Since launching over a year and a half ago, Cointelegraph’s The Agenda podcast has recorded and released 43 episodes. Each episode has focused on co-hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond’s desire to learn how crypto and blockchain are improving the lives of people around the world. 

This week’s episode is the latter half of a special two-part “one year later” recording with some of The Agenda’s previous guests. In this episode, DeYoung and Salmond catch up with CryptoHarlem co-founder Matt Mitchell, OriginTrail co-founder Tomaž Levak, and podcaster and author Joshua Dávila to get an update on their progress, challenges and plans for 2025.

Matt Mitchell says now’s not the time for sleep

When asked how things were going at CryptoHarlem, founder Mitchell quickly suggested that now is not the time for inactivity, saying that hactivists are “guardians of the people” and “guardians of the marginalized” during times of political change and instability.

“In times of mass change are times when they need us most. And so, if anything, I feel an even stronger sense of purpose. As an educator and as an activist, a stronger sense that I was right, I’m doing the right thing, they need me now more than ever. We need each other more now than ever.”

Mitchell said that CryptoHarlem’s focus on leading community workshops centered around strengthening personal operational security and using encryption and cryptocurrency has continued throughout the year.

When asked about the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence and any possible threats presented by it, Mitchell warned:

“Unfortunately, the people who are excited about these technologies do not understand these technologies, their limitations and where they go wrong.”

In a separate chat, OriginTrail’s Levak agreed that AI hallucinations are problematic, which is precisely where OriginTrail’s decentralized knowledge graph (DKG) comes into play. Levak explained that the DKG connects large language models to “reliable external sources,” which helps address bias and hallucinations:

“The DKG is great because it so neatly organizes this knowledge in Knowledge Assets and allows connections, allows ontologies, so allows the semantic explainability. It actually plays the role of [the] left-hand side of the brain in this system.”

Levak said that providing “structured, objective deterministic inputs” results in limiting the obtuseness of AI hallucinations.

Wall Street and politics join crypto, but many are still interested in radical perspectives

2024 is clearly the year that Wall Street and politicians took notice of Bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies. For the first time, multiple United States presidential candidates are regularly speaking positively and authoritatively about the crypto industry and their policy stances.

This year also saw the launch of spot Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It’s clear is that big money has arrived in crypto, and it’s likely here to stay.

With the arrival of the monied and political class, some blockchain advocates are concerned that the industry’s core values of decentralization, censorship-resistance and the open-source approach to code development are at risk of being diminished.

Related: Cryptonauts, LaborDAO, Nym and WetSpace update The Agenda on the state of crypto

According to Dávila, host of the Blockchain Socialist podcast and author of Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It, the heated conversations and mentions of crypto on the political stage are a tad bit overblown, in the sense that people outside the industry aren’t really thinking about crypto that much.

Dávila further explained that from his point of view, crypto had long been a space where people were not constantly preoccupied with politics and came to build cool things with like-minded people.

Regardless of the staunchly held political perspectives of the more vocal actors in the space and the spotlight shifting to the more conservative and pronounced libertarian crowd in crypto, Dávila believes that the builders themselves in the industry are actually interested in socialist-related perspectives, even if they do not consider themselves socialist

“I think that when you are a creator of some sort of application or big protocol in the crypto space,” he said, “a lot of people who are building it are interested in what are the implications of what they’re building and wanting to understand the socio-politics of that.”

“You know, not everyone may agree with socialism on the surface, or whatever else, but I have found that a lot of people who actually work in the crypto space are very interested in that perspective.”

To hear more from The Agenda’s catchup conversation with previous guests, listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.