EP 1: David Johnston of Morpheus

In this deep dive conversation, we sit down with David Johnston, one of the key contributors to Morpheus AI, to explore how decentralized AI is reshaping the future of personal intelligence. From co-authoring the original Ethereum whitepaper to now building the infrastructure for personal AI ownership, David shares the lessons learned from crypto's biggest successes and how they're being applied to solve AI's centralization problem.

What You'll Learn:

• Why personal AI ownership matters more than privacy alone
• How Morpheus uses a "fair launch" model to reward builders, capital providers, and compute contributors
• The key differences between building ecosystems vs. building companies
• Why open-source AI models are catching up to proprietary ones faster than expected
• How to design tokenomics that actually work for all stakeholders

Key Topics Covered:

• The "Holy Trinity" of crypto success: engineers, capital, and compute working together
• Why neutrality and permissionless building create stronger network effects
• Lessons from Ethereum's early days that apply to AI infrastructure today
• The importance of removing friction for both builders and end users
• How fair launches create stronger community ownership than traditional funding models

Standout Quotes:

• "When they say data is the new oil, that's what they're talking about. Your data is worth money."
• "The DAOs that govern best govern least"
• "Action creates information" - why shipping MVPs beats perfect planning

About the Guest: David Johnston is a key contributor to Morpheus AI and co-author of the original Ethereum whitepaper. He's been in the crypto space since 2012 and has been instrumental in developing the smart contract infrastructure that powers Morpheus's decentralized AI ecosystem.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

The best conversations in DEI Dependica. the growth of the ecosystem grow from subnets to multiple subnets to pitch competitions in person to just a whole lot of momentum building around the ecosystem. So great to be with you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:34

Thanks, man. It's good to be here. And it's been really cool to see The evolution from a white paper, an idea published by some Anons in 23, kind of really inspire a lot of people, to real code that's live with 100 plus subnets, people building on Morpheus, and to see Venice and all these other cool projects come out of the ecosystem. Yeah, it feels really good. Like I saw in Venice the other day, they produced a million images where their users created... million images in a day. It's starting to scale and that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

That's awesome. So let's start with one. David is the founder. Morpheus, we'll let you introduce yourself and then we'll jump into a riveting convo.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17

I appreciate that. People give me too much credit because I talk on podcasts and give speeches. I'm one of the code contributors to the open source and happy to be part of the community. I really like the ethos of Morpheus, the fact that there is no founder, there's no company, there's no DAO, it's totally decentralized. What that really creates is a marketplace for voices, right? So you got guys like Brian Bougerie in Puerto Rico hosting Morpheus events. You have people in India and Europe posting Morpheus events. You got people, you know, speaking all over the world about Morpheus, you know, and I think that's interesting because that scales, right? Nobody heard about Bitcoin because there was a Bitcoin marketing officer, right? People just told their friends about it, right? So something very similar has happened with Morpheus where it's this organic community of people that are really passionate about having a personal AI and getting it all open source, all decentralized, not owned by some company. That's really inspiring to me. And that's, that's why I spend time on it, but yeah, happy to be here. Anybody doesn't know me, you know, I really focus on the smart contract aspect of Morpheus, especially the capital contract. And that's sort of one of the heart of Morpheus is the way it did at the fair launch and The way you can add stake to Ethereum without having to risk your principal and just donate the yield. I thought that was a really clever way of building a project where there was no pre-mine and you can sort of have this community built type of project without a treasury, without a middleman, without a risk of getting robbed. So that was really inspiring.

SPEAKER_01: 3:02

Yeah, no, that's amazing. And even now being humble, you're one of the original contributors to the Ethereum white paper, prominent investor as well. So all around, just been around the space and done some fantastic stuff throughout your career. I want to start with diving into the founding impetus of Morpheus, right? So When you dive into the white paper, there's a famous line you all have in there where the ecosystem is built like an ecosystem, but scales like a smart contract, right? And runs like a smart contract, right? So I want to start with what are some of the problems you saw in AI broadly, and you could even say within decentralized AI, that allowed you to come to that thesis of building something that Runs as a smart contract, but scales as an ecosystem. And then attaching a token to it to incentivize all of the stakeholders that could make the ecosystem run. So what did you identify?

SPEAKER_00: 3:57

Yeah, that's one of the things that I really liked when I read the white paper was it tried to extend the idea of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which use proof of work and proof of stake to a broader set of behaviors. And it's like, OK, we're not just going to reward compute and proof of work. We're not just going to reward capital. But what about all the builders? What about the engineers that are actually creating the platform or the people actually creating the smart contracts? How do we reward them? And so in Morpheus, almost half of all the emissions of the tokens are going to builders and coders.

UNKNOWN: 4:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 4:37

That I think is the missing key for a lot of projects. You know, people think back to Ethereum and I was there from the white paper to the launch and beyond and people see the ICO and they saw the GPU mining. What they didn't see is that Vitalik airdropped ETH to every single engineer. who contributed to the project before the genesis block like he religiously hunted them down got an address and made sure they got rewarded and you know that was the heart of why so many developers were building on ethereum it was really the first project to broadly reward engineers for what they were building on top of the platform not just the capital guys not just the compute. That's, I think, I often joke about that. It's like the Holy Trinity. It's like if you can get engineers and capital and compute to all work together, you can build something really big and really disruptive. And so when I read the Morpheus paper, I was like, yeah, that's cool. I haven't seen that in a while. I haven't seen that since Ethereum. I haven't seen that since these early projects. And I think that's why it attracted so many guys like me who have been in the space since 2012 or... guys like Luke or Brian or many, Eric Voorhees, all these original crypto people is because they're attracted by that ethos, right? They're like, oh, it's neutral. Anybody can build on it. That's the way it should be.

SPEAKER_01: 6:07

Love it. So it sounds like you all identified, the Morpheus team, et cetera, identified there are these disparate aspects of building private AI, right? Which is you have your compute players, you have your actual builders, and you have capital, which makes the whole engine churn. And then obviously the community for distribution. And so building something that coordinates all of those players efficiently seemed like the initial focus with the focus of building private AI as well.

SPEAKER_00: 6:37

Yeah, that's a good way to explain it. Effectively, there was a reward for all of those groups. And with the explicit purpose, like you're saying, of having a system that was focused on creating personal AI that anybody could run themselves or anybody. they can access it over a network. So this is what I talked about at Consensus. This is the speech I gave in Austin, is we have to continue to grow into building these light clients that you don't need a GPU. You don't need expensive hardware. You can be the average guy with an Android phone and still access this powerful tool, right? Because people forget the average person in the world has a$150 Android phone.

UNKNOWN: 7:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 7:25

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. But you had to get to that level. So a lot of 2024 was building the infrastructure, building the foundations. Now we can do the fun part in 2025 is to build that application layer on top of those foundations, the websites, the APIs, the apps that the end user can actually touch. So yeah, we're just kind of getting to the fun part.

SPEAKER_01: 8:40

I love that. I love that. So, you know, one of the big focuses for this conversation, and I think that's helpful for the decentralized AI community in general and deep in Deesop, but also the broader AI community, is understanding the key things that help us build great products here in the space. And I think a big part of the Morpheus story is communicating the value of Personal AI, one, and the case for being able to run the thesis of being able to run it yourself, et cetera. But two, privacy and security, but particularly privacy and the importance of that juxtaposed to current AI trends. So I'm curious, as a second point, I want to dive into what made you guys or what has been important about or what have you learned about explaining privacy? the usefulness of Morpheus and its theses to the broader AI community and the general public? So we can start with devs that you've had to meet. How do you go about thinking about how to explain why the Morpheus thesis is important?

SPEAKER_00: 9:44

So I think privacy is critical. And it's one of these human rights that we need to sort of live out. But the basis of privacy is ownership. And I think what most people care about more than privacy is owning their own stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 9:58

Right. Why do you have a smartphone? Your company can give you one, but then every time you change jobs, you'd lose all your apps and your contacts and your data and your stuff. Like, no, I'm going to have my own personal. phone and that's so ingrained in our society that people take their device with them like now people just giving up on trying to give you a new phone when you get a new job or whatever i mean there's some still some boomer companies that do that but like for the most part you got your own phone like they don't need to re do that maybe they give you an email account or something right but you still got your personal email account because one day you're going to leave that job in a year two years five years and you want to take all of your stuff with you It's going to be the same for AI. I want a smart agent. I want a super agent that represents just me. It's a fiduciary to me. Google's not trying to make me money. They're not trying to help me out. They're trying to sell ads. They're in it for their bottom line, and that's fine. But we're switching the paradigm where if an individual owns all their data, all of a sudden they can get paid for that ownership. People should be getting paid for their data. You know, the reason these companies are worth trillions of dollars is because your information is valuable. We're talking thousands of dollars a year per person. When they say data is the new oil, that's what they're talking about. Your data is worth money. But now we finally have a way. All right, now I got a super agent. I have all this valuable data. I don't care if they know I went to Baskin Robbins on a Tuesday, like sell that data. I don't care about that. Personal family photos. Yeah. Don't touch that. But there's a lot of stuff. I don't care. You want to sell me ice cream, do whatever, but people should have that choice. And if they have that ownership, they'll have that choice and start getting paid for the value that they're creating. But there's been too much of a barrier and there hasn't been any entity representing the individual. A bunch of companies that swooped in and grabbed all this data while people didn't know that there was any value in it, but people are waking up. They're being valued there. So that's one of the things I would say is I think this flip the fundamental paradigm on the advertisement industrial complex.

SPEAKER_01: 12:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:22

And like, we're still going to have ads and some people are going to be willing to share that data. That's fine, but they should get paid for it.

SPEAKER_01: 12:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 12:30

And if they own it, then the other side has to come to the table and negotiate and come meeting in the minds and like, all right, I'll pay you X for Y, right? And that's fair, right? Most people would get that and most people would be excited about that. So that's one aspect. So it's not, it's just private. It makes you money. Yeah. Has to be part of this. The other one is the open source models have caught up with the proprietary models. Like a year ago, like people told me that was a fantasy. Like it's never going to happen. Open AI so far ahead, nobody catch it. And then boom, Lama, DeepSeek, all these names you've heard came out. And what do you know? The open source caught up with the proprietary models and now they're just as good. So when there's no technical moat, Why am I paying OpenAI a 10x markup for their API when I can be using literally the same quality model over here for free or way cheaper? I can use it for my proprietary. So we shouldn't just argue, hey, it's better because it's private. I want to argue it's better because it's cheaper. It's better because it's faster. It's better because it has higher quality. And let open AI still compete on, you know, integrations of enterprise or government or things the average person doesn't care about. But if you look at the trend for smartphones, browsers, all of these technology waves, there's the majority of people end up using the Android solution. What are these all? They're open source, frictionless, free or cheap options that the average person can access, and that's where Morpheus is focused. It's not on competing with OpenAI on some enterprise integration. It's for the average person with that Android phone that wants to access intelligence, and they may live in a country where they literally don't have another option. Where's the crypto adoption? Where's the Web3 adoption? I'll tell you. India, China, Brazil... Indonesia. 80% of the users are in countries that have a lot of restrictions around capital or websites you can access also. So the decentralized AI is going to be their only choice. Just like crypto was their way to finally access finance and payments and investments and all the things they had been blocked from. And that's 5 billion people. That's not a small number of the world population. And so I try to remind people like that's the audience. Those are the people that were going going for is certainly not majority that fit in that category.

SPEAKER_01: 15:14

Yeah. Even just to double click on that. So say like when you're talking to folks in traditional AI or call it web to AI, whatever, however we frame it. Legacy, legacy, legacy.

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

Yeah. Just like the legacy financial system. That's

SPEAKER_01: 15:29

a better word. So there, what has been some of the pushback? What are the tricks you're using or tricks of the trades you've learned about communicating? that paradigm shift

SPEAKER_00: 15:42

so again the person using it as an ai tool shouldn't have to understand or care about crypto or web 3 or smart contracts you go to openbeta.more.org you didn't have to connect to wallet you didn't have to know what a smart contract was you didn't have to learn any new jargon you literally just click the button and got exactly what, as a developer, you were expecting, was here's an API key, plug it in here, you're good to go. That's what people want, is not to go up this new learning curve. We have to build user interfaces, UX, UI, user experience that people expect from Web 2, which is frictionless, I click a button, the thing happens automatically and all the complex stuff can happen in the backend. So I would say that's the big focus for 2025 is the Morpheus community has set out these sets of goals and it's all about making that user experience just seamless, right? The average person visiting the website, they don't know what database the website's using. They don't care. They shouldn't have to care, right? And so as much as I love educating and talking to engineers about these things, you have to understand the user does not want that friction and you shouldn't insert that friction unless you absolutely have to, right? And so as a designer and a builder, keep that in mind when you're building these systems is you really should set that web to level experience as your objective, right? And if you can get there, you can pull off a Venice and have a million users in a few months because they just made it so easy. They didn't even have the login. You just show up, get used it. That's it. Like, how did Google get billions of users? Like, guess what? You just went to google.com. There was no login back in the day. You just literally used it. And it was permissionless and free and frictionless. So we got to get to that same level with it. So we're getting there. Yeah. The projects that really break out are the ones that understand that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:52

Yeah, that's awesome. So we mentioned some of the ecosystem participants, right? And there are a lot of ecosystems out there being built that are whether trying to scale data providers or all sorts of kind of supply side stuff and then incentivizing the demand side for crypto ecosystem. I want to understand for you guys, what have been some of the lessons you all have learned about looking at capital providers and their needs, compute providers and their needs, Morpheus holders and their needs, and building specific things to scale each aspect of the ecosystem?

SPEAKER_00: 18:28

So for capital, the whole ethos in Morpheus is safety, right? If somebody comes with staked Ethereum and they put it in the contract, they always have the key to withdraw it whenever they want, right? So the contract never has control of their funds and it's only the yield that's being contributed, right? And so think about that from an investor perspective, a capital provider perspective, you're effectively got the same exposure you started with. Like if you're going to hold Ethereum anyway, you might as well stake it towards a cool open source project and earn some tokens. I wasn't even staking before. I didn't have a reason to do it. And so I literally have the same number of ETH I started with when I started the process. So the community is in the process of expanding that from Ethereum to stake coins, to wrapped Bitcoins. So there's a big integration going on right now in Aave. And so if somebody puts their token on Aave... and they stake it into Morpheus, all of a sudden, if they want to hold stable coin exposure, if they want to hold Bitcoin exposure, they can have that same exposure while contributing the yield from Aave. So Morpheus started with staked Ethereum, which is on Lido, right? And so that was the first mechanism. But this big upgrade to add Aave, I think is really cool because there's$2 trillion of capital allocators sitting in Bitcoin and stable coin exposure. There's$300 billion in ETH, but by effectively 7X-ing the amount of potential capital, it'll be really interesting to see the new capital providers that flow in and say, yeah, I'm going to hold Staples anyway, I'm going to hold Bitcoin anyway, I would love to support this project, earn the tokens. And so I would say safety, I would say holding the exposure that they want to hold anyway, is then you don't have to convince anybody. Yep. Yep. Yep. Don't try to switch their worldview. Like, you're not going to convince somebody. Great

SPEAKER_01: 21:01

point. It's a great point.

SPEAKER_00: 21:02

It should just be like, yeah, I agree. ETH is cool. Bitcoin is cool. Hold that exposure and contribute the yield and you get an extra reward. That's a much easier conversation than trying to, like, switch up somebody's worldview and teach them about crypto from zero, right? Or from scratch. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's on the capital side. We already talked about some of the builder stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 21:28

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 21:28

But I would say it's similar. You're not trying to change builder behavior. What do builders want?

SPEAKER_01: 21:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 21:34

You want to raise capital so they can build a cool product. They want to access compute so they can run that product and they want to get paid.

SPEAKER_01: 21:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 21:43

Those three things. And so when a builder finds Morpheus, hopefully that's what they experience. Oh, Yep. Yep. I'm going to hold the Morpheus tokens anyway. I've locked them off for like years and years and years. And it's like, okay, cool. But what can I do with them? I can stake them towards a cool builder that I want to support. Great. Now I'm earning something from that builder. Like Venice, you know, surprised everybody by airdropping the VVV tokens to all the more holders, to the people staking towards them for pro accounts. That was brilliant. It was like doing an airdrop that was civil resistance. yeah because it wasn't just like oh you sign up for telegram or you know join some community you had to put real money in and so people couldn't game the system i

SPEAKER_01: 22:55

mean they

SPEAKER_00: 22:55

could put money in but they get they could only play the game as much as they were willing to really contribute capital

SPEAKER_01: 23:02

right

SPEAKER_00: 23:03

and so that was really smart so now we're seeing a lot of people doing something similar hey stake towards my subnet, stake towards my project, we're going to do an airdrop. We're going to do an NFT. We're going to give you access to our pro account, call out to CoinCap and more builders and all these groups that are doing something similar. It's really exciting to see. So that's from a builder perspective. That reminds me of the early days of Ethereum. What did people use Ethereum for? It was ICOs. which are just another way of saying crowdfunding,

SPEAKER_01: 23:39

which the

SPEAKER_00: 23:39

government's restricted so much, there was no way to do it through the legacy economy you had through crypto. Now it's a global audience of people that could support you, right? And so capital formation is often one of the first use cases because it's one of the most compelling. And so let's fund these builders. Let's Get them involved. Let's give them the capital they need. Let's give them then the compute they need. Here's your API. Free compute. Great. It's like people show up to AWS, they get some credits, and they try it out. It's similar to that model, except for Amazon doesn't rug you afterwards and send you a giant bill. And so that's where we want to get to. Here's your funding. here's your compute. Oh, and you want to accept payments and crypto and all that stuff for what you're building. Great. Morpheus has the rails for that too.

SPEAKER_01: 24:37

Yep. Love it. Love it. And so it sounds like understanding the, especially when building an ecosystem, understanding the needs of the key ecosystem participants and then removing barriers. That's an obvious way, but then to recognizing running with the, or going with the flow of the space, crypto at its heart, are financial rails. And crypto in general typically is great at aggregating the supply side of most things. So if you're removing barriers to capital access and you're making it easy to use these rails, that to me, that screams as an ecosystem builder. If you're looking to emulate or learn, removing barriers and using the strengths of crypto seems like one of the key insights of Morpheus.

SPEAKER_00: 25:27

100%. If you can do that, you're on a good trajectory to success. So we've seen already a hundred plus builders. You know, I would love to see as these tools roll out a thousand builders this year. Yep. Right. And that's what was another word for that network effects. Yep. You got a thousand of the top builders building on Morpheus, right? that's where all the energy is going to be. That's where all the capital is going to be. That's where all the compute is going to be. And these, these things tend to be really sticky, right? If you remember in 2018, 2019, there's all these Ethereum killers that were coming out and they're going to, you know, displace Ethereum. Nobody displaced Ethereum because already built such a strong network effect around the smart contracts, around developers, around the, building engineering tools, you know, there's groups that have added different things like Solana, you know, became great for payments or great for NFTs or, or stuff like that, or, you know, hyper fast and hyper cheap, but those were different network effects.

SPEAKER_01: 26:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 26:35

Right. And I've, I've often made this, this argument since writing the DAPS paper back in 2013 was network effects specialize, right? Bitcoin's one for digital gold. Nobody's displacing

SPEAKER_01: 26:50

Bitcoin,

SPEAKER_00: 26:50

despite its scalability challenges, despite its technical challenges. It has captured the mindshare. When you say digital gold, people think of Bitcoin, right? Inflation protection, censorship-resistant money. When you think of Ethereum, it's DeFi. It's decentralized finance and smart contracts. And

SPEAKER_01: 27:12

security, yep.

SPEAKER_00: 27:14

All those things, right? Securities, there's real-world assets now. All of that tend to be built on Ethereum. If I think of fast trading and highly integrated tech stack, that's Solana. Cosmos has got a network effect. Near has got a network effect. But these are all different network effects. So when I think about Morpheus, is it capturing the network effect for smart agents? People that want to build these AI agents and hook them up with dollars and compute and payments and all the tools they need. And I think that's what we're seeing. And so while there's all these individual parts of decentralized AI, you know, Akash is great, and they're providing GPUs, and Venice is building an end-user application, and there's all these different parts, but it's nice that you've got sort of one broad community that is solely focused on hooking them all together.

SPEAKER_01: 28:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:11

Like, Give me a cost GPU to power the Venice API, and here's the routing layer on Morpheus that connects together all that compute. Give me 100 builders. I want them to all succeed. Morpheus is not building any agents. It's not building any applications, any more than the Ethereum Foundation is out there building smart contracts. No, they left the field open for Compound and Aave and Uniswap and all these other projects to emerge. On their platform, they're just providing the rails. So I think that's the other thing that's worth saying is neutrality is really undervalued or misunderstood. People appreciate the Vitalik's not trying to compete with them. He's trying to make them succeed. He's given tools and funding and help and advice. He advised like 50 projects early on to the point where everybody would claim Vitalik was their advisor. They took one photo at a conference and he was officially their advisor. People would randomly send him tokens because they understood that's what he wanted. And so I love that ethos. I want that same thing for Morpheus. When people think of Morpheus, Morpheus is out there every day building cool tools to make them succeed. It's not competing with their project, and that's really important. Too many protocols try to centralize development, a foundation, a DAO, and people start looking to those entities to build everything, to create everything, and those entities ended up capturing most of the value. It's not really interesting to builders because they have to compete with the actual protocol itself, and that's the problem.

SPEAKER_01: 29:59

Yeah. And even to double click on that as well. So thinking about Morpheus's growth since 2023, we'd love to understand what are some of the key inflection points you all have figured out or experienced that have led to growth? When you think back to those growth moments, what have you learned about scaling Morpheus?

SPEAKER_00: 30:19

You know, I'm a big advocate for minimum viable products. Like you can get tempted to... Polish something forever and make it perfect. But I love to quote Brian Armstrong. Action creates information. And so in the time somebody could spend three months designing the perfect system, you could have iterated on five different versions, got real feedback from the market, and improved it based on reality, not what you're imagining in your mind. And so... part of the thing that's great about Morpheus is nobody asks for permission for. Like, you want to build a website, you want to launch on there, Morpheus, there's nobody to ask. People pop into the Discord all the time. Who do I need permission from? They're like, nobody. Go for it. It's all open source. Like, push this fork button on GitHub. You can make your own copy and launch whatever you want. And the speed speed and the freedom of that is so refreshing compared to like, let's negotiate a partnership or like sign this end. Like all those friction points go away and you can just built, you can just, and that's why there's, you know, so much success in the Google play store or, or Android or, or areas like that where you're not, you're not waiting for permission to for three months to do something. And so many DAOs get sucked into that. They feel like there needs to be a vote on everything. Like, ah, you know, what should the marketing budget be? What should, you know, should we have pie on Tuesday? Like, just anything and everything. They feel like there needs to be a three-month debate. And it's like, no, guys, the whole point of crypto is freedom, individual freedom. And so, to quote Thomas Jefferson, the DAOs... and the best govern the least. Right? Or at least maybe that's what he would have

SPEAKER_01: 32:18

said. And say that one more time just to make sure it wouldn't hurt.

SPEAKER_00: 32:21

The DAOs that govern the best govern the least.

SPEAKER_01: 32:24

Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 32:26

Which is a riff on Jefferson when he said, you know, the governments that govern the least govern the best, you know, effectively something like that. It's true for every, I think, look at Bitcoin. There's no votes. There's some minor signaling about whether they're going to activate a fork, but nobody's sitting there trying to centrally manage the development. The beautiful thing about open source is you have these experts that are involved, that write the code, and have the freedom to push it themselves. And if other people want to adopt it, great. It's a free market. And so that's one of the things that inspired me about Morpheus is it has this marketplace Yep. Yep. Yep. You got rid of all the bureaucracy and the votes and the DAOs and the rest, and it just became this marketplace. And because Morpheus is modular, you can use any piece of the platform. You don't need to come to defaults or consensus or force everybody to use the lowest common denominator. You can use whatever works for them. If they want to grab the smart contracts for capital, go for it. If they just want to use the compute API, have fun. You want to launch a subnet? These are each modular building blocks. And Ethereum did a good job of that, right? It broke out consensus and execution. They broke out, you know, you want to use the EVM, you want to use a particular ERC, you know, 5,000, you know, different standards you can adopt and pick the one that works for you, right? That's a much better broader approach and and the speed at which you can move like there's no comparison like people almost like you know have have like deep-seated trauma from living in in dowland for years waiting for their proposal to you know cross the threshold because what those systems introduce is politics

SPEAKER_01: 34:43

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 34:44

then it becomes not about writing the code or building the thing who do you know All your buddies on the committee and he's going to recommend it and the community is going to follow his recommendation. It becomes politics. And so it was so funny to see during the launch of Morpheus, all the politicians went away because there was no rewards for them. There was no treasury to take over, you know, centralizing the power. The only people there were shipping code, contributing capital or real builders. Like all the talkers were, there was no reward for talking and they all, they all went away. And so, you know, the community is positive and exciting and welcoming and it doesn't have any of those toxic politics, which is refreshing. Let's

SPEAKER_01: 35:31

say. Listen, I think building it to summarize what we're discussing and what I'm hearing, building an efficient capital engine and then, uh, solving people's problems like allowing capital to flow and then building infrastructure etc at that point that attracts people we've seen this time and time again whether it's ethereum getting out of the way to your point earlier whether it's solana et cetera solving different problems that their communities are looking for and then building efficient ways for builders to get rewarded to use the infrastructure to get rewarded after that folks are typically you know going to go do things within their own interest and so Building that infra and then getting out of the way, if you're trying to scale an ecosystem, it's a tried and true way that we've seen projects develop here in crypto.

SPEAKER_00: 36:19

It's tried and true, but it's always so tempting. Yeah. Oh, but, you know, we just need a little... Central coordination. If only there were a treasury that could cut that check. The discipline, though, of having to write the check yourself. I run a subnet. People stake towards me. I'm building one of the implementations of the super agent. It's called free AI. All those funds, I got to write the check. And so the way people spend their own money Versus the level of discipline they have when they spend somebody else's money is night and day, right? And so you get rid of all those problems that come along with the tragedy of the commons

SPEAKER_01: 37:06

if

SPEAKER_00: 37:06

you get rid of the commons.

SPEAKER_01: 37:09

Let me– we'll sort of close with– I think this has been– Amazing and riveting. And we want to dive into maybe two points. It kind of starts with the beginning of the project and where you all are now, which is sort of a two-part question, but I think we can dive in, which is one, when thinking about fair launches, I know you were there since the beginning, fair launches can be tricky. What are the things you all... wish you knew with launching the fair launch and what are the things you you're super proud of with launching with going that route so that's one and then what is your advice for for builders so that's one and then two you all are in the metropolis stage right now of morpheus's growth So that means you all are focused on the consumer side. You mentioned that a bit earlier and really scaling more. Infrastructure has been the last couple of years of building in the consumer side's next. So Fairlaunch is how you all started. And then thinking about how is it going now with scaling the consumer side and what are you excited about?

SPEAKER_00: 38:07

So one of the big benefits of a Fairlaunch is you don't have a starting price. So what was the starting price of Morpheus? I mean, I guess you could look at the yield contributed as a proxy, and the first people that started contributing yield were effectively getting Morpheus for a buck, for two bucks, for three bucks, for four bucks, for five bucks. As the competition and the capital contributions increased, that dollar figure rose, but... If you have a sale and you're like, oh, I've divined through my intelligence that the magic price should be$100 or$1,000 or whatever, but the market decides something else afterwards, you have all these people that got in and now they're like, oh, well, I paid too much and they're demotivated. So the fair launches that do best, look back at Ethereum. Ethereum didn't, you know, they really let the market set the price. That was a brilliant approach because it was almost like an auction. They didn't have a set number of tokens that were existing. They just said, look, if you show up with a Bitcoin, one Bitcoin gets you X number of ETH. And we're going to let the market decide. And it was an open competition. And so their first effective price of ETH was like 30 cents. 50 cents a block. It traded up to like three bucks and then collapsed back to 50 cents for a while. Like, but the market decided. And so all of those people felt good about like, Oh, it was a fair competition. It was an option. I got in, you know, I got it early and they could, and they could talk about that. Look back to Bitcoin. What was the first price of Bitcoin? Zero. Zero. A penny, two pennies, five pennies, ten pennies. Eventually, people celebrated when it hit a buck. Like, this is crazy, guys. We've reached parity with the dollar. And people felt great about that. And that's so important. So there are 20,000 people holding Morpheus tokens today. And most of them, to my knowledge, have earned them, not bought them.

SPEAKER_01: 40:17

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 40:18

Right. So you can buy on the market and the market's all over the place, right? From five bucks to a hundred bucks to 50 bucks to 20 bucks all the way back to five. But the people that are earning them have that basis and put the real work in, right. And feel like, Oh, this is my project.

SPEAKER_01: 40:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:37

It's not some other guy's project. There is no founder, which it's that like, we can all be Satoshi. We can all be Morpheus.

SPEAKER_01: 40:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 40:45

Right. The Anons that wrote the white paper, they disappeared in 23. Like, nobody knows who they are. Everybody's got their theory. Some people tell me they think it's Eric or Ryan. No, I told those guys about the white paper. Unless they really pretend to know. I don't think there's a thing. But, like, that's okay. Like, who invented zero-knowledge proofs? We don't know today. The guy used Tom Riddle, the Harry Potter character. He started zero-knowledge proofs. He created cash. Who knows? Team Rocket, right? So there's a long tradition in crypto to have these anonymous founders and give it away to the community. I think those are the best projects. Because again, it creates that marketplace for voices. I

SPEAKER_01: 41:26

can come in and

SPEAKER_00: 41:27

say, oh, this is really cool. I want to tell people about this. And so can Luke and Brian and Ryan and Eric and 50 other people can tell people about why they're excited about it. So that's what I would say about fair launches is the payoff. If you can resist... Yeah. Yeah. I didn't get a free more. I bought them or I earned them with code or I contributed staked ETH. And that's true of everybody that owns the token. That's what I would say on launches is really

SPEAKER_01: 42:19

critical. So on fair launches and then quickly on Metropolis. So That stage, what are you all excited about on the scale of the subnets? Because subnets have grown a ton. You guys have real organic users at all sorts of stages. You have later stage projects coming in, building subnets now. With the capital economy going, you also have early stage builders who are thinking about our go-to-market as a subnet. So what's exciting about this stage, Amorphous? Well,

SPEAKER_00: 42:49

the experimentation.

UNKNOWN: 42:51

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 42:52

If you study economics, especially free market economics,

SPEAKER_01: 42:54

you

SPEAKER_00: 42:55

do a lot of humility. You don't know the answer, and that's okay. It's hubris to say you know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. People didn't know what Ethereum would be used for in 2013. Eventually, you got ICOs and then DeFi and then NFTs and now real world assets. But that took a long time to develop. And so we're seeing a ton of experiments from builders creating subnets for gaming, for access to pro accounts, for airdrops. One of the cool ones I saw recently is people are using it for endowments. People launched an AI-first university and they've got anybody staking towards them serves as an endowment to the university. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, that's cool. That's a use case I hadn't really thought about. But I think we're going to see more and more of that experimentation. So for endowments, it might be really useful for trusts. It's a cool... you know, way to handle, you know, these airdrops and other things like that. So I just, you know, I'm, I'm loving watching the experimentation and, you know, let's go to a thousand subnets. And I couldn't tell you today if most of them are going to be games or endowments or, you know, SAS software or air jobs. I don't, I don't know, but you know, people run those experiments and everybody's welcome. It's important to have that humility. It's early. Don't try to over-optimize. You're like, oh, this is exactly the use case and we're going to only build tools for that. No, try to build it for everybody and just let people figure it out.

SPEAKER_01: 44:49

Yeah, I think allowing people to move up the value chain when you're building an ecosystem and then making sure that value flows up the value chain too. Essentially, lowering the cost of building is what Morpheus has done. And then, again, it's allowed people to spend so much more energy on accumulating capital, finding capital, et cetera, because all of it's in one place, plus the tech stack's already solved.

SPEAKER_00: 45:13

To give you a good analogy, that's what people found compelling about the App Store, right? And when Apple released that 2008, whatever it was, about a year after the iPhone came out, developers said to themselves, oh, I don't have to host the servers. I don't have to do marketing. I don't have to figure out how to distribute this.

SPEAKER_01: 45:33

But I can still make a ton of money. Ship

SPEAKER_00: 45:36

my code and get paid for it and they can handle everything else. Yes, sir. Sign me up for that. And so if you think of Morpheus as an agent store, as an agent marketplace, oh, I don't have to host the compute. I can get paid and I don't have to handle distribution. It goes out to this whole community. Sign me up for that.

SPEAKER_01: 45:57

And there's distribution there from the network effect. And so final thing here, this will be not as Morpheus related, but it definitely could be. Love asking a fun question at the end of conversations like this. And so, listen, I know you're a multi-planetary guy in terms of the thesis and certainly close and following space projects all the time, etc. I think With having internet capital markets and what that means, it means you have access to capital markets regardless of location, as long as you have internet. So obviously, that can expand across all different geographies. So as a thought experiment here, I'm curious, looking forward, say, 20 years, 50 years, and I think this is actually tangible for Morpheus, 20 years, 50 years, et cetera. When you're thinking about, say, IPFS with interplanetary file systems, et cetera, How do you see the role of Morpheus as Web3 grows, as we go into, you know, taking on new domains, say, with being in different plants, etc.? Do you see a role for having personal AI in the Morpheus ecosystem that's been developed for our species being a multi-planetary species, etc., etc.? Like, how do you see that connection with as Morpheus and humanity?

SPEAKER_00: 47:15

Well, you hit a chord here. I've been a space nerd my whole life. I've made it down to six of the Starship launches. Incredible to see in person. I love the meme, Mars is the new America. I think that's going to be the case, right? People are going to go out there and sell the new frontier. Yeah. My hope is that blockchain, crypto, open source is the default. Those new places... the same way that, you know, when people came from the old world and the new world, they had a presumption of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, right? And separation of church and state. All these concepts that had been hard won over 500 years of conflict in the old world, when people came to the new world, they brought a lot of good precedents,

SPEAKER_01: 48:08

at

SPEAKER_00: 48:08

least in North America. that have made people prosperous and happy and living long lives. So as we expand from the earth to Mars, moon, asteroids, I'm hopeful and personally what I wanna see is when that land gets settled, it's a real world assets on a blockchain and you know you got the ownership, you're not counting on some government promise, you own it, right? That's a big difference. You look at the outcomes in South America, it was very different. Conquistadors showed up and they did not have presumptions of property rights or freedom of speech or separation of church and state. And so look at the difference. 500 years later, South America, one in 10 people own property. In North America, nine out of 10 people own property. And owning your own house... For most people, it's like 90% of their net wealth. So that gap between North and South America is largely an effect of those systems. Like, did you bring nobility and the people on the farm were peasants? Or did you bring, oh, we're going to hold a competition and anybody can earn the land, go and farm it, have fun, right? Those have real long-term effects. And so if we can bring open source and crypto together, To the new frontier. I think it's going to be amazing. And you can have the most prosperity of anywhere because they're going to start with that point. Central banks with Bitcoin, right? Not with legacy finance, Ethereum. Not with, you know, centrally controlled systems, but a personal AI Amorphous. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun. And I think it's going to be sooner than people expect. I think a lot sooner than people expect. I know if you've gone down there. But what they are building at our base, it's insane. The scale of what they're building, their objective is to build three starships per day. That's a thousand ships a year.

SPEAKER_01: 50:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 50:13

They're not joking. They're not playing around. They are very serious about building a thousand ships a year.

SPEAKER_01: 50:19

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 50:20

You're going to get Earth to Earth transport. You're going to get Earth to the moon. And you're going to have these huge armada fleets

SPEAKER_01: 50:26

going

SPEAKER_00: 50:27

out to Mars. It's going to be wild, man. I'm hoping to be one of the first 100 people.

SPEAKER_01: 50:32

Yeah, I'm excited for that. I think people are going to use personal AI when those realities come. Whatever form they take, if people are on the moon, et cetera, they will probably have personal devices and that will probably have AI, et cetera. So there's a real tangible effect we get here. I'd say caught up in the West in general on, you know, comparing decentralized AI to legacy AI, et cetera, in sort of the product comparisons on a spreadsheet. But when thinking about real uses, there's new systems that have the potential to be developed as humanity keeps growing and as technology keeps growing and as we take more leaps. And so how those systems are set is still up for grabs, right? Like when we get to that world, Hopefully at that point, tools like Morpheus and tools like Aave and others where you have capital markets that are tools in these applications that they're usable enough, whereas we keep progressing as a society, we will eventually want to start from base with these sorts of tools versus considering them as alternate. So I want to make sure that these systems get developed enough to be to be useful. And look, have appreciated the convo. This has been great. Any closing thoughts for you?

SPEAKER_00: 51:50

No, I really enjoyed the discussion. You know, I think there's so much opportunity right now. I try to remind people the future is always larger than the past, right? You know, I was a little too young to catch the dot-com wave. I was like 15 in 2000. I was trading stocks. I was building some websites. But, you know, I was just a little too young. And I was like, oh, I missed out. The dot-com wave, it was the big one, right? But then the next wave came, and it was social, mobile, and then it was crypto, and now it's AI. Every wave is bigger than the last one. So lean in. Go to more.org. Go to freeai.xyz. Use these tools. Check them out. You haven't missed out. We are still so early. The number of people in the world that have a personal AI is less than a million people. And that's if you generously counted everybody with a Venice account and a Morpheus account and other decentralized AI accounts. But you're right at the beginning. So people brag about, oh, I found out about Bitcoin in 2012. That moment is right now. In 10 years, we're going to be sitting here and you're going to be saying, oh my God, how did you find out about decentralized AI or Morpheus in 2025? That is... To your future self, an amazing accomplishment. So that's what I always say to people is dive in, try it out, get to know these tools because you can be that person to your family and friends that gives them access to this new world. Love it. Just like we all did that for our family and friends for Bitcoin. Before that, we did it for our family and friends for the internet.

SPEAKER_01: 53:32

Love it. David, this has been wonderful. Yep. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening to that wonderful conversation. Like, share, comment and listen. Let's keep pushing the space forward.