At a time when countless cryptography projects awkwardly swivel artificial intelligence, Eric Winer spent more than a decade building bridges between advanced technology and everyday users. Now, as CTO near the AI, he pursues a vision where AI agents negotiate, communicate and see in our name – a vision that could fundamentally reshape the way we interact with the digital world.
Winer speaks with the measured enthusiasm of someone who has been several times at the start of technological revolutions. After joining the Winklevoss twins as the first gemini engineer in 2013 and helped launch one of the first NFT markets before the term “NFT” became common currency, he now confronts what could be his most ambitious challenge: creating a decentralized ecosystem of AI agents who preserves the sovereign of soverigne in the increasingly publicized future.
Eric Winer is a speaker with 2025 consensus. This interview was condensed and slightly published for more clarity.
Coindesk: You have been in crypto for more than a decade now. How did this trip led you to focus on AI?
Eric Winer: I have been in the world of cryptography for 11 years now. Eleven years ago, I met the Winklevoss twins by mutual knowledge. They hired me as the first engineer at Gemini, who was the first Bitcoin exchange regulated in America at the time. Our CEO mission was to take this fantastic blockchain technology (really just bitcoin at the time) and to apply adult engineering around it so that it can actually be adopted by institutions, governments and people at high speed.
In 2013-2014, Coinbase was there, but it was a kind of Rinky-Dink Silicon Valley startup at a time before there was really a fintech culture even in California. It was therefore not particularly well constructed. We were building Gemini in New York with people who knew how money worked and tried to build not only for cryptography lovers, but for the masses.
I have always tried to get blockchain technology on the adoption barrier to reach a place where people would use it, perhaps under the hood, to make the world more effective and give people more sovereignty, even if they do not know.
Coindesk: And that led you to NFT before most people even heard the term, right?
Eric Winer: Within Gemini, we acquired a company called Nifty Gateway, which was essentially the third NFT startup after Opensea and Cryptokitties. We launched what was the first NFT market targeting “standards” in March 2020. It ended up increasing by around 1000% of months in months for a few months, going from the sale of NFT dollars to sell a hundred million dollars in NFT in one day.
This has exposed many people to the world of collectibles and online art, in the middle of the pandemic. From there, they died by the Bug NFT then by the bug of cryptography, bringing them to the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
Personally, I think that NFTS’s promise was unfortunately co -opted by the cryptographic crowd and speculation. Nifty Gateway has never used the term “NFT” on her website or in her documents when it was launched. We fought against this even becoming what he called. NFT is just one thing, but online. We sold art, sell tickets. Having to assign a technical nickname and put this to the public, I think, was in fact counterproductive at the end of the day.
Coindesk: Many crypto projects seem awkwardly rotating towards AI without clear vision. What makes the approach close to different AI?
Eric Winer: Near the AI is a fascinating company because the founders of Narch began by building an AI company. They started as an AI company, trying to train models to write code to 2017-2018. It was a bit early for this to be effective at the time.
AG has always been the vision here. Near the AI is less a “crypto x ai” company than an AI company which is aligned with the vision with the same goal close. The vision of N Quart is that users have their own data, have their own decision -making, cannot be liable to the interests of businesses, financial or government, and to be able to decide where their money is going and how their decisions are taken.
Whether it was done via a blockchain or made via an AI model, you must have both. If we do not have an AI effort belonging to the user, then we will lose the game because everyone will start using Chatgpt for everyone in their world, and all that Chatgpt uses for payments is what you use for payments. Then the blockchain loses because you have not won the Battle of AI – not the battle of the Crypto X, but the real Battle of AI.
Near AI has interactions with block channels, including, because we think that near and other blockchains are a good way to do things. But we are mainly an AI company that considers crypto as a technology; We are not a crypto company trying to push in AI.
Coindesk: What exactly is offered near AI as a platform right now?
Eric Winer: Near the AI as there is at the moment is mainly an agent accommodation platform. It is actually one of the simplest ways to operate an online AI agent. You download a fairly simple Python code or a type code, and boom, it is hosted online with a user interface, integrated in any website.
It can be supported by all open weight models, although overall, we delegate the real model operation to other suppliers such as fireworks and anthropes that exist. The special sauce of our framework is that it allows these AI agents to easily speak to other AI agents, whether on our platform or our OFF.
The other thing that is not yet live, but which will be at the time when the consensus takes place is that we are strongly invested in tees (trusted execution environments). We believe that it is very important that you know where your data is going, that it is not harvested by these training models, that even we, the operators of a cloud system, are unable to watch your data, to analyze or steal it if we wanted. We therefore put all these agents and all the underlying models in these confidence execution environments so that you can use them with confidence.
Coindesk: Your vision seems to focus on AI agents communicating with each other. What does this future look like?
Eric Winer: What we are trying to build in near AI is an ecosystem of AI agents who speak to each other. “AI Agent” is a very overloaded term at this stage. Most of the time, when you see something talking about itself as IA agent, it is really a set of guidelines and tools for an AI model to act in your name. Like: “I have Llama or Claude or GPT models, and I will ask to publish on Twitter on my behalf.” To do this, he needs the possibility of accessing Twitter and some general guidelines on how to read and publish tweets.
But that’s not how I necessarily think of the agents. I think of agents mainly with regard to the way they interact with the rest of the world on your behalf. My agent of IA publishes on Twitter, managing my calendar, looking at all my messages and my emails, deciding which spam, to which to answer, which seems to me – just like an assistant in my life should be.
The future that we are considering, which, I think, will inevitably occur, is a world where most of our access to the Internet and to the rest of the world is publicized by our AI personal assistants.
Coindesk: It is a remarkably different vision of most cryptography projects. How to reshape our financial systems?
Eric Winer: If it is my AI agent who speaks, let’s say, Amazon’s IA agent, and they will buy something and negotiate, he is more likely to rationally choose a method of payment based on cryptography and probably a method of settlement of disputes based on AI and a credit based on AI. We reshape the financial system not by building better and trying to convince people to use it, but by building better and trying to convince AIS to use it easier for AI and for people who exploit them.
I think it is the adoption game of crypto now: we are building a world of AIS speaking in Ais on your behalf, then we convince the AIS that blockchain and decentralization are a better world for them and for us than the one we have.
Coindesk: So, in your opinion, AI could actually be the catalyst that stimulates the adoption of the blockchain, rather than the reverse?
Eric Winer: I think that in the future, and probably not too far in the future, you will see this vision that everyone seems to want – the great application, the only place where you go where everything you do online becomes really an AI assistant. This gives you a flow of content, it acts on your behalf, it spends money on your behalf.
And it’s not just doing it alone. It is not only to strike APIs and browse websites – is to talk to other AI agents. This also manages your interpersonal, personal to business or person with government communications. This must be a decentralized ecosystem, just as the Internet is to a certain extent a decentralized system, but we can perhaps do a better and more registers based on blockchain.
