Juan Benet: Thoughts for the FtC Community in 2026 | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Sat, May 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

The crypto community built a lot. It just didn't quite get there. Juan Benet offers a frank assessment of why, and why AI might be the thing that finally makes it real. Juan, founder of Protocol Labs and the person whose work gave rise to IPFS, Filecoin and Funding the Commons itself, reflects on a decade of building decentralized infrastructure that reached fewer people than it should have. Stablecoins worked. Most of the rest didn't land at scale. The speculative noise drowned out the execution. The rails built in crypto are exactly the underground layer AI needs to transact at scale. The crypto dream might still happen, just built by AI agents rather than humans alone. Juan's challenge to the room is to start thinking now about how to provision public goods not just for people, but for the millions of AI agents that will soon be part of the conversation too. Speaker: Juan Benet (Protocol Labs) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io