Uneasy Money: Why Erik Voorhees Calls AI's Hidden Filter 'Deceptive'

**Erik Voorhees** (0:00)
I have zero faith in the political process. Like, I don't vote for presidential candidates. I think the train has left the station. Like, the institutional momentum and inertia of the state cannot be controlled by anyone, badly. The only solution is actually technological. And this was why Bitcoin was so amazing, was because you didn't have to go anywhere and vote for anything, you just use it. You didn't require anyone's permission for it. It actually allowed you to opt out of the system just on your own. That was what was beautiful about it.

**Kain Warwick** (0:28)
Hey everyone, I'm Kain Warwick and welcome to Uneasy Money because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make this show possible.

**Taylor Monahan** (0:37)
This episode is brought to you by 1inch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1inch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills.

**Kain Warwick** (0:50)
See how it works at 1inch.com/aqua.
All right, hey guys, I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monahan, security expert, and we have a very special guest today, Erik Voorhees, the founder and CEO of Venice. Welcome. Hey guys. Thank you for joining us. All right. It's been an interesting week this week. We've had some price action for the first time in a while. Even Bitcoin, at 72k, it feels like we've been ranging for six months now, going nowhere. I know, it went up. Yeah, exactly. I know. What are the odds?
Let's jump straight in. We're very lucky to have your perspective here, Erik, on some of these topics because we mix DeFi and AI on the show often. One of the probably biggest things that came out this week was Stripe buying OpenRouter. I think there's a couple of interesting things. One, OpenRouter, one of the founders of OpenSea. Clearly, also, yeah, also, big fan of the word open. We'll see what he does with his next startup. But I think in terms of crypto pivots to AI, this is definitely one of the most successful ones, right? But pretty hard pivot out of NFTs into open kind of API inference for these guys.

**Erik Voorhees** (2:29)
Yeah, and OpenRouter, of course, wasn't crypto at all. It was just pure.

**Kain Warwick** (2:35)
Just pure, yeah, like full pivot out of crypto, like goodbye.

**Erik Voorhees** (2:38)
Full pivot out of crypto into AI inference. Yeah, it's an incredible achievement. I mean, the company is like a little over two years old, something like that.
Nailed the timing, nailed the products. Everyone loves it. They built a marketplace with providers of inference and consumers of inference over the API, and just totally crushed it. So, yeah, very impressive. Good job, Gigi.

**Kain Warwick** (3:05)
I know, right? Yeah, and the other one, I think the other one is Hermes.
Those guys were crypto and they pivoted pretty hard, maybe a couple years ago, two and a half years ago out of crypto. But I think of the, let's call it crypto plus AI projects, Venice is probably the leading example. We have right now, I would say, like incorporating crypto into an AI product and kind of mashing the two up as opposed to a hard pivot. So, you know, maybe, maybe like give us a head, like why did you incorporate a token into Venice versus, you know, just going full pivot out of crypto into AI?

**Erik Voorhees** (3:56)
Yeah, I mean, first, like can't pivot out of crypto. I've been already re, it flows through my blood.
I care deeply about it because it is a new way for money to move around the world.
And because money is, you know, endemic to all business activity, I don't really see it as like, it shouldn't be its own ecosystem, like it started that way. I'd much rather see the primitives, the best primitives from the crypto and DeFi world are leaving the crypto world and actually get into normal stuff. If it's all just like crypto for crypto people serving crypto products with crypto, then we've kind of missed it. So I wanted to bring some of the primitives into Venice to just like show the world that these technologies are not just for like speculating on coins that go up and down, but that these are incentive mechanisms. And there's a lot of ways to do them badly, but there are some ways to do them well. And we're trying to demonstrate that in a mass market consumer app.

**Kain Warwick** (5:07)
I mean, is it fair to say that like the existence of tokens, right? Or even let's say like models generally like inference, right? Like these, you know, and I say tokens like not crypto tokens, right? But like your inference tokens, the new, the new hot topic is really unfortunate, actually.