Bittensor Could Become the "Bitcoin of AI" w/ Karia Samaroo

**Karia Samaroo** (0:00)
Only Bitcoin and TOW, I own nothing else.

**John Gill** (0:01)
All right, walk me through why only Bitcoin and TOW, and first of all, just like mad respect on the conviction on that. But yeah, give me the thesis on these two assets here.

**Karia Samaroo** (0:10)
Okay, so I guess the personal story is that...

**John Gill** (0:12)
Everyone is talking about the intersection of crypto and AI, but what is the future of decentralized AI? When is it gonna take off? And what do investors need to know about it? Hello and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the podcast that wonders if anyone has tried asking AI to fix Bitcoin and make no mistakes. I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Wednesday, July 1st. We will be releasing this episode on July 3rd, and today we are joined by Karia Samaroo. Karia is the founder and CEO of XTOW, a company focused on the Bittensor TOW ecosystem that acquires and stakes TOW tokens for its corporate treasury, while also operating validators and building infrastructure to support decentralized AI subnets and applications. He's doing a lot of things in the Bittensor ecosystem. He's also the founder of WonderFi, a Canadian crypto platform acquired by Robinhood, which I want to talk to him about as well.
Karia has become a very prominent public figure and advocate for Bittensor. He's going to share a ton of alpha with us today. So that all sounds good to you. Make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. Today's episode is brought to you by Bittget, stocks 2 with real liquidity, real dividends. Without further ado, welcome to The Milk Road Show.

**Karia Samaroo** (1:18)
Karia, how are you? I'm doing well, John. Thanks for having me.

**John Gill** (1:22)
I'm really excited to talk to you today. I have a lot of questions for you. Our community has been very focused on AI and crypto, but we will get to all that in a minute. I want to talk first about WonderFi. You are the founder and former CEO of WonderFi. It was just acquired by Robinhood very recently here. This was the largest crypto exchange in Canada. Talk to me about the inspiration for launching this and some of the hurdles you had to overcome on the way of growing this and, you know, culminating with this big acquisition with Robinhood here.

**Karia Samaroo** (1:48)
So before I started WonderFi, there were a lot of issues with crypto exchanges. We've seen that, obviously, through a bunch of different cycles, going back to Mt. Gox, but there were, you know, just a lot of trust issues with crypto platforms. And I think at the same time, crypto is still, as it is today, it's really intimidating and complicated for a lot of people, probably not so much your audience or people that are in our circles, but just for the general public. So the vision for WonderFi was creating a regulated, trusted, consumer-friendly platform for crypto. And that was really the opportunity that we saw at that time. And so we really set out to do that and also put Canadian crypto on the map. I think there's a ton of great tech companies and crypto companies, frankly, that come out of Canada, but there hadn't been anything in the exchange space that we felt could compete on a global scale and get the recognition that I think was really there and waiting. And so that was the inspiration behind it.
And then we really just pulled together the best people and the best tech in the country to build what would become WonderFi.

**John Gill** (3:11)
It's awesome. So this acquisition from Robinhood, this is a big move from them. Talk to me about where that fits into their overall crypto strategy. They're, I think, launching their own Robinhood chain, just recently announced. There's a lot going on in that space. Where does WonderFi factor into all of that?

**Karia Samaroo** (3:27)
Yeah. So I think in two ways, Robinhood, as you said, they're making a lot of bets on crypto and not just fringe bets. They're really integrating crypto into the whole company strategy. And so yeah, their own chain, launching all types of different crypto products, tokenized stocks. It's really broadly across the whole company, which is, I think, just encouraging to see in general when you have one of the major fintech players like that, that's really doubling down on crypto. And then the other part is their international expansion. So they acquired WonderFi, they acquired Bitstamp, and there's other strategic acquisitions that they're making to enter different markets. And so WonderFi kind of fell into both of those buckets, international, it's their Canadian entry point. And they could have easily spun up Canada themselves, but I think that the regulatory landscape in Canada is difficult. And we had done a lot of work on the regulatory side with WonderFi, which was quite challenging. And then just kind of bringing together a couple million users made it a really attractive target for that.