I’ve been in the cryptocurrency and decentralized blockchain governance space for over 11 years now. I’ve seen thousands of projects come and go and many different models for “decentralization” (which is always on a spectrum and never fully realized). My work building decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and tools for others to build them starting in 2018 eventually led me to be a bit discouraged. Example after example of decentralization essentially not working well enough to protect what the community values. The lack of hierarchy and centralized control consistently led to less than optimal outcomes as people figured out how to game the rules to extract as much wealth from the treasury as possible without creating value. I’ve seen community disruptions that no CEO-driven company would ever allow as people would just get fired.
FIO, the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, is one of the few examples where things are running well and funds are efficiently being used to develop real value to the industry through usability solutions, now integrated into over 70 products and services. Even there, we’ve had our share of team challenges that in some cases took many months to sort out.
It’s easy to think, “Does this decentralization stuff even work? Are there enough humans who actually want to work in decentralized environments and can they come together to build useful things?” As you may know, I’ve been taking a break for almost two years now from fulll-time work to spend time with my family and enjoy Puerto Rico. I’ve had many opportunities to increase my consulting work or get involved in other projects, and it’s mostly been easy to say no.
I’ve certainly promoted and got excited about things like Bitcoin Libre, which I still think is one of the easiest to use and best onboarding experiences for a new crypto user. Their work with ordinals, search, and decentralized exchange of bitcoin inscriptions and tokens seems really valuable to me, like a Google search for web3.
And then there is my passion for AI. It may destroy us, it may lead us to utopia, it may be the future evoluton of our species, or some other outcome we can’t possibly imagine pre-singularity. When my friend Dave Johnston started talking about the idea of decentralizing AI development, having the chat interface experience be the new crypto user experience (something I’ve been passionate about improving for over a decade), and do it all in a truly decentralized manner without a company, a founding team, or even a traditional DAO, I was deeply intrigued. I spent a Saturday a while back with some people discussing the white paper and imagining what might be possible.
I was tempted to get more involved and contribute. Instead, I followed from afar and checked in now and again to see how things were coming along and gauge the commununity interest level. When one of my acquaintances and blockchain decentralization heroes, Erik Voorhees, got involved, I definitely noticed.
And now we’re on day four of the $MOR token fair launch with staking rewards for over $116M worth of ETH from 1600+ contributors going to support the project. But first, what is Morpheus AI?
From a recent community member’s medium post:
“Morpheus AI was developed as a libertarian response to the problems posed by centralized AI. The artificial intelligence industry has become dominated by large centralized companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. These companies run closed-sourced LLMs, monetize user data, and gate-keeps the general public with expensive membership fees. Artificial intelligence monopolized under a few large corporations will not only stifle innovation but also pose a great risk of AI technology being misused at the cost of the general public.”
Many people forget that large centralized companies had big plans for how their proprietary hardware and software would run the Internet. They all lost to open source tools like Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It’s quite possible the open source, decentralized community will do it again with AI development, this time with a focus on decentralized financial tools that properly reward those who create the value we all enjoy, something earlier open source efforts didn’t get quite right.
I’ll leave links below so you can go do your own research and understand how this fair launch works and how you can stake some ETH on Lido to get stETH which you can then stake to the Morpheus AI contract to earn $MOR tokens or how you can participate directly in the community. It’s an exciting time for AI and blockchain development, and you can be part of the beginnings of something big, if you want to get involved. For now, I’m contributing capital to earn $MOR. We’ll see what happens in the future, but so far I’m really excited with what I’ve seen develop within the Morpheus community.
This post mentions https://fio.net/ and https://www.libre.org/, which you should definitely check out and use, but the main focus is on https://www.morpheusai.org/
Here’s the medium article I mentioned: https://medium.com/@Suyu0x/morpheus-ai-the-first-peer-to-peer-network-of-personalized-smart-agents-8a4ed63868f4
Here’s a real time dashboard of capital contribution: https://dune.com/potato6969/morpheus-fair-launch
Info on the fair launch: https://mor.org/fair-launch
And the contribution page: https://morpheus.206.189.243.3.sslip.io/capital
Everything else you can find by joining the discord server and browsing the channels there such as the resources channel.
Hmm, looks really interesting to me. I might just reallocate some funds to take part.