The US Midterms - And What It Means For Crypto

Teana Baker-Taylor, CEO, BasedAI and Kōhai

Overview

BasedAI & Kōhai CEO Teana Baker-Taylor joined Gareth Jenkinson on The Starting Block to discuss the launch of Kōhai, her open-source private AI platform for small businesses, how the US midterm could impact both the crypto and AI industries, and how the debate over AI regulation mirrors crypto's own journey through regulation and adoption.

Episode 51 of The Starting Block, hosted by The Block's Gareth Jenkinson, was broadcasted live with BasedAI & Kōhai CEO Teana Baker-Taylor.

Key topics
• Kōhai launches as a private, open-source multiplayer AI workspace for small businesses.
• US midterms hand Democrats both chambers; Clarity Act seen stalled for two years.
• Crypto PACs spent $170 million this cycle with mixed results, including Brown's Ohio win.
• Baker-Taylor argues AI regulation will mirror crypto's journey and cannot be paused.
• BasedAI APIs and an enterprise version of Kōhai are on the near-term roadmap.

Outline

- Introduction
- The Block Briefing
- The Hot Seat: BasedAI & Kōhai Intro
- Midterms & Crypto Policy
- AI Regulation Parallels
- BasedAI Roadmap
- Show Close

Summary
The Hot Seat began with Baker-Taylor explaining that BasedAI is a portfolio company, and described their first product, Kōhai, as a multiplayer AI workspace built for small businesses under 200 employees, with enterprise partners lined up for testing the following month. She explained that Kōhai is built entirely on open-source, open-weight models, is private and sovereign by design, and integrates with tools like Gmail, Figma, Canva and GitHub through roughly a thousand connectors. Unlike consumer-facing platforms such as Venice AI, which she co-founded and which runs models locally, Kōhai is designed for teams that need a collaborative, plug-and-play solution without the cost or complexity of running their own inference infrastructure. She described the product as developing a company brain that learns about a business over time inside a protected enclave, effectively training a model specific to that company. On the roadmap, she said BasedAI APIs would be available within a couple of months, and that an enterprise version with on-premises hosting support is in development.

Turning to the midterms, Baker-Taylor cautioned that political cycles are just that, cyclical, and said the crypto industry needed to check its integrity, pointing to things like Melania Coin and World Liberty Financial as examples of conduct that alienated moderate Democrats and stalled legislation. She argued that the fine points holding up the Clarity Act were ethics-related, not technical. On AI regulation, she drew a direct parallel with crypto, noting that calls to pause AI development are as futile as calls to ban Bitcoin, and said open-source AI is in a more defensible regulatory position than frontier labs because its models are transparent, ring-fenced and auditable. She said she hopes open source stays off regulators' radar for now, while encouraging builders to engage with policymakers rather than ignore them.

About the guest
Teana Baker-Taylor is the CEO of BasedAI and Kōhai, an open-source AI company building private, sovereign AI tools for businesses, having previously co-founded Venice AI and served as VP of Policy and Regulatory Strategy at Circle, with earlier leadership roles at Binance, Crypto.com, and the Chamber of Digital Commerce.