CINGS Crypto x AI Summer Party
On Saturday 9th September, about 25 CINGS members and guests (plus two very good dogs) gathered in Connecticut for an afternoon of pool, lunch, and three back-to-back panels on AI and crypto. From 12 to 7pm, the group moved between the pool, the patio, and the living room for conversations that ranged from AI-powered zero waste design to agentic AI to crypto investing. Below is a recap of the various panels organized for the event.
Panel 1: AI & Sustainable Design
Shelly Xu — Founder, SXD. Shelly has spent 15+ years specializing in zero-fabric-waste design, with prior stops at Instagram, Prada, and McKinsey, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Through SXD, she's built patented AI technology that scales zero-waste design for partners ranging from global luxury brands to performers, earning recognition including SXSW's Top Innovative World Technology and the Global Change Award.
Shelly quietly posting zero-waste designs to an anonymous Instagram account while working at Instagram herself, and watching that grow into thousands of followers and interest from major fashion labels before she built SXD as a B2B platform rather than her own label, so the impact could scale across entire industries (including notoriously bureaucratic ones like automotive). She spoke candidly about where AI has genuinely helped their zero-waste algorithms leap forward — including a breakthrough from an MIT researcher they later brought on — and where they think the AI hype is running ahead of reality, from inflated valuations to a wave of “AI startups” that are little more than thin wrappers on existing models. The conversation also touched on how U.S.-China tensions around AI research are starting to shape hiring and collaboration decisions, and closed on a candid look at the gap between what consumers say about sustainability and what they actually buy.
Panel 2: Agentic AI
Michelle Wang (moderator) — Cofounder & Partner, Lair East Labs, a NYC-based early-stage venture firm and accelerator (Crunchbase Top 100 Global Accelerator, NJ EDA certified). Nearly a decade in venture, including nine-plus years across KPMG, PwC, and EY in China and the U.S., and experience guiding a European startup's U.S. expansion through to acquisition by a NASDAQ-listed firm.
Dovran — Founder & CEO, NeuronSpike Technologies, building brain-inspired (neuromorphic) AI chips. Harvard MBA graduate (a co-authored paper has drawn 500+ citations), holds a patent with Samsung, and is a three-time International Physics Olympiad medalist.
Rein Wu — Founder, IndicatorLab, running multi-chain HFT strategies built on proprietary payment-network analysis. AI PhD and former Senior Research Scientist at VISA Research; has founded two fintech companies that raised $1M+ combined, holds 10+ US patents, and has published 30+ papers. Currently building Myth, a testing and verification IDE for AI coding agents.
This panel dug into agentic AI and where real defensibility lies as large language models become commoditized — the consensus was that proprietary, domain-specific data is becoming the real moat, not raw model capability. Dovran walked through NeuronSpike's approach to computing directly on memory to break the “memory wall” limiting today's hardware, while Rein shared how techniques from payment fraud detection translate surprisingly well to reading signals in on-chain trading data. Both founders pushed back on the assumption that AI coding tools are a silver bullet — in practice, testing and debugging still eat most of a project's time, so the realistic productivity gain is closer to 20-30%, not the “one person, billion-dollar company” headlines. The group also weighed AI's growing role in both cybersecurity threats (especially AI-generated social engineering) and defenses, and had a genuinely thoughtful moment on what happens to the labor market — and to how we define an economy — as the link between labor and output keeps blurring.
Panel 3: Investing in Crypto & AI
Clare He — Managing Director, Capital Formation at 1kx, a research-driven crypto/Web3 venture firm founded in 2018 and based in Hong Kong, where she leads LP relationships and capital-raising strategy. Over a decade across venture capital and private equity.
Tian Zeng — Founder, Nirvana Capital and Phoenix Digital. Previously Senior Equity Analyst at Charles Schwab, with earlier roles at Morgan Stanley, Citadel, and Jefferies.
Closing out the day, Clare and Tian gave a grounded look at how they actually invest in this space. Clare walked through 1kx's venture approach — underwriting for power-law outcomes, tracking specific founder profiles, and watching a new wave of institutional capital (endowments, pensions, insurers) enter crypto post-FTX. Tian described his fund, Third I, as a discretionary, absolute-return trading strategy across crypto, equities, and derivatives — not high-frequency, just fast — and shared that the fund was up roughly 100% during a stretch when the broader market dropped 35-40%, a reminder that capital protection matters as much as upside. Both touched on the ongoing debate over whether value accrues to tokens or equity (using Hyperliquid's revenue-driven buybacks as a counterpoint to the old hype-and-narrative playbook), why Ethereum's valuation is getting harder to justify as activity shifts to Layer 2s, and the loosening regulatory environment creating both new opportunity and new risk. They closed on where the two fields are colliding: tokenized real-world assets trading 24/7 and stablecoins emerging as a payment rail — including, increasingly, for AI agents transacting on someone else's behalf.