Co-founder claims AI-powered blockchain technology will 'replace Bitcoin'

Co-founder claims AI-powered blockchain technology will 'replace Bitcoin'

Ambient has secured $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z, Delphi Digital and Amber Group.

Danny Nelson | Edited by Steven Alpher Updated March 31, 2025, 17:20 UTC Published March 31, 2025, 16:00 UTC

What you need to know:

• Ambient Secures $7.2M in Seed Funding from Crypto Acceleration Program a16z and Delphi Digital
• The goal of the network is to deliver advanced artificial intelligence quickly, affordably, and openly.

Travis Good, co-founder, claims that the new AI-powered blockchain technology, backed by Andreesin Horowitz, is “ultimately designed to replace Bitcoin.”

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This bold claim is based on what Good calls a stark reality: Bitcoin's encryption mechanisms have “become truly obsolete” and could “become completely obsolete within five years,” posing serious business challenges for miners.

“You have people who have invested billions of dollars in computing power into ASICs to secure the network,” he told CoinDesk at the ethDenver conference this year. “And the question is, where is it all going?”

His answer is Ambient, a blockchain with deep AI capabilities—“the future economy,” as Good calls it—that could become “a decentralized competitor to OpenAI.” The network uses the proof-of-work mechanism that is so attractive to Bitcoin miners, he says, making it easy to adopt.

“It's a useful proof-of-work network that we don't think anyone has succeeded at in cryptocurrency yet,” Good said.

Many crypto projects have attempted to combine two popular tech trends, believing that blockchains and decentralized crowdsourcing can use AI to benefit humanity more effectively than individual private companies can.

One of the largest and best-funded is Bittensor. However, Good argues that the market leader has significant shortcomings because it does not actually run AI models on the blockchain, despite its original intention to “become this global computer.” Its alternative, Ambient, integrates AI into its core.

Whether Bitcoin miners — let alone users — will actually use a radically new and different network likely depends on the economic success of Ambient. Good aims for Ambient to deliver superintelligent AI quickly, inexpensively, and, crucially, transparently, so that users get the answers they paid for.

While Ambient's security is similar to Bitcoin's, the network itself functions like Solana.

Ambient has secured $7.2 million in seed funding from crypto accelerator a16z, as well as Delphi Digital, one of the world's most venture-capital hungry funds working in the space of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence crossover technologies.

“Everyone in crypto right now is using centralized AI to power their applications, their front end,” said Alex Golding, a venture partner at Delphi. He believes this is a serious problem because it deprives users of insight into what the models are based on and puts them at risk of being fooled by answers from the worst-performing models.

Miners' “verified outputs” (the basis of their reward mechanism) act as a means of verifying the facts of origin, a guarantor

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