Weekly Newsletter, 6 February 2026

Why AI needs blockchain

The AI era demands new infrastructure for proving authenticity, enabling agent economies, and coordinating resources at scale.

We are entering the AI era. On that point, there is a broad agreement. What is discussed far less is the infrastructure shift required to support an AI-driven economy. As AI systems become more capable, autonomous, and economically relevant, the limitations of our current infrastructure become increasingly apparent.

Distinguishing what is real from what is fake

AI makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between authentic and synthetic content. Text, images, audio, and video can now be generated at scale and with high fidelity, eroding trust in digital information.

Blockchain provides a solution through verifiable authenticity. Messages, content, and data can be cryptographically signed and anchored on-chain, allowing anyone to verify origin and integrity. If a message is signed on a blockchain, it can be independently verified as originating from a specific entity and as unaltered.

The same applies to identity. Blockchain-based protocols, such as Sam Altman’s World, aim to allow humans to prove personhood in a digital-native way, without relying on centralized authorities. As AI-generated content proliferates, such mechanisms become increasingly important.

AI agents becoming financially active

AI agents are increasingly paying for resources autonomously, and interacting with other agents and humans, but our existing financial infrastructure is poorly suited for this. An AI agent cannot apply for a credit card, open a bank account, or sign paper contracts. Blockchain infrastructure, by contrast, is natively programmable. An agent can hold a crypto wallet, make payments, and enter into smart contracts with minimal friction.

In that sense, AI agents naturally speak the language of blockchain. We expect blockchain infrastructure to support continuous AI agent activity, and it would not surprise us if, within a decade, the vast majority of blockchain transaction volume is driven by AI agents rather than humans.

Importantly, blockchain is not just an enabler of AI’s financial activity. It also provides guardrails, defining what agents can and cannot do through transparent, enforceable rules encoded in smart contracts.

Coordinating resources at scale

AI requires vast resources: data, compute, and energy. Blockchain networks are increasingly used as coordination layers to source and optimize these inputs. Decentralized networks can aggregate idle or underutilized resources and allocate them efficiently through market-based mechanisms, unlocking capacity that would otherwise remain unused while reducing dependence on centralized providers. This counters the growing concentration of power in a handful of technology companies and nation states. Prime Intellect is a good illustration of this in the compute category.

Attribution and ownership of intellectual property

AI systems are trained on vast amounts of intellectual property without clear attribution or compensation, one of the most unresolved issues in AI today. Blockchain provides a foundation for registering, attributing, and monetizing IP in a programmable way, creating transparent records of contributions and enabling automated compensation. While still early, this addresses a fundamental tension in how AI models are built and who benefits from them.

Just like how AI collapses the cost of intelligence, blockchain collapses the cost of trust. Taken together, it becomes clear that AI and blockchain are highly complementary technologies. From an investment perspective, this also opens an alternative way to gain exposure to AI: not only through capital-intensive, centralized companies, but through infrastructure-native models enabled by open networks.

Also this week

Relevant financial updates

Zama*, an open-source cryptography company focused on developing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain and AI, had its TGE and is currently trading at a $311mln FDV
Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered crypto bank providing digital asset custody, has received a $100mln strategic investment from Tether at a $4.2bln valuation.
TRM Labs*, a blockchain analytics provider serving law enforcement agencies and financial institutions, has raised $70mln in a Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital at a $1bln valuation
Jupiter, an all-in-one financial application on Solana, has secured a $35mln strategic investment from ParaFi Capital
Bluff*, a social-centric betting platform and sportsbook with real-time settlement and provably fair games, has raised $21mln in a Strategic funding round led by 1kx with investments from Makers Fund and Delphi Ventures
Opinion, an onchain prediction market platform, has raised $20mln in a Pre-Series A funding round with investments from Hack VC, Jump Crypto, Primitive Ventures, and Decasonic
Relay Protocol*, a cross-chain bridge, has raised $17mln in a Series B funding round led by Union Square Ventures and Archetype
Ruvo, a global account connecting Pix, stablecoins, and Visa for cross-border payments between Brazil and the US, has raised $4.6mln in a Seed funding round led by 1Confirmation with investments from Coinbase Ventures and Y Combinator.
Kairos*, a unified trading terminal for prediction markets aggregating data from Kalshi and Polymarket, has raised $2.5mln in a Seed funding round led by a16z crypto with investments from Geneva Trading

*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 06/02

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