Orchid Labs CEO Steven Waterhouse on DePIN, AI, Decentralized VPNs, and Internet Freedom

Matt Zahab of Cryptonews recently interviewed Steven Waterhouse, CEO and co-founder of Orchid Labs, an open-source, decentralized marketplace for Internet services designed to provide the building blocks for a better, freer Internet.

In this exclusive interview, the CEO discussed:

• ensuring decentralization as the convergence of AI and Web3 accelerates;
• shifting away from centralized infrastructure to unlock the full potential of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN);
• the role of Digital Resource Networks (DRNs) within DePINs;
• the foundational elements of a freer Internet;
• privacy in the digital age, enabled by decentralization.

Watch the Full Episode with Dr. Steven Waterhouse

Or read on to learn what he shared with Matt.

Decentralization Predates Crypto

Waterhouse noted that the concept of decentralization or distributed systems dates back to the early days of the Internet.

The core routing design, infrastructure, and protocols at the lowest level were originally designed to be fully decentralized. Centralization emerged later.

He stated,

“The actual Internet itself is a decentralized architecture. It’s designed to withstand a nuclear attack.”

Various applications can operate across “large decentralized distributed clusters of machines.” For example, the backends of Apple, Google, and Amazon are all built on this foundation.

“So we kind of went from decentralized to more centralized, and now we’re going back to decentralized inside the data centers,” he added.

However, the business models of these companies, which are largely supported by advertising, do not lend themselves well to decentralization. It is a matter of economic interest.

But “along comes crypto”, bringing the idea of decentralized architectures that are widely available – not just within isolated data centers. “And that becomes the collection of blockchain families that we know and love,” the CEO said.

Now, people are attempting to “replicate what we did before with data centers, but not just with one machine, but with many, and do the same across a wide area. And that’s DePIN,” Waterhouse explained. “It’s like decentralized machines performing tasks that are connected and incentivized using crypto.”

To get someone interested in DePIN, he suggested, give them a problem to solve.

“Tell them that story and say, this is why we need decentralized physical infrastructure. So you need to be able to solve that problem where not one person controls the algorithm.”

Decentralized Virtual Private Network

Blockchain was a solution to and an improvement on many things, but not all.

The concept of decentralized infrastructure – running a service where participants are incentivized to do so and are likely paid to consume it – was something many assumed had already been solved by blockchain.

According to Waterhouse,

“It became very clear very quickly in the summer of 2017, that not only was there a lot of interest, but that the ideas of trying to bring the concept of decentralization as it relates to security and privacy, and bringing that as a core principle within the blockchain/Web3/crypto ecosystem, was possibly just as important as anything we could build.”

Orchid offers its own decentralized, pay-as-you-go VPN. According to the website, Orchid Global does not run servers on the VPN protocol. Instead, independent providers run the Orchid server configuration and stake the native token OXT to provide bandwidth in exchange for payments directly from users via the Orchid nanopayment system.

Users do not pay for services they do not receive, the site added. Nanopayment tickets travel alongside data packets to the bandwidth provider.

With a decentralized VPN, Waterhouse said, there are two nodes in the architecture. Hence, “no one can figure out what it is you’re looking for and who you are, because the two things are never connected together.”

Enter AI

OpenAI’s popular AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT has changed the AI landscape.

According to Waterhouse, the original idea behind it was to make it open-source.

“Basically the idea was like, do a lot of research in AI, publish it all to make sure that not-so-nice people don’t get all the good AI research and do bad things, have all the power.”

Things have changed since then, but Waterhouse had another thought: “let’s do that for security.” He wanted to find a way to reinvent computing with security as the default component – not an afterthought.

“What if you could rebuild things with security as a foundational principle?”

When it comes to the concept of decentralization, people can talk about privacy, he argued, but unless you truly have a decentralized architecture, you can never be sure that privacy is guaranteed.

Related to this, Waterhouse said he does not worry about AI becoming self-aware and “creating Skynet.” He is much more concerned about the human tendency to give AIs like ChatGPT everything – happily feeding it information about ourselves.

“And for it then to be able to apply very sophisticated understanding and eventually reasoning about what you’ve told it, about what other people who know you have told it and so on. And this thing is gonna know you.”

Finally, the sense of what it feels like to be very powerful will come from a convergence of many AI systems working together, Waterhouse concluded.

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About Steven Waterhouse:

Dr. Steven ‘SEVEN’ Waterhouse is an active investor and builder in the crypto/Web3 space with 11 years of experience.

He is currently CEO and co-founder of Orchid Labs, an advisor to various projects including RiscZero and Squid Router, and CEO and co-founder of Nazare Ventures, a new fund focused on crypto and AI.

Waterhouse was recently CTO and Venture Partner at Fabric Ventures and was previously a partner at Pantera Capital from 2013 to 2016. He served on the board of Bitstamp during this period.

He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Cambridge with a focus on speech recognition and machine learning.

The post Steven Waterhouse, CEO of Orchid Labs, on DePIN, AI, Decentralized VPNs, and Fighting for Internet Freedom | Ep. 307 appeared first on Cryptonews.