For all the buzz artificial intelligence has generated across the crypto industry, Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer isn’t impressed—yet.
“We can’t all go into AI,” he said during a recent interview for the gm from Decrypt podcast. “The AI valuations are sky high. There’ll be some stuff there, maybe, but $30 billion valuations for things that barely hold a conversation and can’t do arithmetic?”
“If you want to buy into it, fine. That’s great. But you can only do so much of that,” he added.
gm: Meet the Brain Behind Avalanche
Avalanche founder and Ava Labs CEO Emin Gun Sirer has been working on proof-of-work cryptocurrencies since before Bitcoin (seriously). He talked to Dan Roberts and Stacy Elliott about how Avalanche avoided FTX and how much damage SBF has done to crypto’s image with VCs, why institutions still aren’t backing away from crypto, why Avalanche will succeed in the long run, and trying to cater to both Wall Street institutions and DeFi degens. Watch and make sure to subscribe to the gm podcast on Apple or Spotify.
Despite his skepticism, Sirer isn’t trying to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) around the wave of AI-driven projects starting to flourish in the blockchain industry.
The category, which includes AI tokens like Fetch and Singularity, has ballooned to account for almost $5 billion worth of the $1 trillion crypto global market capitalization, according to CoinMarketCap.
For context, that number has almost doubled since late January, when the category accounted for $2.7 billion worth of roughly the same global market cap.
Sam Bankman-Fried Did ‘Immeasurable’ Damage to Crypto Industry: Ava Labs CEO
The implosion of FTX last fall dealt crypto a black eye, bruising the nascent industry’s reputation in terms of legitimacy and trust. And this damage is vast, according to Ava Labs CEO and Founder Emin Gün Sirer. “The damage that Sam did is immeasurable,” he said on the latest episode of the gm from Decrypt podcast. “All of that goodwill that we built over many, many years of hard work is just usurped by some guy who comes in and puts on this boy genius act.” Sirer said he’s seen the digital as...
“Imagine what you could do with an intelligent bot that is able to digitize assets, send them, buy them, trade them, using a uniform interface,” Sirer said. “That is going to be an amazing new thing, where I think asset pricing is going to be determined, not so much by people anymore, but also by bots—by algorithms.”
But first, the tech must overcome two big obstacles: Computer scientists need to find a way to stop AI from replicating gender or race biases, he said. And Sirer would like to see bots, specifically the ones that trade AVAX, learn to recognize black swan events.
He recalled that AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche network, took some collateral damage from the news that crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy in November. That happened despite the fact that Avalanche has been pretty well insulated from direct exposure to Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed empire.
Sirer explained that for a long time, AVAX and SOL prices mirrored one another. So trading bots that use past data to predict future prices inferred that if one of the tokens moved, the other would follow.
Esports Giant TSM Forges Ahead With Web3 Gaming on Avalanche
Despite the collapse of FTX and a scrapped $210 million naming rights deal, Team SoloMid’s affinity for crypto hasn’t soured. In fact, the esports org also known as TSM is now building its own crypto sub-network on Avalanche to facilitate esports transactions and tournaments, TSM parent company Swift announced Tuesday. Swift, which also owns the Blitz Esports platform, is building the blockchain sub-network—or “Subnet”—on Avalanche for TSM events. Swift has also chosen crypto payments firm Core...
Sirer hypothesized that when SOL’s price floundered on news of its financial ties with FTX and Alameda Research, the algorithms behind trading bots didn’t account for the fact that Ava Labs and AVAX weren’t similarly entangled with Bankman-Fried’s companies.
“If you have the training data that you did up until the FTX crash, then that’s fine. You’ve got that training data and that correlation is reinforced,” he said. “And then FTX happens and that should only affect Solana—it’s the Sam coin.
“But because the bots have learned this [correlation],” he continues, “you have to now wait for a whole training cycle before the bots can unlearn the correlation between Solana and Avalanche.”
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