In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with George, co-founder of Balance, a Toronto-based crypto custodian, about his path from academia to building custody infrastructure for institutional crypto clients. George shares his Romanian-Canadian background, his master's research in machine learning at McGill under Doina Precup, and his years leading engineering and R&D at photo-sharing company 500px before pivoting fully into crypto. He recounts first encountering Bitcoin in 2008 during undergraduate cryptography classes, mining and losing early coins, then being reconvinced by Ethereum's whitepaper years later. George explains why Balance pursued custody specifically starting in 2019, the long enterprise sales cycles involved, and how Techstars Toronto helped launch the business. The conversation also explores possible long-term intersections between AI and blockchain, particularly around decentralized federated learning, and closes with George's reflections on money as a social convention shaped by trust and exchange rather than any single fixed definition.
Balance's George on quitting AI research for Bitcoin, and why crypto custody took Canada years to build.
What's happening in the crypto market right now?
Bitcoin just broke through the previous psychological barrier around 20,000, the price is in discovery mode again, and everyone in the ecosystem is excited. It feels like Bitcoin finally got the monkey off its back after holding since the 2017 crash. Our clients are happy, we're happy, it's a bit of a bonanza across the whole space right now.
Where did we first meet?
I think it was at a conference back in 2019, around the same time we got into Techstars Toronto. I believe we were introduced through a warm intro, either by Mike Kobkin or Jamie Kalchenko, one of them connected us.
What does your background look like, are you from Toronto originally?
I'm Romanian by origin, a dual citizen of Romania and Canada. I moved to Canada around 2010 for a master's in computer science at McGill in Montreal. I spent two and a half years in the Reasoning and Learning Lab under Doina Precup, who later ran DeepMind's Montreal team. I have a bachelor's in computer science from Romania and specialize in unsupervised learning.
Do you see threads between blockchain and AI, short or long term?
Right now the most exciting AI work, like GPT-3, is centered on digital assistants and doesn't directly tie into crypto. But there's one promising intersection: federated learning, where local model updates get aggregated by a central server. Replacing that trusted central server with something decentralized is where blockchain could eventually fit, though that's still a few years off.
When did you get bitten by the crypto bug?
I first heard about Bitcoin in 2008 during my computer science coursework, hash cash, b-money, it was treated as edge-case cryptography nobody took seriously. I mined some early on and lost the wallet in Dropbox. I didn't grasp the implications until 2013 when I reread the whitepaper, and then Ethereum's launch in 2015 fully convinced me.
What did your path look like before building a crypto custody business?
Before crypto, I spent three and a half years at 500px, a large photo-sharing company backed by Andreessen Horowitz, first building their licensing marketplace, then becoming Director of Engineering and later Director of R&D applying deep learning to search and recommendations. After that I did a brief stint in pharma working on antisense nucleotide therapeutics before moving fully into crypto in 2017.
What is money, really, in your view?
Honestly, I don't know, and that might be the best answer. Money is driven by social convention as a means of exchange, and those conventions vary across cultures and eras, from barter to tap-to-pay. It's a useful social convention that lets society operate efficiently, whether that convention is shells, greenbacks, fiat, or cigarettes in a prison.
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