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Ben Fielding: Decentralizing Machine Intelligence

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3 месяца ago

2 апреля, 2025

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It started with a noisy desk. The desk was a wooden cubicle in a lab at Northumbria University, in northern England, where a young AI researcher began his PhD track. This was in 2015. The researcher was Ben Fielding, who had built a large machine stuffed with early GPUs to develop AI. The machine was so loud it annoyed Fielding’s lab-mates. Fielding crammed the machine beneath the desk, but it was so big he had to awkwardly stick his legs to the side.

Fielding had some unorthodox ideas. He explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned. “Google was doing this research as well,” Fielding says now. “And they had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center. The things they were doing weren’t crazy. I knew the methods… I had lots of proposals, but I couldn’t run them.”

Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensyn, is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

Jeff Wilser is the host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast and will host The AI Summit at Consensus 2025.

So a decade ago, it dawned on Fielding: Compute constraints would always be an issue. In 2015, he knew that if compute was a hard constraint in academia, it would absolutely be a hard constraint when AI went mainstream.

The solution?

Decentralized AI.

Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute – and I’ve spoken with Fielding about this for CoinDesk and on panel after panel at conferences – but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack.

And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold.

In this conversation leading up to the AI Summit, at Consensus in Toronto, Fielding gives a primer on AI Swarms, explains how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators — not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.”

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Congrats on the testnet launch. What’s the gist of what it is?

Ben Fielding: It’s the addition of the first MVP features of blockchain integration with what we’ve launched so far.

What were those original features, pre-blockchain?

So we launched RL [Reinforcement Learning] Swarm a few weeks ago, which is reinforcement learning, post-training, as a peer-to-peer network.

Here’s the easiest way to think about it. When a pre-trained model goes through reasoning training – like DeepSeek-R1 – it learns to critique its own thinking and recursively improve against the task. It can then improve its own answer.

We take that process one step further and say, “It’s great for models to critique their own thinking and recursively improve. What if they can talk to other models and critique each other’s thinking?” If you get many models together in a group that can all talk to each other, they can start learning how to send information to the other models… with the overall goal of improving the entire swarm itself.

Gotcha, which explains the name “Swarm.”

Right. It’s this training method which allows many models to kind of combine, in parallel, to improve the outcome of a final meta-model that you could create from those models. But at the same time, you have every single individual model just improving on its own. So if you were to come along with a model on a MacBook, join a swarm for an hour and then drop back out again, you would have an improved local model based on the knowledge in the swarm, and you would have also improved the other models in the swarm. It’s this collaborative training process that any model can join and any model can do. So that’s what RL Swarm is.

Okay, so that’s what you released a few weeks ago. Now where does blockchain come in?

So the blockchain is us moving forward some of the lower-level primitives into the system.

Let’s just pretend that someone doesn’t understand the phrase “lower-level primitives.” What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so I mean, very close to the resource itself. So if you think about the software stack, you’ve got a GPU stack in a data center. You’ve got drivers on top of the GPU. You’ve got operating systems, virtual machines. You’ve got all this stuff going up.

So a lower-level primitive is the closest to the bottom foundation in the tech stack. Am I getting that right?

Yes, exactly. And the RL Swarm is a demonstration of what’s possible, basically. It’s just a somewhat hacky demo of doing really interesting large-scale, scalable machine learning. But what Gensyn’s been doing for the past four-plus years, realistically, is building infrastructure. And so we’re in this period now where the infrastructure is all at that v0.1 sort of beta level. It’s all done. It’s ready to go. We have to figure out how to show the world what’s possible when it’s quite a big shift to the way people think of machine learning.

It sounds like you guys are doing a lot more than decentralized compute, or even infrastructure?

We have three main components that sit underneath our infrastructure. Execution – we have consistent execution libraries. We have our own compiler. We have reproducible libraries for any hardware target.

The second piece is communication. So assume you can just run a model on any device in the world that’s compatible, can you get them to talk to each other? If everybody opts into the same standard, everybody can communicate like TCP/IP from the internet, basically. So we build those libraries and RL Swarm is an example of that communication.

And then, finally, verification.

Ah, and I’m guessing this is where blockchain comes in…

Imagine a scenario where every device in the world is executing consistently. They could link models together. But can they trust each other? If I connected my MacBook to yours, yes, they could execute the same tasks. Yes, they could send tensors back and forth, but do they know that what they send to the other device is actually happening on the other device or not?

In the current world, you and I would probably sign a contract to say, yes, we agree that we’ll make sure our devices do the right thing. In the machine world, it needs to happen programmatically. So that’s the final piece we build, cryptographic proofs, probabilistic proofs, game theoretic proofs to make that process entirely programmatic.

So that’s where the blockchain comes in. It gives us all of the benefits of blockchain you can imagine, like persistent identity, payments, consensus, etc. And so what we’re doing with the testnet now is taking RL Swarm and the primitives of the other infrastructure and we’re adding in the blockchain components and saying, ‘Hey, when you join a swarm now, you have a persistent identity, which exists out there on a decentralized ledger.’

In the future you’ll have the ability to make payments, but right now, you have that trust consensus mechanism where we can terminate disputes. So, it’s kind of an MVP of the future Gensyn infrastructure, where we’re going to add in components as we go.

Give us a tease of what’s coming down the pipeline?

When we reach main-net, all of the software and infrastructure is live against blockchain as the source of trust, payments, consensus, etc., identity. This is the first step of that. It’s adding identity in and saying when you join a swarm, you can register as the same person. Everyone knows who you are without having to check some centralized server or website somewhere.

Now let’s get wild and talk further in the future. What does this look like one year from now, two years from now, five years from now? What’s your North Star?

Sure. The ultimate vision is to take all of the resources that sit under machine learning and make them instantaneously programmatically accessible to everyone. Machine learning is heavily constrained by its core resources. This creates this huge moat for centralized AI companies, but it doesn’t need to exist. It can be open-sourced if we can build the right software. So our view is Gensyn builds all of the low-level infrastructure to allow that to get as close to open-source as it possibly can. People should have the right to build machine learning technologies.

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ETH Price Surges as $2.9B Inflows, EthCC, and Robinhood’s L2 Fuel Bullish Sentiment

Published

2 часа ago

30 июня, 2025

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Ether (ETH) 3.5% in the past 24 hours to $2,519 as of 18:59 UTC on June 30, according to CoinDesk Research’s technical analysis model, supported by continued institutional demand, network upgrades, and major retail platform integrations.

Institutional interest remains robust, with CoinShares reporting $429 million in net inflows into ether investment products over the past week and nearly $2.9 billion year-to-date. This trend has coincided with a declining ETH supply on exchanges and rising staking levels, with over 35 million ETH —a round 28% of the total supply — now locked in proof-of-stake contracts. Market analysts suggest that these factors are reducing liquid supply and bolstering ether’s long-term investment thesis.

Robinhood announced on Monday that it is developing its own Layer-2 blockchain using Arbitrum’s rollup infrastructure. The network is not yet live, but the initiative will eventually support Ethereum staking, tokenized stock trading, and perpetual crypto futures. Although the L2 is under development, the decision to build it on Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem is seen as a long-term vote of confidence in Ethereum’s scalability roadmap.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also introduced a new digital identity framework using zero-knowledge proofs. This system allows users to verify traits or credentials without revealing private data and is designed to help Web3 apps incorporate privacy-preserving identity systems. Analysts view this as a key step toward wider adoption of decentralized applications requiring sensitive user authentication.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) kicked off in Cannes, France, gathering more than 6,400 attendees and 500 speakers. The event showcases Ethereum’s ongoing developer momentum through presentations on new tools, scaling strategies, and protocol improvements.

Despite the positive momentum, ETH remains just below its 200-day moving average, suggesting technical barriers still exist. However, the confluence of inflows, developer progress, and scaling plans continues to support a constructive outlook.

Technical Analysis Highlights

Ether traded between $2,438.50 and $2,523 from June 29 19:00 to June 30 18:00, marking a 3.47% range.
The largest spike occurred during the 22:00–23:00 UTC window on June 29, when ETH surged 2.9% on volume of 368,292 ETH, briefly pushing through the $2,500 barrier.
On June 30 at 15:00 UTC, ETH found strong support around $2,438 on above-average volume, confirming a bullish floor.
A local high of $2,523 was reached earlier in the day, establishing resistance just above the psychological $2,500 level.
During the final hour from 18:00 to 18:59 UTC on June 30, ETH retraced from an intraday peak of $2,499.19 to close at $2,487.19.
A sharp upward move between 18:20–18:21 saw ETH climb 1.6% on 6,318 ETH volume, stalling near $2,499.
As of 20:23 UTC on June 30, ETH traded at $2,519, up 3.49% in 24 hours, signaling renewed bullish momentum into the Asia open.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

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Circle Applies for National Trust Bank Charter

Published

3 часа ago

30 июня, 2025

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Circle (CRCL), the company behind the USDC stablecoin, said Monday it has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to form a federally regulated national trust bank.

A federal trust charter would bring Circle under direct OCC oversight, aligning it with how traditional financial institutions are regulated. If approved, the new entity, which would be called First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A. would oversee custody of USDC reserves and offer services tailored to institutions. If approved, Circle would join the ranks of federally chartered institutions like Paxos and Anchorage, both of which previously secured trust bank status to offer crypto-related services nationwide.

The trust bank status would allow Circle to operate across state lines without obtaining separate licenses in each state — a hurdle that has complicated expansion for many digital asset companies. It would also permit Circle to offer regulated digital asset custody services to institutional customers.

The move signals a strategic effort by Circle to solidify its regulatory standing as the U.S. mulls legislation like the GENIUS Act, which would create new guardrails for dollar-backed stablecoins. The company said becoming a national trust bank would help it meet anticipated requirements under the bill, which passed through the Senate earlier this month and now awaits a vote in the House of Representatives.

«By applying for a national trust charter, Circle is taking proactive steps to further strengthen our USDC infrastructure,» Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in a statement. «We will align with emerging U.S. regulation for the issuance and operation of dollar-denominated payment stablecoins, which we believe can enhance the reach and resilience of the U.S. dollar, and support the development of crucial, market neutral infrastructure for the world’s leading institutions to build on.”

Circle went public last month and issues the world’s second-largest stablecoin, USDC, and the leading euro-pegged token EURC.

The OCC, which oversees national banks and federal savings associations, must still review and approve Circle’s application. The agency has granted similar charters to a handful of crypto firms in recent years, signaling growing regulatory acceptance of digital asset companies operating within the traditional banking framework.

UPDATE (June 30, 2025, 20:50 UTC): Adds additional information.

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HBAR Climbs 2.1% as Traders Digest ETF Review, AI Launch, and Energy Governance Move

Published

3 часа ago

30 июня, 2025

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Hedera’s native token HBAR HBAR extended its rally on Sunday, trading up 2.1% to $0.1519 as of 19:56 UTC on June 30, according to CoinDesk Research’s technical analysis model.

The move follows a flurry of ecosystem updates that broaden Hedera’s enterprise reach and reinforce its growing footprint in AI, gaming, and sustainability.

On June 24, Blockchain for Energy (B4E), a nonprofit focused on sustainability data management in the energy sector, officially joined the Hedera Governing Council. B4E already runs its carbon tracking platform on the Hedera network, and its addition brings domain expertise in emissions reporting and digital MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) standards. As a council member, B4E will run its own node and contribute to governance decisions—particularly those aligned with environmental transparency and enterprise accountability.

Just two days later, Hedera unveiled its AI Studio, an open-source software development kit designed to help developers build decentralized applications powered by artificial intelligence. The suite includes an Agent Kit that integrates with LangChain and enables AI agents to interact directly with Hedera’s consensus and token services using natural language commands. The goal is to lower the barrier for AI-native apps while maintaining onchain auditability, transparency, and regulatory alignment.

On the gaming front, Hedera Foundation announced on June 19 a partnership with The Binary Holdings (TBH), a Web3 infrastructure firm. The collaboration aims to bring Hedera-based gaming apps to mobile users in Southeast Asia via OneWave, TBH’s decentralized app store. Integrated into native telecom platforms across Indonesia and the Philippines, OneWave is expected to onboard over 169 million users with built-in Web3 rewards and onchain verification.

Meanwhile, in mid-June, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began a formal review of the Canary HBAR ETF, which would offer direct exposure to HBAR via a regulated investment vehicle. A public comment period is now open ahead of the SEC’s July 7 deadline. If approved, the ETF could catalyze broader institutional access and further legitimize HBAR’s role in capital markets—though regulatory scrutiny remains high, and analysts remain divided on long-term token utility.

Technical Analysis Highlights

HBAR traded in a 4.1% range from $0.1478 to $0.1538 between June 29 19:00 UTC and June 30 18:59 UTC.
A strong breakout occurred during the 22:00 hour on June 29, with price surging to $0.154 on volume of 104.5M units.
Major support formed at $0.148 between 14:00–15:00 UTC on June 30, with 80.6M units traded.
From 18:00–18:59 UTC on June 30, HBAR showed a V-shaped recovery, dipping to $0.149 before rebounding.
During the 18:20–18:21 UTC window on June 30, price stabilized with 1.3M in volume, forming short-term support at $0.149.
As of 19:56 UTC on June 30, HBAR traded at $0.1519, up 2.1% for the day with resistance seen at $0.1538.