Billionaire Barry Silbert Says This Is the Next Big Investment Theme for Crypto Assets

Crypto investor and billionaire Barry Silbert says there’s one digital asset play that he thinks will be the “next big investment theme” for the asset class.

In a new interview with Raoul Pal on the Real Vision YouTube channel, Silbert says that he’s created a new venture called Yuma, which exclusively focuses on Bittensor ( TAO ), a decentralized blockchain-based network built for a global, collaborative marketplace for artificial intelligence (AI).

Says the Digital Currency Group (DCG) CEO,

“I started looking across the whole decentralized AI space and started digging in on Bittensor, and I very quickly came to the conclusion that from a theme or era perspective, this was the next big era for crypto. You had the Bitcoin and the Ethereum and the NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and you had the layer 2s and DeFi (decentralized finance)…

I think this is the next big investment theme for crypto, and there are a number of projects that have launched. We’ve backed a number of them, but the one that over the past year or year and a half that has reached escape velocity is Bittensor, and so I decided last year, we’re going to do with Bittensor – try to do with Bittensor what we did with Bitcoin.

We’re going to invest in it, we’re going to build on it, we’re going to help educate, create awareness, create access. We launched a new business in the fall of last year call Yuma, that I’m putting my jersey back on, and I’m the CEO of Yuma – I’m still running DCG – but I’m back in the game and I’m now building this busines Yuma that’s focusing exclusively on this thing Bittensor.”

Bittensor’s ecosystem includes “subnets,” which are like independent segments dedicated to a certain AI task or service. Silbert says Yuma has focused on developing an “accelerator” to easily build new subnets on Bitensor.

He also says one of his investment goals is finding the “Coinbase,” “Bitgo,” or “Chainalysis” of the Bittensor ecosystem.