Leemon Baird Just Broke Blockchain—and Maybe AI—Here’s How He Did It (With Two Hashes?)

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If you’ve ever wondered whether distributed ledger technology could be made interesting without the aid of fire, tribal chants, or Quantum Sheep, then you, my friend, are in good (or at least semi-respectable) company. Leemon Baird, a man known for asking questions like “What if blockchains, but without all the existential dread?” has boldly gone where no mathematician has gone since last Tuesday.

His story begins in the swirling, chilly hinterlands of academia and industry—where neural networks were the awkward teenager sulking in AI’s ‘90s basement. Baird didn’t just write about this; he lived it, which in those days meant explaining to people why your computer needed more RAM to think about bananas.

Against this backdrop, he co-founded Hedera, a sort of intergalactic hitchhiker’s guide to smoother, shinier consensuses. (Consensi? No matter. English is a consensus anyway.)

CoinDesk: Your hashgraph algorithm popped up in 2016, sneakily dodging the blockchain crowd like a mathematician at a house party. What were you actually hoping to fix?

Baird: Look, I’m an incurable puzzle addict. My life’s a game of “What’s Actually Broken Here?” Take Bitcoin—it’s clever, but it’s slower than continental drift and gets hot enough to power your average volcano (not actually recommended). ABFT, electricity bills, carbon guilt—surely, I thought, one could create a system secure, speedy, and not in imminent danger of being regulated by penguins for environmental abuse.
So in 2012, I started poking at the problem, repeatedly convincing myself it was all utter nonsense. By 2015, I threw in TWO hashes (because sometimes one isn’t nearly enough), and everything clicked. Suddenly, it ran at the speed of the internet and didn’t require sacrificing a herd of CPUs. Also, proof of stake—because who doesn’t love a good popularity contest where the winner is “best at not frying polar icecaps”?

And governing the thing? Instead of the traditional “let’s pretend we don’t govern it but secretly hold all the keys,” why not make it actually decentralized—invite globally reputable organizations and keep everyone’s hands out of the same cookie jar? Checks and balances, but without 18th-century wigs.

CoinDesk: RWAs, carbon credits, stablecoins—everyone claims to do this, but who’s actually doing anything on Hedera?

Baird: Let’s count’em down for the people at home:

  1. AI is the new shiny thing. Also slightly terrifying, like a blender that gets philosophical. Provenance, governance, and version control for AI—so humans know if Skynet is behind the latest cat video. Hedera makes tracking and paybacks simple. Especially exciting: EQTY Lab + NVIDIA + Intel—honestly, I just like typing that out.
  2. Tokenizing real-world assets is like Pokémon, except instead of Charizard, you’re trading gold, real estate, or the world’s most valuable thing: carbon credits (take that, Mona Lisa JPEGs).
  3. Stablecoins! If you want your DeFi shopping cart to not wobble uncontrollably, you need these. Our Stable Coin Studio is basically IKEA for stablecoins, minus the flatpack regret.
  4. Immutable data records. So immutable, in fact, that not even your mother can delete them from the fridge. Hyundai and Kia use this for supply chain emissions, so you know your exhaust wasn’t forged in Naples, Florida.

CoinDesk: UCL’s study says you’re the greenest, but is it because you’re clever or because your data center is mostly hamsters on wheels?

Baird: It’s pure design: start with proof of stake, bake in eco-guilt from day one, and suddenly carbon credits come to you like moths to the world’s only energy-efficient lamp. The self-reinforcing green-ness flywheel is now spinning so fast it could power the Starship Enterprise. UCL says we have the lowest carbon emissions per transaction, and we buy extra credits just to flex. We’re so green, gardeners are filing patents in our name. 🌱

CoinDesk: AI and blockchain—sounds like a lot of strategic PowerPoint slides. Is there substance, or just really good clip art?

Baird: The overlap isn’t just a buzzword generator—it’s the “who-made-this-content-and-are-they-a-cyborg?” question. Provenance, permissioning, digital signatures: you want to be sure that the angry tweet really is from your grandma and not from GPT-47. Each data donor must have veto power—today’s internet is the Wild West and everybody has a horse. Identity gets very weird—digital signatures for everything, and you’d better hope someone’s still checking IDs.

CoinDesk: You studied neural nets in the ‘90s. Any surprises with today’s language models, or is everything just…bigger?

Baird: I saw most of it coming. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AI beating humans at chess and poker—predicted. Needed more transistors, not bigger brains. Self-driving? On track, though still not reliable for picking up your dry cleaning.
But LLMs like ChatGPT? Didn’t see it coming. Transformers were the plot twist nobody expected—one day, we’re smugly failing at language tasks, and suddenly my computer can write better love letters than I ever could. The next few years? Anyone’s guess. Maybe superintelligence, maybe another existential crisis. Oh, and humanoid robots? We’re way ahead. They’ll take all the unglamorous jobs first—soon, plumbers named Dave-9000. Factory work will never be the same.

When all’s said and done, society is about to be pantsed by exponential change, and most people are still reading the instructions upside down.

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2025-05-12 20:56