About CoopHive
Who We Are
CoopHive was incubated at Protocol Labs as part of Project Bravo, which grew out of the necessity for an incentivization layer on top of the Bacalhau distributed computing platform. The primary requirements were 1) a way to handle payments, escrow, and other financial primitives for computional resources; 2) a verification protocol that assures clients their computations are being done correctly; 3) a scalable solution that can meet the high demands of modern computational workflows.
CoopHive achieves all of this, and much more. With carefully designed cryptoeconomic protocols, the simple architecture underlying CoopHive can be implemented to accomplish a wide variety of goals.
Why We Are Doing This
Humanity is at a turning point. AI capabilities are accelerating dramatically, far faster than we have had time to come to terms with. While open source models proliferate, they are threatened by legislation and large incumbents with resources far in excess of what almost anyone or any entity has access to.
Simultaneously, there is an enormous amount of latent computing power lying dormant all over the world. As environmental concerns over limited resources, e-waste, and more mount, we aspire to make better use of existing computational resources.
Where We Are Going
Multi-chain multi-currency generic marketplace for anything and everything.
Seriously.
Autonomous agents will soon be representing us and our preferences, making our purchases, booking our tickets, choosing our restaurants, etc. These agents need marketplaces suited for they ways that they work, not the ways that humans work. Marketplaces that can integrate digital goods like compute, storage, and networking with real-world assets that you can buy online.
Simultaneously, science is on the verge of its next revolution. Artificial intelligence is already shaping up to replace more and more scientific labor, and the pace of advancement in this field is accelerating. With the right cryptoeconomic incentives, we can coordinate human and machine intelligence to not only dramatically accelerate scientific progress and increase human prosperity, but do so in a way that actually benefits those that created the knowledge in the first place, and decentralize it so that no single entity, or small group of entities, can control the systems that create this knowledge.
Meet Our Team
Levi Rybalov
Founder
Levi has been working in the intersection of mechanism design and distributed computing since 2017. Most recently he was at Protocol Labs, conducting research on game-theoretic verifiable computing, and autonomous agents for pricing and scheduling in distributed computing networks.
Luke Marsden
CTO
CEO, helix.ml
Tech Lead for Bacalhau and Project Bravo, Protocol Labs
Founder, MLOps Consulting
Early Docker API
Aayushi Jain
R&D
EECS @ UC Berkeley, 2025
Machine Learning Research Apprentice - Squishy Robotics
Cybersecurity Intern - Deloitte
Pratham Dave
R&D
CS and Math @ Cornell, 2027
Vlad Radu
Senior Software Engineer
PhD in Wireless Network Sensors @ University Politehnica of Bucharest, 2026
Prev at GoPro, Ethernity Cloud, Antler Interactive, Xperi Corporation, Human, Vartos, Luxoft, NXP Semiconductors
Vardhan Shorewala
R&D
EECS and Business Administration @ UC Berkeley, 2026
Amazon, IEEE, UCSF/LBNL
Taylor Hulsmans
Senior Software Engineer
Prev at Molecule, Sigmadex, HedgeTrade
OSS contributor @ IPFS, Filecoin, various DeSci projects
Geronimo Pylypchuk
Software Engineer
Software Engineering @ Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, 2028
Prev at Monopolio, Panxora, Olio, Coinfabrik
Advisors
Chris Hill
Advisor
Co-founder and CEO, DeSci Labs
Michael Zargham
Advisor
Founder and CEO, BlockScience
Kai Davenport
Advisor
Architect for Bacalhau and Project Bravo, Protocol Labs
Tech Lead, Momentum
Mythical 10x engineer in the flesh
David Aronchick
Advisor
Co-founder and CEO, Expanso
Head of Compute Over Data and Bacalhau, Protocol Labs
Kubernetes’ first non-founding product manager
Google, Microsoft
About the Founder
Levi Rybalov got his start at the intersection of DeSci and DePIN in 2017 when he discovered Gridcoin, a cryptocurrency that incentivizes volunteer scientific computing for the BOINC distributed computing platform, which grew out of SETI@home, one of the first major distributed computing projects. His interest in game theory and mechanism design led him to start researching incentives in distributed computing; you can find his earliest anon-posting on Steemit here. He published the culmination of his work in a paper generalizing Bitcoin’s reward mechanism to a heterogeneous hardware and heteregeneous computing environment. He was then recruited to work on the Bacalhau distributed computing protocol at Protocol Labs, where his research focused on the game theory of verification-via-replication, specifically the game theory of anti-collusion. He is now the founder of CoopHive, which was spun out of Protocol Labs in January 2024.