Liam “Akiba” Wright
Editor-in-Chief at CryptoSlate. Former technical founder. Experimenting and building with generative AI since GPT-3.
I lead editorial at CryptoSlate, covering Bitcoin, digital assets, market structure, regulation, and the AI systems changing how people research, verify, and make decisions.
Outside the newsroom, I use coding agents and local models to build working tools for memory, research and automation, and connect software, APIs, local AI infrastructure and home automation into systems I actually use.
I’ve been building with AI since 2018, and experimenting with generative models since GPT-3.
AI experience
- 2018: consultancy building an AI-driven social media app, years before ChatGPT (never launched).
- Experimenting with generative models since GPT-3 (davinci), with early OpenAI Playground beta access.
- Hands-on with OpenAI’s GPT-3 closed beta. 2025 look-back
- Ran Folding@home during the pandemic, donating compute to protein-folding research.
- April 2022, before ChatGPT: had GPT-3 (text-davinci-001) write a CryptoSlate article, then interviewed it over several weeks. the article · the interview
- 2023: called it the start of the “Post-Knowledge Era” and predicted the white-collar reaction to AI would turn political. op-ed, May 2023
- 2023: benchmarked ChatGPT against Claude 2, Bard and Llama 2. benchmark
- Daily LLM use, including for code, since 2021.
- Coding agents and local models for working tools, automations and prototypes.
- 63 pieces on AI for CryptoSlate, from experiments to analysis. Writing on AI
Crypto reporting, analysis, and newsroom judgment.
My work sits at the intersection of crypto markets, policy, decentralized infrastructure, and emerging AI.
Whatever the tools, every story still moves through the same steps.
From signal to story
AI can speed up the research. The judgment stays with the editor.
- Signal. A signal appears across markets, policy, filings, on-chain data, or public claims.
- Source capture. Primary material is captured before interpretation hardens into narrative.
- Provenance check. Claims are checked against provenance, incentives, and source quality.
- Contradictions. Contradictions are surfaced, not compressed away.
- Editorial judgment. The final call is editorial: what matters, what is missing, and what readers need.
- Publish. Publication is the result of judgment, not just output.
Selected reporting
Terra/LUNA collapse, 2022
45 pieces covering Terra’s rise and collapse, Mar–Jul 2022.
- 4 Jun 2022 · Luna insiders reveal info on Terra’s closed-door meetings including Do Kwon
Exclusive interviews with Terra validators on the closed-door relaunch meetings. - 1 Jun 2022 · Validator leaks secret LUNA ‘war room’ chat logs
Leaked chat logs from the Terra relaunch, with a validator speaking exclusively to CryptoSlate
Scoops & investigations
- 16 Jul 2026 · SEC filing shows viral $71 million XRP ETF claims are out by 1,000x
Checked a viral claim against the SEC filing itself - 18 Jul 2022 · Investors lost over $100M after Invictus Capital moved funds into UST, Celsius against their wishes
Investigation built on first-hand sources - 25 Apr 2022 · We are ready for a bank run says Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino
Exclusive interview, two weeks before the May 2022 stablecoin stress - 11 Apr 2022 · Mallers’ Bitcoin payment demo was staged but Chicago store will accept crypto soon
On-record confirmation from the store in a keynote demo
Data & analysis
- 16 Oct 2024 · Two Polymarket whales bet $4 million for Trump across 1,600 trades in 24 hours
Wallet-level look at the election whales before they were widely reported - 16 Jan 2024 · Identifying potential ETF wallet addresses as Coinbase leads weekly BTC trading
On-chain analysis in the first week of spot ETFs - 9 Nov 2022 · Research: FTT token active addresses close to 0 for the entirety of 2022
On-chain data published during the FTX collapse - 26 Oct 2022 · Is Ethereum now under U.S. control? 99% of latest relay blocks are censoring the network
Block data on OFAC-compliant relays after the Merge
Markets & cycle calls
- 24 Nov 2025 · Akiba’s medium term $49k Bitcoin bear thesis – why this winter will be the shortest yet
My own bear-market thesis, with the levels and signals I was watching - 16 Oct 2025 · Time is up: The case for why Bitcoin bear market cycle started at $126k
Cycle-timing case that the $126k high was the top
Policy
- 2 Apr 2026 · A four-way deadlock is now blocking the US Clarity Act crypto bill
Long read on who can stall US market-structure law - 20 Sep 2025 · US Bitcoin reserve could drain 40k BTC faster than miners mint in the next 90 days
Supply modelling of a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
AI
- 27 May 2025 · We interviewed GPT-3 in 2022 before ChatGPT. Here’s what it got right (and so very wrong)
Looking back at the 2022 interview - 15 May 2023 · The dawn of the Post-Knowledge Era: AI’s threat to white-collar jobs
Op-ed on AI and knowledge work - 29 Apr 2022 · Artificial Intelligence believes nothing is more important than blockchain – Interviewing OpenAI
Long-form GPT-3 interview, seven months before ChatGPT
Opinion
- 18 Mar 2024 · I was wrong. Why I changed my opinion on Bitcoin in 2024.
A first-person essay on changing my mind - 26 Oct 2023 · Could a spot ETF lead to ‘paper’ Bitcoin controlling the market?
Op-ed written before spot ETF approval
Origin story
A timeline, in roughly the right order. Mostly hardware.
- Early years: Learned the uppercase alphabet on a keyboard, helping Dad do payroll on an Apple II with a dot-matrix printer.
- 6th birthday: First computer: a Sega Mega Drive.
- Around 8: First PC, shared with Dad. A CD-ROM drive arrived as a present, for Championship Manager and Encarta.
- About 9: Built my first website, in Microsoft FrontPage.
- 14: Built my first PC from scratch.
- Phones: A pager, then a hand-me-down Nokia 3210, then an Ericsson T3. First proper phone: a Nokia 7110. I still have it.
- University: Ran local file sharing for music and video. Learned IRC and torrents.
- Film: Founded a movie company. Directed and edited a feature film that was accepted into the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
- Banter Media: Technical founder of a full-service agency: websites, systems and campaigns for brands including Suzuki, Nike, Converse, Colgate and Manchester United.
- 2012 to 2014: Mined Dogecoin and Bitcoin overnight on the agency’s video-rendering GPUs.
- 2016: Left agency work for consultancy.
- 2018: AI consultancy: building an AI-driven social media app, years before ChatGPT. It never launched.
- 2020: Mined Ethereum, Chia, whatever was going. Ran Folding@home during the pandemic, donating compute to protein-folding research.
- May 2022: Parked money in Terra’s UST for the ~20% Anchor yield. My own reporting in April flagged the peg risk (insuring UST cost almost four times as much as USDT), so it went from safe yield to mid-high-risk bet. I pulled it all when the peg first wobbled to $0.995, just before Terra collapsed.
- 2022: Sold all the GPUs at a profit, a few months before The Merge. Went back to writing and joined CryptoSlate.
Skills
- Editorial and communication. Shaping stories, finding the angle, simplifying complex subjects, sharpening headlines and copy, and running publishing workflows.
- Research and analysis. Connecting developments across crypto, AI, technology and markets; testing claims and turning technical material into useful explanations.
- AI-assisted development. Building working tools, automations and prototypes with coding agents and local models; designing workflows, evaluating model behaviour and debugging integrations.
- Product thinking. Finding useful problems, shaping concepts, thinking through UX, and getting quickly from idea to something people can try.
- Creative direction. Writing, visual ideas, interactive experiences and game concepts, including experiments that bring news and community into playable worlds.
- Practical systems. Connecting software, APIs, local AI infrastructure and home automation into systems that support real workflows.
Career
- 2024 to now · Editor-in-Chief, CryptoSlate. Leads coverage strategy and the editorial team.
- 2022 to now · Author at CryptoSlate. Writing for CryptoSlate since March 2022: 3,100+ articles; host of the SlateCast.
- 2022 to now · Director, AKIBA.GG LTD. UK company, incorporated 31 March 2022 (public relations and communications).
- 2016 to 2021 · Consultant. Downsized Banter Media into consultancy and marketing contract work, including building an AI-driven social media app in 2018 (never launched).
- 2009 to 2016 · Founder, Banter Media (Manchester). Full-service agency across film, video, web design, systems and marketing; websites, systems and campaigns for brands including Suzuki, Nike, Converse, Colgate and Manchester United.
- Before Banter Media · Founder, film company. Directed and edited a feature film accepted into the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
- 2007 · BA English and Philosophy, University of York.
“I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the [akiba.gg] was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization”
- Agent Smith, 1999