The Decentralized AI Society (DAIS), a newly-formed nonprofit at the nexus of blockchain and artificial intelligence, plans to launch a regulatory pilot in Bermuda and an AI venture fund next year, Michael Casey, DAIS’ co-founder and chairman, told Cointelegraph in an interview.
Both initiates aim to combat what Casey describes as the looming threat of centralization in AI models, which are permeating society at a rapid clip.
For the AI fund, DAIS is “exploring how decentralized economic groups can raise capital effectively without falling into the same traps as the traditional [venture capital] model,” Casey said.
“Tokenization is likely to play a significant role, enabling collective ownership and growth while avoiding centralized control,” Casey added.
Meanwhile, DAIS aims to pilot a new AI regulatory model in Bermuda “to define principles that can accommodate decentralized organizations,” Casey said.
“Existing policy frameworks, focused on centralized registration models, don’t align with decentralized systems,” he added.
Source: DAIS
Launched in September, DAIS seeks to guide policymaking and technological development at the intersection of AI and Web3.
It aims to serve as a counterweight to centralized AI developers — such as OpenAI and Anthropic — which Casey expects will invest in steering regulatory frameworks over the coming years.
“Major players are lobbying for regulation, often to establish their models as the standard, which can exclude competitors,” Casey said.
Blockchain-enabled AI has attracted increasing interest from crypto-focused venture capital (VC) firms, which invested some $213 million into AI-related startups in the third quarter of 2024, according to Messari, a crypto researcher.
Agentic AI has also emerged as a hot theme for liquid token investors after a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen donated $50,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC) to Truth Terminal, a semi-autonomous AI agent, in July.
Since then, newly launched AI tokens such as Goatseus Maximus (GOAT) and AI16Z are bootstrapping billions of dollars in market capitalization.
The fusion of AI and blockchain will transform the digital economy and ultimately create a world where autonomous AI agents freely interact with humans on Web3, Coinbase Ventures said in October.
“We predict a future where agents will have their own crypto wallets to autonomously transact […] or leverage stablecoins to pay humans and other agents to complete tasks necessary for their overall objective function,” Coinbase Ventures said.
