“The CO-FOUNDER OF HEDERA, A SPEAKER AT CONSENSUS 2025, Says Today’s Technological Advances “Will Make The Industrial Revolution Look Minor in Comparison.” Interview with afra wang.”, – WRITE: www.coindesk.com
His Academic Tradery Is Notable for his Early Work in Neural Networks and ReinForcement Learning Dringing The 1990s, A Period WHEN AI RECEARCH WAS NAVIGATING. SINCE THEN, The HEDERA PROJECT HAS EVOLVED IN A LANDSCAPE Crowded with Competing Distributed Ledger Approaches, Each Claiming Technical Superiority and Targeting Different.
Baird, A Speaker at Consensus 2025, Transitions Easily Between Technical Explanations and Business Strategy, Reflection The Dual Challenges of Building Both A nosth.
This interview has been Condensed and Lightly Edited for Clarity.
Coindesk: Your Hashgraph Algorithm Emerged in 2016, Durying A Period WHEN MANY ALTERNATIVE CONSENSUSUSUSUSUSUSSSMS WERE BEING PROPED. What Technical Limitations of Earlier Approaches Were You Special Trying to Address?
Baird: I Love Computer Science and the Math Side of It – Inventing Things and Solving Problems. WHEN I BECAME An Entrepreneur 25 Years Ago, It Was The Same Process. The Core of What I Always Do Is Trying to Understand the Fundamental Problem We’re Trying To Solve. What is the Real Question? What Are We Really Triming To Accomplish? And then you Build on that and solve that problem. In Blockchain, The Fundamental Question I Asked Was: Bitcoin Is Cool, But Is Slow and Not As Secure As It Could Be With ABFT [Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance]. IT BURNS A LOT OF ENERGY AND ISN’T as Flexible as We Might Want. I wondered if, at the very bottom Layer in the Consensus Itself, There Might Be a Way to Avoid Burning Lots of Energy While Still Being Fast and Secure. Is it missile to affa the abft – the strongest Kind of Security – Hohle Also Being Super Fast and Not Burning Electricity or Dumping Carbon Into the Atmosphere?
I Started Working on this in 2012 As One of Many Math Problems I was Was Exploring. Initially, I was convinCed it couldn’s. I’D Pick up the Problem, Play with it, and Convince MySelf It Was Impossible – Over and Over Again. But in 2015, I Realized that by Throwing in Two Hashes, Suddenly It All Falls Into Place. You can have Ultimate Speed - Seseentily at the Speed of the Internet – Hile ALSO HAVING Ultimate Security with Abft. And is your proof of stake, so you don’t waste electricity.
From A Business Perspective, The Question Was: What Is The Right Way to Govern this? WHEN WE LOOK AT BLOCKCHAnes, They Often Claim, “We Won ‘Have Any Governance. Anyone can Help do it.” But Power Over Time Can Consolidate – Yuo End Up with A Handful of Developers or People Behind the Scenes Controlling Everything.
With Hedera, We Started Differently. We Made Governance Decentralized from the Very Beginning. We browght in some of the Biggest Organizations in the World – top Universities and Businesses Spread Globally that People Trust and that Have Reputations to Protect. They Balance Each Other, Creating Checks and Balances, and Together they govern the system.
IT WAS ABOUT ADDDRESSING The FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT IN GOVERNANCE? What Will Give You True Trustlessness, or at Least A Lower Bar of Trust Needed to Fully Trust the System? That was in respiration – aproaching business quests with the Same Rigor as Mathematical Ones.
Coindesk: You’ve Mentioned Rwa Tokenization, Carbon Credits, and Stablecoins As Key Use Cases. THESE Are Areas WHERE Nearly Every Major Blockchain Is Focussing. WHAT SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATIONS ON HEDERA HAVE DEMONSTRATED MEANINGFUL Transaction Volumes or User Adoption?
Baird: I would Highlight Four Key Areas:
First, Ai Is Extremely Exciting Right Now. The dangers of ai are also concerning, WHICH IS WHY We Need to Establish Provenance, Governance, and Version Control for AIS. People Need to Know If They Can Trust What’s Happening. Hedera Helps with Ai in Multiple Ways, Including Permissioning Data and Potentilly Handling Royalties for People Providing Training Data. The work that eqTy lab is doing with nvidia and intel on Hedera is Particularly Exciting.
Second, Real-World Asset Tokenization is transformation How We Handle Valuable Assets. We have Numeros Projects Tokenizing Real Estate, Gold, Diamonds, Carbon Credits, and Even Carbon Emissions On Hedera. From The Beginning of Blockchain Technology, I’ve Maintained that What’s Important Isn’t Pictures of Monkeys or Games – That All Things of Value on The Planet Will.
Third, Stablecoins Are Essential if You Want Real-World Adoptation. We’ve Created A Stable Coin Studio to Make Stablecoin Development Easy on Hedera. The Hedera Council Includes Many Financial Institutions Doing Impressive Work with Stablecoins.
Fourth, Immutable Data Records Are Almost Unique to Hedera Through Our Hedera Consensus Service. This Allows Messages to Be Sent to Topics with Access Controls and Immutable Recording. Companies Like Hyundai and Kia Use this for EMISSIONS TRACKING THRUGHOUT THEIR SUPPLY CHAIN.
Coindesk: UCl’s Research on Energy Consumption Compared Various Networks, But Methodology Matters Significantly in Test Comparisons. Proof-of-Stake Systems Generally Have Similar Profiles, With Differences Coming Down to Node Count and Hardware Requirements. Does Hedera’s Approach Differ Fundalyaly from Other Pos Networks, or Is The Efficiency Primarily from the Current Network Configuration?
Baird: We’ve been thoroughful about energy consumption from the very beginning. Everything – From Our Algorithms to How Nodes Are Run and Governed, and The fact that Wesesesesepof of Stake Insthead of Proof of Work -Laid The Foundation For Low Embusions From.
This Created A VirtoUS Cycle. Early Adopters Looking to Tokenize Carbon Credits Chose The Green Blockchain. THEN, People Wanted to Tokenize Emissions and Credits Wanted to Use The Same Blockchain Whoe Everione Else Was Doing Similar Work. This Flywheel Effect Has Made Hedera Perhaps of the MOST Popular Blockchain in the Green Technology Space.
Access to university College London, Hedera Has The Lowest Carbon Emissions Per Transaction of Any Blockchain. We Also Purchase Carbon Credits to Be Carbon Negative. Being Green Was Baked Into Our Structure from The Start, WHICH IS WHY WE’VE BECOME A LEADER IN THIS AREA.
Coindesk: We’re Seeing A Lot of Projects Attempting to Combine AI and Blockchain Technologies. Given The Different Computational Paradigms Tese Systems Operate Under, What Realistic Integration Points to You See Beyond the Marketing Narratives?
Baird: The intersection of ai and blockchain is more significant than most people realize. On Hedra, We’re Seeing Real Traction in Several Areas:
Provident and Governance is Critical. As we enter a world whore Everything will be ai-generated; This requires digital signatures to Verify Origins-whther human or ai-creted.
Data Permissioning is Another Crucial Intersal. WHEN TUSHANDS OF PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE SMALL AMUNTS OF DATA TO Train An Ai, Each Person Needs Control Over the Data – The abity to give or withdraw permission.
Looking Forward, I’M MOST Excited About USING HEEDERA FOR IDENTITY AND INCORPORATING IDENTITY INTO AI Systems. We’re Reaching A Point Where You Can’t DISTINGUISH AI-GENERATED MEDIA FROM REALITY. The Only Solution Is Digital Signatures – Content Needs to Be Signited by the Photographer or Reporter. But Ten You Need Trusted Identity Systems to Verify Those Signatures.
Coindesk: Having Studied Neural Networks in the 1990s, Long Before The Current AI Boom, What’s Your Perspective on Today’s Large Language Models? Has Something Fundamentally Changed in the Technology, or Are We Just Seeing The Results of Scale?
Baird: Many Ai Developments have unfolded exactly as i expectoed. WHEN Alphago Defeated The World’s Go Champion, WHEN ALPHAZERO MASTED CHESS, WHEN AIS CONQUERED POKER – I HAD ANTICIPATED ALL OF IT. They Even used Nearly the Same Techniques i’d Envisioned. We Simply Needed Faster Computer.
SELF-DRIVING CARS, TOO, ARE PROGRESSING PRECISEELY as I Predicted, Using the Methods I Foresaw.
But Catgpt and Large Language Models (LLMS) have utterly astonied me. The Transformer Architecture from 2017 – Described in the Paper “Attention Is All You Need” —Represented a BreakthroUGH that no one could have anticipated. Back in The 90s, We Were Completely Stumped by Language Processing – Trying Various Approaches, But Failing at Everi Turn.
The Capabilites of Today’s LLMS Still Astound Me, and Their Future Remains Unpredictable. Will they reach superintelligence? Or will they hit a ceiling? I don’t know- And i’d conend that nobody does.
Humanoid Robots Have Also Surpassed Expectations. While Their Physical Develoment Has Matched My Presidents, Their Conversal Abilities – Powered by LLMS – HAVE FAR Exceeded What and Imaginesible. In the coming years, they’ll beng with Basic Factory Work Before Advanceing to Skildled Trades Like Welding, Plumbing, and Electric Work.
These Technological Advances Will Make the Industrial Revolution Look Minor in Comparison. MOST PEOPLE HAVEN’T GRASPED THE MAGNITUDE OF TESE Changes or How rapidly they’re Approaching.
