2025 SPEAKERS

Arto Bendiken, Founder of ASIMOV Protocol, is a cypherpunk, open-source advocate, and Knowledge graph pioneer with over 25 years in cryptography, decentralized systems, and structured data. An autodidact and early builder in censorship-resistant technologies, he was involved in digital currencies before Bitcoin, hacking on eGold in the early 2000s, and has been shaping the decentralized web ever since. As founder of Datagraph Inc., he built Dydra, a first-of-its-kind content-addressable graph database, laying the foundation for verifiable AI and machine reasoning. He is also the creator of The Unlicense, a radical open-source licensing model, and co-founder of Aurora Labs, where he helped launch Ethereum compatibility on NEAR, scaling Web3 interoperability to millions of users daily. Arto has built three successful startups (Datagraph, Aurora Labs, Haltia.AI), worked on mission-critical software for the European Space Agency and the U.S. Navy, and leads engineering at Haltia.AI, where he is developing user-owned AI with local inference, Knowledge graph reasoning, and cryptographic privacy protections—creating an AI model that works for the user, not the cloud. His work has influenced open-source licensing, decentralized computing, and structured knowledge verification—laying the groundwork for ASIMOV Protocol’s mission to secure verifiable knowledge in a decentralized world. Arto began his career in high-performance systems programming, specializing in C/C++, Go, OCaml, and Rust. His work on European Space Agency navigation software and U.S. Naval Space Command defense systems built deep Expertise in cryptographic applications, which later informed his approach to decentralized infrastructure. At Aurora Labs, Arto co-led the launch of NEAR’s EVM, delivering Ethereum compatibility to NEAR Protocol while architecting a global RPC edge infrastructure that reduced execution costs 20× lower than competitors. His work helped bridge Web3 ecosystems at scale, setting benchmarks in high-performance, permissionless computation. Now, as a founder of ASIMOV Protocol, Arto is building a cryptographic framework for structuring, securing, and proving knowledge at scale—ensuring that machine intelligence operates with integrity, provenance, and verifiable claims of knowledge. For the past two decades, Arto has lived as a digital nomad, embodying sovereign computing and borderless innovation. His philosophy is clear: AI is only as good as the knowledge it’s built on. If that foundation is centralized, opaque, or unverifiable, we will not have intelligence—we will have controlled narratives. ASIMOV Protocol exists to prevent that.