Unchained

The Chopping Block: Erik Voorhees on AI Privacy, Agentic Payments, and Crypto x Memecoin Mayhem

14 snips
Mar 12, 2026
Guest
Erik Voorhees
Erik Voorhees, founder of Venice.ai and long-time Bitcoin pioneer, talks about bringing privacy-first and uncensored AI to life. He discusses agentic payments and whether bots will become primary payers. Conversation covers provable privacy techniques, memecoin-driven chaos on AI social platforms, and the rise of agent societies reshaping DeFi and software work.
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INSIGHT

Venice Built For Privacy And Free Speech

  • Erik Voorhees launched Venice to bring privacy and free speech to AI, opposing centralized prompt storage and censorship by big labs.
  • He framed it as user sovereignty: Venice avoids storing prompts/responses and offers uncensored model options like GLM 4.6 for sensitive use cases.
ADVICE

Use TEEs To Prove Private AI Claims

  • Prove privacy with cryptography and TEEs rather than relying on audits or reputation to gain user trust.
  • Venice will add trusted execution environments and end-to-end encryption to make privacy verifiable, despite performance trade-offs.
INSIGHT

Hybrid Model Routing Balances Privacy And Capability

  • Venice mixes open source local models (full control) with frontier proprietary models (better performance but retained by vendors).
  • When routing to Anthropic/OpenAI via Venice, the model may store prompts but won't be tied to the user's identity.
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