Verbwire was a Web3 infrastructure company that collapsed the entire smart-contract stack into a single REST API. Founded by two former Wall Street quants, it let developers in any language - Python, Java, JavaScript, C++ - deploy contracts, mint NFTs, manage wallets, store files on IPFS and query on-chain data without ever touching Solidity or Hardhat. With 60+ endpoints across 10+ EVM blockchains, it served tens of thousands of developers and processed millions of API calls before the founders wound it down, noting that AI had begun to close the very complexity gap they were built to bridge.
Juan Benet (born Juan Batiz-Benet) is a Mexican-American computer scientist, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, and the inventor of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Filecoin. A Stanford-trained distributed systems engineer, he left Yahoo's orbit after a startup acquisition to build open-source protocols that challenge the foundational architecture of the web. His Filecoin ICO raised $257 million in 2017, and the network now holds over 15 EiB of decentralized storage. In 2026 he launched a podcast exploring neurotech and human intelligence augmentation - a signal that the architect of decentralized storage is now thinking about upgrading the human mind itself.