Michael Heinrich didn’t remove a single brick from the Berlin Wall – he was too young – but he was there when it fell. His family lived just 100 metres away from the notorious divide that delineated the Iron Curtain separating East and West. Born in Ukraine but raised in East Berlin, his early life was defined by the wall that arbitrarily split friends and family in the German capital.
Thirty-six years later, Michael has come full circle and is now in the business of connecting walled-off worlds. This time, it’s gap in AI between web2 and web3. It’s been a remarkable journey for the Co-founder of the largest AI Layer, 0G Labs, that’s seen him surmount barriers, borders, and continents before returning to his roots. This is a story that starts and ends with walls, both literal and metaphorical.
From East to West
Recounting the historic events of November 9th, 1989, Michael recalls: “That night, I remember I was in my room when I woke up to loud noises outside. I was curious, so I went out onto our balcony. I saw my parents celebrating with champagne glasses. I saw masses of people walking towards the wall…I was really little and had no idea what was happening, nor the historical significance of it. That would come much later.”
Fast forward two decades, and that “much later” saw Michael working for Ray Dalio-founded asset firm Bridgewater Associates just as the 2008 financial crisis was hitting. By that time, his family had relocated to the US, and Michael’s fluent German had given way to fluent English following stints at an American school and Berkeley, where he scored top marks in engineering before interning with the Visual Studio team at Microsoft and then JP Morgan.
Around the same time as Satoshi Nakamoto was crafting his seminal whitepaper and polishing the code that was to become Bitcoin, Michael was immersed in the very industry it was designed to displace. “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” ran The Times’ headline memorably encoded in Bitcoin’s genesis block of January 3rd, 2009. He may have been an engineer and not a floor trader, but at that point in time, Michael was to all intents and purposes, part of Wall Street. He was back in East Berlin while Satoshi was shouting over the wall from the West. It didn’t take him long to heed the call.
From Bitcoin to Blockchain
He might not have made the first wave of intrepid bitcoiners, but by any reckoning, Michael was still early. By 2013, he’d bought his first bitcoin and within a few years was running a small mining operation with his brother. These tentative crypto forays were not unusual among tech natives, who formed the bulk of Bitcoin’s initial user base.
By 2017, blockchain as a concept was well-established, but blockchain as an industry was still some years off. As a result, Michael’s journey still had more miles to run until it would inexorably lead him to blockchain as a founder, builder, and full-time web3 evangelist. It was time well spent, however, for it gained the autodidact a grounding in developing founder experience that would prove invaluable when 0G came calling.
Post-Bridgewater, he enrolled in a Master’s program at Stanford on engineering and business management before founding the corporate wellness company Garten. After onboarding Apple, a slew of corporate contracts came their way and by 2019 had $100M in annual recurring revenue. It wasn’t to last through the COVID pandemic decimated the startup’s revenue, but the company tightened its belt and survived the downturn.
Michael had proved his mettle as a founder, survived his first crisis, and gained an indelible lesson in scaling pains. Now he was ready for a fresh challenge – and it didn’t take long to arrive. Stanford classmate Thomas Yao was seeking a co-founder to join him and MIT PhD Fan Long – a two-time Olympic gold medal winner in informatics and professor at the University of Toronto – and Ming Wu, an 11-year Microsoft Research veteran and Computer Architecture PhD. Their idea was to create a web3 startup focused on data availability, and it wasn’t long before they had a game plan and a name.
AI Meets DA
At the same time as Michael was making his founder’s foray into web3 in earnest, another force was arriving onchain: AI. Web3 developers had been swift to spot the potential for merging artificial intelligence with blockchain, creating open networks for running large AI models. But for all the upsides this marrying of two transformative technologies brings, it also carries a major bottleneck: storage requirements for LLMs are huge, and enabling onchain data verification without compromising scalability and security is complex.
It was a challenge that called for connecting centralized databases with decentralized nodes tasked with verifying data and making it available to smart contracts. Connecting bifurcated ecosystems, not by breaking down walls but by building bridges to connect them. And here, 0G Labs has had early success, hitting 10 MB/s per node for data delivery – at least 8x faster than incumbent solutions. Their recent V3 testnet Galileo delivers a 70% throughput increase over the previous testnet and can process up to 2,500 TPS using an optimized CometBFT consensus.
Michal Heinrich’s story so far has been characterized by big moves, both geographically and professionally. But in the blockchain industry, he seems to have found his forever home at the helm of 0G Labs. There’s just a few modifications still to be made before he can settle down and enjoy the view – like demolishing the final walls that separate AI between web2 and web3. He’s on the case.
