decentralized-ai
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DCG Built a Crypto Empire. Now It Has to Prove the Model Still Works.
Barry Silbert designed DCG to hold crypto businesses for the long haul, not flip them on a fund's timetable. A decade later, its mix of asset management, mining, consumer finance and decentralized AI is both its edge and its hardest governance test.
Dillon Rolnick
Dillon Rolnick is the chief executive of Nous Research, an applied AI lab building open-source, human-centric language models and the decentralized Psyche training network. A Vanderbilt graduate who came up through quantitative FX trading at Effex Capital and founded the litigation-claims firm Crysknife Capital, he moved from finance into AI research leadership, helping steer Nous through a Paradigm-led $50M Series A and, by 2026, a reported $75M round near a $1.5B valuation. His focus is proving that world-class models can be trained openly and over the internet rather than behind the walls of a few large labs.
OpenGradient
OpenGradient is a New York-based decentralized infrastructure company building the compute layer for verifiable AI. Its network hosts, executes, and verifies machine-learning models on-chain, attaching cryptographic proofs to every inference so applications, agents, and blockchains can confirm exactly which model ran, on what input, and what it returned. The stack pairs an EVM-compatible chain with a heterogeneous GPU/TEE compute architecture, a decentralized Model Hub of 2,000+ models, and developer SDKs, positioning it as an open, auditable alternative to closed cloud AI endpoints.
Jasper Zhang
Jasper Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbolic, an open-access AI cloud and GPU marketplace based in San Francisco. A math prodigy who won gold medals at the Chinese and Russian Mathematical Olympiads and finished a UC Berkeley math PhD in two years, he moved from quantitative research at Citadel Securities to blockchain research at Ava Labs before founding Hyperbolic in 2022 with Yuchen Jin. His mission: make large-scale AI compute affordable and available to anyone with an idea, from students to enterprises.
Matthew Wang
Matthew Wang is the founder and CEO of OpenGradient, a New York company building a decentralized compute layer for verifiable and confidential AI. A former Two Sigma research engineer who cut his teeth on equity-options market-making infrastructure, he left quant finance in 2024 to chase a simpler question: can you prove that the AI answering you is the AI you think it is? OpenGradient runs models on-chain with cryptographic proofs and hardware enclaves, and has raised $9.5M led by a16z crypto, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, and angels including Balaji Srinivasan, Illia Polosukhin, and Sandeep Nailwal.
Bluwhale
Bluwhale is a San Francisco AI and Web3 company building a decentralized intelligence layer that turns on-chain data and personal financial activity into a monetizable, user-owned asset. Its platform pairs wallet-level AI profiling with autonomous agents that act across banks, brokerages, and blockchains, giving consumers a single view of their money and a financial-health score (WhaleScore) while letting enterprises and dApps reach engaged, verified users. Founded in 2022 by repeat founder Han Jin, the company has grown to millions of users and expanded into multi-chain agentic finance backed by SBI, UOB Venture Management, Cardano, Sui, and others.
Han Jin
Han Jin is the co-founder and CEO of Bluwhale, a San Francisco AI company building an intelligence layer on the blockchain that lets people own and monetize their own data. Born in China, raised in Germany, and trained as an engineer at KIT and UC Berkeley, he first made his name building the LucidCam - one of the earliest consumer 3D/VR cameras - at Lucid VR. A Forbes and Inc. '30 Under 30' honoree, he now wants to turn the world's 7 billion smartphones into a decentralized AI network that rivals Google and AWS but is owned collectively by its users.
Wow AI
Wow AI is a US-registered, end-to-end AI training-data company that supplies high-quality, multilingual datasets and human-in-the-loop services - data collection, transcription, annotation, validation and RLHF - to teams building large language models, voice assistants and computer-vision systems. Its crowdsourcing network spans 170,000+ contributors across 120+ languages, with 100,000+ hours of audio and domain datasets for finance, healthcare and retail. The founding team has since extended the vision into AIxBlock, a decentralized platform for building, training and deploying AI, and WowDAO, a community-owned AI ecosystem.