How Blockchain can tackle a bunch of challenges that AI will unleash

We all know by now that AI will bring a bunch of new challenges to our world, besides the overwhelming positive potential it has. This does not mean that there won’t be any solutions for these challenges. Even better, today I am going to explain that a bunch of these solutions are already here thanks to blockchain technology.

You might think “ah here goes Funs again with his crypto stuff” and honestly I don’t blame you. I have said it many times before in this newsletter, bad news and negativity travels much further, much faster than anything good does. Trump launching a crazy meme coin, the president of Argentina getting pulled into a memecoin scam (and therefore scandal) of his own, you maybe even heard about the one and only “hawk tuah girl” pulling of a scam with her “own coin”, a bunch of bs, it’s horrible. It is also probably all mainstream media wants to talk about when it comes to blockchain. So no, I don’t blame your negativity but I also won’t stop advocating for the positive opposite side of it. Every technology is a double-edged sword and every technology will be misused to do harm, unfortunately that is the nature of humanity.

Today I want to combine the above though and show you how blockchain technology can help us battle the AI challenges that we are going to face. I’ll dive into multiple solutions and discuss how it works, without getting to technical.

Proof of Humanity
AI is becoming extremely good in mimicking human behavior. Now it might be just text and it is easy to recognize as long as it stays within OpenAI’s website for example. But what if AI’s start talking to you on WhatsApp, with a phone number. They type like a human, they sound like a human when they share voicenotes, they look like a human when they send pictures or videos of themselves and yes even when you get on the phone they sound and feel real. This will be possible, I am sure of it.

So, the big question becomes: How will we know who—or what—we're dealing with?

This is where the Proof of Humanity idea can help. Think of it as a cryptographic way to verify that you're an actual, living, breathing human—without handing over your entire digital identity or passport. Because I bet we don’t want to give anyone, and any company, are full passport every time we want to communicate. Right?

How this could potentially work:

• You complete a one-time verification step for your personal wallet, on the blockchain. This might involve a quick face scan, government-issued ID check, or something similarly secure. Only you can control this wallet as it is decentralized, meaning nobody can access, change or control it.

• Once you have done this, your wallet will contain some sort of badge, or verification, showing that this wallet is linked to an actual human.

Having this wallet now gives you super powers. It can unlock a wide variety of use cases you can utilize it for. For example:

• Social Media Verification: Making sure that you won’t be fooled by AI Agents who pretend to be human and potentially have a certain agenda of influence. It will also drastically battle fake celebrity accounts etc.

• Secure Online Voting: Ensuring one vote per real human, bringing trust and legitimacy to digital elections. Drastically increasing efficiency of voting and making it possible for more people to vote without being limited to people who can reach a voting station for example.

• Transparent Government Benefits: Governments can reliably distribute financial support or benefits directly to verified citizens, eliminating fraud and increasing efficiency.

• Online Dating Safety: Providing confidence that users are interacting with verified, genuine people.

• Authentic Reviews and Comments: Platforms could easily filter out fake reviews and comments, significantly improving content trustworthiness.

Again, keep in mind that all the platforms, websites or apps you share your verification with do NOT get your passport. Zero-Knowledge Proofs technology prevents that, making it not needed to. In simple terms, ZKProof technology allows you to prove that something is true without revealing the underlying details. For instance, it lets you verify you're over 18 without sharing your exact birthdate. This makes it possible to securely prove your identity without compromising your personal data.

People have already called for regulation that would make it mandatory for AI systems to disclose that they are AI when interacting with humans. We can either choose to “trust” that everyone will build that in voluntarily or we eliminate the need for trust altogether and create our own verification layer as humans.

Proof of Content Authenticity
We don’t have to look into the future for this one because the challenge is already here. Accelerate what is happening now and we are going to a world where 90% of what we see online is generated (these are Nvidia CEO Jensen’s words by the way). I do think it is very healthy for everyone, at the moment, to change their own thinking on content they see when scrolling. If there is something you bump into that is shocking, extremely beautiful or otherwise, don’t assume any longer that it is real. I do this personally, I stop and give pictures and videos a couple extra looks before forwarding it to anyone. In the most extreme cases, such as (geo)political stuff, celebrities and other, I do make the effort to go to the original source/video to find out for myself.

These fake images and videos can have major, real world, consequences. See below for an image that went viral, although completely fake.

The result of it was that the stock market took a brief hit, in a panic. Although the panic was short lived, you can imagine the potential damage something fake can have on our very real world.

Two years ago I already posted about the potential harm of deepfake ads (and that blockchain can be a solution). It was because the below fake video of Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman went viral where they promote certain supplements, again completely fake.

This will only get worse and in a world where people get more and more polarized it is more important than ever to fight this. How? Blockchain. Let me explain.

The goal is to know if the thing you are looking at comes from the original source (in the Joe Rogan case, if it comes from his official account and was part of an original video) and is unedited. How blockchain can make this happen is as followed:

• When someone creates a piece of content—an image, a video, a news article, etc. they publish a proof of origin onto a blockchain.

• This might include when and where it was made, who made it, and a cryptographic hash (a unique digital fingerprint) of the original file.

• Anyone viewing that content later could instantly check its authenticity, even if it’s been shared thousands of times.

This would massively help creators like Joe Rogan and others, who have real (almost scary) power and influence to make sure their influence is not misused by anyone. In the case of the Pentagon explosion example, Canon has already tested something that would directly work inside their camera.

• Canon, Reuters, and Starling Lab built a camera system that digitally signs images as they’re captured.

• Each signature is instantly recorded on a public blockchain, creating a transparent, tamper-proof authenticity record.

• Any edits or changes to the image are transparently logged, preventing hidden manipulation.

• Proven effective in Ukraine, ensuring visual trust even in challenging conditions.

We’ve spent the last two decades building tools to create and share anything instantly. Now we need tools that help us trust what we’re seeing. Blockchain can give us exactly that: a decentralized way to verify the truth behind the pixels.

Data Ownership & Monetization
We are used to the following saying by now: if the service is free, you are the product. You don’t pay a monthly fee for your Facebook, TikTok or Instagram account, so how do they make money? They sell/use your data to make a profit.

And then there were the large AI models.. who have been trained on all the content that lives on the public internet. Scandals broke out of video creators whose content has been used by video models. The Times sued OpenAI for training on their data and more.

As regular consumers we rarely have had control over our own data, although it is definitely ours. There is a world where we could potentially take back that control and, therefore, make it also possible to share more data with the companies we want and for how long. How this could potentially work? See below:

• Your personal data, your digital footprint, your medical records, your financial history, whatever, is securely stored in your own blockchain-based wallet.

• Instead of companies freely mining your data, they must request your permission. And if they want your data for training AI models or targeting ads, they pay you directly.

• You choose exactly what to share, with whom, and under what terms. This means you could also revoke access to your data when the brand/company does something you don’t like.

Brands have to start working for your data. Whenever I said that during one of my presentations at brands they all looked at me very strange haha! You, as a company, need to give me a great reason (and a sense of safety) to share my data with you. It flips the model around, putting power back into the hand of the individual instead of the massive cooperations.

AI Agent commerce
As you know, I strongly believe AI Agents will radically shift everything we know and will become a massive help for everyone. But in order to unlock the full potential of these agents they have to, eventually, be able to have access to some of our personal funds. We want agents that can actually buy the thing we want and have it delivered, instead of asking to put in our credit card information or pay with our bank account manually.

The challenge: do you think an AI Agent can get a bank account or that banks will allow access to them? Probably not haha! I also don’t foresee a future where your agent will have access to everything you own all the time by the way, definitely does not sound like a very smart thing to do but ok haha! Well you guessed it, they need blockchains:

• Agents can independently execute payments, subscriptions, and transactions. Blockchain wallets allow them to autonomously trade assets, purchase services, and engage in peer-to-peer exchanges securely and transparently.

• Every single transaction an AI agent performs is recorded on-chain, creating an immutable trail. This ensures transparency and helps easily audit an AI agent’s behavior, decisions, and financial dealings. Preventing manipulation, fraud, or unintended harm.

• Smart contracts set boundaries and they actively enforce rules. This means AI agents can’t stray from their coded responsibilities, greatly reducing risks related to misuse or unethical behavior.

• Agents can handle microtransactions instantly and cheaply, allowing entirely new business models—like pay-per-task or pay-per-insight—where AI agents offer hyper-specific, on-demand services at scale.

All together, I don’t see a world where AI Agents will get to their full potential without blockchain. Even better, I think its safer if it all happens onchain so we can both limit and track what they do.

Decentralized AI
Saving possibly the most important one for last and that goes back to a question we have discussed many times before. Should the power of AI be controlled by the few, or shared with the many? It’s hard but I do think the thought of a few people having to power to decide what goes into these models, what the models can and cannot say is not a healthy one. Below a few ways how blockchain can help prevent this:

• Decentralized Compute: Blockchain-based networks distribute computing tasks across countless devices, breaking dependency on big centralized servers. This enables broader, community-driven AI training.

• Open Training Sets: Blockchain can host transparent datasets, accessible to everyone, ensuring AI training data isn't locked behind corporate walls.

• Tokenized Incentives: People contributing compute power, data, or expertise can earn blockchain tokens, motivating wider participation and collaboration.

• Immutable Transparency: Every change to AI models is recorded transparently on-chain, allowing anyone to audit and verify model fairness and integrity.

• Community Governance: Decisions about AI ethics, use-cases, and developments can be collectively governed by decentralized communities—not just corporate interests.

Let me end by saying; blockchain is not perfect (yet) but I do hope you see the enormous value this technology can bring to only AI. Not even talking about how it could make our financial system so much more honest, and sooooo much more efficient.

More than happy to spar about it with anyone who is interested. I remain a believer. I strongly, strongly, believe the world is a better (and more honest) place if we enable blockchain tech for the use cases where it makes obvious sense.

I really hope I am right ❤️ 

4o Image Generation by OpenAI is, VERY, impressive.

It only released yesterday and damn it’s very, very good so I thought I would give some extra attention to it. Up until this point Dall-E, the image model that was integrated in ChatGPT was pretty shit. This feels like a major upgrade with some very interesting use cases it can handle.

One of the biggest advances is in text, it seems like someone finally cracked the generation of good and accurate text in images. See the following example:

The accuracy is very impressive!

Generating full posters, billboards, flyers, whatever you want for your product and it looks incredible.

I mean, can we actually generate ANYTHING now? Look at this wikipedia page that doesn’t exist? 😅 

Here are a few more marketing examples to show how impressive it is, not only photorealism but also adding actual brand products.

This one is beautiful too:

Another very easy one, anyone with a fashion brand or trying to start something can easily get high level photography done for their products. A reader of the newsletter shared this picture with me.

To all my advertising friends, what are your thoughts on this? I am confused, I don’t see the future very clearly so would love to hear your thoughts/ideas/impressions. I mean look at this:

Last week we talked about vibe coding, is this the beginning of vibe marketing? Just anything you can think of you can just easily generate and put it out immediately?

I know we have said it 100 times already but damn the speed of progress is just incredible. It will be interesting to see what the internet will cook up with this model in the next few days, have fun!!

Here are some of the latest announcements and other things that I found interesting this week (underscore means clickable!):

• Not only OpenAI, also Google keeps kicking ass. They just launched their most powerful model yet: Gemini 2.5 Pro and yes, more vibe coding!! For more examples of their capabilities click here.

  

• Cute idea for anyone thanks to the new OpenAI image model 😉

• A personal AI tip: I started using GPT as partner when reading a book. It is very nice to discuss things you read, want to understand better or spar about, immediately while reading. If its fiction, tell GPT to not spoil it and tell it at which page you are before you ask your question. For business books, it is interesting to discuss concepts, how to potentially implement it etc. Really enjoy it!

• We talked about the NBA being run as a business before and it shows once again as they are going to vote soon for a plan to expand the NBA to Europe. For more details click (here).

• To be honest, not much else this week as the whole internet is about 4o Image Generation at the moment. Go have some fun and share your thoughts!

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

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