Innovation Live From Paris at Proof of Talk: Self-Upgrading Chains, DNA Vaults and BitTensor

From Proof of Talk in Paris, host Josh Kriger engages with Aldo de Pape, CEO and co-founder of Genomes.io, a UK‑based biotech DAO reimagining genomic data privacy through genomics blockchain innovation. Aldo, with a background in social‑impact edtech and venture capital, co-founded Genomes.io in 2018 alongside a geneticist partner. Together, they set out to redefine how genomic data is stored, accessed, and valued. With a personal DNA vault secured by homomorphic encryption and Ethereum blockchain audit logs, Genomes.io ensures users control who accesses their DNA—and even earn GENOME tokens for participation in research. They’ve even partnered with Moss Genomics for strategic growth. In a world where breaches and exploitative data sales have marred trust, this episode shines with a guarded, future‑forward vision for DeSci, secure DNA vaults, and equitable scientific progress. This is essential listening for Web3 builders, DeSci advocates, and anyone passionate about reclaiming genomic rights.

Key Topics Covered

• Genesis of Genomes.io and DeSci mission
  Aldo de Pape co-founded Genomes.io in 2018 to fight genomic data misuse and over time, navigating crypto and privacy to create a blockchain‑enabled genomic vault ecosystem.
  
  
• Safety-first design over scientific exploitation
  Emphasizes prioritizing security and privacy—not speed—contrasting with companies like 23andMe whose business model hinges on data monetization.
  
  
• Subnetwork on BitTensor for synthetic genomics
  In partnership with Contango Labs, Genomes.io is building the first human genomics subnet on BitTensor, using synthetic genomic simulators to power AI drug discovery securely, without compromising real DNA.
  
  
• Encrypted DNA vaults and token incentives
  Users control encrypted vaults on Ethereum-powered infrastructure; sharing for research yields GENOME tokens—never compromising raw data.
  
  
• Growth, traction & strategic investment
  With thousands of users, tens of thousands of health reports, and half a million in ARR, Genomes.io just secured strategic equity backing from Moss Genomics, marking a leap in privacy-first biometrics infrastructure.
  
  

Episode Highlights

“We start with safety… If you start with ‘how can we make it safe?’ that changes the dynamics.” — Aldo de Pape genomes.io+6proofoftalk.io+6Cointelegraph+6WIRED+2arXiv+2CointelegraphWIRED

“We would be a subnet for human genomics… the first one ever… on BitTensor.” — Aldo de Pape PitchBook

“Your vault is exported to another vaulted environment… there’s no data leakage in the process.” — Aldo de Pape Messari+4proofoftalk.io+4Cointelegraph+4

“We’re well over half a million in annually recurring revenue.” — Aldo de Pape genomes.io

“Moss Genomics has entered into a strategic, non‑controlling equity investment… excited to work with Genomes.io.” — Aldo de Pape genomes.io+9BioSpace+9tipranks.com+9

People and Resources Mentioned

• Aldo de Pape – CEO & Co-Founder, Genomes.io
  
  
• Genomes.io – Secure genomic data vault via blockchain
  
  
• Moss Genomics – Strategic investor
  
  
• BitTensor – Platform for genomics subnet
  
  
• Ethereum blockchain – For audit log infrastructure
  
  

About Our Guest

Aldo de Pape is the Co-Founder and CEO of Genomes.io, a biotech DAO backed by blockchain and decentralization to safeguard genomic data ownership and privacy. With an MBA and a background in social-impact ventures, Aldo launched Genomes.io in 2018 to protect users from exploitative genomic practices with Ethereum-powered vaults and GENOME token incentives. Based in London, the company has gained traction—receiving a strategic equity investment from Moss Genomics and developing the first genomics subnet on BitTensor. Aldo envisions a world where genomic science is secure, equitable, and user-controlled.

Guest Contacts:

• Website: https://www.genomes.io
  

Transcript:

Arthur Breitman: Every blockchain kind of evolves. But the problem is that most of them evolve via hard forks, and you essentially have to kind of follow the herd. Everyone is hard-forking, so you have to hard fork. There's no debate. There's no place for a formal governance process that can actually decide how the chain is going to be unified. And that's the first idea behind Tezos. But beyond that, the reason for the need for governance is that Tezos was going to be a chain with lots and lots of innovation. So those innovations were really strong smart contract programming language and a pioneer of proof of stake.

Intro: Welcome to The Edge of Show, your gateway to the Web3 revolution. We explore the cutting edge of blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, ordinals, DeFi, gaming and entertainment, plus how AI is reshaping our digital future. Join us as we bring you visionaries and disruptors pushing boundaries in this digital renaissance. This show is for the dreamers, disruptors, and doers that are pumped about where innovation meets culture. This is where the future begins.

Josh Kriger: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Edge of Show live at Proof of Talk in Paris. It is bustling here and lots of exciting conversations. I'm so excited to be here with Aldo Depop, who's the CEO and co-founder of Genomes.io. I've been thinking about this use case for blockchain for quite some time, and you're getting it done. And we'll be able to dive into that first, but maybe you can just like, Tell us a little bit more about your background and what got you excited about this intersection of genetics and blockchain.

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, well, thanks, first of all, for having me. It's really, as you say, buzzing with energy here in Paris, so very happy to be here. My background is, this is my second technology venture. The first one I built was an education social impact company, helping teachers to overcome the problem of information abundance. Before that, I worked for a corporate venture capital fund. that invested in technology ideas beneficial to science. By training, I'm a journalist, I have an MBA and a master's degree in international relations, so I'm not a scientist but my co-founder is. So he's a geneticist and has a PhD in stem cell biology from Imperial. So Mark, who's my co-founder in this endeavor together with three other friends, Simon, Al and Chris, we got together in 2018. Mark and i previously had been working together already so for the while we were working on his idea in technology but i wasn't the founder of that company and then that's when i left to set up my tech company. The idea in essence came from when is scientific data valuable, when can it be used for open science to contribute to what we're doing in developing progress in general, versus where is the line crossed when it comes to the safety, security and privacy of your data. And we say that that is with your DNA, because your DNA is the blueprint of who you are. It's the most identifiable piece of information you will ever have. And if it's just out there, you're exposed to loads of kind of scary things.

Josh Kriger: I mean, obviously, everyone, I think, is familiar with the 23andMe breach. How does what you're doing prevent that from happening for those that were sort of reticent to to do anything with their DNA given what occurred there?

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, that's a very good question. So we start with safety, right? Other organizations such as 23andMe or other laboratories, they start with scientific progress. They start with Okay, how can I get to data? How fast can I get to data? What can I do with the data? Right? So if you start kind of your philosophy with how can we make it safe? How can we make it more secure? That changes the dynamics. So that is a crucial difference. And when you opened with talking about blockchain, we apply blockchain to bring that element of safety in there. And was that part of the original genesis in 2018? Yes, it was from the beginning because we saw that safety and security and the privacy of people was being violated. And that 2018, when it started, they closed the deal of $300 million with GlaxoSmithKline for the first time revealing their true business model, which isn't your $200 at a Christmas sale to get a quirky genetic ancestry report. or finding long lost cousins in a database.

Josh Kriger: It's like, we're going to sell your data and make a lot of money.

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of that bit of exploitation, but also breaches. And in most recent years, unfortunately, loads of cyber hacks, over 133 million people were victimized because of cyber hacks in the healthcare sector. That's just in 2023 alone. Last year as well, record highs on cyber hacking. So we need to do more to protect our data. And experts in the market say we've over-invested in sequencing and over-invested in understanding what's in our DNA, but we've under-invested in security technologies that keep our data safe, that we need as well.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, I think safety has been a theme of many of the conversations I've had with guests today and in terms of sort of all aspects of the blockchain industry, if it's going to mature. I think some of the reality of this is real-time simulations and sort of real-time monitoring and having transparency between the user and the various blockchains about what's happening there. But, you know, let's talk about the progress you are making, because that's exciting as well. You recently closed a major round led by Contago Labs to do genetic simulations and create a marketplace for this. Kind of unpack that for me. What does that mean? And what are some of the aspirations and potential outcomes that can come out of an initiative like this?

Aldo de Pape: Yeah. So, Contango Labs is, and so they're part of General Tao Ventures, which is also, you know, at this event, notably present. So, they are helping us to gear up our subnet, right? And so we would be a subnet for human genomics, the first one ever in genetics, in the field of genetics on BitTensor. So, we're very excited about that. And the idea is, that we indeed double down on our vision on the level of safety, precision and scale, but do that specifically for the pharmaceutical sector. And the way we would do it is we would power up genetic simulators, synthetic genetic simulators that are out there, that's a field in computational biology. There are loads of those simulators active and we would use that as a data feed into the subnet to eventually train our own AI algorithm for drug development. So that's, in essence, what we're going to be doing. I'm pitching about that later today, but we're very excited about that because, as you can imagine, a subnet getting the architecture right, making sure the data feeds works, making sure that the dynamics between miner and validator works and subnet owner, and also making sure that the output is there, is quite a task.

Josh Kriger: So, I mean, the draw, discovery and development cycle is very long and very expensive. Yeah. Is this an initiative where you'd be working with big pharma or are you trying to sort of instill a new type of sort of emerging company environment where other companies can sort of create innovative draws?

Aldo de Pape: But that's a very interesting question. We initially set this out to lead by example, again, looking at the safety and security and privacy of genomic data, right? So by igniting synthetic genomic data, so synthetic is artificial genomic data. It isn't real life genomic data. I'm not violating any living being's privacy by using that type of information. we want to kind of show the world that this is also a good, safe, equitable way of doing it, right? So that is first and foremost our priority. Whether this is traditional pharma who wants to be a part of it or whether these are new drug discovery companies, we're open to both. So we don't necessarily have a kind of a priority. And I agree with you what you say about, okay, the drug discovery kind of, you know, timelines are very long. We're a small part of that, right? We're in the phase where you use genomic data to confirm your assumptions around drug development, but also pinpointing it, for instance, to a region that you are interested in as a pharmaceutical company. Let's say you want to introduce a kind of a drug in East China, you know, and then so we could, with our simulators, we could really give you a genetic simulation of, okay, here's what genomes in that region look like at, you know, give you hundreds of thousands of data sets, matching that with a drug and making sure that you really have a good understanding of what the drug can do before you introduce it to market, right? So that is the bit that we would touch. We wouldn't necessarily touch the the original kind of development bit or further down. So it's only the genomic match.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's underlined data that can help with the development process. And you're rewarding users for sharing their genetics in an anonymous, encrypted manner. Is that correct?

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, so we reward them for when they're using their vault. So all the genomic data is vaulted, it's encrypted. And what happens is if you, for instance, say yes to, yes, I would love to work on a paid study with the British Heart Foundation, then you say, well, you will receive $60, the equivalent of that in our native token genome. if you want to do so. Now, what is important to point out is that at no point whatsoever it's a data transaction. So what happens is that if you say yes, your vault is exported to another vaulted environment where the research takes place. So at no point the British Heart Foundation would receive kind of real raw genomic data, because that would defeat the purpose, right? There's no data leakage in the process. It all happens in an encrypted virtual vault, so to say. What the organization receives is the outcome, are the answers to their research questions.

Josh Kriger: And what's been the traction in terms of the number of participants so far in the number of research studies that you guys have conducted?

Aldo de Pape: So thus far we've done two paid studies. We've done far more because we have 60 health reports running on our infrastructure already. And we have thousands and thousands of users growing in the hundreds each week. And the number of health reports that are being run is in the tens of thousands of reports, right? And we're well over half a million in annually recurring revenue, kind of protecting the direct-to-consumer, so users, these users, with our infrastructure.

Josh Kriger: So I've used Function Health and True Diagnostics. I'm personally really excited about the possibility of getting to know my own sort of body from a longevity perspective, what supplements I should take, what I should eat, what I should do, what I shouldn't do. Do you see your company sort of get into the longevity business in different ways? And if so, in what?

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, no, that's a very good question. And I've been asked before, it was a Cointelegraph journalist who asked the same question. It's like, well, the health and wellness is very up and coming. Loads of people want to know, as do I, right? Our answer to that is like, yes, we definitely want to participate. But again, looking at safety and security, because 23andMe did the same, right? They also give you a report. but they charge you a very high price for it, which is your genome, essentially, or the commercial rights over your genome, and they get to sell it to whoever, right? So you want to partner with the right organization here that also has that safety and security in mind on the same level that you have, meaning that we would love to partner with an organization who shares that mission and vision, but not with one who basically doesn't care.

Josh Kriger: Makes a lot of sense. Let's take a step back for a moment. You come from an educational background. Deci feels like the forgotten stepchild of blockchain in a sense where there's often it's a side event at the big event. It doesn't get as much stage time or much conversation but it seems like one of the most impactful potential use cases. What are your thoughts on what's missing for this broad narrative to shift and for people to get excited about Deci and is that sort of occurring?

Aldo de Pape: Yeah, that's a very good question. I kind of, I think multiple things. I think that the kind of the sector in and of itself, right, needs to mature when we're talking about the possibilities of decentralized technology. And an event like this is very good because you talk about utility, right? But unfortunately, the industry is also polluted by meme coins and kind of all those things. As long as people want to go for short term profits, they're not really investing in the utility end. Now, the utility end you need to keep the market going, right? So if someone thinks long-term profits and says, hey, I want to do this again and I want to invest and I want to grow this, they should double down on utility, which is definitely where science But I would say, yes, science is really at the other end of utility. Science is not a sprint, it's a marathon, right? You should not be impatient when it comes to scientific results. You want quality over speed, you know, any time of the day, because we're dealing with such sensitive information, right? You don't want a doctor to tell you you've got scary diseases and then turns out, well, no, I'm sorry, you don't. Or, you know, God forbid, the opposite, whereby you say, well, you're completely fine and it turns out you're very sick. Right. So just to give that as an example, you want that level of quality. You want kind of all the checkpoints in place to make sure that it makes sense for you as a living human being. Right. And that is why science doesn't have the kind of quick win that many in the sector are unfortunately driven by. So what I would say to those who say, well, I love that you said forgotten stepchild, not even child, stepchild. It's very like, let's nurture the understanding around what science is. bring more experts in, bring people in who know science and how it can really improve science across the board. So I always say DeSci is not kind of recreation of science in the real world, bringing that to a decentralized world. No, it's showing where decentralized technology can do better in science across the board, right? For all these research institutions, Ivy League universities, you know, anyone that is doing research in science, we can make a difference here. So let us.

Josh Kriger: Beautifully said. Thank you so much for your time. I'm going to continue to follow what you all are up to. It's really exciting stuff. For those in our audience that want to dive deeper, where should they go?

Aldo de Pape: Genomes.io. That's our website. Genomes.io on X or on LinkedIn. Are you on X as well? I'm on X as well. I'll do the pop. Yeah. All right. I'll go. Pleasure. Thanks so much, Josh. Thanks for having me. Awesome.

Josh Kriger: I wanted to finish on time, but obviously we should always have a longer conversation. Thank you for your flexibility. Yeah, no, it's all good. I'm sorry, I'm a staff here and I've got a little bit. Let's take a pause to shout out one of our favorite partners. VR, AR, quantum computing, and more, ZuberLawler offers expert guidance in capital raising, IP transactions, M&A, litigation, and compliance. Visit ZuberLawler.com, that's Z-U-B-E-R-L-A-W-L-E-R.com for cutting edge legal solutions. Hi everyone, Josh Krueger here, co-host of The Edge of Show, live in Paris at Proof of Talk. We're having some great conversations with a wide array of projects and interesting folks, and this is no exception. So it's great to be here with Josh Field, one of the members of JoshDAO. For those of you that didn't listen, we started this fun little DAO of all the Joshes in Web3 a while back, and you know, we just say GMJ to each other every day. and we're cooking up other plans. Maybe it'll be a Josh token at some point. But when Josh doesn't hang out on JoshDow, he's the managing partner at Contego Digital Assets and co-founder of General Tao Ventures. You guys have a pretty big presence here and there's a lot of talk lately about BitTensor. So let's kind of jump in to sort of that topic first and educate our audience about what is BitTensor and how does it integrate blockchain with AI?

Joshua Field: Yeah, great question. And thanks for having me, by the way. So I think you can really think of a BitTensor like a layer one blockchain specific for creating intelligence or kind of like building the future of AI. But when you kind of really strip it back, what does that really mean? BitTensor is essentially allowing for anyone to come onto the network and provide some version or some incentive to people looking to create intelligence or create AI. And an analogy that I really like that's been used quite a lot in the world of BitTensor for the layman is that if you can think of BitTensor like a school where each individual subnet within BitTensor is like a specific subject within school or classroom. All of the minors within that classroom are like the students and they're all doing the work. The work in this case of BitTensor is to usually improve on some AI model, train it in some capacity. And then the validators within that network are actually like the teachers and they're grading the homework of the minors. And the goal is that you want to bring all these amazing AI ML developers that come in as these minors. They improve upon these AI models and the best AI ML devs that are able to do that with the best compute. are rewarded the most tau for doing that. And so these validators have a really important role to play in this ecosystem because they're essentially grading it to make sure that this work is being done properly.

Josh Kriger: And is there unlimited improvability with these models or do these models hit a point where they're 99.9% there and there's less effort to put in from that point forward?

Joshua Field: I think that's an interesting question. I think with AI, I think there are a lot of people that can go down the road of thinking that, oh, this is going to hit a plateau. But I really don't see that happening. I think within BitTensor specifically, you're seeing the majority of these subnets continue to improve over time, or at least the digital commodities that they produce. And even just from a human capital perspective, you think of something like genomics, people are always gonna continue to try and improve these things. There's never going to be someone that's stopping to look for a cure for cancer.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, you don't stop studying physics or public policy or any of these academic subjects. There's always sort of new additions to books and new analysis, psychology, right? Like, um, so I guess these models are representative of just this sort of quest for continuous learning in our society at the end of the day.

Joshua Field: Yeah. And if anything, I think you could argue the fact that they're actually exponentially improving. Right. It's like, um, where we were at, even with like GPT 2.5, like what was that year and a half ago to where we're at now? It's it's the, the difference is kind of like astounding. So to even imagine where we're going to be at in two, three years from now, I think it's going to be, it's going to be pretty wild. It's going to get weird.

Josh Kriger: So how is Bitcensor approaching decentralized AI differently than other folks in that sort of genre? And what do people need to understand about the differences between decentralized AI and traditional AI and what the implications are?

Joshua Field: Yeah, so I think for a typical company, one of the big ones like OpenAI, when they're training their models, they're basically doing these really intense pre-training runs where they have all the compute in-house, they're trying to continually iteratively improve their model, and it's all done within this closed loop where you have no ability to see what's actually happening on the inside. And that, you know, the individual layman doesn't really have an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the labor of what comes out of that AI and that model. And I think it's like, you know, it's pretty obvious to everyone at this point now that the team or the person that comes up with the super intelligence or, you know, this super version of AI, they're probably going to control a lot of what happens in the world moving forward. What we think at Contango and GTV and most of the people in the world of BitTensor is that it's extremely important to decentralize AI as much as we possibly can. BitTensor is one way of doing that. And so how that works within BitTensor as an example, you might have a subnet that is specific to just training models, or you might have a subnet that is specific for providing specialized compute. And anyone can come in and try and improve on that model. So if you're just someone that's in university, you're an AI ML dev, and you want to improve on this model, and you want to earn a mission by doing so, that is what the ecosystem is set up to do. And if you're just like me or you and you're like, hey, how do I get access to this? Like I want to enjoy some of the fruits of the labor of what's happening here is you can buy the subnet tokens. The subnet tokens appreciate in value based off of how valuable that actual digital commodity is. If that subnet is truly improving on models at the rate that's similar to these closed source counterparties are, then you would assume that that token would go up in price. And that's how you're able to kind of like, I guess, be a part of this network. And so that's the goal of BitTensor is to open it up to everyone. So then you can have a little piece of the pie, and hopefully compete with the closed source counterparties.

Josh Kriger: And how exactly does the TAU token function within the ecosystem?

Joshua Field: Yeah, so it's it's it's changed a lot. So like, you know, don't hate me if I get this a little bit wrong here, because honestly, BitTensor has gone through so many changes, most recently DTAU, and I'll do my best to try and explain it. It's a little technical. But TAU was originally needed where you when you were setting up a subnet, you would have to lock away your TAU in order to get access to that subnet. And then the way that what happens when you're actually mining TAO or you've set up a subnet or a validator, you're earning parts of those emissions. So the subnet owner owns 18% of all TAO emissions that come out from that specific subnet. The miner's 41%, the validator's 41%, and that TAO is basically being distributed out on a daily basis at the exact same schedule, like vesting schedule or tokenomics schedule as Bitcoin. So it has the same 21 million supply, the same FOIA you're having. So that part's pretty easy to understand. But of course, there's crazy emissions right now. TAO has gone like, you know, absolutely parabolic over the last couple of years. And so there's like on a daily basis, you know, millions of dollars of emissions. And so where's the demand side for that come from? You know, enter DTAO. DTAO essentially tokenized every single subnet. And the only way that you can get access to that DTAO token is through buying TAO and locking up that TAO, staking it to receive a DTAO token in return. And then you can't just sell down that DTAO token, you have to sell it back into TAO. So it's basically like an entrance into this ecosystem. And if you fast forward two, three years from now, there might be a thousand subnets, maybe 2000 subnets, each with their own token. And you need to get access to TAO before you get access to any of these different subnet tokens.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's a really interesting tokenomics strategy.

Joshua Field: Yeah, it's cool. It started with just basically the same as Bitcoin, and then now they've gone down this interesting route with dynamic TAO upgrade, and it's been really fun to play around with, because some of these tokens, it's kind of like they're very low market cap. The emissions schedule is pretty crazy on it, and so you have to play the game a little bit, at least in the early days of DTAO before the supply catches up to kind of the rest of the crypto ecosystem.

Josh Kriger: Makes sense. So you're investing in the BitTensor ecosystem as well. Can you talk about some of the promising projects that you've invested recently and what criteria you're thinking about as you're exploring new potential investments?

Joshua Field: Yeah, for sure. So I'll just just keep it pretty high level. I'll speak of one that's actually here as well, called red team. They're really cool. So they are they're actually a team called inner works and their traditional business we invested in through the fund. They're basically just doing like they're like a security and auditing protocol. And they work with a lot of like the big crypto exchanges. But the interesting thing that they're doing outside of BitTensor is that they're able to do kind of a bot detection for these exchanges to stop Sybil attacks for airdrops and things like that. But they've gotten so good at what they do, it's no longer just the fact that they can tell if you're a bot or a human. They can tell if you're the human that you say you are based off your keystrokes, the way you move your mouse when you log in. It's really, really cool. Wow. And then when we were chatting to them, like, this is what we do at General Tau Ventures. It's like, how can we get you guys to start building in BitTensor as well? And so together, we came up with this subnet called Red Team. And what Red Team does is it basically creates a platform, like a gamified platform for miners to come in and Red Team these security problems. And so they're trying to basically white hat hack into these individual security problems. And the better you are at finding these security vulnerabilities, the more Tau emissions that you actually receive for doing that. And you find that the better you get, you add more compute, you kind of like add some AI to your ability to actually try and red team this situation. And the better you have, the better white hat hacker you are, the more emissions you get. And then they use that data to then power their existing business as well.

Josh Kriger: Cool. I thought you were going to say they're also collecting bounties outside of the tensor ecosystem. Is that a potential future use case here? I mean, my sense is that really good white hat hackers make quite a good living doing this type of work and that can be reinvested into the subnet.

Joshua Field: Yeah, I mean, it's a great idea, right? Yeah.

Josh Kriger: Cool. What are some of the subnets that are thriving currently on BitTensor and maybe some of the ones that haven't panned out as would have hoped yet?

Joshua Field: Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest one, I think, is Chutes. And so it's like an inference subnet. They're serving like a trillion tokens a day already, which is pretty nuts.

Josh Kriger: What do they do?

Joshua Field: They're basically like a decentralized inference subnet. And so if you're looking to run a query, they basically take that query, they run it through like their inference subnet, and they're able to produce tokens on the other side of that. And so like, that's like, you know, pretty standard inference, there's a subnet 51, which is doing compute. um which is like again pretty standard just like distributed rental uh renting of compute uh you can rent h100s h200s and whoever's able to like keep their compute online the longest that's the mining capability here you get rewarded in more tau for doing that and so there are a lot of teams out there that have uh you know like a bunch of racks of h100s sitting there idle sometimes and so they'll plug it into a bit tensor and so that every once in a while someone will come along try to do a training run they'll rent that compute from this team and this team will get rewarded in more tau emissions for doing that and so it's like a little added bonus for these people that are sitting there with data centers that are not 100% utilized.

Josh Kriger: Nice. Pretty exciting stuff. And General Top Ventures, you recently closed a round and you're looking to expand. Where do you see that entity going next while you're on that topic? Where do you see the BitTensor ecosystem moving?

Joshua Field: Yeah, good question. And so yeah, we just closed around from DCG, Luna Capital, and Outliers Fund. You know, very grateful to have them in our corner here. And we've been growing really quickly. So I think the current plan for us is to consolidate some of the work that we do around some of the subnets. Like in the early days of BitTensor, anyone could kind of just like set up a subnet. And there was a lot of things that didn't survive past DTab because they had to show actual value. And in our case, I think like of the five that we had, like three or four of them are still doing pretty good, one or two, not so much. But now the quality of the subnets that we're looking at, like there's two today that are here in the pitch competition. One is around genomics, the other one's around robotics. Both from teams that are like, one is backed by Paradigm, one is backed by Pantera earlier. And so these amazing teams. Competition. Right? Well, they're amazing teams. They're coming into BitTensor now to start building subnets. And they're looking for help from us to do that because we have the experience doing that. The biggest thing for us, the next driver would be twofold. One is really expanding our mining team. And so we've hired in the last three or four months, six AI ML devs. They've been working really hard on mining. We've just kind of fully got up our first mining run over the last couple of months, and we're earning a decent amount of Tau emissions, but we're only really mining on three or four subnets. In order to get really big, you have to mine on, call it, you know, a couple of dozen. And to do that, like each subnet is different, it's specialized, there's like a new skill set involved, there's different levels of compute required. And so you have to really scale and you have to bring on the right talent to do that. So that's the one thing. And then the other thing would be kind of creating user-facing products. Like there are some awesome websites out there like TaoStats or Tao.com. You know, we want to throw our hat in the ring there. And so we're creating something internally around that as well. I can't speak too much about it right now, but should be coming soon.

Josh Kriger: I'm sure I'll have a fun name too, since you guys seem to be all about good names.

Joshua Field: Yeah, I think it will. Yeah, I'm sure it will. Yeah, that's pretty much it for us. I think where BitTensor is going in the future is I think you're starting to, and I think this was mentioned on the stage, but I totally agree with what Alla was saying yesterday, that you're seeing BitTensor go down two routes. One is the research subnets that are actually providing like a digital commodity that can eventually be used by someone else, potentially another subnet. On the other end, you have actual real products. So for me, what I see with something like Red Team, that's actually more of a research-focused subnet. You're trying to create research, do some R&D, and then you can use that R&D to facilitate something else. But if you think of actual other products, then you have something like this compute subnet where they're actually offering something. I mean, the front end, you can go in and you say, hey, I need to rent this GPU. Boom, click, I can rent that. And I think that's what's probably going to be the next driver of BitTensor is more so around the product-focused subnets.

Josh Kriger: Or user-oriented.

Joshua Field: Yeah, better UX. People can touch and feel it. And it's a little bit less just kind of like heady. I think there's a lot of people that their first experience with BitTensor kind of leaves them a little bit confused. They're like, what is the real value here? And I think that's maybe where we're losing some people, but.

Josh Kriger: Is there a Venture Studio potential component to what you're doing where you guys, where you see a market gap and no one's doing it, you'll build it yourself?

Joshua Field: That's what we do, yeah. So the, like for the product that I was mentioning, this is our first one that we're doing entirely in-house. All the other subnets and things that we've built in the past have just been partnerships, like usually 50-50 partnerships with teams. But even on the subnet front now, we're looking actively at a couple right now that we just build entirely ourselves now that we have the team to do that. So yeah, that's our goal and our job is just to find those gaps and try and improve as much as we can.

Josh Kriger: exciting stuff. If people want to learn more about Contego and Tau Ventures and yourself, where should they go?

Joshua Field: Just follow us on Twitter. So at gtauventures on Twitter, Contengo Digital, and myself as Josh Contengo.

Josh Kriger: Thank you, Josh. Good to have you on the show. Really appreciate it.

Joshua Field: Thanks.

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Josh Kriger: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Edge of Show. This is Joshua Krieger, your co-host, and I am live in Paris at Prefitar with Arthur, the co-founder of Tezos. It's so amazing to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. I was an early supporter of the project, and it's just been really exciting to see how the Tezos ecosystem has sort of evolved over the last few years, and you guys are up to some really exciting things now. I guess we should just start with what inspired Tezos and how has your vision evolved over the last few years?

Arthur Breitman: Yeah, so the original, I would say, main concept of Tezos, you said there were three pillars, but the main one was governance. And it's become commonly accepted now, but it was this idea that when everyone would launch blockchains and they were supposed to either stay, you know, they were supposed to stay that way forever. And so people would launch a blockchain with feature X or feature Y. But that doesn't work. The blockchain needs to be able to evolve, and we see it now all the time, except maybe for Bitcoin. Every blockchain kind of evolves. But the problem is that most of them evolve via hard forks, and you essentially have to kind of follow the herd. Everyone is hard forking, so you have to hard fork. There's no debate. There's no place for a formal governance process. that can actually decide how the chain is going to be unified. And that's the first idea behind Tezos. But beyond that, the reason for the need for governance is that Tezos was going to be a chain with lots and lots of innovation. Those innovations were really strong smart contract programming language and a pioneer of proof of stake. Now on, it's expanded. I used to say the three pillars of Tezos were governance, proof of stake, and smart contract security. And now I would say scalability is one of them. Over the past two years, we've pioneered a lot in scaling.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's really exciting. And you're definitely always trying new things. You guys were very advanced in thinking about digital collectibles. And my understanding is now you're really thinking about decentralized finance in new and creative ways. You recently launched a uranium project. Tell us a little bit about that.

Arthur Breitman: Yeah, I've been excited personally about uranium as an asset since end of 2021. And the reason is that there was a shift, I would say, in attitude towards nuclear power. It used to be that, you know, you had all this generation that had this sort of Cold War and a peace movement that was mostly concerned about proliferation. And so there was a lot of pushback against nuclear power, especially after Chernobyl. But now, I would say like in 2021, you had seen that concern about global warming was a bigger factor. And so younger generations were far more pro-nuclear power, especially if you looked in the US, even in the Democrats in the US, you had older generation still opposed to nuclear power, younger generation pro-nuclear power. So if you just extrapolate the trend a little bit, it was only a matter of time before we saw a nuclear renaissance. And then on top of that, we've now had you know, projection for demand for energy massively increasing with AI. And as a result, we're seeing tons and tons of nuclear power plants being built around the world.

Josh Kriger: So how has the community responded to the ability to trade uranium and what have, you know, has it attracted new folks to Teslas? Has it sort of, you know, worked for the community, you know, that was also like buying digital art? It's quite a stark difference.

Arthur Breitman: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people were puzzled. People were surprised, like, what? Uranium? Some people were like, is that even possible? Why uranium? It felt like a little surprising, but I think we're making a good case that it makes a lot of sense. You know, I'm surprised that an asset as important as uranium doesn't have, you know, established and liquid markets. And yeah, we're trying to create one.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, so has it brought any kind of new users to Tezos from what you can tell so far? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arthur Breitman: So there's been new users coming in, you know, whether like retail or institutional. There's even a game that launched around Uranium that has attracted 100,000 monthly active users. Tiny amounts, on the one hand you have users buying very tiny amounts, but you've also had discussions with institutions who are interested in trading this and not trading it on the OTC market where you can only trade in increments of several million dollars. So there is definitely something that tokenization is offering. We've seen a lot of criticism of the crypto industry over the past 10 years saying, look, it's a solution in search of a problem, it doesn't do anything, you can replace it with a database. And a lot of this criticism has been true for a lot of things. There are things we can pinpoint where it's definitely not been true. One of those is stablecoins. Stablecoins have exploded. There's hundreds of billions now of stablecoin. It keeps growing. You know, this isn't made up. There's clearly a product market fit. And I think tokenization of commodities in particular, like uranium, is going to be one of those important market fits.

Josh Kriger: So are you leaning in? Do you plan to tokenize more commodities over the coming years?

Arthur Breitman: Yeah, absolutely. I think I'd like to see, to understand exactly what is the right playbook for uranium, trying to map out the market, understand the demand for the consumers. If you're a hedge fund and you want to trade uranium, you're going to face some constraints potentially with a tokenized product, understanding what they are, addressing them, bringing the middleware that's necessary. But then, you know, once you have this really good blueprint, you can do it across a wide range of assets.

Josh Kriger: Cool. And what are some of the other plans over the next five years? Like, it feels like with the advent of AI and spatial computing and quantum computing, you know, the blockchain use cases are expanding. And I think there's more of a divergence between the sort of cultural plays like meme coins and then the real-world use cases. How is Tezos going to play in this world as sort of, you know, one of the most tactically advanced platforms? Like, what are your aspirations over the next five years?

Arthur Breitman: I mean, my aspiration is to make Tiddles as big as possible. You know, any metric that you pick, have as many users as possible, as many transaction volume as possible, has a number of transactions or volume transacted, all of that. I would like it to be on the basis of real activity. I would like Tiddles to make a real contribution to the world. I think it does this, you know, in the art space. So we have a huge community of artists And a lot of people have conflated a lot of the NFT activity from 2021, which was largely just a prelude to the Memecoin era. Memecoin that were just slightly non-fungible. Here's a non-fungible collection of a million unique odders. Yeah, they were meme coins, essentially. And the art community that has been resilient at Santezos, there's real value. People want to collect digital art, and it's here. Likewise with Uranium. I think there's really interesting primitives in DeFi, but for DeFi to be interesting, for finance to be interesting, it has to finance something. You want to finance real economic activity. So getting into that, I think, is quite interesting. Now, underpinning all this, there's, of course, the technology. You know, you don't want to be a technology in search of a problem, but there are clearly demands for security, throughput, latency, all of that. And a lot of the work that's been going on in different core teams working on Tezos over the past couple of years in scaling is starting to pay off as we see demand for the number of transactions on blockchains rising.

Josh Kriger: Exciting. I guess one of the interesting intersecting trends is smart cities. I have the opportunity to work with Neom, the smart city outside of Riyadh, one of the Kingdom's big projects. And there's other sort of advances in smart cities globally. Clearly, you know, New York is excited about, you know, becoming a smart city. So is Miami. Many cities are excited about this. You talked about practical applications. Do you see Tezos as a potential, you know, platform of choice in the world of Deepin and of sort of advances in the smart city infrastructure building?

Arthur Breitman: Actually, there was already, it was a very small scale, but a city project in Switzerland on Tezos, the city of Vatican, created a stablecoin on the Tezos chain for its users, for its citizens that was accepted by different stores. So yeah, I think municipal and citywide initiatives are quite interesting. On Deepin, I I am interested in it. I think there's still a lot of bullshit in Deepin. There's some value prop. A lot of it seems to be centered around the idea of like, there's going to be a device and then you can essentially subsidize the device by creating a token and incentivizing it. But at the end of the day, a lot of it just looks like selling a token as opposed to really creating a network. So I think the jury's still out to see if there's a huge benefit of options in Deepin. I think it's possible, but the use cases are a bit narrower than people imagine at the moment. So we'll see a few emerge. Most of them, to me, currently don't make a lot of sense.

Josh Kriger: There's a lot of fluidity in users in our industry. And what I mean by that is if movement from one chain to another, you know, recently Barrier Chain has received a lot of, you know, community activism. Abstract is a new chain. How do you segment the users of Tezos relative to other chains? And what are the types of users that you're going for that you think have more sticking capacity? Or is it just an understanding, like I'm in the podcast business and people listen to my show and they listen to other shows and they're not, you know, the loyalty factor isn't as important as the content and the quality of the latest guests. So hopefully they tune into your show. But what are your, Is it about what are you doing for us lately, or is there true customer segmentation in the layer one space?

Arthur Breitman: I think there is. But if you look at Bearish Inn, for example, I don't have the exact number, but I think they spent about $100 million in incentives, got to $3 billion in TVL, spiking down to a billion. How much of it is going to stick? What is the expense? I don't know. But a lot of this industry runs on subsidies. It's like people launch a new token. And it used to be in 2017, you would collect money for the token or some people would sell the tokens. And now it's kind of like, no, no, no, you'll have like... you'll create a token and then you're going to give X percent to custodians and X percent to infrastructure and middlewares. It's just like this college industry of taking new issuance from these chains. And you'll spike the volume at first and then it kind of collapses. So I don't know how much of that actually does useful user acquisition. In some sense, it's just all subsidized by people who end up buying the token and trying to gamble on it. That doesn't seem very sustainable as a model. So then the question is, who is your customers? And how do you get them to stick around? I think it's loyalty to chains. Some people, if you're a farmer and you just say, I just want the largest incentive, you're going to go on every chain and collect the incentive. You're not really a user. You're just collecting farming subsidies. In fact, if you create farming subsidies, you probably don't want those type of users, unless you want to print a vanity metric.

Josh Kriger: Everyone says they don't, but then they realize, oh, it's really hard to attract real users, so why don't I just, you know, issue some coupons. Well, they want the vanity matrix. They want to say, like, look, the TVL is this much. But it's like Bed, Bath & Beyond. Once they started giving those discounts, they could never stop.

Arthur Breitman: Ah, yes, yes. It didn't end well for BitBasin, unfortunately. So what do we... It can last for a while, you know, the console and the gaming business also run on, you know, the console business run on subsidies for a very long time with people, like, any time where you have strong network effect, people will spend a ton of money trying to, like, build and get that network effect.

Josh Kriger: But can you... Can you define the Tezos user? You meet them at a party, you know who they are. Is there truly some attributes of the type of individual that you currently have using Tezos and that you want to attract?

Arthur Breitman: Or is it a little bit more abstract? No, there's not a single attribute, I would say. Clearly, this is a big art community and people who care deeply about art and Tezos. They're not necessarily solely on Tesla, so a lot of them will use other chains as well. We have a DeFi community. Paradoxically, it is an industry where profit is a huge motive for people and subsidies, but there's also a lot of brand loyalty. Does that make sense? It's a mix between sometimes supporting a religion or supporting a football club. And it's weird. I think a lot of these blockchains can be thought of as online communities, oftentimes, more than products. It's a weird mix. I don't think it has an equivalent anywhere else.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, it's something I've thought about a lot. And since I know you've thought about it, I wanted to get your perspective. Anything else before we wrap up on the roadmap that you're particularly excited about you want to mention?

Arthur Breitman: Yeah, but just to close, what attracts users to Tezos? I think we have a lot of people who really appreciate the technology of the chain and the way it's designed. We have a lot of tinkers, so running a node on Tezos can be done on a Raspberry Pi. So we have hobbyists who just really enjoy participating in a network. We have people who really care about decentralization and who love the decentralization model. So different people, I think. Sometimes it reflects people's personal values to be using a network.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's really helpful. And with that said, just closing thoughts on sort of where things go from here for Tezos?

Arthur Breitman: I think growing, you know, historically, I would say one of the weakest point of Tezos has been modest adoption, like, you know, strong community of users with small community of users. So by far, the priority is grow these metrics, grow the number of transactions, grow the number of active users, grow the TVL. All of this matter. We need to be a bigger ecosystem. We definitely have the technology for it. We need to find more of an audience for it. Sounds good.

Josh Kriger: And if people want to follow you on Axe, what's your handle? It's Arthur B. All right. At Tezos, of course. Yeah. Just Google Tezos, you'll see.

Arthur Breitman: Yeah.

Josh Kriger: Arthur, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. I wanted to have you on such a long time, so it's an honor. My pleasure. Thank you.

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