforms
rather than them being stored and controlled
by a centralized organization that is providing you access
to the assets and when you transfer them in,
you are giving up a significant amount of control
and putting those assets at risk.
And you only need to look at the recent large scale
exchange hacking events, including the Bybit recently shows just how dangerous these centralized implementations are.
Right. And, you know, thankfully, you know, the Bybit team responded extremely well to that enormous, that enormous breach.
But I think the principle of the thing remains the same, which is you are much better off leaning into a self-sovereign implementation,
which is one of the whole points of what blockchain technology enables. Until now,
there hasn't been an effective way to replicate a large scale, very smooth, fully cross-chain across
all kinds of possible assets and pieces of infrastructure experience until now, because what Kane has done with Infinix is they've
taken the intense piece of the chain abstraction stack that I mentioned earlier, which allows for
seamless cross-chain transfers and liquidity and integrated it into this centralized exchange-like
experience to produce this fully decentralized, fully self-sovereign exchange experience.
And for us, this is a really exciting launch that's coming up, as I said, in the next
couple of weeks, because we believe that it's something which the industry has been sorely
needing and has really only been made possible by the innovations in the near ecosystem and
extending the core protocol so that it can
function on this seamless cross-chain basis. I think that would be a great example of something
that Nier is uniquely enabling in the industry right now. That sounds incredible. I can't wait
to hear more about that. Futuregaze, in five, 10 years out, where's Nier and Web3 at and how
big will user-owned AI agents be in our daily tech lives?
Well, I mean, our hope, certainly, and Ilya's vision is that this technology will be influencing and
helping not just millions but hopefully billions of people's lives. Now, five years maybe is a
five years maybe is a particularly tight timeframe for that.
particularly tight time frame for that, but certainly at some point in the future that is
But certainly at some point in the future,
that is the aspiration.
And as I said, we also think that that's necessary.
Now, obviously the impact that AI is already having,
but will continue to have on just about every aspect
of our lives.
When you already think about the fact that,
I don't know, we use the internet
and the internet influences pretty much everything that
we do from work, from our personal lives, from who we date and get married to, from how we make our
money, how we digest information and think about the world and form concepts and beliefs, etc.
AI will be driving all of that and effectively in a position to control all of that. And if we
of that and effectively in a position to control all of that. And if we don't make the technology
such that each user is able to control all of that, all of those outcomes and control the
information and the sensitivity and the formation of beliefs and concepts, then I think we're going
to be in a very bad place indeed. And so our belief is that, as I said, Nir is extremely well
positioned to scale and to grow the technology
and to show people that there is a better way
than the kind of current dominant paradigm.
And I think if we are successful,
which we believe that we absolutely will be,
then I think there will be many things
that people are doing every day
that will be powered by this technology
and will be optimized for bringing about better outcomes.
And I think that, as I said, it doesn't even necessarily matter if people don't realize that the technology that they are using has blockchain and even has AI under the hood.
The key is to deliver and enable unique user experiences with better outcomes than what is currently
possible and we believe we're very well placed to deliver that.
Exactly. I think it will be like an unmentioned thing further down the line that it's run
on blockchain or it's AI. It will just become like the norm eventually.
For sure. I think AI will be integrated into and will power pretty much everything that we do. And is already kind of scarily integrated and scarily influential already, a lot more than I think a lot of people realize.
Oh, definitely. So, final one, a fun one for you. So if you had a near powered AI agent just for you, what's it handling?
So your schedule, your crypto trades or something wilder?
That's a good question.
I mean, well, I just moved house on the weekend, which I would not wish on my worst enemy.
So I think an agent that could fully end to end organize and take care of moving house.
Yeah, I would love that.
I would fund that.
So if anyone is working on building that, please reach out.
Just a load of robots moving all your boxes,
that'd be amazing. Well, as long as I don't have to think about it or be involved, I would be happy
basically. Sure, thank you Chris. So yeah, thank you for dropping all that insight and Alpha. I
just wanted to cap it off with like a quick rapid fire round, five quick hits, are you ready?
Fire around, five, five, so you ready?
So let's do it.
Coffee or energy drinks to power for an all nighter?
Coffee.
One word to describe Nier's future?
Incredible.
Uniquely incredible.
Uniquely, that was two, I'll give you that.
Touche.
Smartest AI use case in Web3 that you've seen?
Smartest AI use case in Web3 that you've seen?
That's a great question.
Well, I think NearAI's implementation of
using trusted execution environments to do
verifiable inference and compute, I think,
it's one of the best implementations
that demonstrates the power of
the intersection of crypto and AI.
Amazing. The biggest web-free myth?
That blockchain technology is only for criminals.
And Paris Blockchain Week, best food spot nearby?
Oh, I mean, there are so many great places to eat in Paris. There's a great Italian restaurant
bizarrely called Racines that's about 10 minutes walk from the venue that I would highly recommend.
It's delicious if you like Italian food.
Oh, yeah, definitely. I'll look out for it. Well, thank you, Chris. Massive thanks for
joining us on that. Your thoughts on the AI open web, web 3 were spot on. So, yeah, to everyone
out there, thanks for tuning in. Paris Blockchain Week is coming up very fast. Our biggest yet
with stars like Chris and more companies and more everything. So whether you're new or
pro in web 3, Paris is the place to be in two weeks time. So check out ParisBlockchainWeek.com
for full information on tickets, speakers,
agenda, hotels, you name it and be sure to download our new networking app which goes
live tomorrow to make the most out of your visits. Chris, we'll see you in Paris. Thanks
again.
Yeah, likewise. Pleasure. Thanks everybody and yeah, thanks Mike. Pleasure to chat. Enjoy
the rest of your day. Take care.
Thank you very much and that's it everyone. Thanks for hanging out. Enjoy your day or
night wherever you are. Until next time. Bye bye.
