Balázs Nemethi

Over the last decade, I've worked across fintech, decentralized identity, web3 compliance, and open internet standards—usually in places where technical systems meet institutions, regulation, and coordination problems in the real world.

Right now I'm building the .agent Community, a community-backed effort to establish a new top-level domain and identity layer for AI agents, alongside AID, a DNS-first standard for agent identity and discovery. A lot of my current thinking is about what trust, discoverability, and coordination should look like once software agents become first-class actors on the internet.

Before this, I served as a Director at the Decentralized Identity Foundation, where I helped scale the organization from roughly 50 to more than 300 member organizations and worked on the kind of standards and coordination infrastructure that only matter because many different players have to trust and adopt them together. See the full timeline on my journey page.

Earlier, I founded taqanu in Germany, a financial-inclusion company focused on banking access for refugees in collaboration with organizations including UNHCR, Amnesty International, and major European banks and regulators. That work led to the G20 Financial Inclusion Symposium. I later founded Veri Labs, where I built web3-native compliance tooling and became the inventor on a granted U.S. patent for programmable access control on blockchain assets.

I try to think from first principles. I like getting underneath consensus language, market narratives, and surface-level trends to understand what is actually changing, what remains structurally true, and where new infrastructure is genuinely needed.

I also do my best not to be reactionary. I care more about building for the long term than chasing short-term noise, and I'm usually looking for approaches that remain useful, legible, and durable even after the hype cycle moves on.

Outside work, I'm serious about cooking. I love the whole process—from planning and research to sourcing, prep, and hosting—and I regularly put on both long 7–10 course dinners and more informal one-meal sit-downs for friends. It has become a running joke in my circle that if someone needs help figuring out a dish, ingredient, or technique, they come to me.

I'm also an avid paddle player and genuinely love the sport. And long before startups, I spent years sailing competitively and represented Hungary at the 420 Sailing World Championship—excellent preparation, in retrospect, for constrained environments and difficult conditions.