DJ
Guest profile
David Johnston
Open-Source Code Maintainer, Morpheus
David Johnston is an open-source contributor and code maintainer at Morpheus, a decentralized peer-to-peer AI network, and an early blockchain investor.
He became active in Bitcoin in 2012 and co-founded the BitAngels angel network in May 2013. In December 2013 he wrote "The General Theory of Decentralized Applications," a paper credited with defining the term DApp.
In 2014 he co-founded the Decentralized Applications (DApps) Venture Fund and served as its Managing Director. He has also served as a Mastercoin Foundation board member and as Chairman of Factom, and in 2016 he started the family office Yeoman's Capital.
He later co-founded the venture firm YGC and led strategy at the public company DLTx. Since 2023 his focus has been Morpheus, where he wrote the Smart Agents framework and describes himself as one of many code contributors to a network with no founder or central company.
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Latest interview · Sep 17, 2025How Morpheus is building a decentralized AI networkWatch the episode →
Key points
- Morpheus has attracted over 320,000 ETH staked and 6,500 capital providers by building a decentralized AI network with four pillars: Builders, Capital, Code, and Compute.
- Decentralized AI offers practical advantages including free access globally, privacy preservation, and user ownership compared to paid centralized alternatives like ChatGPT.
- Morpheus uses tokenomics to incentivize compute providers, code providers, agent builders, and capital providers, ensuring persistent infrastructure similar to Ethereum smart contracts.
- Over 100 projects are building on Morpheus, including Venice, which gained initial traction by offering free private alternatives to centralized AI services.
- The MOR20 fair launch model enables anyone to contribute and earn through the Morpheus ecosystem regardless of geographic location or economic resources.
In their own words
“If it's not your keys, it's not your AI.”
“I recently argued we should define AGI as artificially generated income.”
Every appearance on Crypto Coin Show
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