Mind Crunches #23: Some Personal Updates
Alternatively: Pushing the frontiers of emerging technologies
š¼ Transitioning from Web2 to Web3
After almost 8 years at Microsoft, I decided to get officially crypto pilled and join Matter Labs, the company behind zkSync leading their Enterprise team. For those who know me or follow this blog, they know that for the past 3 years I have been utterly fascinated by blockchain technologies. I am confident that I am still objective enough to recognize the maladies of the Web3 industry but I am also convinced that crypto offers us an opportunity to build a completely new computing paradigm with exciting business models and use cases that current tech stacks canāt enable. I am very excited to join the admittedly most innovative company in Web3 and bring ZK technologies to mainstream use. My interview at The Block provides a more in depth view of my thinking and the reasons that led me to this decision.
šøAngel Investing at Modulus Labs
On a similar note and going a little deeper into zero knowledge, the field that excites me the most is the intersection of crypto and AI. I have written in the past about the importance of developing a āverifiability layerā in AI if we want to proactively address challenges like the explosion of synthetic content, misinformation and rogue actors. For that reason, I am extremely happy to be an angel investor at Modulus Labs, one of the first ever companies to develop ML-specific zk provers. Verifiable ML can be the key that will unlock a bright future for crypto by enabling smart contracts to access AI. Modulus raised a $6.3M seed round from a group of great VC firms and angel investors and I canāt wait for the everyone to experiment with their -soon to be published- API. Itās (accountable) Magic!
š¤Speaking at Singaporeās Token 2049
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to attend Token 2049 in Singapore and speak at a panel about **drumroll* AI and Web3 with Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly, and Mo Shaikh, CEO at Aptos. Itās a non-technical conversation and I believe you will find it insightful if you are even remotely interested about the future of GenAI and its intersection with blockchain.
š°Featured in the World Economic Forum report about NFTs
Back in 2020 when the last crypto bull run was starting, NFTs were the ākiller use caseā onboarding many mainstream users in Web3. Today, NFT transaction volumes are way down and NFTs are ridiculed as a stupid idea that attracts only speculation and grifters. As in most cases with new tech innovations, the truth is that the technology itself is philosophically neutral and itās what people decide to do with it that creates good or bad outcomes. I still believe that being able to prove the ownership of a unique digital asset in an open and trustless ādatabaseā is a powerful primitive for great business use cases so I was very happy when I was invited to participate to a report about the evolution of NFTs from the World Economic Forum and Bain Consulting. I found the methodology and the approach that these organizations followed to be really smart and well-studied and the final result is a very insightful report that is really worth reading. You can find it here. Strongly recommended!