Gonka X Beincrypto Ama Session

What Happened

Gonka is redefining decentralized infrastructure by optimizing computational power for AI model training and inference. Unlike traditional centralized cloud providers—often costly, monopolistic, and prone to censorship—Gonka offers a scalable and efficient alternative that channels nearly 100% of its computing resources into meaningful AI tasks.

Recently, David Liberman, co-founder of Gonka, joined BeInCrypto for an AMA session to discuss how the platform’s novel consensus mechanism transforms Proof-of-Work into a productive system for AI computation.

During the session, David explored why compute power is becoming the new currency, how Gonka bridges the gap between AI and decentralization, and what gives the project the potential to outperform tech giants like AWS, Google, and OpenAI.

Market Context

In this article, we’ll recap the key takeaways from the AMA and unpack how Gonka is pioneering a new era for decentralized AI infrastructure.

Why It Matters

BeInCrypto: So, for everyone just joining – today we’re talking about Gonka, the decentralized AI compute protocol that’s taking on centralized giants and redefining Proof-of-Work for the AI era.

So David, let’s start with the big one – you’ve said that Gonka is not a company, not a startup, and not even a platform, but rather a network and a protocol.

Details

Can you explain what that means in practice? How does Gonka actually function without a traditional team or ownership structure?

David Liberman: In practice, everything is governed by consensus of the protocol; there is no foundation or any org controlling the protocol. Miners with their vote control the network.

Bitcoin is a great example, how protocols can be governed without traditional structures

We’re based in the U.S., where regulators are quite clear that you shouldn’t raise funds to build protocols. Otherwise, the coins are considered securities.

We know that many projects outside the U.S. don’t follow those rules, but in our case, we wanted the network’s coins to be freely used by developers in San Francisco. So we never raised funds with the promise of coins and ensured the network was community-controlled from the genesis

BeInCrypto: That’s super interesting – and honestly pretty rare these days.

It sounds like Gonka was designed from day one to stay truly decentralized – not just in tech, but also legally and economically. Love that you mentioned the U.S. angle too – it’s refreshing to hear about a project that was actually built with compliance in mind rather than trying to work around it.

So let’s dig into the origin story a bit. You’ve said Gonka was born out of collaboration between Web2 AI researchers and Web3 miners. That’s not a combination we see often! What brought those two worlds together, and how did that shape the early design of the network?

David Liberman: Yes, Gonka provides pure utility, and most of the developers building AI startups are in the US. We come from the “Web2” world and have been building AI companies for the past 15 years, but we’ve always been passionate about decentralization as a way to create the most efficient compute network.

When we were in college in the early 2000s, we built a community of 300,000 computers around the world. Initially, we just wanted to do scientific computing, but once the network came together, we realized it had a total power of 10 teraflops. More than the largest supercomputer at that time.

Since then, we’ve believed that the networks of the future should be decentralized.

When Bitcoin was released, its idea of “One CPU, One Vote” was rooted in the truth that the greatest computing power should remain in the hands of the people

BeInCrypto: That makes total sense – keeping it purely utility-focused is such a smart move, especially when your core dev base is in the U.S.

That’s wild – 300,000 computers back in the early 2000s?! That’s basically proto-Gonka! You were crowdsourcing compute power before it was cool haha. So let’s fast-forward to today – your Proof-of-Work model isn’t just for mining, it’s actually useful.

It trains and runs AI models instead of wasting energy on random hashes.

Can you walk us through how that works technically? How did you make PoW “productive” instead of purely computational?

David Liberman: Yes, that’s correct. We use a Proof-of-Work model to build the infrastructure, with all new coins issued daily going to miners. The more computing power you contribute, the larger your share of coins.

It’s crucial to actually build an infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of high-end GPUs and later ASICs, which none of PoS protocols will be able to achieve.