Interviewers: flowie, kit, ChainCatcher

Guest: Matt Wright, Co-founder and CEO of GaiaNet

Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher

In 2015, Matt Wright became involved in cryptocurrencies after helping Barclays, a leading British bank, organize a blockchain hackathon. Now, he has been in the crypto field for nearly 10 years.

Matt Wright worked at JPMorgan Chase and participated in the development of the open source blockchain platform Quorum. With the acquisition of Quorum by Consensys, Matt Wright joined Consensys and became the head of the community. He later took charge of Consensys's DAO organization and its accelerator Fellowship.

Matt Wright spends most of his time dealing with developers. As AI technology develops, more and more developers around Matt are investing in AI-related projects.

But Matt soon realized that today's AI field is dominated by a few centralized organizations in Silicon Valley, and there are many problems, such as censorship and bias of closed-source models, high model training costs, user privacy and IP ownership, etc.

Therefore, Matt decided to lead his team to create a truly democratic AI infrastructure that can solve these problems. Gaia came into being in May this year. As an open source distributed AI infrastructure project, Gaia attempts to become a decentralized alternative to AI giants. It aims to decentralize AI Agent software so that AI data content providers can have the ownership and compensation of data content they deserve.

GaiaNet's first use case was born in colleges and universities. Dr. Yang, director of the FHL Vive Center at the University of California, Berkeley, is using GaiaNet's distributed network to build decentralized teaching assistants for all of his courses, books, student communication feedback and other research and data.

In addition to building network infrastructure, GaiaNet is also seeking cooperation with academic institutions that have large amounts of valuable data, trying to enable them to have their own AI Agents.

When GaiaNet was first established, it received US$10 million in seed round funding. Its main strategic advisors include Lex Sokolin of Generative Ventures, Brian Johnson of Republic Capital, Shawn Ng of 7RIDGE, Kishore Bhatia, EVM Capital, Mantle EcoFund and ByteTrade Lab.

Hackathon veteran player

1. ChainCatcher: How did you first get into the crypto field? What other career experiences did you have in the crypto field before founding GaiaNet?

Matt Wright: I started my career at an international hackathon company and accelerator called AngelHack. AngelHack organizes more than 200 hackathons every year in more than 60 countries and regions including North America, Latin America, and mainland China.

I am involved in AngelHack’s emerging technologies and markets arm and have organized hackathons for more than 20 Fortune 500 companies such as Mastercard, AWS, ABInBev, Capital One, Smartone, Motorola, and Barclays.

During this period, I also participated in the construction of AngelHack's strategy in mainland China and held many activities in Shanghai and Shenzhen. I really like and understand the culture of Chinese-speaking regions.

Around 2015, I participated in a blockchain hackathon held by Barclays, a leading British bank, in New York.

During the conversation, they told me that blockchain is disrupting banks. Although I have heard of Bitcoin before, this is the first time I have come into contact with engineers building blockchain applications and infrastructure.

The use cases they mentioned were all things I care about, such as transparency, democratization, and returning sovereignty and assets that people have been deprived of. This experience motivated me to learn about and later join the crypto space.

Around 2017, I joined JPMorgan to work on their open source blockchain platform Quorum, which was also a fork of the Go Ethereum client (geth) designed to handle private transactions with a set of permissioned, known participants.

Quorum was acquired by Consensys soon after, and I joined Consensys. Consensys originally wanted me to take a marketing position, but I was determined to focus on the developer community. I hope to apply the organizational experience during AngelHack to Consensys.

Later, I became the head of DAO at Consensys, thinking about how to build applications for on-chain organizations, organizations without CEOs, how to use communities for tokenized incentives, and so on.

I also led the Fellowship, an accelerator at Consensys, supporting some amazing builders.

2. ChainCatcher: You also founded an investment institution, EVM Capital. Why did you start trying institutional investment?

Matt Wright: We have come into contact with a large number of developers. In order to raise funds, many developers need to spend a lot of time explaining their products to VCs who may not understand technology very well, and they often lack patience.

We have been dealing with developers in the past, so we saw this opportunity and hope to help many potential products capitalize and find value networks.

At the moment we almost think of EVM Capital as a fund of GaiaNet. If our portfolio is built around AI, governance automation, identity and reputation automation, etc., then we can recommend GaiaNet's products to them for use to create synergy.

Challenge the giants and build a decentralized "ChatGPT"

3. ChainCatcher: In May this year, you co-founded GaiaNet. How did this entrepreneurial idea come about? What are the backgrounds of the core team?

Matt Wright: The core team of GaiaNet is currently basically from leading projects such as Consensys, EVM Capital, and Aleo. One of the co-founders of GaiaNet, Sydney Lai, was the head of developer relations for Magic, Mantle, Filecoin, and Outsystems. She is very influential in the developer community and is now our development director.

Shishank Shipada, another co-founder of GaiaNet, has a very rich experience, with institutional capital and multiple entrepreneurial experiences, which makes him feel like he has lived two lives. He has co-founded and exited three companies, and has investment management experience in multiple institutional capitals. He currently runs a $7 billion family office and co-founded a $600 million fund.

I chose to create Gaia in the hope of promoting the democratization of AI technology. Web3 enables anyone to become their own bank or knowledge monetization service provider, and AI is enabling anyone to become their own content generator or their own intelligent agent. In the future Web3 world, there may be more AI robots participating than real humans.

However, AI data is currently controlled by a few centralized organizations in Silicon Valley. If we continue to give control and trust to a centralized service provider, the consequences are unimaginable.

4. ChainCatcher: What is GaiaNet's specific solution to the centralization problem of AI? You mentioned in the press release that you will first target the demand scenarios in the field of higher education. Can you give an example of how GaiaNet solves the problem in this field?

Matt Wright: Our first coolest use case started with Dr. Yang, the director of the FHL Vive Center at UC Berkeley. He had a plan for decentralized teaching assistants.

There is currently a severe shortage of teaching assistants in higher education, especially in high-enrollment courses such as introductory computer science and engineering.

Dr. Yang put a lot of research and data, including his own courses, works, project white papers, and student feedback, into his GaiaNet nodes. Each GaiaNet node acts as an AI Agent, similar to a real-world teaching assistant.

His group of about 30 doctoral students will talk to lecturers at the FHL Vive Center at the University of California, Berkeley through this smart teaching assistant.

With the accumulation of time, it is very imaginative that if someone wants to co-author an article with this intelligent teaching assistant, the intelligent teaching assistant can get paid. In other words, there may be programmable royalties.

At present, we have supported various open source large language models and established corresponding core nodes in the Gaia network, such as Meta's llama-3-8b, Google's Gemma and CodeGemma, Microsoft's Phi-3-mini model, Alibaba's Qwen series models, etc.

We allow users to use their own proprietary data for data training and vectorize the data for vector storage.

When an application is running, our nodes can run in different environments with the same performance. Users can run their own Agent node by typing only a few lines on the command line. They choose to host it on a GPU, on a local computer, or in the cloud.

5. ChainCatcher: In addition to the field of higher education, what other application scenarios will GaiaNet expand in the future?

Matt Wright: We are looking for scholars and institutions and individuals with a lot of proprietary data, and we hope to help them build decentralized AI agents. I think this is our biggest advantage.

For example, a company like the New York Times is suing OpenAI because OpenAI is training a model based on hundreds of years of New York Times newspaper data. In this case, we can actually help the New York Times have its own AI.

At the same time, through Web3 technology, this AI is open source and permissionless, allowing users who need it to call it at any time and pay the New York Times corresponding compensation through token economics.

6. ChainCatcher: GaiaNet received $10 million in seed round financing at the beginning of its establishment. What do you think is the core reason why GaiaNet received their financial support?

Matt Wright: On the one hand, the AI+Web3 direction we are working on is something they are optimistic about in the long term.

On the other hand, the comprehensive capabilities of our core team are highly valued. Most of the core members of the EVM Capital and GaiaNet teams come from Consensys, Filecoin and Aleo. They have both technical and developer resources as well as rich experience in commercial operations and capital operations.

More than 17,000 registered nodes

7. ChainCatcher: GaiaNet recently launched a Beta product. What updates does it have compared to the Alpha phase test? What are the operating data?

Matt Wright: An important improvement in the Beta version is that nodes can be registered to wallet addresses. Each time you start a node, it is like opening and controlling a network node through a wallet. We now have more than 17,000 registered nodes, and we are still expanding.

8. ChainCatcher: What is GaiaNet’s roadmap going forward?

Matt Wright: In terms of technology, the first priority is to improve performance to ensure that the nodes are very useful to our community, whether they are on the cloud or on GPUs.

We're also in touch with some of the teams that build GPUs to figure out how they work in different, smaller capacities.

In addition, we study domain names, node staking infrastructure, etc. Some of our models require a large amount of data to be trained. How can we use technologies such as zk proof, DA and Eigen AVS to ensure the accuracy of verification data and the security and effectiveness of the Gaia network without accessing the data?

In summary, we are trying to use different cryptoeconomics to maintain our open source Web3 infrastructure and ensure that it operates in a privacy-preserving and operationally efficient manner like any centralized company, while ensuring that participants can get paid for their applications.

In addition to technology, we need to attract more developers to our ecosystem. We have discussed integration with more than 200 AI software companies, and I think in the future we will have a plug-in ecosystem that can bring many different functions to the nodes in the ecosystem.

9. ChainCatcher: What is the biggest challenge GaiaNet is facing at present?

Matt Wright: I think the biggest challenge at the moment is how to keep teams in different time zones collaborating well. Some of our teams are located in New York and Los Angeles, and some are in Singapore and Taiwan.

But I believe we can handle it well. I have invested a lot of time in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Hong Kong, and have also worked with teams in other cultural regions. Now we are also overcoming this and integrating the two cultures that are most deeply involved in Web3.

10. ChainCatcher: What other interesting innovative use cases do you see regarding AI+Web3?

Matt Wright: We've been working on an interesting use case recently.

We are working with a decentralized governance team, Boardroom, which has a lot of rich on-chain governance data.

We are thinking about how to build Gaia's DAO and Foundation to construct snapshot proposals and statistical proposals.

It is important to understand that in this ecosystem, there is approximately $40 billion in capital under management, participants make decisions around this capital, and thousands of proposals are issued every month.

We hope that this will help build GPTs powered by this data, allowing users to converse directly with the agent and quickly propose decisions.