The recording of my talk from @bankless Summit is up!
This unconventional talk dives into the WHY of crypto, something we unf don't think about enough anymore.
I hope this is helpful context for folks who are new to the space, and a galvanizing reminder for the veterans. 🏴
LIVE NOW -- Why Are We Here? Exploring the Core of Crypto-Anarchism | Arjun Bhuptani
@arjunbhuptani gives one of the best non-technical talks at the Bankless Summit. Everyone in crypto needs to hear it.
Arjun explains the first principle concept of Crypto-Anarchism & outlined a compelling argument for its role in addressing today’s societal challenges.
Few more facts:
- 8GW of ML-eligible Mac machines in the world
- Idle for 12+ hours day
- 8GW is equivalent to 16GW+ due to Apple's energy efficient architecture
- No cost of land, maintenance, new hardware acquistion cost. Only electricity cost.
- Darkbloom currently has 21.1 kW, 120kW currently offline in the network.
- There is currently 8GW of active data centers, to be grown by 30%-50% every year -- if logistics don't take time.
If we want to avoid power concentration with data centers, censorship with people: Darkbloom(.)dev is the way to go!
darkbloom is your best shot against a feudalistic world where few hyperscalers and model creators decide what access you should have.
our sole objective with darkbloom, distributed autoresearch and others eigen labs initiatives is to preserve and accelerate individual agency.
at all costs.
Monday: Darkbloom goes live on OpenRouter.
Every OpenRouter user gets a free trial of private inference, powered by idle Macs around the world.
And for providers -- next week we're launching an Alpha Rewards Program: earn up to $40 guaranteed just for running a node. Limited time while we're in alpha. Breakdown in the replies.
The network is ready for it. Since our Public Alpha two weeks ago: Gemma 4 is now multimodal, SSD caching has made time-to-first-token much faster, and load tests show we can sustain millions of tokens per second -- with more upgrades landing before launch.
If you run a node: turn it on. Demand arrives Monday.
If you have a Mac: darkbloom(.)dev → one install command and you're earning.
The world's sleeping compute is waking up.
Happy Mythos/Fable day!
It's been a little over a year since I posted the quoted tweet.
IMO we're still on this trajectory (though I do agree now that physical and service jobs may take longer to disappear).
> T minus 18-24 months until hard takeoff.
And, if Fable is teaching us anything today:
> Even if you have resources, frontier intelligence wont be fully available to you.
Intelligence, knowledge, and agency need to remain democratized. There is no bigger problem out there to solve.
It is likely that we only have ~3 years remaining where 95% of human labor is actually valuable (i.e. earns you money)
Most people haven't realized this yet.
It is also likely that this will be the end of our current iteration of labor-based capitalism.
dropped this last friday night, but still fresh enough for monday -- let me know what you think!
another frame: commodity scale outcomes but governed as an internet utility
Darkbloom just completed a major network upgrade!
BIG UPDATE: We’re moving from Research Preview to Public Alpha.
In the last month:
- 1000s of provider signups, 250 live providers at peak
- 600M+ tokens served
With this upgrade, performance is up 30–200% across key metrics like TTFT, TPS, and total tokens served.
The goal is simple: private, low-cost inference, powered by idle Macs.
We’re starting with Gemma 4 and GPT-OSS, then slowly ramping up to larger models as we load test and scale over the next 2 weeks.
Providers: go to darkbloom [dot] dev, scroll to down, and run the install command.
Thank you to everyone who has been running nodes, giving feedback, and helping us build this network.
Waking up the world’s sleeping compute!
We've made the difficult decision to wind down @EverclearOrg.
@LayneHaber@RHLSTHRM and I started Connext (later Everclear) in 2017 to help solve the painful UX holding Ethereum back from mainstream adoption.
Over the last 9 years, our team:
- Shipped the first production L2 (using state channels) in 2018.
- Contributed to the creation of the @MolochDAO, catalyzing renewed interest in DAOs.
- Pioneered the first intent-based bridge in 2020.
- Created the Chain Abstraction vision and demonstrated it's potential for staking/restaking protocols.
- Pushed forward ERC-7281 as a neutral, open standard for bridged tokens.
- Brought clearance to DeFi.
- Processed over $6B in network volume.
Throughout that time, we've also done our best to stay true to our principles and the crypto ethos; pushing for a higher bar of transparency and trust-minimization for ourselves and the space at large.
Even though this isn't the ending we ultimately wanted, I am *incredibly* proud of what our team has accomplished and grateful to those who have supported us all of these years ❤️
Longer post-mortem coming soon.
In the meantime, if you are a team that is hiring: we have a team of 10x operators who have executed ruthlessly through some of the harshest market conditions on shoestring budgets. Reach out!