EdenBase Insights: The Swiss Edition
January finds members of EdenBase making their way to Switzerland. Skiing, you might wonder? While always appealing, our annual journey has a different purpose. We dedicate two weeks to attending distinctly different events; first the private CfC Conference in St. Moritz, followed by the bustling and engaging Davos week with over 900 wide-ranging panels and events. And of course this year, following the crowd, the main focus across both weeks was on current AI and its impact on just about everything.
St. Mortiz
Eric Van der Kleij at the CfC Conference
Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to Chair CfC St. Moritz and interview very interesting speakers, from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss to the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. This year was no exception. During the conference I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Blania, CEO of Tools for Humanity, creators of the much debated Worldcoin project, Co-Founded by Sam Altman.
High-Level Takeaways:
Regulation for cryptocurrencies is here and inevitable.
Wholesale CBDC’s may be coming, however, the impact on personal freedom may be far from positive.
Tokenisation of real world assets is gradually moving forwards, with new tools emerging to help manage the supply chain and ecosystems around these assets.
Proof of humanity is a hot topic in a world powered by AI and frontier technologies.
The final day culminated in the annual EdenBase roundtable, this one on the “..convergence of AI and Blockchain powering the next decade of growth.” The session was co-hosted with Bill Tai (Chairperson, ACTAI Global) and had great contributions and lively discussions from David Johnson (Mor.org, Decentralist), Erik Voorhees (Founder, ShapeShift) and Illia Polosukhin (Co-Founder, NEAR Protocol). This session also featured the book “Unsupervised” co-authored by EdenBase Partner Daniel Doll-Steinberg, with foreword by Bill Tai.
Davos
Daniel Doll-Steinberg in Davos
Running parallel to the World Economic Forum are the Davos Fringe Events, where organisations host gatherings for their respective communities and WEF participants.
Having been selected as a Bloomberg Book of the Year, and with AI as a main Davos theme, there was widespread interest in the messages in my book, 'Unsupervised'. I was asked to deliver keynotes and be included in fireside chats and panels to inspire and drive forward the conversation on technology and innovation. This included my interview with Dan Abrams at the Web3 Hub (hosted by CV Labs), my closing keynote at The Hub, for Caspar Labs and the Financial Times, and my fireside chat with Carolina Casas Forga and the inspirational Bill Tai at the Family Funds Investor Summit.
The Davos Fringe Events focussed on the transformative potential of AI and additional frontier technologies, emphasising their role in driving change and providing opportunities worldwide. However this year's WEF Theme 'Rebuilding Trust', highlighted that rather than merely talk about trust, corporations and leaders really need to act on it. We are rebuilding the foundational layers of the world with AI and frontier technologies and we need to embed trust in this, an aspect many of our actions do not do.
Despite challenges such as political polarisation and susceptibility to interference in elections, Davos Fringe had a prevailing optimism and a can-do attitude towards leveraging frontier technologies for a positive outcome. Something EdenBase was created to support. It was also evident in Davos, that the UK is well positioned as a stable and promising place for this technological transformation and investment.