The Web3 + AI Daily #35
TradFi gains exposure to more dAI assets, another BTC miner pivots to AI, Coinbase suggests Web3 + AI ideal to fight money laundering.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to all newly-joined subscribers!
This is The Web3 + AI Daily, your definitive guide to the world of Decentralized AI (DeAI/dAI)! The investment interest in dAI is rising exponentially with TAO Synergies Inc. and Flora Growth (FLGC) expanding treasuries, and Grayscale Investments launching Decentralized AI Fund to provide exposure to $TAO, $NEAR, $IP, and others.
Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.
What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?
Grayscale Debuts Decentralized AI Fund
Grayscale Investments‘ Decentralized AI fund, aimed at giving accredited investors exposure to the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto, is now open.
The fund holds a diversified basket of tokens from decentralised-AI and blockchain projects, including Opentensor Foundation‘s $TAO, NEAR Protocol‘s NEAR, Story‘s $IP, Render Network Foundation‘s $RENDER, Filecoin Foundation‘s $FIL, and The Graph‘s $GRT.
The vehicle is structured as a private placement (only for accredited investors) and aims to capitalize on the growing momentum in decentralized-AI protocols.
TAO Synergies Expands $TAO Holdings
TAO Synergies Inc. shared that it has increased its holdings of Opentensor Foundation‘s $TAO tokens to 54,058 tokens, through acquisition and staking. By doing so, the company claims to have become the largest publicly-traded pure-play holder of $TAO. This move emphasizes the company’s mission to provide regulated public-market access to the decentralized-AI sector and to capture long-term value from Bittensor’s ecosystem growth.
Last week, I reported that the company had raised $11M in a private placement, backed by investors including DCG and James Altucher, and that capital has not yet been deployed.
Flora Growth Buys 2nd Batch of 0G Tokens
Flora Growth (FLGC) has completed a second acquisition of 0G‘ $0G tokens, as a part of its broader strategy to become the first publicly listed 0G treasury. This second purchase involves 880,025 $0G tokens.
Flora Growth, soon to rebrand as ZeroStack, is making a huge shift - from a cannabis company to an AI investment one. A month ago, it announced a $401M deal to back 0G, thus pushing Zero Gravity’s valuation to $3B.
CleanSpark, Yet Another BTC Miner Seduced by AI Profits
CleanSpark, the fifth-largest Bitcoin mining company by market capitalization, announced its expansion into the AI datacenter infrastructure market. The company aims to leverage its existing expertise in power management and large-scale computing (from its mining operations) to build high-performance computing (HPC) and AI-centric facilities.
The move is framed as a diversification away from solely BTC mining, in response to growing demand for AI-ready data center capacity, and a way to create new revenue streams and future-proof the business.
Web3 + AI Readings & Conversations
Coinbase: Integrate AI + Blockchain to Fight Money Laundering
Coinbase has urged the U.S. Department of the Treasury to modernize anti-money-laundering (AML) regulations to better incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain analytics, and decentralized identity (DiD) verification tools. The company submitted formal feedback to the Treasury’s Request for Comment on “Innovative Methods to Detect Illicit Activity Involving Digital Assets”, highlighting that traditional AML frameworks are falling behind in addressing new threats emerging from digital asset flows.
Coinbase’s proposed reforms include:
Establishing a safe-harbor under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) allowing regulated entities to use AI for real-time monitoring and suspicious-activity detection under defined governance.
Issuing guidance for APIs supporting AML compliance technologies that link monitoring systems, blockchain analytics and sanctions data-sets in real time.
Recognizing decentralized identity systems (including zero-knowledge proofs) as acceptable verification methods, and expanding the “reliance” framework so regulated entities can share verified digital identities.
Giving formal regulatory recognition to blockchain analytics and “Know Your Transaction” (KYT) screening as valid risk-based tools for ongoing AML oversight.
Web3 + AI Explainer
Phala Walks You Through ERC-8004 Agents in TEEs
Phala published a walk-through on how to deploy an ERC-8004 agent running in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on Phala Cloud’s “VibeVM”.
As you remember, ERC-8004 is a new Ethereum standard for registering and discovering trustless agents. By combining it with TEE execution (which provides attestation and secure key derivation), developers can build agents whose runtime, origin, and integrity are provable.
ERC-8004 + TEEs offers a practical pathway to “trustless agents” with deterministic keys, attested execution, and on-chain identity, i.e., an upgrade over traditional agent deployments that rely only on signatures.
Web3 + AI Events
ERC-8004 Community Call #2
And since I mentioned ERC-8004, the Ethereum Foundation‘s dAI team is hosting a second community call on the topic tomorrow, October 22nd. If you’re interested in meeting builders, contributors, and curious minds exploring the future of verifiable, trustless agents, don’t hesitate to join.
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Disclaimer: The content of this newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing contained herein should be construed as financial advice or as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any of the companies or assets mentioned.
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