- Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick and CoinFund’s David Pakman expressed skepticism about crypto projects competing with major AI players like OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft.
- Panelists agreed that decentralized AI systems lack near-term practicality and scalability, with limited potential to challenge centralized giants during this market cycle.
Speaking at The Block’s Emergence conference in Prague, Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused VC Dragonfly, is not convinced crypto projects can outperform major AI players such as OpenAI , Meta and Microsoft, let alone achieve synergy between the two areas. .
Hadick basically said that what RWA, DePIN, GameFi, AI crypto and other niches are essentially doing is trying to rebuild the wheel only to end up sabotaging themselves.
Crypto has the problem of taking things that exist really, really well off-chain, making them worse, putting them on-chain, and selling them to people who are already on-chain. We see it across all asset classes and across all narratives…a lot of what’s happening in this AI/crypto crossover is essentially that.
Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused VC Dragonfly Related: US Bitcoin ETF Holdings Surpass Satoshi Reserve, Become World’s Largest at 1.1 Million
Meanwhile, CoinFund Managing Director David Pakman said AI’s main contribution to crypto was to improve software development and overall coding efficiency. Pakman explained that AI has significant potential in infrastructure, security and decentralized applications, calling it a “massive software (and) technical revolution.”
Keep dreaming!
An interesting topic discussed at the conference was the rise of AI agents, autonomous programs designed to perform complex tasks.
We are talking about a relatively new market with a capitalization of over US$8 billion (A$12.5 billion). If you look at this category on CoinGecko, you will find AI projects like Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, a combination of three other AI projects (Ocean Protocol, SingularityNET and Fetch.ai). Damn, talk about UX and simplicity.
And what are the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance or other crypto-AI projects doing? I don’t know. Seriously. But if you look deeper down the rabbit hole, you’ll discover a subcategory of AI agents derived from Truth of Terminals. This market is dominated by coins like Fartcoin (FART), Turbo (TURBO), and Goatseus Maximus (GOAT).
Needless to say, you review these projects at your own risk.
Regardless, Hadick doubted any of these sophisticated, abstract agent-based AI crypto projects would have long-term viability, comparing them to crypto games in 2021 (ouch!).
I think almost everyone is going to lose a lot of money.
Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused VC Dragonfly He said AI agents could work in crypto projects, facilitating payments:
If we have an agent-based future… crypto is an ideal substrate for agent-to-agent and human-to-agent payments.
Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused VC Dragonfly Related: SEC Set to Reject Solana ETFs in Final Gensler Crypto Crackdown, Says Bloomberg Analyst
All told, both panelists agreed that decentralized AI systems are unlikely to challenge dominant centralized players – such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta – during this market cycle.
Hadick said decentralized training and machine learning models are neither practical nor scalable in the short term.