Balázs Nemethi

For about a decade I've worked across fintech, digital identity, and web3 compliance, usually where software runs into institutions, regulators, and the messy business of getting many parties to agree on one thing.

Right now I'm building the .agent Community, a member-backed effort to make .agent a real top-level domain and an open identity layer for AI agents. We're applying through ICANN's 2026 gTLD round with more than 28,000 members behind it, including Datadog, Netlify, Grab, and CrewAI. Alongside it I wrote AID, a DNS-based standard for how agents prove who they are and find each other. The question underneath all of it: when software agents start acting for us online, how do we decide which ones to trust?

Before this I was a Director at the Decentralized Identity Foundation, where I helped grow the group from about 50 to more than 300 member organizations. It was standards work, the kind that only counts when a lot of competitors agree to adopt the same thing. The full timeline is on my journey page.

Earlier I founded taqanu in Germany, working on banking access for refugees with UNHCR, Amnesty International, and a number of European banks and regulators; that work took me to the G20 Financial Inclusion Symposium. After that I founded Veri Labs and built compliance tooling for web3, and I'm the named inventor on a granted U.S. patent for programmable access control on blockchain assets.

I like to start from the actual problem rather than the language that has grown up around it. A lot of my time goes into separating what is really changing from what only sounds new.

I also try not to chase noise. I would rather build something that still makes sense after the current excitement has passed than something tuned to this quarter's story.

Outside work I cook a lot. I like the whole arc of it, from planning and sourcing to the prep and the hosting, and I'll put on anything from a long tasting menu to a quick one-dish dinner for friends. By now it's a running joke that if someone is stuck on a recipe or a technique, they text me.

I also play a fair amount of paddle. And before any of the startups, sailing was the whole thing. I raced for Hungary at the 420 World Championship in Weymouth, then moved up to the 470 class for an Olympic campaign with the national team. We didn't land a country quota for the Games, but it was full-time racing at that level. After that I trained as an architect before ending up in software. Good prep, it turns out, for tight constraints and bad weather.