Blockchain Meets AI: Ralph Glabschnig on building trust through decentralized technology.

Anthony Perl: Blockchain meets ai, Ralph Laish nag on building trust through decentralized technology. In this episode, Dr. Gemma Green continues her conversation with Ralph Laish nag exploring the convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence in building a more decentralized future. Ralph shares his insights on how these technologies can democratize access to wealth, particularly in regions lacking traditional trust infrastructure.

He also discusses the impact of recent US policy changes on global crypto adoption. From sustainable solution building to the future of AI blockchain integration. Ralph offers valuable perspectives on navigating the evolving digital landscape. I'm your cohost Anthony Pearl, and whether you're an investor or a startup looking for insights, it's time to get unblocked.

Can I ask Ralph, how then, with all of that, with regulation and want, looking at creativity, and you've talked about some of the investments that you've made and where you have been looking, but how do you actually make those evaluations?

Ralf Glabischnig: Look at the end of the day. I'm trying to understand a bit of the things we are doing and that the startups are doing.

So I'm trying to stay up to date with what's happening. And on the other side, I trust in founders. I mean, you will hear that a lot, but the most important thing are the people running a company. Do I have a good gut feeling with them? Do I believe they do the best to bring their project forward? So for me, it's really less the project at the actual state.

It's more. The people behind the project because there will be probably five pivots on the way because of different markets or because of regulators or whatever. But when the founders are having the right mindset, they will come over there.

Dr Jemma Green: It's a great observation. I think that we think about it when investing in other companies.

You really want somebody that you feel is gonna be like water around that market, like explore, experiment, and really push forward and that you're really buying into them as a person to actually solve the problems that you don't even know about yet.

Ralf Glabischnig: Absolutely. I mean, the complexity is much too high that you can understand fully the markets where the startups are in.

I mean, Gemma, you know, we love what you guys are doing, but I have no clue what in detail you're really doing, so I can't, I. Get into these details because you and the energy market, that's an own specific market where you need a lot of expertise in the end of the day. But what we do is we trust you, Gemma, and your team, and this is the important thing at the end of the day.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah. And speaking of trust, we just wanna go back a bit and explore the micro strategy, strategy and what you think of that in terms of like an equity play involving Bitcoin.

Ralf Glabischnig: Look at, it's much more than an equity play because what he did is he created different financial products, and I'm again, not the expert on that side, but I'm following, for example, Anton Goup, who has an excellent white apps about MicroStrategy, and I learned that there's on one side, the equity play and buying Bitcoin with equity.

There's on the other side, the bond. Play and buying Bitcoin with bonds. And then he gives with that products volatility to the markets for big hedge funds searching volatility at the end of the day. So a very complex financial engineering system. I think it's super smart from Sailor doing that. I don't like it really.

I don't like this accumulation of Bitcoin to accumulate Bitcoin. I believe we should have a more fair distribution of Bitcoin. There should be more people holding Bitcoin. And at the moment when you look at the top 10 Bitcoin holders. It's growing. The centralization of the Bitcoin holding. I mean, just last week came out that Alala, the, one of the, so wealth funds in Abu Dhabi bought Bitcoin for $450 million around, so we see another concentration on the, so wealth funds and states buying Bitcoin.

I'm not sure if this was the idea of Sakamoto. Mm-hmm.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah, it's kind of like a double-edged sword, you know? It's kind of like the institutionalization of it and it's become a mainstream thing rather than a fringe thing. But along with that, you know, concentration risk as well and country risk and yeah, new kind of parameters to take account of.

I mean, not least with the new administration in the us what is your view overall of both the blockchain market? And I would just also add in ai, like how we haven't talked about that. There is an intersection between blockchain and ai. Is that something that you are looking at and interested in?

Ralf Glabischnig: Absolutely. It's a super exciting topic. Let's probably stay first with the US and the new administration as this is a total different animal. I have two perspectives on that. The first perspective is that's great for global adoption of our industry. I think this openness of the US will help to grow in a lot of areas now.

The second opinion is there was an opportunity to build unicorns outside of the US The last 10 years, there was an opportunity for Suk to be the center of the Crypto Valley. There was an opportunity for the Middle East to grow very fast for Singapore. Now this opportunity might get back to, we need to move to the us, the Silicon Valley, or wherever it is, probably more Miami and New York, but we need to move back to the US and I heard this already from a lot of founders and entrepreneurs and I.

As a early support of the Crypto Valley and the creator of the crypto ais. This makes me a bit sad because I like this, that this also the building of big tech companies was a bit more decentralized and we are not only having the centralized players out of the US or probably a little bit out of Asia, that there was another opportunity.

So I hope this opportunity. It's not going totally away that we still have decentralized companies and changing the world.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah. Um, seeing that I heard the same commentary and also on the one hand, the US being under the previous administration really let so much regulation by enforcement. I think that put a lead on what was possible everywhere.

I think you are absolutely right. There's gonna be more competition now between nation states and. To a certain extent, there's a lost an opportunity that wasn't fully taken advantage of where us wasn't a big kind of competitor in the space. But I think it's not a zero sum game. I think there'll be a lot more opportunity overall, and it will create more competitive tension without question.

So I think countries are gonna have to move, be more agile or seize the day sooner.

Ralf Glabischnig: Yeah, look, I still believe the opportunity in Switzerland, for example, layer bonds and infrastructure, it's a huge opportunity because this is a long term play, or should be a long term play, and in Switzerland will not change all four years.

The direction, the foundation model of Switzerland is an old model, and when we use this, we can use this for the next 100 years hopefully. And on the other side. The other strengths of Switzerland of banking, digital assets, of custody, of digital assets. I mean, Switzerland holds a lot of the wealth of the whole world already in the old markets.

Private banking basically is more or less invented in Switzerland, and there's a big opportunity. To be the digital asset custodian of the world. Also in the long run without having all four years, big changes on the regulatory side. So when you ask me with whom I would hold my digital assets, would I take a Chinese company?

Probably not. Would I take a Middle East company? Probably not. Would I take a US company also? Probably not. So. A Swiss private bank or a Swiss player in that area has more trust for me. So there's specializations possible. Absolutely.

Dr Jemma Green: Makes sense. So it sounds like you're not about to move to Miami, Ralph.

Ralf Glabischnig: No. I'm gonna stay in Switzerland and in the Middle East. Absolutely.

Dr Jemma Green: Excellent. Glad to hear that. Thanks for separating the US story and the AI story. Maybe we could chat about what your, you mentioned you're excited about it. Love to hear your thoughts.

Ralf Glabischnig: Absolutely. Look, we started to use the term Web3, I think around two years ago, a little bit more.

And yes, I still don't think it's the best term you can have, but Web3 is for me already, the congregants of different technologies for the future of the internet. And these different technologies are on one side, blockchain, digital assets. On the other side, ai. And we see now these two things coming a lot together in different ways.

So in a simple way, AI helps you to analyze big data volumes and make easier decisions on top of this data. And the blockchain space helps you to transact and interact more auto automatically. So. And transacting two very important things in our work on the. That's the question. Which data is used to run an AI and how do you control this data, which is getting into an ai?

I think data governance, AI governance and all these topics will be very important because when we rely on technology to make decisions for us, or at the moment probably to prepare decisions and later on to make automated decisions, we need to make sure that the data given in is controlled. To control data.

Again, the blockchain helps us to create immutable data at the end of the day. And then the further thing is running AI systems on blockchain based systems. So make these AI systems probably unstoppable at the end of the day. I think one of the players really on the forefront of this technology is definitively the internet compute in Switzerland.

The guys. Build a great infrastructure in a blockchain space, which is much more than only a blockchain. It's an own cloud infrastructure, basically. And they have been able to run LLMs on their blockchain and they're really able to run full models there. And on the other side, we are building with them to get a functionality like how can you create with a prompt.

A new application and deployed automatically on the blockchain. So there are a lot of interesting things of enabling users to be software developers by themself without understanding how to develop software and then deploying these applications and run these applications. So also being a system engineer, a DevOp.

Everything because of ai. And that's exciting. I mean, we are only tipping the top of the iceberg at the moment. What's gonna be possible in that area? And we have seen AI much faster being rolled out into corporates. Used in corporates. I mean, in the blockchain space. We are talking since 10 years about corporate adoption.

We are. Honestly, nowhere in the AI space since two years there, and a lot of the big corporates have integrated this in their daily work.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah, I mean, what would you say is the problem with centralized AI that needs blockchain in it? Like some people would listen to this bit of the conversation and go, well, that just sounds like, you know, you want blockchain to be part of the AI world, but what is the reason why you'd want that, and what is the problem with centralized AI that using blockchain solves?

Just to sort of delve into that a bit further, Googles.

Ralf Glabischnig: Look, I like the sentence, don't be evil. You remember this Google sentence. Don't be evil. I mean, with ais and with centralized ais, there's a lot of decision power hand over to technology. I. We need to make sure that this decision power is not used in a bad way.

I mean, you can integrate data with changing the decisions and when we are not used anymore to ask behind information, where's it coming from and is it true? It's gonna be dangerous. And so we need alternatives in the AI space to not have only one reality basically. And for that, it's in my opinion, very important to have different models, decentralized and have an opportunity to compare these results.

Find out what is really true and what is not true, and that's gonna be a challenge. I mean, you can ask AI systems today a lot. They will act like a good strategy consultant and try to get all the information which is available, label and give you the whistle. But who's gonna do the checks and balances on collecting this information?

What is the governance behind? That's a very interesting challenge for the next five to 10 years. I've seen a

Anthony Perl: lot of stuff just in terms of content that's produced through AI that is completely unchecked and you read it and you're trying to go, what value is this adding? Because people are just mindlessly farming AI for content to promote their own brand, but yet it's not really them.

And finding that balance between what is authentic and what is AI and what is actually logical stuff that's produced from the ai. Because plenty of times, as you say that there's stuff that's produced. If you haven't read through it, you, you wouldn't know. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Ralf Glabischnig: Always. Yeah. Look, I think it totally changed.

Um. 20 years ago when someone gave you a paper with 200 pages, you thought, wow, they spend a lot of time to create this 200 pages paper to get all this information together. And today we need to try to get the 3, 4, 5 relevant points out and say to get the information short enough to be able to check it.

Basically, and there's this old quote, sorry, I didn't have enough time to make it short enough, which is more important today than 10 years ago.

Anthony Perl: I find it fascinating when you compare the same input to three or four ais next to one another to see what the results are that are returned, and it can be quite interesting to see how different one can be from the other.

Yeah, and

Ralf Glabischnig: exactly this. We need to automate at the end of today. So we need to have models where we say, Hey, please give me the different information, bring it together and fact check the different ones. Or at least show me the differences in a way that I easily can see where might be a different information base behind where can I dig deeper on that?

And this is the difficult challenge. I mean, today, information we have everywhere. Everyone can be an expert in every topic, but. Are you able to question this content? This is the question, are you really an expert? Are you really able to understand that? At the end of the day,

Anthony Perl: it's one of the things I love about this kind of medium, right?

Because that we're doing exactly that. We're asking questions and sharing information.

Ralf Glabischnig: Absolutely. And I don't have time to use the AI for the answers.

Dr Jemma Green: I mean, it's not until you're a subject matter expert on a particular topic and then you make an AI query on that, that you really deeply understand the limitations of the ai.

And we do want AI that don't give all the same answers, but 'cause they're gonna have different data sets and also perhaps not be biased or have a predilection to a certain outcome. Ralph, that what that actually says is that we're gonna get lots of different answers. So we still need to discern, we still need the skill of discernment as well.

We want the AI to say the same thing, which I don't think is what you are advocating.

Ralf Glabischnig: No, absolutely not. But the problem is what we have seen till now. One system rules it all at the end of the day. So I mean, more than 90% of the people are using Google today. I think we forgot what I Vista was, and you know, the majority of the people will not spend the time to compare.

This will only be an expert topic, and we need to make sure that we are not leading people into the wrong directions.

Dr Jemma Green: Absolutely. Is it something that you're working on in your venture studio? Anything on ai?

Ralf Glabischnig: We have different AI projects, so we built AI projects together with, with fin. As I told you before, there's a super exciting project called Caffeine.

On the other side, we have different projects where AI is integrated in the wallet. Where you can talk with your wallet and say, buy Bitcoin when it hits 95,000. And so making products more accessible at the end of the day. I think user interfaces will change totally in the next few years. I mean, I personally, I hate.

Voice messages. I hate voice to text things and so on, but when you look into the generation, which is coming up now, this is just for them, it's the most convenient way to interact with an application. We will see a total shift. The ui, ux is, is the new Alexa or things like that. Alexa sent me money or sent money to Gemma $5 for sharing the parking spot or whatever it is.

That's gonna be the standard in 10 years. And, uh, and we will not think about how many buttons does this application have and how do I do that? It will just be naturally integrated in a WhatsApp, in a telegram, or in whatever it is.

Dr Jemma Green: You might be able to give your thumbs a rest, even though you'd prefer not to.

Ralf Glabischnig: Look, it's not about what I prefer to not do. It's where the majority of the people is gonna go. I mean, I. You know, my experience with voice messages is someone sends you a two minutes message and there was only one question in it. It could be, do I have time tomorrow at nine o'clock for a coffee? And I prefer the WhatsApp message in four words and not the two minutes message, but probably I need the AI to get this.

Four words out of the two minutes message.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah,

Ralf Glabischnig: that's the thing.

Dr Jemma Green: Ralph, we are going to just turn to a couple more personal questions, not too personal. Tell us what your favorite song is at the moment.

Ralf Glabischnig: Oh, what is my favorite song at the moment? That's a super, super difficult question because it depends totally on the mood.

If it's more tech dancing or if it's more, I love Austrian songs at the moment, for example. There's a song called,

it Means Because Your Heart is Like the Mountain basically. And I'm listening to these old songs in my Austrian language and they love the texts. And uh, it's another band called STS and they have songs from the eighties and nineties, which have outstanding text where I understand the meaning only today.

Dr Jemma Green: Beautiful. And in terms of this year, like what are you most excited about?

Ralf Glabischnig: We have a lot of companies where, see the opportunity that this year might be an IPO and token sale going public. So we didn't see a lot of exits in the venture capital space the last years. It was rather difficult and I'm excited to see some of these growth stories.

And this is of course unable through the new government in the US at the end of, so that's the positive part of that.

Dr Jemma Green: And anything else that you'd like to share with the unblocked listeners?

Ralf Glabischnig: Yes, look, this site we have at the moment is a lot about meme coins, and I'm totally not a fan of meme coins, so I didn't invest in any of them.

Uh, I'm not in to make, uh, five x or 10 x to invest in the Trump coin when I hear this in the morning and think, wow, that might be great. Even I might have the information early enough and I might have the opportunity to follow that. I'm just not interested in that. So my opinion is do the due diligence, do you see the value of the project?

Is there really something behind? And then invest in things you believe in a long time and not invest just to trade. But this is, I'm long always in all the things I'm doing. I like to believe in the things behind and where it's heading and less in the short term trends at the end of the day.

Dr Jemma Green: Great.

Ralph, what I'm hearing from this entire conversation is that you are really high commitment participant and investor. You really like to understand. The kind of macro trends and form a view and support entrepreneurs that understand the subject matter in those segments very deeply and really back them and support them with the work that you're doing in building out the ecosystem, but also the those specific businesses and projects.

And hearing that, you know, you love the application area, but you also recognize that the infrastructure sort of segment needs to be built out first, and you're focusing on that as well as supporting the. Development of the applications that will ultimately create a new financial system. What I hear that you are really working on and lit up by, and it's really a pleasure to have the conversation with you today and I just wanted to acknowledge the great work that you are doing in the e ecosystem.

It's been wonderful to be a part of that since I moved to Switzerland, you know, one and a half years ago. And, um, thank you.

Ralf Glabischnig: Thank you very much. I would like probably to add one thing when I'm about talking, being excited this year. Look, this technology, the decentralized things, the blockchain, the integrated trust, it's not very important in Switzerland.

So all of us have. Several ways to pay, to store value, to transact, et cetera. Yeah. We are excited now to go into areas where we really see a big value on that, and we are, for example, partnering up with Hedera Hash Graph to be more in Africa. This year. We will join Tex Africa there. We did some stuff like.

From tokenizing cattle farms in South America to tokenizing cooking stove or solar power in Africa. And so financing projects in a world where trust is not like in Switzerland, everywhere where you don't trust others where financing is difficult. This is exciting because I really want to get out of only the financial use cases when the blockchain space brought us only a new financial system.

And not anything more than that. Then we didn't get to the target where we wanted to get. So really we need to get into self. So identity into all the other areas, which we're talking since 10 years, but we're. No scale happened till now. We had the fastest accumulation of wealths with finance, with terror, with you name it, in that area, but really democratizing access to technology and to wealths didn't happen till now, and I hope we make a big leap forward this year in that area.

Dr Jemma Green: Yeah, a lovely way to finish Ralph. And I think, and thanks for adding that in because it's like not just defi for defi sake, it's defi to provide broader access to capital so that people can build new businesses, develop economically, lift themselves out of poverty, and actually create a better world.

Absolutely.

Ralf Glabischnig: Absolutely.

Dr Jemma Green: Wonderful note to finish on, and thank you again.

Ralf Glabischnig: Thank you. It was my pleasure to be with you on the podcast.

Anthony Perl: That's all for this episode of Unblocked. Please check out the show notes for information on Power Ledger and other contact information. We welcome your comments and feedback and please hit subscribe wherever you are listening.

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