Francesco Renzi, co-founder of Superfluid, said he is stepping away from his role at the crypto project after years in the sector and is now focusing on private AI infrastructure.
Writing in a first-person essay published by ChainCatcher, Renzi said he has worked in crypto since 2017 and co-founded Superfluid in 2019 with what he described as a big ambition: changing how money works.
He said he still believes money streaming is the logical evolution of recurring payments. What changed, in his view, is a clearer understanding of how difficult it is to shift deeply rooted behavior around something as basic as money.
Stepping back from Superfluid
Renzi said he decided earlier this year to give up his role at Superfluid. Miao has taken over, he wrote, and is leading the team as it launches Superfluid Wallet, a new wallet aimed at creating the best user experience for coordinating agents’ onchain interactions.
He added that he remains proud of what the team built and is still deeply committed to Superfluid’s success, even though his own attention is moving elsewhere.
Why his view changed
According to Renzi, Superfluid’s streaming model introduced a radically new user experience into an extremely entrenched system. He argued that this kind of shift takes decades, requires broad coalition-building, and may need top-down pressure rather than the bottom-up countercultural force that has defined crypto.
He said the team saw signs of early adoption as far back as 2020, but the market was not mature enough. Unresolved issues in accounting, tax, and security, he wrote, consumed much of the goodwill the project had built early on.
Renzi said that from 2017 to 2021 he was highly optimistic that crypto could drive fundamental social change. That belief was one reason he committed himself so fully to the field. At the time, he thought technical advances in trust, financial access, and transparency would change how most people relate to money, investing, and institutions more broadly.
Now he frames the question more narrowly: where has crypto repeatedly shown that it is good enough to replace an existing mainstream behavior? By that measure, he said, the list remains uncomfortably short.
What crypto did achieve, and where it fell short
Renzi said crypto has been remarkably successful at creating alternatives to existing financial institutions, and he said he remains impressed by that progress. He also pointed to the spread of entirely new behaviors, especially in new asset issuance and new market creation, citing AMMs and prediction markets as examples.
Still, he argued that the clearest cases of replacement are not flattering. He listed ransom payments, sanctions evasion, and possibly gambling deposits and payouts. Stablecoins, in his view, are a more constructive success, but they mostly reinforce access to the U.S. dollar rather than create an alternative to it.
He also wrote that he once believed crypto would support a genuinely multipolar world by helping people leave parts of the traditional financial system, reducing some forms of government control, and, at least in the early imagination around Bitcoin, offering a path away from dependence on the dollar. Instead, he said, institutional capture, revealed preference, and broader geopolitical trends have combined to re-center crypto around the United States and the dollar.
A larger shift is happening elsewhere
At the same time, Renzi said, a much bigger social shift is unfolding outside crypto. He wrote that building software had been the most lucrative activity skill for the past 30 years, yet in roughly a year it has become almost automated.
He described the change in personal terms. He now chats with his agents more than with friends and family, he wrote, and his AI assistant makes more phone calls on his behalf than he does himself.
That has pushed him toward a broader set of questions:
- Who gets to see our data?
- Who can change the software that acts for us?
- Who holds its keys?
- Can we leave a system without giving up our history, our relationships, and our ability to function normally?
Since January, Renzi said, he has been an enthusiastic user of OpenClaw and Hermes. To him, it is obvious that the future will involve experiences that are much more digital for everyone.
But once software can read messages, coordinate work, and act on a person’s behalf, a new class of custody and control problems appears. In crypto, he wrote, people learned to ask whether they truly control their assets. In an agentic world, the question becomes whether they truly control the systems acting in their name.
Why he is looking at TEEs and CVMs
Renzi said he has recently been studying trusted execution environments, or TEEs, and confidential virtual machines, or CVMs, in greater depth.
He described these technologies as ways to run software inside hardware-protected environments designed to prevent even the machine operator from freely inspecting memory and data. Through remote attestation, those environments can also provide evidence of what software is actually running.
He was careful not to overstate their guarantees. Proof does not show that an application is safe, he wrote, and confidential hardware cannot stop authorized software from leaking information through permitted channels.
Even so, Renzi said he increasingly sees TEEs and CVMs as the most practical short-term answer to many of the trust problems that are about to become more pressing.
The infrastructure he wants to build
More important, in his view, these technologies offer a way to change expectations around infrastructure itself. Today, he wrote, people broadly accept that whoever runs the cloud has ultimate access to what runs inside it. That should no longer feel inevitable.
He said the same assumption exists in software deployment: deployers are generally expected to be able to inspect, patch, or update the software they deploy. CVMs challenge that assumption. Like smart contracts, he wrote, they can be deployed as immutable and opaque systems that even the deployer may not be able to inspect or modify once they are running. The major difference is that they run on a full Linux computer.
Renzi argued that the new expectation should be infrastructure without standing plaintext access. In that model, privacy depends less on promises from operators and more on boundaries operators cannot casually cross.
He also said that building an immune system against AI centralization will require stronger data sovereignty. For both companies and individuals, data defines and differentiates them, and keeping data away from what he called data eaters is becoming a basic form of self-defense.
That is where he now wants to spend his time: building private, verifiable infrastructure for software that needs access to the most sensitive parts of a person’s life or a company’s business.
Leaving crypto is not a rejection of crypto
Renzi said he does not see his time in crypto as a detour. Quite the opposite, he wrote. The field taught him to pay attention to trust boundaries, adversarial systems, and the roots of control and privacy.
One of crypto’s hardest lessons, in his telling, is that compromises on core values compound in ways that are not immediately visible. A compromise that looks small today can grow and spread like cancer.
AI, he wrote, needs what crypto once had: systems that are more sovereign and more private, and that remain useful even if their operators are not, or are no longer, acting in good faith.
He described his move not as a break with that work, but as a shift from one expression of it to another. The question now, he wrote, is no longer only who owns an asset, but who owns and controls the computer that thinks, remembers, and acts beside us, or in our place.
Renzi ended by saying that this is where he is spending his time now, and that he is excited to announce his first product in the area soon.