Consider the image of a nation’s leader, flanked by the four most powerful private entities in the history of computation: Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Broadcom. This is not a trade delegation. This is a strategic surrender of sovereignty to centralized gatekeepers of intelligence. As an open source evangelist who has spent years translating the ethical underpinnings of decentralized systems, I see the Korean president’s recent announcement to attend the San Francisco AI summit as a litmus test for the blockchain community’s own values.
At the heart of this event lies a fundamental tension: the same industry built on peer-to-peer trust is now watching its national governments kneel before proprietary AI stacks. The meeting list—Nvidia for hardware, OpenAI and Anthropic for models, Broadcom for networking—reads like a shopping list for a closed infrastructure. There is no mention of open source alternatives, no commitment to decentralized compute or federated learning. It is a stark reminder that while we build DAOs for governance and Bitcoin for sound money, the most critical resource of our era—artificial intelligence—is being weaponized as a centralized asset.
Code is law, but ethics is soul. This phrase has guided my work since I first translated Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum whitepaper into Portuguese. Back in 2017, I added an 80-page ethical commentary, arguing that decentralization is not a feature—it is a commitment. Today, that commitment is being tested by a different kind of protocol: one where the governance is a CEO, the code is closed, and the data is proprietary. Korea’s move to secure GPU supply from Nvidia and model access from OpenAI is the equivalent of a country deciding to use a proprietary operating system for its entire digital infrastructure. It is efficient, yes, but it is also a lease on sovereignty.
Transparency isn’t the oxygen of trust. We learned this during the DeFi summer of 2020, when I spent 600 hours auditing Aave V2’s interest rate models. I found logic errors that could have led to a $4 million exploit. But more importantly, I realized that technical audits must include social contract verification. The same applies here: Korea’s summit is not just about technology transfer; it is about whether the nation will build its AI on open protocols or on leased land. The difference between a trustless system and a trusted one is not transparency alone—it is the ability to verify and exit. With proprietary AI, exit becomes impossible.
From my experience curating the “Soulbound Truths” exhibition in 2021, I saw how NFTs could be used for identity rather than speculation. The idea was simple: value lies in authenticity, not liquidity. Korea’s AI strategy risks the opposite—it prioritizes liquidity of access over authenticity of control. By handing the keys of its AI future to four foreign corporations, it commodifies its own intelligence. The contrarian view argues that this is pragmatic: to compete with the US and China, Korea needs speed. But speed without sovereignty is just faster dependency. In the bear market of 2022, I wrote “Code as Law, but People as Gods,” arguing that resilience comes from owning the infrastructure. Korea must own the infrastructure of AI, not just rent it.
Guard the commons, or lose the future. This is not a call to isolationism; it is a call to build open alternatives. The blockchain community has the tools—zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized storage, tokenized incentives—to create a public AI layer. My own work with the “Verifiable Humanity” initiative showed that we can verify human agency without centralized gatekeepers. Korea could be the testing ground for a different path: one where national AI strategy combines open source models with blockchain-based governance. Instead of meeting with four CEOs, the president could meet with the communities building Bittensor, Akash, or the open source LLM movement. That would be a real declaration.
The takeaway is not to criticize Korea, but to see this as a mirror for our own industry. Every time we celebrate a protocol being acquired by a centralized entity, or a DAO being bailed out by venture capital, we repeat the same pattern. The AI summit is a warning: if we do not build the infrastructure of sovereignty for the next generation of intelligence, others will build it for us. And they will not share the keys.
Will Korea’s AI strategy create a walled garden, or will it plant the seeds for a truly open digital nation? The answer lies not in the summit, but in the protocols we choose to build. And in the ethics we choose to code.