The worlds of TradFi and web3 have inched a little closer with the news that Mario Caraghi of SingularityNET Foundation has been added to the board of Intellistake Technologies. More than just a corporate appointment, the move looks poised to help accelerate the convergence of TradFi, AI, and web3. Mario Caraghi, of course, has deep experience of all three domains, particularly given his dual roles with SingularityNET and as CEO of Singularity Venture Hub, the web3 and AI-focused digital assets firm with $90M AUM.
Intellistake specializes in digital currencies and decentralized AI and is listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, where its stock trades under the ISTK ticker. The company provides traditional investors with exposure to artificial intelligence and blockchain technology using traditional stock exchange mechanisms. It aims to give accredited investors access to AI-centered digital assets, whose total market capitalization has surpassed $27B and is growing fast.
Mario Goes Full Circle
In being appointed to the board of Intellistake as an advisor, Mario Casiraghi’s career has effectively gone full circle. He started out in investment banking before entering the digital asset industry to become CFO of SingularityNET Foundation in 2020 and co-founding SingularityDAO Labs, where he led a $6 million Series A round and helped scale the DeFi protocol to a TVL of over $200M.
Explaining the rationale behind the appointment, Intellistake CEO Jason Dussault said: “Mario’s unique combination of traditional finance background and deep understanding of digital asset ecosystems makes him a great addition to our Advisory Board. His experience executing billion-dollar transactions in both traditional and digital markets provides invaluable perspective as we build infrastructure bridging AI and blockchain technology.”
Mario, for his part, professes to have been impressed with Intellistake’s vision and execution. It’s one that he believes aligns closely with the blockchain projects he leads that are operating at the frontlines of the DeFi and AI sectors. His role as CEO of Singularity Venture Hub, which provides capital allocation and regulatory structuring to fast-scaling AI and blockchain companies, makes him ideally suited to advise Intellistake on its pathway into the market.
Tokenizing AI
A number of web3 projects have made significant progress in providing distributed access to AI resources such as GPU compute, powered by data storage and computation tokens that meter access. These assets support a two-sided marketplace between AI startups that require computational resources and hardware owners. Expected to become a trillion-dollar market by 2030, these DePINs are poised to democratize access to AI innovation by giving developers access to affordable and scalable computational workloads.
The growth of AI-adjacent web3 infrastructure has attracted strong interest from professional investors who recognize the upside to an emerging sector that could play an outsized role in artificial intelligence development. TradFi investors that position themselves accordingly will be well-placed to capture the upside to further expansion of tokenized AI assets. Investors are attracted to the leading projects within this onchain vertical due to their strong fundamentals that are tied to real revenue. As a result, it’s possible to model projected cashflows as web3 makes in-roads into the global AI economy.
