Hedera Co-Founder Predicts That 'Everything Of Value' Will Be Tokenized (CORRECTED)

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to clarify EQTY Lab's collaboration with Intel and NVIDIA.

Hedera HBAR/USD co-founder Dr. Leemon Baird says artificial intelligence will accelerate blockchain adoption by making development accessible to non-technical users, while predicting that “everything of value in the world” will be tokenized within five years.

What Happened: Baird said during an interview with Benzinga at Consensus 2025 that building an AI system, agent or software is hard.

“What we have is AI Studio that makes it easy. And so it helps you to add AI to your apps and to make it be able to do all the things you want to do,” he said.

Hedera’s AI Studio integrates with Eliza OS and includes an MCP server and SDK designed to democratize blockchain development.

The platform addresses security concerns by implementing a two-step approval process for consequential actions.

The AI does the “fuzzy squishy stuff” but the consequential work is passed to non-AI software and approved by humans, Baird said.

A project building on Hedera, EQTY Lab, is working with Intel and NVIDIA to create immutable records of AI model training data.

This system addresses growing concerns about data provenance and permissions in AI development.

“The chip that does the training that builds the model will digitally sign off and say ‘Yep, that’s the data I use and that’s the model I created,'” Baird explained, noting this creates permanent proof of when models were trained and with what permissions.

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Why It Matters: Hedera currently supports “a million people building on top of it” as a Layer-1 blockchain with dollar-denominated transaction fees that allow businesses to predict costs.

The platform emphasizes governance through its council structure while maintaining high transaction speeds and low costs.

Regarding regulatory clarity, Baird expressed optimism about the changing landscape.

“Regulation has been well tangled but also just non-existent. No one knew. You had to guess whether what you’re doing is okay or not. And so now we’re going to have clarity,” he said, adding that this applies to both Web3 and AI development.

What’s Next: Looking ahead, Baird envisions dramatic changes in how assets are managed and traded.

He predicts “everything of value in the world [to be] tokenized” and tradable within seconds and without middlemen.

Baird forecasts a safe and quasi-free trading infrastructure, citing title searches on houses as an example that “will take seconds and be almost free.”

The co-founder also highlighted AI trustworthiness as a critical challenge, noting that digital signatures and identity verification will become essential as AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from authentic material.

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