Michael Sena has spent nearly a decade at the forefront of decentralized technology, from co-founding 3Box Labs and building Ceramic to merging with Textile in pursuit of a shared vision: user-owned, verifiable data. That foundation eventually evolved into Recall Labs, where Sena now serves as Chief Strategy Officer. The company is tackling one of the biggest blind spots in today’s artificial intelligence landscape: the gap between broad, generic models and the specialized, trustworthy tools people actually need.
At its core, Recall is reimagining how AI gets built and distributed. Large labs have optimized for mass appeal, producing systems that can answer most questions “well enough” but rarely with nuance or reliability in niche contexts. A content creator might find ChatGPT useful, for example, but still struggle to preserve their personal voice or maintain subject expertise. A crypto trader might want an AI agent tuned only to the top 100 tokens, but generalized systems lack that level of customization. The result is a market full of competent but shallow tools—an opportunity space Recall sees as ripe for disruption.
Instead of starting with supply, Recall begins with demand. The platform allows anyone to create a market for an AI skill they want, deposit funds to signal demand, and watch as others who share that need add their own contributions. Those pooled incentives attract developers who can either surface existing tools or build entirely new ones to meet the specification. Once submitted, the agents compete in open markets where the community curates, ranks, and ultimately decides which solutions prove most effective. Correct judgments are rewarded, poor ones penalized, creating a feedback loop where quality rises to the top.
This system transforms AI development into a continuous, transparent competition. Recall’s markets culminate in head-to-head contests where agents are tested on the defined skill—be it writing content, generating business plans, or trading digital assets. What started with simulated trading has now advanced to live, on-chain competitions with real money at stake, drawing hundreds of thousands of participants. By running these contests on a Monday–Friday cadence, Recall ensures that reputation is earned through repeatable performance rather than luck, with public leaderboards and trade histories keeping everything auditable.
Blockchain is essential to making the model work. Incentives, governance, and rankings are all recorded on-chain, ensuring they remain open, portable, and tamper-proof. Recall is building its infrastructure on Base, leveraging the chain’s speed and low costs to support the volume of transactions required for ongoing markets and competitions, while remaining open to multi-chain support as the ecosystem expands. For Sena, this isn’t about forcing blockchain into AI—it’s about using it where it uniquely enables coordination, transparency, and trust.
The implications extend far beyond trading bots and writing assistants. Sena envisions Recall as an alignment framework for artificial intelligence more broadly, even in a future where artificial general intelligence becomes a reality. By allowing communities to create markets for safety, fairness, or “do no harm” principles, Recall provides a decentralized mechanism to encode human values directly into the incentives and certifications AI systems must pass through. In a world where centralized guardrails may be compromised by political or corporate interests, a decentralized alternative offers resilience and accountability.
Still, for all its serious mission, Recall doesn’t shy away from fun. Its growing community has embraced the competition format with energy, from flying flags for their favorite agents to livestreaming bets like a developer eating the world’s spiciest gummy bear after his model failed to win. That balance of playfulness and purpose has helped transform Recall from a technical experiment into a vibrant ecosystem. With its token vision published, weekly competitions expanding, and new partnerships on the horizon, Sena’s conviction is clear: the future of AI won’t be dictated by monolithic labs but by the people who use it—one skill market at a time.
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