• Breakthrough announcements by Yuma Group, peaq, Pulsar, Somnia, and Entravel set the tone at Proof of Talk 2025, where visionary discussions, like Silvio Micali’s tokenless Fiat Chain, pushed the boundaries of what’s next for AI and decentralized systems – from infrastructure to finance
• More than 3,000 leaders from policy, finance, and blockchain gather for powerful conversations, key announcements, and groundbreaking initiatives in the heart of Paris

Returning to the historic Louvre Paris, Proof of Talk 2025 delivered its most impactful edition yet, welcoming over 3,000 attendees from across the globe for two days of high-level dialogue, transformative insights, and real-world action across DeAI, DeFi, tokenization, and beyond.

Proof of Talk once again proved itself as the forum where traditional finance, frontier tech, and decentralized builders converge to shape the future of global systems, with Barry Silbert making a highly anticipated return to the public stage after nearly five years away. In a headline-making panel with Mosaic Venture Partners’ David Lawee and former Forbes Senior Reporter Michael del Castillo, Silbert announced that Yuma Group will launch an asset management business focused on alpha token strategies. The initiative marks Silbert’s entry into the rapidly growing Bittensor ecosystem and is designed to give institutional investors streamlined access to high-potential teams and projects building across its subnets, potentially signaling a pivotal moment in Bittensor’s evolution.

Bittensor also took center stage at Proof of Talk 2025, with Co-founder Jacob Steeves delivering a standout keynote, “Satanic to Sublime: Aligning Human Potential Through Open-Ownership Protocols.” The mainstage was packed to the last seat, with attendees standing to hear his powerful vision for decentralized AI and open-ownership systems.

Some other standout announcements include Somnia, detailing how Sparkball, backed by $2M and developed by industry veterans, will leverage Somnia’s Layer 1 network to introduce on-chain wager mechanics and prize tournaments and transform the esports landscape; and Entravel launching EntravelX, the world’s first Telegram-native hotel booking app, tailored for the growing wave of crypto-savvy travelers.

Unveiled live at Day 2 of Proof of Talk 2025, peaq, the Machine Economy computer, and Pulsar Group, a leading Emirati advisory firm in tech and blockchain, also announced the launch of the world’s first Machine Economy Free Zone (MEFZ), set to roll out in Abu Dhabi and Dubai while legendary MIT professor and Algorand founder Silvio Micali took the main stage to unveil a bold new vision for blockchain: the Fiat Chain, a public, decentralized ledger that operates without a native cryptocurrency.

Zohair Dehnadi, Co-Founder and CEO of Proof of Talk, said:

“Proof of Talk 2025 has marked a milestone in bringing together visionary leaders and groundbreaking projects in the blockchain space. With announcements like Somnia’s ecosystem expansion and deep discussions on finance and tokenization, it’s clear that this industry is moving beyond innovation to become a core part of our digital future. We’re excited to keep driving this momentum.”

Over 700 industry-leading Web3 companies were present at Proof of Talk 2025, showcasing their latest innovations and thought leadership across one of the space’s most influential and curated exhibitions. Title sponsors included MEXC Ventures, the investment arm of the global cryptocurrency exchange MEXC, Unit Network, a decentralized financial ecosystem enabling trading of real-world and digital assets through tokenization, Somnia, a pioneer in immersive metaverse infrastructure; CertiK, the premier blockchain security firm; and General Tao and Tao Ventures, builders and investors in decentralized AI infrastructure, both recognised as thought leaders within the Bittensor ecosystem.

Wrapping up an inspiring two days of conversations and innovation, Proof of Talk 2025 culminated with the launch of the Top 50 Women in Web3 & AI initiative, in partnership with CoinDesk and TON Foundation, celebrating leading female innovators in blockchain and AI. The winners were recognised at an exclusive gala dinner, honoring excellence, leadership, and the power of representation in tech. Among them were Daniela Amodei, Co-founder and President of Anthropic; Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology; and Betsabe Botaitis, Chief Financial Officer of Hedera. The launch highlighted the vital need for greater representation and recognition of women in tech’s fastest-growing fields.

With event highlights such as the Investor Dinner and Proof of Pitch Startup Competition and over 140 VCs joining from a16z, Pantera Capital, Arrington, Borderless, Animoca Brands, and Haun Ventures, alongside institutional heavyweights such as BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, this years event made one thing clear: crypto is here to stay.

Following the success of the 2025 edition, Proof of Talk will return in 2026 with an expanded format and a continued commitment to hosting the most influential conversations in Web3 and beyond. For more information on future editions and partnership opportunities, visit: www.proofoftalk.io.

I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for nearly as long as I’ve been covering OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it really been that long?)

I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would become by day job, but, unfortunately, OpenSim never really took off. Instead, I covered cybersecurity and, more recently, generative AI.

But then I saw some reporting about a new studies about AI, and immediately thought — this could really be something in OpenSim.

The study was published this past April in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it showed that a majority of people – 67% to be exact – attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the more people use these AI systems, the more likely they are to see them as conscious entities.

Then, in May, another study showed that 54% of people, after a conversation with ChatGPT, thought it was a real person.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid owners should run out and install a bunch of bots on their grids that pretend to be real people, in order to lure in more users. That would be dumb, expensive, a waste of resources, possibly illegal and definitely unethical.

But if users knew that these bots were powered by AI and understood that they’re not real people, they might still enjoy interacting with them and develop attachments to them — just like we get attached to brands, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, yes, virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.

In the video below, you can see OpenAI’s recent GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one where ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to start at the point in the video where they’re talking to her.

I can see why ScarJo got upset — and why that particular voice is no longer available as an option.

Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t widely available yet. But the text version is — and its the text interface that’s most common in OpenSim anyway.

GPT-4o does cost money. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. A million tokens worth of questions — or 750,000 words — costs $5, and a million token’s worth of response costs $15.

A page of text is roughly 250 words, so a million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you can get a lot of back-and-forth. But there are also cheaper platforms.

Anthropic’s Claude, for example, which has tested better than ChatGPT in some benchmarks, costs a bit less — $3 for a million input tokens, and $15 for a million output tokens.

But there are also free, open-source platforms that you run on your own servers with comparable performance levels. For example, on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a score of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is close behind with 1272, and the (mostly) open source Llama 3 from Meta is not too far distant, with a score of 1207 — and there are several other open source AI platforms at the top of the charts, including Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.

I can easily see an OpenSim hosting provider adding an AI service to their package deals.

Imagine the potential for creating truly immersive experiences in OpenSim and other virtual environments. If users are predisposed to see AI entities as conscious, we could create non-player characters that feel incredibly real and responsive.

This could revolutionize storytelling, education, and social interactions in virtual spaces.

We could have bots that users can form meaningful relationships with, AI-driven characters that can adapt to individual user preferences, and virtual environments that feel alive and dynamic.

And then there’s the potential for interactive storytelling and games, with quests and narratives that are more engaging than ever before, create virtual assistants that feel like true companions, or even build communities that blur the lines between AI and human participants.

For those using OpenSim for work, there are also applications here for business and education, in the form of AI tutors, AI executive assistants, AI sales agents, and more.

However, as much as I’m thrilled by these possibilities, I can’t help but feel a twinge of concern.

As the study authors point out, there are some risks to AIs that feel real.

First, there’s the risk of emotional attachment. If users start to view AI entities as conscious beings, they might form deep, potentially unhealthy bonds with these virtual characters. This could lead to a range of issues, from social isolation in the real world to emotional distress if these AI entities are altered or removed.

We’re already seeing that, with people feeling real distress when their virtual girlfriends are turned off.

Then there’s the question of blurred reality. As the line between AI and human interactions becomes less clear, users might struggle to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I’m not too concerned about this one. We’ve had people complaining that other people couldn’t tell fantasy from reality since the days of Don Quixote. Probably even earlier. There were probably cave people sitting around, saying, “Look at the young people with all their cave paintings. They could be out actually hunting, and instead they sit around the cave looking at the paintings.”

Or even earlier, when language was invented. “Look at those young people, sitting around talking about hunting, instead of going out there into the jungle and catching something.”

When movies were first invented, when people started getting “addicted” to television, or video games… we’ve always had moral panics about new media.

The thing is, those moral panics were also, to some extent, justified. Maybe the pulp novels that the printing press gave us didn’t rot our brains. But Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, that thing that Hitler wrote that I don’t even was aided and abetted by the books they wrote.

So that’s what I’m most worried about — the potential for exploitation. Bad actors could misuse our tendency to anthropomorphize AI, creating deceptive or manipulative experiences that take advantage of users’ emotional connections and lead them to be more tolerant of evil.

But I don’t think that’s something that we, in OpenSim, have to worry about. Our platform doesn’t have the kind of reach it would take to create a new dictator!

I think the worst that would happen is that people might get so engaged that they spend a few dollars more than they planned to spend.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)