Twice now I have built infrastructure that strangers have to trust with something they cannot take back.
The first time it was money. The second time it is your voice, and the room you say it in. Different thing, same shape of promise: hand this over, and trust that it is handled the way we said it would be. When the thing you hand over is irreversible, that promise is not a feature of the product. It is the product.
LedgerX
Before AuraVision, my co-founder Juthica and I built a company called LedgerX. It was the first U.S. federally regulated venue to trade and clear bitcoin options — approved and overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the same regulator that watches the oil and wheat markets. It was written up at the time from the New York Times to Forbes, mostly because almost nobody else was doing it the hard way.
Because it was the hard way. In that era you could launch a crypto exchange offshore, unregistered, and be taking deposits in a weekend. We spent years in front of a federal regulator instead — building the clearinghouse, the custody, the segregation of customer funds, the controls — when nothing and no one required us to. We chose the slow, regulated path because the whole point of a clearinghouse is the guarantee behind it, and a guarantee you took a shortcut to isn't one.
That is the lesson I took from it, and it has not changed: in trust infrastructure, the guarantees you refuse to break are the product. Everything else — the interface, the speed, the features — is in service of the handful of promises you have decided you will not break even when it costs you.
Why we left
On our board sat Mark Wetjen. He had been a Commissioner of the CFTC from 2011 to 2015, and the agency's Acting Chairman in 2014; he joined the LedgerX board in 2015, soon after leaving the regulator.
Over time, Juthica and I became uneasy. I'll be plain that this is my account and my judgment, not a matter of record: I did not want him on our board, and we pushed for a change in the company's leadership. The board disagreed. When it was clear they weren't going to move, we left the company we had founded. That is a hard thing to do over a disagreement about who sits at the table — but if the people steering a trust business aren't the ones you'd trust, the disagreement isn't really about a seat.
Here is the part I'll state only as public fact, and let you make of it what you will. The company we left went on. In October 2021 it was acquired by FTX and rebranded FTX US Derivatives, and Wetjen stayed on the board. In November 2021 he became FTX US's Head of Policy and Regulatory Strategy — the firm's top liaison to the regulators in Washington. A year later, in November 2022, FTX filed for bankruptcy in what is now widely called the largest fraud in the history of the industry; its founder was later convicted. Wetjen himself was never charged with any wrongdoing, and I am not suggesting otherwise. I'm only telling you why we walked, and where the road went after we did.
The same promise, a new form
I didn't expect to be back in trust infrastructure. Then voice assistants quietly became the most intimate version of it anyone has built.
A microphone that is always on in your home is asking for the same irreversible thing a clearinghouse asks for — trust us with this — except now the deposit is everything said within earshot of it. And almost every one of them keeps the same shortcut the offshore exchanges took: it ships your voice to a server somewhere and asks you to trust the destination. The policy is the guarantee. And a policy can be rewritten the week after you buy the device, by people you will never meet, in a building you cannot visit.
I have seen where "trust the policy" leads. So this time I wanted the guarantee somewhere it cannot be quietly rewritten: in the architecture itself.
Build the guarantee into the hardware
AuraVision runs in your room, on the device in front of you. The wake word, the speech recognition, and the language model all run locally. There is no account, and no cloud path — not a cloud path you can switch off, but no cloud path at all. Nothing is stored on a server, which means there is nothing on a server to breach, to subpoena, or to resell when someone's business model changes. The promise that nothing leaves the room is not a line in a policy. It is a fact about where the computer is.
That is the same bet I made the first time, built the same way: decide which guarantee you will not break, and then engineer so that breaking it isn't even possible. The first time I built it into a clearinghouse. This time it's in the hardware on your table.
The Founders' list reopens on October 23 at 12pm ET. It is capped at 335 and will not be expanded; Founders get 33.59% off. If you've read this far, you already know why I'd rather build it this way.
— Paul Chou, Founder, AuraVision