Invest in Convergence. The biggest winners will be vertically integrated companies that master data across multiple converging technology platforms, not siloed specialists.
AI is an Operating System Shift, Not an App. Bet on the new “crypto-native” AI players (OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic) building the next computing platform, not the incumbents trying to bolt on AI features.
Stablecoins Are the New Gateway. The next wave of crypto adoption will be driven by regulated, dollar-backed stablecoins, which serve as the accessible “broadband” infrastructure for the DeFi economy.
Representations Are Reality. A model's capacity for true generalization and creativity is dictated by the quality of its internal representations. "Fractured" models produce "impostor intelligence" that can pass tests but can't invent.
The Path Is The Prize. The journey to a solution matters more than the destination. Brute-force optimization creates brittle models; open-ended exploration that builds complexity incrementally creates robust, elegant ones.
Seek Interestingness, Not Objectives. To unlock transformative creativity, we must design algorithms that search for "interestingness" and "evolvability" rather than just optimizing a predefined goal. Greatness, it turns out, really can't be planned.
Data Is The New Enhanced Asset: The future isn't just accessing data, but accessing data that has been intelligently processed. Ready is turning unstructured archives like Common Crawl into the highest-quality pre-training and agentic datasets ever created.
The Future Is A Network of Niches: Forget one monolithic Google-like index. The agentic web will run on a network of specialized, MCP-enabled data sources. Subnet 33 is building the reference platform for this new, decentralized data economy.
The Bridge to Revenue Is Built: With a $2.7M sales pipeline and active enterprise pilots, Ready is demonstrating a tangible path from decentralized network incentives to real-world revenue, creating a playbook for monetizing Bittensor commodities.
**The Gold Standard Dataset:** The Common Crawl partnership is a massive value-add, creating a premium, open-source dataset structured for agentic use that could become a global standard for pre-training and RAG.
**Enterprise Adoption is Here:** With 6 active POCs and a $2.7M pipeline, ReadyAI proves clear commercial demand for decentralized data structuring, offering a 95%+ cost reduction over firms like Scale AI.
**Direct Token Utility:** The TAO Agent's new token-gated private terminal is a powerful experiment in direct value accrual, linking product utility to token value—a model for the entire ecosystem.
**Today's AI is a Brilliant Impostor.** It excels at mimicry but its internal "spaghetti" wiring reveals a lack of deep, structural understanding, limiting its potential for genuine creativity.
**The Objective is the Obstacle.** Directly optimizing for specific goals, the core of modern AI training, is a deceptive trap. True innovation comes from open-ended exploration where the destination is unknown.
**Diversify the AI Portfolio.** The industry's singular focus on scaling massive, objective-driven models is a high-risk bet. Investing in alternative, bottom-up paradigms is crucial for discovering more robust and truly intelligent systems.
Performance Over Hype: Subnet 18 proves that a decentralized network of specialized agents can outperform monolithic, state-of-the-art models in complex tasks like weather forecasting. The 30% accuracy improvement is a hard metric that speaks for itself.
Attack Niche, High-Value Markets: The strategy isn’t to boil the ocean. It's to provide a quantitatively better tool for specific B2B customers—like hedge funds and energy traders—where even small predictive edges translate into major financial gains.
Start as a Miner: Wouter’s top advice for aspiring subnet creators is to first become a miner. This hands-on experience provides an unparalleled understanding of the network's technical struggles, incentive mechanisms, and what it truly takes to build a viable product.
Over-regulation is a gift to incumbents. A complex web of state laws or premature federal rules could inadvertently hand the future of AI to a handful of giants by crushing the startups needed to challenge them.
Open source is the competitive frontier. It’s not just a development philosophy; it’s a strategic weapon for startups to survive and for the West to out-innovate geopolitical rivals without relying on ineffective protectionist policies.
AI's energy appetite is exponential and unsustainable. The environmental cost is a non-negotiable part of the equation, demanding solutions that move beyond simply building more massive, power-hungry data centers.
Weaponizing the Enemy: The shift to a GAN-style architecture is a masterstroke. It solves scalability and privacy while turning the generative AI arms race into a self-improving engine for its own detectors.
The Open-Source Anti-Orb: Mind ID is a direct assault on Worldcoin's centralized, hardware-dependent model. It proposes a more secure, transparent, and ethically sound AI-native approach to proving humanness.
From Grants to Growth: Bitmind has a pragmatic plan to become profitable. For investors, the goal to neutralize the ~$300k monthly TAO sell pressure within six months is a critical milestone toward long-term network value accrual.
**The New Frontier is Pipeline Parallelism:** This is the key that could unlock distributed training for massive, GPT-4-class models. While centralized players have used it for years, making it work decentrally is a historic breakthrough with profound implications for who gets to build AI.
**Validation is the Moat:** Efficiently verifying work without re-doing it is the hardest problem in decentralized compute. Innovations like CLASP, which use statistical analysis over brute-force checks, are the true enablers of large-scale, trustless networks.
**Democratization Through Architecture:** By breaking models into layers, the barrier to entry for AI training plummets. This architectural choice is a direct path to a more distributed and permissionless AI ecosystem, where contributors could even earn perpetual licenses for the models they help create.
AI's gravitational pull on talent and capital is forcing crypto to mature beyond speculative tokenomics, transitioning focus from "meme value" to demonstrable product-market fit and real-world utility.
Identify and invest in projects building at the intersection of crypto and AI, or those creating "net new" applications that abstract away crypto complexity for mainstream users, especially in areas like identity or fintech.
This bear market is a necessary, albeit painful, reset. It's a time for builders to focus on creating tangible value and for investors to seek out projects with genuine utility, as the era of easy speculative gains is over.
The commodification of AI compute, driven by decentralized networks, is shifting power from centralized data centers to globally distributed, incentive-aligned miners. This creates a more efficient, resilient, and cost-effective foundation for intelligence.
Explore building AI agents and applications on Shoots' expanding platform, leveraging their TEEs and end-to-end encryption for privacy-sensitive use cases. The "Sign in with Shoots" OAuth system offers a compelling way to integrate AI capabilities without upfront compute costs.
Shoots is not just an inference provider; it's building the foundational infrastructure for a truly decentralized, private, and intelligent internet. Over the next 6-12 months, expect to see a proliferation of sophisticated AI agents and applications built on Shoots, driven by its unique blend of incentives, security, and global compute.
The Macro Shift: Ethereum pivots from a "rollup-centric" vision to a multi-faceted approach: a powerful, ZKVM-scaled L1 coexists with a diverse "alliance" of specialized L2s. This adapts to technical realities and renews L1's core focus.
The Tactical Edge: Builders should prioritize differentiated L2 solutions or contribute to L1's ZKVM scaling. Investors should evaluate L2s based on distinct utility and symbiotic relationship with Ethereum.
The Bottom Line: Ethereum's market leadership remains, but this pivot signals a pragmatic roadmap. The next 6-12 months will see rallying around L1 ZKVM scaling and clearer L2 roles, demanding sharper focus on where value accrual and innovation occur.
Global liquidity is high, but capital is reallocating from speculative crypto to traditional stores of value and, paradoxically, to DeFi platforms offering RWA exposure. This signals a maturation where utility and transparency are gaining ground over pure hype.
Identify protocols with demonstrable revenue generation from real-world use cases, like Hyperliquid, as potential outperformers. Focus on platforms that offer transparency and accountability, as market structure shifts towards more regulated and predictable venues.
The crypto market is undergoing a structural reset, moving away from a retail-driven, speculative cycle. Investors must adapt to a landscape where fresh capital is scarce, institutional flows favor gold, and DeFi's next frontier involves real-world assets.
The convergence of AI agents and programmable money is creating a new frontier for digital commerce and liability. This shift demands a proactive re-evaluation of regulatory frameworks, moving beyond human-centric definitions of accountability and transaction.
Builders should design AI agent systems with cryptographically embedded controls, allowing for granular policy enforcement (e.g., spending limits triggering human review) and leveraging stablecoins for microtransactions in decentralized agent-to-agent economies.
The next 6-12 months will see increasing pressure to define AI agent liability and payment rails. Investors should prioritize projects building infrastructure for secure, auditable agent commerce, while builders must integrate compliance and control mechanisms from day one to navigate this evolving landscape.
The economy is shifting from human-centric labor and scarcity to AI-driven abundance, where machine intelligence itself becomes the primary unit of economic exchange, challenging traditional monetary and employment structures.
Investigate and build "proof of control" solutions using crypto primitives (like ZKPs, TEEs, decentralized compute/storage) to secure AI agents and data.
The next 6-12 months will see increased demand for verifiable control over AI systems. Understanding how crypto enables this, and how human value shifts from transactional jobs to unique human interaction, is crucial for navigating this new economic reality.
