The 3rd Annual Summit on Decentralization and AI 2025, hosted by Berkeley RDI, brings together researchers, innovators, thought leaders, and builders to showcase and discuss responsible innovation at the intersection of decentralization and AI for a greater future for humanity.

The Summit explores how AI/ML and decentralization technology can mutually enhance each other, and how to build a full decentralized, open source stack for AI/ML, including: 1) decentralized ML infrastructure, such as decentralized training, inference, provenance, and integrity guarantees, 2) open source data, model, and tooling, 3) personalized AI with privacy and trustworthiness, and 4) democratic and decentralized processes for AI governance and alignment.

This Summit creates a unique opportunity for researchers from diverse backgrounds including AI/ML, Security & Privacy, game theory, economics, decentralization technology, to get together and cross pollinate to help seed the meaningful discussions in this important space and make advancement in responsible AI with decentralization.

Date:   Sunday, August 3, 2025

Venue:   Pauley Ballroom, MLK Jr Building, UC Berkeley

* Note that for access, registration approval is required for security purposes, and space is limited.

🟢 Watch Summit Recordings

Main Stage

Morning Afternoon

Workshops

Live Stream

Program Schedule

Main Stage
Workshops
Session 1: AI and DeAI
9:30 AM
Sean Ren
CEO, Sahara AI; Associate Professor, USC
The Convergence of AI & Web3
Ben Fielding
Co-Founder, Gensyn
The Personal Superintelligence Revolution Will Be Decentralized
Michael Heinrich
Co-Founder/CEO, 0G Labs
Why Verifiability Should Take Centerstage in AI
10:25 AM
Break
10:45 AM
Welcome Remarks
11:00 AM
VC Panel
Avichal Garg
Co-Founder/GP, Electric Capital
Haseeb Qureshi
Managing Partner, Dragonfly
Franklin Bi
General Partner, Pantera Capital
11:30 AM
Jan Liphardt
Founder/CEO, OpenMind
Blockchains are for Machines
Dawn Song
Professor, UC Berkeley; Co-Director, Berkeley RDI
Towards Building an Open, Responsible AI Economy
12:10 PM
Lunch
Session 2: DeAI Stacks
1:00 PM
Hart Montgomery
CTO, Linux Foundation
Decentralized Technology, AI, and Open Source
Gordon Liao
Chief Economist and Head of Research, Circle
Onchain Agents and Boundaries of the Firm
Daniel Shorr
Applied Researcher, Tools for Humanity, supporting World Network
Verifiable AI for the Human Network
Victor Fang
CEO, Anchain
Agentic AML: AI Agents for Fighting Financial Crime in the Genius‑Act Era
Session 3: DeAI Infrastructure
2:00 PM
Bowen Wang
CEO, NEAR One
Decentralized Confidential Machine Learning
Sreeram Kannan
Founder, Eigenlayer
Build Unstoppable Verifiable Agents
Howard Wu
Founder/CEO, Aleo & Provable
The Privacy Spectrum
2:45 PM
Break
Session 4: DeAI Focus Talks
3:05 PM
Ron Bodkin
Founder/CEO, TheoriqAI
Agentic Economies Are Here: Coordination > Control
Eric Yang
Founder, Gradient Network
Alex Fowler
Chief Strategy Officer, Nexus
Enabling Verifiable AI
Abner Jia
Co-Founder/CEO, Polyhedra
ZKPyTorch: A Hierarchical Optimized Compiler for Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning
Marco De Rossi
Director of Product/AI Lead, MetaMask
I Want AIs to Be Like Bartenders
Xinyuan Sun
Research, Flashbots
Agency Engineering
Aniket Kate
CRO, Supra Research; Associate Professor, Purdue University
Threshold AI Oracles for Blockchains
Siiri Ruuhela
Co-Director, Frontier Technologies Lab, University of Cambridge
We Have Scaled Compute but not for Autonomous Agents.
Joshua Tan
Co-Founder, Metagov
DeAI for Countries
Sam Herring
Researcher in Residence, Nous Research
Steering the Shoggoth: Taming LLMs with Sequential Monte Carlo
Jari Kolehmainen
Research Engineer, Gensyn
Scaling Challenges in Decentralized Training
Radhakrishna Dasari
Technical Education Lead, Web3 Foundation
Polkadot: Powering Decentralized AI and Authenticity
4:45 PM
Startup Spotlight & Lightning Talks
5:30 PM
Networking & Reception
11:00 AM
AI Agent Takeover by Sahara AI
Jesse Guild
Product Lead, Sahara AI
12:00 PM
Lunch
1:00 PM
Why Blockchain is Not Created for Humans by OpenMind
Jan Liphardt
Founder and CEO, OpenMind
2:00 PM
Break
3:00 PM
AI-dentify Yourself: Proving Humanity in an Increasingly Agentic World by Aleo/Provable
Pranav Gaddamadugu
VP of Product Development, Provable


Featured Speakers


Previous Summits have demonstrated remarkable engagement, with the 2024 NYC event drawing over 500 in-person attendees, and the 2023 Summit at UC Berkeley attracting over 1,000 in-person attendees. Both Summits have attracted many thousands of livestream viewers. With momentum building in this critical space, we expect 2025 to be a banner year for decentralization and AI!

Sponsorship: If you are interested in sponsoring this year's edition, please find more information here along with the sponsorship interest form and details.

General Information: Please visit the SBC'25 Berkeley RDI page for more details on the Science of Blockchain 2025 and other affiliated workshops.

Sponsors: Funding for SBC’25 conference and DeAI'25 Summit is provided by -

More details on schedule, speakers and sponsors will be announced in early July. Follow Berkeley RDI on Twitter/X and join the RDI mailing list for all news/announcements related to this Summit. For other requests, please feel free to reach out to the Berkeley RDI team at rdi_events@berkeley.edu, and we will get back to you soon.



The Summit is hosted by Berkeley RDI, a multi-disciplinary campus-wide center, focusing on advancing the science and technology of decentralization and decentralized intelligence, to make it universally accessible and empower a responsible digital economy.

Follow Berkeley RDI on X/Twitter for announcements and join our mailing list for all RDI news!

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