• DCG chief and Yuma CEO Barry Silbert said he believes Bittensor could be as transformative as bitcoin.

• Yuma will operate as an accelerator for startups looking to explore Bittensor, and as an incubator to partner up and build subnets.

Digital Currency Group (DCG), an early champion of cryptocurrencies and the digital asset industry, is now turning its attention to AI as well. Not just any artificial intelligence, but a decentralized version that drives the Bittensor ecosystem.

The conglomerate led by Barry Silbert has unveiled a new company, Yuma, focused on incubating and building new businesses that use decentralized AI to perform tasks and earn rewards.

At its core, Bittensor is a decentralized network for AI that creates incentives for people to contribute data and computing power for activities ranging from text translation and data storage to predicting the structure of complex protein chains.

“If you ask five people: 'What is Bittensor?' You will get five different answers,” Silbert, a cryptocurrency OG investor and evangelist, said in an interview. “If you remember early bitcoin, some people would say it's money, some people would say it's gold. Some people would say it's this blockchain [...] The way that I look at Bittensor is as the World Wide Web of AI.”

There's no doubt AI is a foundational technology with all sorts of possibilities, but it also has the potential to hand way too much power to the Microsofts, Facebooks and Googles of this world as users shovel their data in the corporations mighty computers. Decentralized AI may help avoid that, not only when it comes to harnessing vast untapped computational resources, but also removing some of the tech’s opaque and creepy reputation.

Bittensor’s native cryptocurrency, $TAO, is used to incentivize an army of decentralized workers: either miners contributing advanced computing services to certain tasks or validators assessing contributions for quality and allocating rewards.

This interest in AI didn’t happen overnight. DCG made its first investment into Bittensor in 2021. More recently, DCG’s asset management firm, Grayscale, added funds dedicated to AI including the $TAO token. Underscoring his belief in the project, Silbert will step into the CEO position at Yuma, which will have some 25 employees on day one.

In some respects, the Yuma incubation and design studio is to Bittensor what Joe Lubin’s Consensys model was to Ethereum. But rather than owning 100% of the subnets grown under Yuma’s auspices, it's more like the Y Combinator model of a venture capital firm mixed with an accelerator, Silbert said.