We brought Bill Laboon, VP of Ecosystem at the Web3 Foundation, into the studio to talk about something simple that’s strangely rare online: proof. Not marketing, not pledges, just proof. The conversation wasn’t a recap of hype or a technical lecture. It was a straightforward case for designing systems that don’t require belief, as they incorporate verification into their design.

Bill’s path matters here. He came up through defense and medicine, moved into teaching blockchain, and now helps steer an open ecosystem where governance, funding, and upgrades happen in public. That background shaped a clear view: trust shouldn’t be a feeling; it should be the by-product of good infrastructure.
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AI imagines. Blockchains remember.

During our conversation, we explored how generative AI and blockchains should work together rather than against each other. AI is great at creating and interpreting text, images, and patterns. It’s also great at producing convincing fakes. Blockchains, device signatures, and content hashes serve the opposite purpose: they anchor claims in time and space, allowing anyone to verify them later. The practical pattern for builders is straightforward: utilize AI for intelligence and interface, but bind meaningful outputs to cryptographic proofs, hashes, signatures, and on-chain references, ensuring verification is inexpensive and private data remains private.

Governance that executes, not just advises

Polkadot offered a real example of what “proof over promises” looks like at scale. Decisions there don’t live in forum threads; they execute as code. Upgrades, parameters, and treasury flows are voted on and enacted on-chain. You can read the proposal, view the voting results, and observe the change take effect in the runtime. It isn’t always tidy (democracy rarely is), but it’s legible. That’s the point: public institutions that behave like software can be audited end-to-end, not just explained after the fact.

Funding follows verifiable utility.

We also talked about money, where it goes, and why. Bill made a simple point: meaningful funding increasingly backs tools that reduce “trust debt.” In practice, that means grants for zero-knowledge proofs, digital identity, and governance experiments that make manipulation expensive and honesty easy to prove. If people can independently verify what your product claims, you’re speaking the correct language for the next decade of infrastructure.

Why this matters now

AI is accelerating ambiguity. Content looks real even when it isn’t. Meanwhile, the rails most people use every day (payments, records, decisions) still conceal crucial state changes behind institutions that claim, “Trust us.” That gap is our opportunity. If we want coordination without gatekeepers, we need systems where rules are visible, incentives are aligned, and cheating has a cost. Proof shouldn’t arrive as a PDF after the damage is done; it should be embedded in the process that creates value.

“We used to trust institutions. Now we can prove things ourselves.”  Bill Laboon

After that statement, the conversation continued to circle the same practical idea: making truth verifiable by design. Bind claims to cryptography so anyone can check them later. Keep sensitive data private, but prove what matters with selective disclosures. Treat governance like software, so decisions are executed in the open, not behind closed doors. And direct funding toward the primitives, zero-knowledge, identity, and auditable treasuries that reduce trust-debt across the stack.

The episode doesn’t try to recap a protocol or promote a token. It asks a fundamental question: how do we build systems that don’t ask for trust because they produce proof as they run? That’s the thread running through the episode, and it’s the standard we should hold our own products to.

If that’s the direction you’re building toward, the Bill Laboon episode is worth a listen. Then tell us how you’re wiring verifiability into yours.

🎧 The episode is now live wherever you get your podcasts.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7lEvQzKsQUkAsBtxg3L5ZX?si=GZ5j01eARqiPy3vxkx5w0g