{"id":872222,"date":"2025-09-11T21:12:46","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/11\/billionaire-barry-silbert-says-he-hasnt-been-this-excited-about-a-crypto-project-since-discovering-bitcoin\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T21:12:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:12:46","slug":"billionaire-barry-silbert-says-he-hasnt-been-this-excited-about-a-crypto-project-since-discovering-bitcoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/11\/billionaire-barry-silbert-says-he-hasnt-been-this-excited-about-a-crypto-project-since-discovering-bitcoin\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaire Barry Silbert says he hasn\u2019t been this excited about a crypto project since discovering Bitcoin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

One of crypto\u2019s earliest entrepreneurs is betting on something other than Bitcoin<\/a>. Famous as an early advocate of \u201cdigital gold,\u201d and for launching franchises like CoinDesk and Grayscale, billionaire Barry Silbert shared his newest passion at Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm Tech<\/a> conference in Park City, Utah.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI believe that the next big wave in crypto is going to be the convergence of AI and crypto,\u201d said Silbert, who is the founder and CEO of crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group, on a Tuesday panel.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not just the intersection of two of the buzziest buzzwords in tech that has Silbert excited. It\u2019s a project called Bittensor, a decentralized marketplace for AI founded by Jacob Steeves, a former Google<\/a> engineer.<\/p>\n

Silbert is so excited about Bittensor that he\u2019s started a new company called Yuma that\u2019s dedicated to the protocol and its associated cryptocurrency TAO. \u201cI want to open up the development and the access to AI and Bitensor is enabling that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is the thing that I\u2019ve gotten most excited about since Bitcoin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bitcoin to Bittensor<\/h2>\n

Silbert isn\u2019t your average crypto evangelist. The billionaire first obtained his stock broker license at the age of 17 and worked in finance after he graduated college, including on marquee bankruptcies like those of Enron and WorldCom. In 2004, he founded what would become SecondMarket, a trading platform where users could buy and sell alternative assets, which he would later sell to Nasdaq<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2012, Silbert discovered Bitcoin and soon spun up a new company called Digital Currency Group, which included subsidiaries like the popular crypto news publication CoinDesk, a crypto trading and lending arm called Genesis, and Grayscale, a crypto ETF issuer. Digital Currency Group eventually sold CoinDesk to the crypto exchange Bullish, and, in July, Grayscale confidentially filed to go public.<\/p>\n

Silbert\u2019s crypto empire suffered significant setbacks amid the \u201ccrypto winter\u201d that followed the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX, but he has since returned back into the public eye to boost Bittensor and Yuma, his new company dedicated to decentralized AI.<\/p>\n

Major AI algorithms require mammoth amounts of computing power, and only large, centralized players like OpenAI, Google, or Amazon<\/a> have the capital to compete. Bittensor tries to repurpose the same incentive mechanisms that power Bitcoin to encourage participants to lend their computing power to create a decentralized network of servers to power AI algorithms. Silbert\u2019s Yuma<\/a> helps different projects looking to make use of Bittensor\u2019s network to power their AI applications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the way that the internet was the world wide web of information, Bittensor is creating the world wide web of intelligence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The protocol was especially popular<\/a> in the first half of 2024, when its cryptocurrency TAO notched an all-time high in March 2024 of $757. The token now trades at nearly $360 as of Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On the new Fortune Crypto Playbook<\/em> vodcast,<\/strong> Fortune<\/em>\u2019s senior crypto experts decode the biggest forces shaping crypto today. Watch or listen now<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Ben Weiss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of crypto\u2019s earliest entrepreneurs is betting on something other than Bitcoin. Famous as an early advocate of \u201cdigital gold,\u201d and for launching franchises like CoinDesk and Grayscale, billionaire Barry Silbert shared his newest passion at Fortune\u2019s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah.\u00a0 \u201cI believe that the next big wave in crypto is going<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":872223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27397,132],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-872222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-barry","8":"category-billionaire"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}