At a time when countless crypto projects are awkwardly turning against artificial intelligence, Eric Winer has used over a decade of building bridges between cutting -edge technology and everyday users. Now, as CTO of near AI, he is pursuing a vision in which AI agents negotiate, communicate and act on our behalf – a vision that could basically reshape how we interact with the digital world.
Winer speaks to the measured enthusiasm of a person who has repeatedly been early in technological revolutions. After joining the Winklevoss twins as Gemini’s first engineer in 2013 and helping launch one of the earliest NFT market places before the term “NFT” became common, he now confronts what could be his most ambitious challenge: creating a decentralized ecosystem of AI agents that retains the user’s supreme.
Eric Winer is a speaker in Consensus 2025. This interview is condensed and easily edited for clarity.
Coindesk: You’ve been in crypto for over a decade now. How did this journey led you to focus on AI?
Eric Winer: I’ve been in the Crypto world for 11 years now. Eleven years ago, I met the Winklevoss twins through mutual acquaintances. They hired me as the first engineer at Gemini, who was the first regulated Bitcoin exchange in America at the time. Our mission from CEO was to take this amazing blockchain technology (really just Bitcoin at the time) and apply some adult technique around it so that it could be effectively adopted by institutions, governments and people broadly.
Back in 2013-2014, Coinbase was around, but it was a kind of Rinky-Dink Silicon Valley startup at a time before there really was much of a fintech culture, even in California. So it wasn’t very built well. We built Gemini in New York City with people who knew how money worked and tried to build not only for cryptography enthusiasts but for the masses.
I’ve always tried to get blockchain technology over the adoption barrier to reach a place where people would use it, perhaps under the hood, to make the world more efficient and give people more sovereignty even if they don’t know.
Coindesk: And that led you to NFTs before most people had even heard the term, right?
Eric Winer: Within Gemini we acquired a company called Nifty Gateway, which was basically the third NFT start after OpenSea and Cryptokities. We launched what was the first NFT market space targeted at “Normies” in March 2020. It ended up growing by approx. 1000% month over month for a few months, going from selling a thousand dollars NFTs to selling a hundred million dollars NFTs in one day.
This exposed many people to the world of collectibles and art online, right in the middle of the pandemic. From there, they became a bit of the nft bug and then of the crypto suction, which brought them into the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
Personally, I think the promise of NFTs was unfortunately cooperated by the amount of crypto and speculation. Nifty Gateway never used the term “NFT” on his site or in its materials when it was launched. We fought against it even called it. NFT is just one thing but online. We sold art and sold tickets. Having to assign a technical moniker and put it in public, I think, was actually counterproductive at the end of the day.
Coindesk: Many crypto projects seem to be awkward to turn towards AI without a clear vision. What does near AIS approach do differently?
Eric Winer: Near AI is a fascinating company because the founders of near actually started building an AI company. They started as an AI company and tried to train models to write code around 2017-2018. It was a little early for it to be effective at the time.
Agi has always been the vision here. Near AI is less a “Crypto X AI” company than it is an AI company that is vision-adapted with the same purpose for near. NEAR’s vision is for users to own their own data, own their own decision -making, not be seen to corporate, financial or state interests and be able to decide where their money is going and how their decisions are made.
Whether done via a blockchain or done via an AI model, you need both. If we do not have a user-owned AI effort in progress, we will lose the game because everyone will start using chatgpt for everything in their world and no matter what Chatgpt uses for payments is what you use for payments. Then Blockchain loses because you didn’t win the AI stroke -not the Crypto X AI stroke, but the real actual AI fight.
Near AI has interactions with blockchains, including near, because we believe that near and other blockchains are a great way to do things. But we are primarily an AI company that sees crypto as a technology; We are not a cryptic business trying to sky in AI.
Coindesk: What exactly offers AI as a platform right now?
Eric Winer: Near AI, as it exists right now, most of it is an agent -hosting platform. It’s actually one of the easiest ways to get an AI agent to run online. You upload some pretty simple Python code or TypeScript code, and Boom, it’s hosted online with a user interface that is integrated on any site.
It can be backed by all open weight models, although we largely delegate the actual model surgery to other providers such as fireworks and anthropic that are out there. The special sauce from our framework is that it makes it easy for these AI agents to talk to other AI agents, whether on our platform or off.
The other thing that is not live yet but will be when consensus rolls around is that we are heavily invested in tees (trusted execution environments). We think it is very important that you know where your data is going, that they are not harvested by these models for training, that even us as operators of a cloud system are unable to look at your data, analyze them or steal them if we wanted to. So we put all these agents and all the underlying models in these trusted execution environments so you can use them with confidence.
Coindesk: Your vision seems to center on AI agents communicating with each other. What does that future look like for you?
Eric Winer: What we are trying to build within AI is an ecosystem of AI agents talking to each other. “AI -Agent” is a very overloaded expression at this time. Most of the time, when you see something that talks about itself as AI agent, it really is a set of guidelines and tools for an AI model to act on your behalf. Like “I have lama or claude or gpt models and I will instruct it to send on Twitter on my behalf.” To do so, it needs the opportunity to access Twitter and some general guidelines on how to read and post tweets.
But that’s not how I necessarily think about agents. I think mostly about agents about how they interact with the rest of the world on your behalf. My AI agent posts on Twitter, manage my calendar, look at all my messages and e emails, decides which ones are spam to answer that you have to surface to me -just as an assistant in my life should be.
The future we see for us that I think will happen inevitably is a world where most of our access to the Internet and to the rest of the world is communicated by our personal AI assistants.
Coindesk: It’s a remarkably different vision from most crypto projects. How does it reshape our financial systems?
Eric Winer: If it is my AI agent who talks to, says Amazon’s AI agent, and they will buy something and negotiate, they are more likely to rationally choose a crypto-based payment method and probably an AI-based dispute resolution method and AI-based credit. We do not reshape the financial system by building a better one and trying to convince people to use it, but by building a better one and trying to convince AIS to use what is easier for AIS and for the people who drive them.
I think it’s Crypto -Adoption Games now: We build a world of AIS talking to AIS on your behalf, and then we convince AIS that blockchain and decentralization are a better world for them and for us than the one we’ve got.
Coindsk: So, in your opinion, AI could actually be the catalyst that drives the blockchain -recording rather than vice versa?
Eric Winer: I think in the future, and probably not too far in the future, you will see the vision that everyone seems to want -the super app, the one place you go, where everything you do online is really becoming an AI assistant. It gives you a content feed, it takes action on your behalf, it spends money on your behalf.
And it’s not just doing it alone. It’s not just hitting APIs and browsing sites – it talks to other AI agents. It also handles your interpersonal, person-to-business or person-to-state communication. It should be a decentralized ecosystem, just as the Internet is to some extent a decentralized system, but maybe we can do a better one on top of blockchain-based registers.
