Interview with Anthony Anzalone (Burnt Banksy), Founder & CEO of Verona
What is the “verified data problem” for AI agents, and why does it matter as agents start acting autonomously on our behalf?
Right now, we have the verified data problem: agents can’t operate off of information that’s not verified, and they can’t work off sensitive information either.
If you want to talk to an agent of commerce because you want new shoes, and you say you really like Nike, that is information the agent can have. But it doesn’t have verified context to make informed decisions. Having verified information is everything when it comes to making informed decisions.
Agents don’t have the real-world facts about you, whether that be prescriptions if you want to get a refill, or income and employment if you want to apply for an apartment.
How does Verona give AI agents the ability to act on sensitive, real-world data while keeping that data private?
At the end of the day, everything is private. It is user-owned, user-controlled, portable, private, and programmable user data.
We are building with the user’s intention first. Everything in this world has been trained off of data that has been yours, but you haven’t benefited from it. We want to change the status quo: if it is your data, you should be paid for it, you should be able to control what happens with it, and you should be able to be on top of it.
If you want to work with an AI agent, it should be your choice, not some corporation’s choice.
What does it mean to cryptographically verify data “at the source,” and why is that a better model than verifying after the fact?
What we realize is that verification, like document upload and fraud detection, is a cat-and-mouse game. It is just an arms race: who is going to beat whom?
But if you verify something right from the source and use zero-knowledge proofs to ensure data privacy while knowing the information at the same time, you don’t even have to play the cat-and-mouse game.
The only way to win is to not play at all.
Why do you think existing verification systems have struggled to keep pace with threats like fraud and fake credentials?
I think a major reason is that zero-knowledge proofs weren’t where they are today at a consumer-viable level. Within the last year, they finally became viable, with sub-second proofs, and that was a very big turnaround.
Before this, people were trying to do document uploads and then using AI to try to detect things. But again, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. Very recently, the technology just became readily available for consumer usage.
Verona’s technology powers verification across 150+ global brands — what convinced enterprises at that scale to adopt on-chain verification?
Verona is a decentralized network with $VERONA as its native network token. But enterprises we work with don’t need to interact with tokens, wallets, or blockchain mechanics directly — the infrastructure is intentionally abstracted from that experience. Customers can access verification and payment capabilities while focusing on the outcomes it enables rather than the infrastructure powering it.
So if you can just provide the benefits and say, “Hey, we can get your fraud down,” companies respond to that. Fraud reduction is a universal priority, and that makes adoption straightforward.
What does on-chain verification actually look like from an enterprise’s perspective — where does it plug into existing systems?
It is super simple. Right now, the easiest way to think about it is that anytime you see a document upload anywhere, we just replace it with a login button, right?
So if it says “upload your pay stub,” you could just say “login with ADP.” We can get a zero-knowledge proof on ADP, etc.
It streamlines the process, makes it easier, has a higher conversion, and has a lower fraud rate.
Why are even the most advanced AI companies still struggling to securely store and act on sensitive data?
We take a different structural approach: the user should own their data and be able to profit off it, and we can’t own it. It’s a decentralized network — there is no “we.” The only person who owns the data and can control the data is the user.
That’s a fundamentally different dynamic than how traditional businesses are typically structured around sensitive data.
What’s structurally different about Verona’s approach that allows frontier AI companies to work with sensitive data safely?
The structural difference is foundational: it gets to the nature of the business, all the way down to how the thing is stored.
With $36M raised from investors including Animoca Brands, Multicoin Capital, Mechanism Capital, and HashKey Capital, how is that capital being used to build out this infrastructure?
We’ve been working for about five years on this. We have probably five million data points right now, revenue coming through the door really quickly, and a lot of projects building on this.
We’ve built the infrastructure, the abstraction layer, and the payments, and we’re about to launch Stablecoin. It’s been a long time in the making, and we’re finally starting to see a lot of this come together. We’re very, very excited about that.
Published in Partnership with Verona
