CONSENSUS COMES TO TORONTO – AI x Crypto, Reclaiming Canada’s Advantage and More!

This week Consensus is in Toronto! I am going to provide a full run-down next week of all the most interesting news, top projects and key insights from the event.

But in the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of what I’ll be focused on.

I am hosting two separate panels this week. The first, on Thursday, May 15th is about the intersection of AI and blockchain.

To date almost everyone assumes that, like previous technological revolutions, massive companies will provide the technology to create and sustain AI, in particular agentic AI. Throughout modern history, corporations launched, developed, and ultimately captured the markets for energy, electricity, telephony, mobility, computing, the Internet, and social media.

But AI doesn’t necessarily need to be this way! First, AI is becoming democratized quickly. The DeepSeek announcement in February shook the windows and rattled the walls of many big tech companies by proving that you didn’t need vast amounts of compute to do good AI work. And second, the Web3 toolkit offers some solutions to some of the biggest challenges of AI. In the Web2 model, large corporations own and profit from our digital companions and the data they generate. By contrast, Web3 democratizes power so that we all can decide how to use our data, who may use it, and who benefits from its use. If we shift this power, then we may realize a future where AI systems work for us individuals, not only for corporations, and with greater accountability, privacy, and fairness.

In my second session on Friday morning, I will focus on what Canada needs to do to lead again in Web3.

In many respects, blockchains are a made-in-Canada technology, and our country was once the global leader. Ethereum, a blockchain network founded by a mostly Canadian group in 2014 is, today, the largest Canadian business venture ever built, now worth a staggering $300 billion¹ (twice the size of RBC, Canada’s largest company). It is also the backbone of thousands of applications and enterprise use-cases being built by Visa, PayPal, BlackRock, LVMH and Nike, to name a few, who are using Ethereum to rethink how they do business and deliver value to customers.

A decade ago, facing regulatory uncertainty and indifference and skepticism from Canada’s business establishment, most of Ethereum’s founders left Canada and set up shop in the U.S., Singapore, Germany, Switzerland - anywhere but here, perhaps the largest national economic opportunity lost since we scrapped the Avro Arrow in 1959.

We still have time to put Canada back on track - to say Yes In My Backyard to crypto innovation and investment. Our economic prosperity may ride on our next steps. We need a plan, and we must act now.

If you’re interested in my Canada thoughts, please check out this recent Op-Ed I wrote for the National Post – Let’s make Canada the richest country in the world