Exploring Decentralized AI with Morpheus
Developer DAO · June 2025 · 39:41
David A. Johnston of Morpheus talks with DevNTell host Narb about his long career in the blockchain space and the peer-to-peer network for general purpose AI powered by MOR. They cover highlights from the Super AI Conference, the intersection of AI and web3, and the future of decentralized AI.
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From Developer DAO, hosted by Developer DAO.
Transcript
GMGM, welcome to what's going to be another great episode of Devantel. So, if you didn't know, Devantel is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase their product. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome David Johnston, who's a web 3 OG and a open- source contributor and maintainer on uh Morpheus AI. So, if you didn't know, Morpheus is the first peer-to-peer network for general purpose AI powered by the Moore token. So, if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see David speak about his illustrious tenure as a pioneer in the web 3 space, give us an overview of Morpheus, and discuss the future of decentralized AI. All right, let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsor. Today's episode of
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[Music] GMGM, welcome, David, to the show. Uh, really ecstatic to have you on, man. Awesome. Glad to be here. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Uh, so I' I've read a little bit uh about your background. Uh, you have quite the uh illustrious um uh history in in web 3. Um, so uh really excited to get into that and have the audience kind of learn about that. And uh obviously you being a maintainer on the Morpheus uh AI uh repo um talking about that and decentralized AI um especially in today today's climate um is going to be really awesome um but uh before we get into all those goodies um
did you want to just give a brief introduction about yourself? Sure. Hey everybody, David Johnston. Um been in crypto since 2012. Was a early Bitcoin nerd. Um, and you know, that sort of put me down the rabbit hole and started speaking with the different conferences about how to build startups in the Bitcoin ecosystem, even back at the first Bitcoin conference in May of 2013 in San Jose that the foundation put on. Um and that sort of just led to this series of events where I ended up writing uh in the space. Most people know me for creating the framework for decentralized applications or DAPs. And uh you know I sort of just tried to say hey let's take that same ethos that made
Bitcoin great and apply it to other projects open source peer-to-peer based on blockchains and has its own token. And I said if you have those important ingredients you're really a decentralized application. And so yeah, um that terminology caught on. I was funny. I saw it in the intro for the arbitram. I was like, "Build DAPs." I was like, you know, I always got a smile when I see that still the same way I spelled it with the small D and the big A uh for DAPs. And uh yeah, I don't know. People started to send me white pipers. Ethereum adopted that language when they launched as a platform for smart contracts and DAPs. Um, and that sort of put me in a position to help with each layer of the ecosystem as I helped with the first layer twos and you
know I helped with sort of every evolution as it got to DeFi and data storage and all these other things. So yeah, it's been an amazing journey. But interestingly enough, I actually worked in AI before crypto back in 2011 uh when we called it natural language processing and machine learning. Like there were no transformers yet. there were no LLMs. Um, but I realized I was too early in that particular trend and decided to focus full-time in crypto uh in 2012. So, yeah, that's sort of been my journey is just trying to help, you know, Bitcoin with Ethereum with each project uh that launched based on this technology because sort of at my heart is I'm a freedom maximalist, right? And
I want humanity to have the maximum amount of freedom because that's what correlates to prosperity and happiness and life expectancy and all these outcomes that we want, right? And so, you know, just thinking back, you know, as I look to each protocol, it's like what's the next tool we need in order to increase human freedom? That's what I want to work on, right? And in 2012, that was Bitcoin, you know, and in 2014 that was Ethereum. And now uh today it's with Morpheus because I think what AI is really going to give us is this user interface and this beautiful easy way to access crypto for the average person. So anyway, that's what I'm all about. I'm
hanging out in Switzerland today. Just finished with or Switzerland, I'm just hanging out in Singapore uh today. Just finished up the SuperAI conference was a blast here. The community held a decentralized AI day in Koala Lumpur right across the border. and I just got back from Forest City from network school with the network state stuff uh speaking there about Morpheus. So anyway, yeah, it's been a a crazy week, but I'm glad to be here. Amazing. Amazing. And yeah, I I mean uh like obviously it seems you're you're you're a pioner not only in the web 3 space but also the AI um AI space as well. Um mentioning you're you're a bit early early to that space, but now it's kind of become mainstream. So uh it's funny how how that works out. um for some
people where they just build something that's really cool or or really um groundbreaking but it's just not the time for people to adopt it and then it kind of comes back around. But uh yeah, it's just it's just the way it's just the way tech works. Uh innovation I guess in general% 100%. Uh I guess uh there's a couple of things I want to unpack, but since you uh mentioned the um the conference, um do you want to mention any highlights that kind of um came to your forefront? Uh anything that we you're particularly excited about? Well, the really cool thing is there were so many Morpheus community members uh there at the conference. Uh saw and got to catch up
with a lot of friends. Uh big credit to some of the other uh code maintainers uh Renee and Eric who put together an entire decentralized AI focused event at one of the top universities basically like the MIT of Malaysia um just focused on teaching people about you know what's happening with this whole trend how now you can have a personal AI that means for you right now that you can own your own AI you know so yeah I mean I always get so encouraged ed and reinvigorated by these conferences because you get to meet the people in person and there's something like 300 code contributors to Morphia spread over the entire world and half of them are anonymous. I don't even
know who they are but if I look at the IP addresses a lot of people are in Asia, a lot of people are in Europe um I live in Austin so there's a contingent in in North America but you know there's no there's still no substitute to meeting people in person right and hanging out and understand what they're building. So there's over a hundred projects now building on Morpheus. You get to meet all those developers in person and see what they're creating and what's coming up next. So yeah, no, it's been a really cool event. And then just super AI in general. I would say the mainstream has woken up to AI, but also now agents, right? You saw our friends at Nevermind there. There was a crew from BitTensor. There was a folks from
Manifest. a lot of the crypto um and web 3 projects that are involved in AI were very well represented like right next to Google right next to all the major sort of traditional web two players you saw all the web 3 uh players have a huge presence there so the industries have really merged right there's no gap anymore like crypto is bringing GPUs and compute and capital and that's merging with okay great AI technology uh that can empower the individual. So, yeah.
No, it was a cool event. Yeah. Yeah, it certainly sounds like it. It sucks. I missed out. Maybe maybe I'll catch it next year. Uh but yeah, uh exactly like what you said, like just getting to meet people in real life, connect with them, see the people that like you see do uh pushing out pull requests every couple of weeks, like, oh, there's a name to a name to or a face to a username now. Um but uh yeah I so certainly seems that uh there is uh like you say um like a lot of mainstream attention now and over the last year year and a half maybe two years um we've also seen um the web 3 side really trying to come together and
get a piece of the action um particularly I' I've noticed um agents uh AI agents uh this year whether they're autonomously trading crypto. Uh launching a meme memecoin as we saw earlier this year. Um just curious to get your your thoughts um since you're quite um tenured in both both verticals. Just like how do you see these two coming together and and what do you think um has worked up to this point and maybe uh still needs work uh to kind of get it over the line?
I think uh Ilia from Near said it best. Um AI is going to be user interface and blockchain is going to be the back end. And I think that sums up really well. You know, if you think back to the early days of the internet, people were very dismissive. They're like, "Ah, the internet will never catch on. It's just for engineers. I don't know how to type in IP addresses, right?" Um, but as soon as there was a beautiful user interface, right, Google landed and they're like, "Hey, just type in what you want. The machine understands it. It'll find all the websites for you." Great. That was a website and a user experience that could scale to a billion users, right? And
that's what we saw, right? The internet went from a niche to something very mainstream overnight in the late 90s, early 2000s, right? And I think we're at that same moment again for crypto, right? There about five, six00 million people using crypto, right? Um, it's becoming mainstream, right? But it's still missing that user interface. It's still considered hard to use. Nobody understands smart contracts and nodes and how do I do this without losing my money. And so now to have a technology where I can just say to my agent, go send money to Bob. And I never had to, you know, understand how it worked under the hood, right? It comes back to me,
oh, is this how much you want to send? Is this the right Bob? You know, push this button on MetaMask and the money gets sent, right? But then you open up all these kind of opportunities because the user might know DeFi exists, but they don't know how to navigate it. They don't know which contracts are safe, you know, they don't they don't want to lose their money. All of a sudden, if they have a trusted personal agent that knows all the smart contracts in the world and can say, "Yeah, you want to use a you want to use compound, you want to use unis swap, and here just tell me what you want to do. I'll do it for you." And that's what's at the heart of the idea of Morpheus. When I read the the white paper, I thought the idea of connecting web 3 wallets to an AI was brilliant
because it lets the individual, if you hold the private key, now my AI can take action for me. It can send money for me. It's not just giving me information. It's actually doing useful work on my behalf. And that's what I would say the shift is. You know, people have been they've gotten used to now that they've got a large language model and they can tell them any information in the world. But agents open up action right now can do stuff for me. That's really I think the transformative thing and the core question is who does the AI work for?
Is it a company or a government or does it work for you as an individual? Right? I really want AI that is is a fiduciary to me. it has my best interests as its top priority. And the only way we're going to get that is if the root credential, if the if the web three wallet key is owned by the person and not by some custodian or third party. Like Google's not in the business of, you know, making your life better. They're in the business of selling ads, right? And they will happily mine this new trove of data that you give them in order to manipulate your behavior and get you to buy certain things. and all the rest of this. So, I think the way we
get really good outcomes is if the individual's at the heart. Yeah, I I I totally agree. And uh this is actually a a great segue. Um I wanted to ask you around um kind of what your motivation was um around creating the um decentralized app um paper and kind of like if there's a story of some centralized service or something kind of like irking you the wrong way leading you to to go this direction introduce that to to the world. Uh that's a great question. Um I would say the inspiration was Bitcoin. You know what made Bitcoin successful? Because people forget there
were a bunch of predecessors to Bitcoin, ecash, e-old, the Lynen dollar, and every single one of them got shut down, censored or restricted because they were a private company. You know, they could knock on the door of Winden Lab in California and say, you know, do you know what people are doing with your currency? you know, you can't have casinos and stock markets and all these things and you have to censor all of this activity. And so all of a sudden, you know, to have an uncensorable version, right, that just worked, you know, regardless of what the government thought about it, you know, when I saw Bitcoin in 2012, I was like, "Oh, it's
an unstoppable Lynen dollar. It's open source. There is no company. This is brilliant." Right? I know exactly what people are going to do do with this because I I had been in Second Life. I had experienced these systems all the way back in 2006. I'd seen their potential, but I also saw them got censored. I also saw them get restricted, right? And and it was a shame to see, you know, like sort of all the lost opportunity um that could have been in those systems even back in 2006, but they didn't have the right structure. And so the structure and architecture was key. If you started with a company, you were forever anchored to the state.
If you started with open source, if you started with a blockchain, you could be free to serve anybody in the world. Right? That was the brilliance of Bitcoin. It was is Satoshi's innovation is he let the software for the first time pay for its own hardware because you had token emissions. It could truly be an independent network, right? As long as there was some guy cutting a check for the server every month, like it's his network, right? But the idea of giving the software its own way to pay for hardware was that was brilliant, right? And I said, "Okay, how do we do that for everything?" But because I didn't buy the the story that there would only be one coin, right? There
would only be one chain. Oh, there can only be one of these. Like, no. I I don't see that anywhere else in technology. technology and network effects specialize, right? Bitcoin's amazing for digital gold and Ethereum is amazing for smart contracts and Morpheus is trying to build a network effect now around smart agents, but these are different network effects and we need to bootstrap and pay for the incentives of whatever behavior makes that network possible. So in the case of Bitcoin, it has hash power, right? But Ethereum needed validators to, you know, go through transactions that were using EVM and Morpheus needs, you know, rewards for builders and LLM providers. Like
they're each different use cases. And so being a free market guy, I was like, that's great. We'll have a free market develop, but we need a model. We need a standard by which to say if you're these four things, you're a real decentralized application. So that was really the inspiration. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. I didn't know it was that deep. Uh but yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. Uh I guess the did those same thoughts and feelings you had around um blockchains kind of um translate their way to this decentralized AI that you're focusing on now. And I guess um you mentioned earlier point of these centralized
services or or whatnot, they can get shut down. they're tied down to a state. Um, basically today's market we're um we're very much tied down to centralized AI like two or three big players and then it's like um the very small little piece of like open- source models and people running their own AI uh infra and the decentralized AI networks. So I guess um like what would you say is like a one of the top selling points of decentralized AI before we get into what Morpheus is like over centralized AI.
So first of all you know I sort of like to break the myth that these centralized companies have all the resources. Um, Ethereum before it switched to proof of stake was using proof of work with GPUs and the amount of GPUs that were mining Ethereum is actually 50 times more than created chat GPT4. Like the scale of compute in crypto is un unparalleled. there's there's no there's no parallel comparison uh to the amount of compute in crypto either for the Bitcoin network or for these other GPU networks and so you know that idea is important to break like they don't
have a monopoly on the GPUs we do as a community as a global open source movement have far more compute than any one company will ever have right because there's all these underutilized resources sitting in data centers all over the world right most data centers only about 70% efficient, right? And they're constantly looking for what do I do with these this extra hardware. So, first of all, it's it's important to say that we can be bigger and more effective and more powerful and cheaper than any of these players. And so, a year ago, I was saying, guys, the open source models are going to catch up. And that was considered like a fantasy at the time, like no, you know, OpenAI is so far ahead, there's no way anybody will ever,
you know, get close to their level. I was like, I don't buy that. You know, open source is is is outco competed in all these other areas. And so we saw Llama come out, then you saw Deepseek, you've got, you know, Elon open sourcing Grock on a larger and larger basis. And so now that reality is here, you know, Deepseek and these other models are right on par with the best closed sourced proprietary models that exist today. And so there's no gap, right? It's really neck and neck. Each new model gets released. Now it's the best and this one's the best and llama's the best and DeepC's the best. Like it goes back and forth almost every week. But that's amazing. That's us winning because now the average person, like you
said, can download it themselves, run it on their own hardware, and have instant access to the best intelligence in the world. The challenge is most people don't have a GPU. Most people don't know how to run something locally, right? there's a knowledge gap but also a capital gap. Only about 5% of the people in the world have an you know enough money to run the top top grade equipment. So the solution is a network and that's what the Morpheus paper when when I first read it in September 23 I was like yes if we want this to go beyond hobbyists right because we know this from Bitcoin and Ethereum there's only about 20,000 people in the world that run a full node. Anybody could run a full node. You
have to have the knowledge and the hardware and the motivation and and all of those things. And it's a very small set of sub a very small subset of people. Most people experience Ethereum through MetaMask. Most people experience Bitcoin through a wallet like blockchain.com, right? And that's okay. We can bring that benefit to most people in the world if it works in a light client network type context, right? And so that's what that's what Morpheus set out to do is not just create a local install, but create a network that it was incentivized for those people that did have the hardware to provide that inference to people that didn't. Right?
And so that's what we've seen now is this amazing network grow up. There's over a million people now using decentralized AI thanks to Venice and the many other projects built on Morpheus. Who knew free AI would be a popular idea, right? But you know the models are uncensored. They're unlimited. You own the outputs forever, right? And that's that's really what's come together is now I have Morpheus, which is my personal AI uncensored, unrestricted forever, right? And that's that's the dream that we've been really chasing after. Amazing. And and I guess um for people who haven't used uh Morpheus before, maybe could you give
like a highlight set of of the features is capable of. It sounds like it's capable of uh running inference. Can can it run uh training on data as well? You can use the inference and tokens for anything you want. The Morpheus uh compute router is completely agnostic. You can pick whatever model you want, you know, closed or open source, though most people are running open source models. Uh they're running across decentralized GPUs on networks like Akos, STI, Bit Tensor, like anybody can be a compute provider to Morpheus.
Morpheus's goal is just to then route that compute compute to the person that needs it, right? Um but that's just one aspect like you know that's hash power is to Bitcoin what inference is to Morpheus but but the objective right is not the hash power the objective is not the inference it's to use it for these smart agents it's the power of person's personal AI right that's the actual output that creates all the value and and is is really interesting right uh having the inference is a prerequisite it's a building block to get to bad outcome just like the EVM and Solidity were building blocks for Ethereum to support smart contracts, right? But the
actual value is in the DeFi applications and all of the uh DAPs that people build on Ethereum, right? So, it's very similar for Amorphus, but give you something very tangible. If you're a developer and that's a lot of your audience, you go to open beta.more.org, or there's a free API and you can generate a key with a click of a button and use it and replace anything today you're running OpenAI. It's literally the same schema. It's literally the same format. Just take that curl and and swap it out uh for the Morpheus one and you can get going in in a few seconds uh to switch over your models to open source and distributed models. And because
Morpheus has an incentive mechanism built in, you've got compute providers competing to provide the inference. So the costs are vastly lower on Morpheus. And what's happening in the back end is the subnet that's running the API is just staking the more token. And that's a really brilliant model. instead of paying every day, it's staking the token to open up these sessions with compute providers and providing that to everybody who accesses the API. So, open beta.mmore.org has been live for a few weeks and really easy to use. I I used it the other day and set up a key in less than a minute. Um, so it's cool to see like we're getting to that point.
You don't have to download the node anymore. You don't have to touch the smart contracts. You can just go to a website like that and explore it. So, so for developers, that's probably a good starting point. Um, for people that want to use the inference, there's beautiful apps like Venice.ai. Um, there's a native uh Morpheus chat app coming out now that's built on top of uh the API. People are building all these different light clients, right? Because there is no one Morpheus. There's no foundation or DAO or company. There's no premine. There are no investors. This is an entirely communitybuilt project from the ground up. Right. And so you've got all these people building building different versions of Morpheus that sort of fit
their vision for, oh, I want to use it for inference. Oh, I want to build on it. Oh, I want to use it for capital. There's all these different aspects. But those are the four keys to Morpheus is the compute, the capital, the coding tools, and the builders are really the four audiences that it's focused on. Amazing. Yeah, that that sounds awesome. And yeah, we will link to the open beta um URL that you mentioned, David, in the description below so folks can go play around with it. Uh sounds like it's fresh off the presses a couple weeks. Um so yeah, definitely folks will want to play around with that. And I suppose um like that you mentioned the more token.
So it sounds like it's a utility token um used to in incentivize the network. Um, do people who want to utilize the network uh need more token to to pay for jobs or um how how does the how does a token work? Um, that's how it works in the back end. A lot of that complexity has been abstracted now that you have folks like uh the subnetss running the API. They're doing that on behalf of users. So most users are just going to show up with a credit card and want to pay for something. If they're doing like inference at scale or if it's a fairly small scale, they can just use the API for free. You know, there's there's a lot of compute available on the Morpheus
network. Um, and because of that competition because people are incentivized to provide the compute, you know, we're seeing an increase of more and more uh flowing onto the network. So, you know, yeah, you can get started and off and running for zero cost, right? And at scale you'll end up either directly or indirectly having more tokens stake to the network so that you can access more and more of the infrit. But I really like that model because think about you get rid of all the gas fees. You get rid of all the small transactions paying you know per prompt or anything. all that goes away, right?
You're just effectively having a one-time cost, you know, and you can have access to that intelligence for as long as you want, right? Which is really powerful and goes back to the idea of a personal AI. I want to own more tokens because I want to own my AI forever, right? How do I persistently store the outputs? There's an IPFS integration built directly into the Morpheus node. So now I can store pointers to where all of my data is, right? So it's not just the intelligence, it's the memories, it's the outputs, it's the knowledge that I'm building with my AI. I can take that with me anywhere I take my private key. I've got the ability to effectively
reinstantiate my AI with all of its connections, integrations, data, and the rest. So, I think that's going to be really powerful for the for the same reason you have a a smartphone. You probably don't use some company phone that they gave you as your primary phone because you want to be able to take your stuff with you when you leave that job and you go to the next one. You want to keep your contacts and your memories and your photos and your apps and and all the rest, right? And so, that is taken for granted as basic table stakes globally that everybody has an individual phone. Then we're gonna get to that same output here for everybody having an individual AI.
Yeah. And that that's really powerful, like a a really powerful statement like um it might not be it might not hit home right away when you hear it the first time, but like when you experience it, it's like wow. U yeah. And it sounds like Morpheus is quite uh quite uh ways um in development. Is it still in uh beta? Is it testnet? is in mainet. Um it's mainet in the sense that the smart contracts are on Ethereum base arbitum. Um you could say there are different pieces of it like the API that are are in beta or still emerging. I would say the the super agent is still in that in that beta category. The super
agent is your personal agent that detects intent, understands what you want to accomplish, and then interacts with other agents on your behalf. Right? You're not going to end up talking to a hundred agents every day. You can have one agent that you've effectively sort of trained with your preferences, your goals. You've connected it to your data and your wallet, and then it can go and interact with tons of other thirdparty agents on your behalf representing you. So there's a great website in the community free.xyz that's one of the implementations of the Morpheus uh super agent. So but yeah the capital aspects are very mature at this point. Uh the smart contracts launched
in February of 24 and it processed over $3 billion in staked Ethereum that people then provided the yield to the project. And I think that fair launch mechanism is such a brilliant innovation. It's actually one of the things that first got me excited when I read the Morpheus white paper. It's like, oh, it's an ICO without the risk because I hold my own capital. I'm just staking it towards this project and I have the same number of ETH I started with. I never gave up custody of my funds. I'm only contributing the yield. It's like I wasn't staking anyway. I I might as well stake it towards a cool open source project that I want to support. And so
that fair launch mechanism has been adopted by a bunch of projects. If you know Arweave, their AO platform adopted the Morphe smart contracts and they did over a billion dollars of staked Ethereum. Um, Nounspace and other groups have all adopted this this fair launch mechanism. So, you know, it's sort of really cool rebirth of those 2017 days minus the centralization all in smart contracts with no custodian. Now I can support any project they want. So the capital aspects are fairly mature and the community has extended that now you can stake the more token not just ETH towards any project you want to support.
So if you go to builders.mmore.org you can see over a hundred projects that people have built and it's like yeah I want to stake my my more towards that. And it's the same model. I'm only directing the yield. I keep custody of my my more tokens and I can unstake them whenever I want and redirect them to another project, right? And so I think protecting users and avoiding rugs is critical for the industry to scale beyond where it was in 2017 to like where it can really serve the mainstream. Um so the capital aspects are $3 billion a lot of capital. Um, and now the capital contracts, this is one thing I'm working on right now, are expanding from stake Ethereum and and
Morpheus has been using Lido, right, to do that. Um, to an integration with a so you'll be able to stake WBTC if you want to hold Bitcoin as your long-term exposure. Now, you'll be able to donate that yield to the project. You want to hold stable coins? Cool. Stake stable coins and on a and contribute that yield to Morpheus, right? So, it's really going to open up, right? Not just Ethereum bulls, but people that want to hold Bitcoin, people that want to hold stables or other exposures will also be able to contribute to the Morpheus uh capital contract. So, that's already been coded up, community tested. It's going through audits right now. Uh so,
I'd expect that in in the fairly near future. But yeah, that that that part is really caught on and I'm glad because, you know, I think that fair launch mechanism is is really important and gives people again an alternative. You didn't need a company. You didn't need a Dow. You didn't need an entity. You didn't need a committee or a bureaucracy or a bunch of votes. You just put it all in the smart contracts. Yeah. Yeah. And you you answered one of my questions I had for you around uh what's on the road map. Uh it seems like there's uh some fun stuff coming up. Uh I is there uh um would you say that after those pieces are done that would
uh that kind of completes the Morpheus vision or is there more uh is there more yet to come? Like I guess what's Morpheus's um endgame uh so to speak? So uh if you go to the getbook so getbook.org.org board. There's a lot of great documentation of the smart contracts but also of like the road map of Morpheus and the phases or eras have been very similar and and almost you know sort of mirror the ones for Ethereum right you know when the white paper came out that was the the genesis era right and then you had the launch of the com uh the capital contracts that was the the frontier era right and then
all of a sudden you know you can do all the compute aspects when that launched last November. That was uh the Homestead era, right? And now we've we've progressed to Metropolis where uh you're able to launch a builder and a subnet and a smart agent on on Morpheus. And right now we're in the Serenity area where it's expanding to other chains, right? Not just Ethereum and base and arbitrage. It's been coded up for Salana will probably be one of the next chains that it spreads to. And you diversify the capital types, right? Morpheus is supposed to be for everybody. It's chain agnostic. It's yield agnostic. You know, I have opinions about chains, but my opinions shouldn't dictate what other
people decide, right? You know, and so I love that Morpheus is a neutral platform for all the chains, for all the builders, you know, um across types. And so we're in that serenity era right now and sort of delivering now the pieces that the the community envisioned, you know, three to six months ago. Um, but the next era, maybe not the last, but the next era is called Zion. And the concept of the Zion era is that super agent, that personal AI that is working on your behalf, doing these recurring jobs based on what you tell it to do. Like, you could say that's the payoff for all these previous eras. You had to have the
compute first. You had to have the capital. You had to have the coding tools. They all had to exist before you could have a super agent that acts on behalf of a person, right? And that accesses a bunch of other agents on your behalf. So, you know, that's really exciting to me. Uh the community is still sort of thinking about and writing the documentation around what's included in that Zion era, but that may go from now till, you know, the end of the year, right? So, so the next six months, they're not really time bound. It's much more like what's included in this next era and phase that everybody wants to see, right? And so that's sort of what's coming next. And and for me is the
exciting payoff because I get I go back again to like what does it mean to have a personal AI? What what does it mean for that to really be, you know, involved in every application that I'm connected to or connected to my wallet? you know, is that an NFT that does that association? Is it connected to uh my private key, my my wallet address directly, right? The community is figuring out a lot of those architectural questions and there's a lot of proposals and standards out there that people have put out like what does it mean to have a personal AI? But we have all the building blocks now and so it's a matter of putting it together and the community will come up with a
reference implementation and then anybody else is free to build it. however they want, right? Um there's no concept of a core implementation. There's no sort of uh consensus mechanism. You know, Morpheus is not a blockchain. We don't have to force everybody into a lowest common denominator. It's a set of smart contracts, right? And so it's very modular. If you just want to use Morpheus to, you know, grab some compute for a lava model, go for it. If you just want to launch a a subnet and use it as a way for capital formation, you know, to coordinate your community, go for it, right? But a lot of us are driving towards this vision of a super AI, of a personal AI, right? And taking all these
building blocks in order to achieve that. Awesome. Awesome. And yeah, uh I'm really looking forward to seeing Morpheus continue to to expand. Um, it sounds like it's a very capable and amazing product now. So, um, if you're a developer or AI enthusiast, I definitely recommend you checking it out using the resources we have um, in the description below. Uh, but, uh, with that uh, uh, we've unfortunately come to time. David, I felt like we could probably go another hour talking uh, decentralized AI and and agents and whatnot. Uh may maybe a point of discussion for another time, but uh I just want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to
come chat with us. Um and uh yeah, this is amazing. Absolutely great discussion. Good to hang out. All right. Well, uh with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Thursday, Friday, uh weekend, wherever you may be. Uh and that we'll catch you back here for another great episode of Devontail next week. Till then, have a good one. Cheers.