- Barry Silbert, head of DCG and CEO of Yuma, said he believes Bittensor could be as transformative as Bitcoin.
- Yuma will function as an accelerator for startups looking to explore Bittensor, and as an incubator to partner and create subnetworks.
Digital Currency Group (DCG), an early champion of cryptocurrencies and the digital assets sector, is now also turning its attention to AI. Not just any artificial intelligence, but a decentralized version that drives the Bittensor ecosystem.
The Barry Silbert-led conglomerate has unveiled a new company, Yuma, focused on incubating and building new businesses using decentralized AI to complete tasks and earn rewards.
Basically, Bittenseur is a decentralized network for AI that incentivizes people to contribute data and computing power for activities ranging from text translation and data storage to predicting the structure of complex protein chains.
“If you ask five people, ‘What is Bittensor?’ You’ll get five different answers,” Silbert, an OG cryptocurrency investor and evangelist, said in an interview. “If you look back at the early days of Bitcoin, some people would say it’s silver, others would say it’s gold. Some people would say it’s this blockchain (…) The way I think of Bittensor is like the World Wide Web of AI.
There is no doubt that AI is a fundamental technology with all kinds of possibilities, but it also has the potential to give far too much power to the Microsofts, Facebooks and Googles of this world as users store their data in the powerful business computers. Decentralized AI can help avoid this, not only when it comes to exploiting vast untapped computing resources, but also by removing some of the technology’s opaque and scary reputation.
Bittensor’s native cryptocurrency, $TAO, is used to foster an army of decentralized workers: either miners providing advanced computing services to certain tasks, or validators evaluating the quality of contributions and awarding rewards.
This interest in AI did not happen overnight. DCG made its first investment in Bittensor in 2021. Most recently, DCG’s asset management company, Grayscale, added funds dedicated to AI including the $TAO token. Underlining his confidence in the project, Silbert will serve as CEO of Yuma, which will have some 25 employees from day one.
In some ways, the Yuma Incubation and Design Studio is for Bittensor what Joe Lubin imagined. The Consensys model was for Ethereum. But rather than owning 100% of the subnetworks developed under Yuma’s auspices, it’s more like the Y Combinator model of a venture capital firm mixed with an accelerator, Silbert said.
“There are two types of subnetwork partnerships,” Silbert said. “We are working on an accelerator, so if you are a startup or company that has an idea and wants to explore the world of Bittensor and launch a subnet, we will help you. Next, we have a subnet incubator, where we will partner with someone to create a new subnet from scratch.
So far, Yuma has five active subnets. Four went through the acceleration program and one through incubation. Nine more are in development and expected to go live in the coming weeks, one of which is in incubation and resting in the accelerator. The current list is a good mix of use cases, said Evan Malanga, Yuma’s chief revenue officer.
“We have human detection, like robot detection subnets,” Malanga said in an interview. “We have time series prediction subnetworks that come online. We also have some academic ones; AI research, leveraging subnet miners to do this work for them, security tasks, and role-playing. And sports predictions. Lots of sports predictions.
