# Self raised $9 million seed in November 2025 as it moves identity into AI agents

Incline, a Stabledash show. Aug 25, 2026. Rene Reinsberg.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/incline/episodes/celos-rene-reinsberg-on-proof-of-human-why-ai-needs-cryptos-k9JX4rfclyA

Rene Reinsberg argues that identity is where agentic workflows stall, and that cryptography could give AI the guardrails it lacks.

Self, the zero-knowledge identity protocol led by Celo co-founder Rene Reinsberg, raised a $9 million seed round in November 2025. In April 2026 it acquired the AI agentic-workflow company Loam, which made Uber's former Head of AI its COO.

## Identity as the friction point

Reinsberg says that when traditional companies try to make a workflow agentic, the point of friction is identity: verifying whether someone is human, or who sits behind an agent. Self launched a product called Agent ID for that, and has added preconfigured workspaces for age verification, proof of human and sovereign personhood in its enterprise dashboard.

He describes zero-knowledge proofs as a way to share less with AI. Proving to a chatbot that you are over 18 with a proof based on an ID, he says, avoids uploading a picture of the ID so that all of its content sits in the model's context.

## Free stablecoins for verified humans

USAT went live on Celo, and a partnership with Google and Self lets someone verify they are a unique human, connect a wallet and claim once. Reinsberg expects that soon there will be major programs where people get a daily allocation of compute.

## Celo's stablecoin footprint

Reinsberg says 28% of USDT transfers across all blockchains happen on Celo Blockchain, measured by transfers rather than dollar volume, and that it holds 90% market share by number of holders of Tether Gold. Celo also onboarded seven or eight new non-dollar stablecoins covering Latin American currencies, plus the Nigerian cNGN.

He says close to 80 OTC and cross-border payment companies use it for naira-to-dollar hedging, and he expects on-chain FX yield curves and derivatives to develop within 6-12 months.

## Opera and corporate interest

Opera has worked with Celo since around 2021, and its MiniPay wallet is part of that relationship. Reinsberg says it is still early given Opera's 500 million plus active users, and he expects surprises as big corporations return to the technology.

Reinsberg presents security and privacy through cryptography as crypto's other killer use case after stablecoins, a way to keep agents from abusing the data they collect. In his words, crypto brings the guardrails to control the system.

## Key takeaways

1. Self raised a $9 million seed round in November 2025 and acquired agentic-workflow company Loam in April 2026, making Uber's former Head of AI its COO.
2. A partnership between Google, USAT and Self lets people verify they are a unique human, connect a wallet and claim free stablecoins.
3. Reinsberg says Celo Blockchain carries 28% of all USDT transfers across blockchains by transaction count.

## Transcript

**Host** (0:06)

Uncharted territory. Where road maps are useless. Conditions don't negotiate. The terrain doesn't wait. Where opportunity abounds, but so does death. The builders who understand what's coming aren't mapping it. They're already climbing. This is incline.

**Host** (0:46)

Renee, Renee, welcome to the show. Good to see you. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Host** (0:51)

We're so happy to have you. We're to dive in. I know you've got a a few cool things going on. Too bad. I'm overwhelmed. I'm looking at your LinkedIn. I'm just like, where do I even start? Maybe you could maybe you could help us figure it all out here. Let's unpack it a little. Let's dive in. Yeah.

**Host** (1:08)

You wanna... Here... Here's my first question. Do you wanna talk more... You like... You got solo and self. I feel like we could go down either of those routes. Maybe, like, feel free to open up with an intro and kind of help us position where you... How you're thinking about the the relationship difference, where you're spending your time. We've loved, like, you know, seeing all the different build... Things being built on Cello,

**Rene Reinsberg** (1:29)

but we'll let you take it. No. It's cool. You've you've had some Cello friends on the show before. So, yeah, it's it's awesome. Look, Self came out of Cello. Right? We... And you guys will remember this and and appreciate it. The first sort of agents that, you know, been dabbling with were were crypto agents. Right?

And then now it's sort of this mainstream thing, but I think there was this insight maybe two years ago that, like, we'll move into this world where a lot of the, not just on chain, but sort of Internet traffic and activity is gonna be agentic. Right? And identity is gonna matter even more than than ever. And so that got us sort of down this this sort of... This road.

And we'd always thought about identity in the context of, you know, obviously, stablecoin commerce with Sello and trying to figure out what's the right solution, but it was very clear that there was a need for much more holistic platform. And so a starting point for for self in the early days was a lot around just, you know, civil resistance, right, as people were kind of, for example, distributing rewards on, like, the major platforms.

So, you know, Uniswap, they all integrated integrated self early on for for that sort of proof of human. But but now that's really... A lot of the use cases now are in sort of the agentic web space and around sovereign AI. Happy to talk about that. I... I'll give you guys a little sort of sneak preview... Exclusive preview here and some alpha on the show.

**Host** (2:59)

So that's We love it. Yeah. Yeah. Right?

**Rene Reinsberg** (3:02)

You probably saw that this AT went live on several, which is which is very exciting. And we we did previously had sort of an announcement, but there was more sort of high level, and so I'll get I'll get more into this that we'll also have a partnership with Google. So Google, USAT, SELF, everything is running on Saddle, basically giving people free Sablecoins. Right? And so all they have to do is verify that they're unique human with SELF and then put their wallet and boom. They have money money in it. Right?

And so that's, like, really the first of its kind implementation. It's it's global. Right? All you need is to verify your passport or or or ID through self. You don't even need a Google account, I think. And and there you go. And that's that's really kind of a phenomenal step. You know, we... When we started Sello, we're maybe, like, a little backstory there. We're very excited by CRM and sort of... It looked like, well, money can be software now. Right? It can have all these features.

And and so spend a lot of time thinking about what are the features of money you would want. And there was always sort of from the very early sello days and even in our early ecosystem, a lot of people excited about things like universal basic income. Right? Fast forward to today, you know, it's not just, like, people getting people money, right, in sort of an AI world, but it's like, how do we give people compute?

So this concept of universal compute is almost like it's eclipsing in terms of the excitement, right, sort of universal basic income because everybody's realizing if you have access to compute, you can you can do things. You can build things. Right? You can be productive, and you can create economic value.

And so I think it's phenomenal that Google is piloting this with stablecoins, but I see a world where very soon you'll have, like, pretty major programs where where people get sort of their kind of daily allocation of compute. And and that to me is super exciting use case for this tech.

**Host** (5:12)

Absolutely. So these use cases here, it looks like you're really driving as you have a couple of these on the site. Maybe we can kind of use these as... One, I I like how you've framed some of these and just kind of helping people get to step two or three in their minds of, like, why would this be useful? Like, how would this take shape? So you have pre k age verification, proof of human. So it's like, I'm not an agent. I am actually human. And then things around sovereign, cis Mhmm. Personhood.

Why these core buckets? And maybe speak to like some of the issues given your work with Cello and and some of the things that we've run into in the past with crypto and and all these things. Like, why are these types of problems...

**Rene Reinsberg** (6:02)

Like, why do they exist, and why do they matter in your mind? Yeah. 100%. So we have... So Celf is is a protocol, and you can use it for whatever use case. But what we realized is, especially now with most of our users being enterprises, right, that are a little bit removed from sort of, you know, the the protocol world. Right? We've we've realized that actually taking taking self and creating... And these are all workspaces in our self enterprise dashboard. Right?

So when you come in, you can still create your custom workspace and create whatever combination of proofs you may want for for whatever use case you're you're dreaming about. But we've realized this. It actually makes sense and helps people to give them these dedicated workspaces that are somewhat preconfigured.

And so if you're a big social media player and you're looking to just put a h verification check your in your in your sign up flow, for example, right, you just take the h verification workspace and takes five minutes to set to set it up. If you're if you're... If you need... If you... If you're doing some distribution, right, and where you're giving out rewards and you wanna do a proof of human check, boom. You just go in and, you know, that's preconfigured.

You you just have to maybe change one or two dials depending on, like, what exactly you're looking for. Same with sovereign. Right? Like, after fable five and, you know, extra controls kind of happen. Right? Everybody's like, oh my god. You know what? I may not have, you know, access to my favorite models in the future. So what does it mean? Right? How do we think about sort of a more sovereign setup, right, where we are where we have more control power over the systems that we're using.

And so that for us has been just... It's been... A lot of it has been customer driven. People are like, hey. I wanna do this thing, and then you have a few people say the same thing. You know, okay. Let's create a custom workspace to make it just easy for people to onboard. And, you know, I I think with all the excitement about AI and agents, you know, I mean, I've used agents in a personal context. I'm using agents, obviously, building building self and at Sello as well.

But in a lot of traditional companies, right, there's only starting now. Right? There's thinking about, okay. We have these workflows. How do we set up, you know, sort of... How do we make this workflow agentic? Right? And what we realized is that as people are kind of engaging in this exercise, there... There's... The the the point of friction is whenever identity is involved. Identity in the narrow sense of, like, verifying, you know, whether you're human or who is sort of the person behind an agent.

We have a product for that called agent ID. But also more more critically in the broader sense of identity, right, who has access to the credentials, right, to a certain service or who can control, you know, payment details. And and so all of that is where self... Where we're sort of using kind of the same sort of self technology that's based on zero knowledge proofs and TEs to offer a much wider range of functionality to help people securely, privately, you know, onboard to this to this neogenic world.

And and that's, in in many ways, much bigger scope than we would have ever imagined for this for this product. But it's it's exciting. You know? I feel like, you know... I mean, you guys will appreciate this. I mean, stablecoins, of course, killer use case for for crypto. Right? I I do think sort of secure...

Security privacy and using sort of, you know, cryptographic systems in AI is sort of the other big killer use case that hopefully also create a much better sort of perception for for crypto as an industry in the broader world because it is sort of the one thing that can really help keep the stuff... You know, keep agents in control and, you know, not have them, you know, abuse all all the data that they're getting from us. Right?

So I think this is where where we're excited to see, you know, this technology be be be just super useful.

**Host** (10:01)

Absolutely. I love something you said earlier, Rene, about sort of designing money, like, this should be. It seems like you guys aren't just taking on a challenge where you say, oh, this problem already exists. We're just fixing it. You're kind of designing the future, giving people what they don't even know that they want yet because it's sort of you're having to imagine a future that... While people can say directionally, I know this is coming. But do you find yourself trying to imagine, oh, how should this work?

How should AgenTic finance work? How should we be able... Like, you... It sounds like you might almost have to project yourself into the future. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this is the fun working in these sort of frontier industries. Right? You you sometimes...

**Rene Reinsberg** (10:47)

I mean, a lot of it is like there's no chartered tear... You know, I I mean, kind of the trailer you guys played before. Right? It's like spot on. Right? You you you don't really know what it's gonna look like. And so you have to, you know, make a couple educated guesses, run a bunch of tests, you know, do a lot of experiment... Experiments, and be ready for them to to fail. Right? And I think specifically with Salo, I think back to the early days.

And, I mean, one fun example is from almost the very, very first day. This is, twenty twenty eighteen. We're thinking a lot about on chain effects. Right? And we're thinking about, okay. Well, if you look at... And I had worked at Morgan Stanley beginning of my career doing, you know, interest rate and FX derivatives.

And so I was very passionate about, like, you know, moving sort of FX markets on chain and having, like, twenty four seven trading and, like, going more seamlessly between different currencies and maybe allowing, like, smaller companies to more easily hedge exposure. And, you know, it was, 2018, you barely had, like... You know, I mean, Tether was live. Right? But there wasn't, like, I think... I don't... Not even, like, die. It feels like we're just now getting to that moment with FX on chain.

It feels like it's just now happening. The last six months. Yeah. So it's, you know, I I look back to my notes from back then and and conversations, and, you know, it's like, wow. Like, you know, this is, like, a... Probably, like, a whole, like, ten years too early. Because even now, we're still... I mean, Celo, you guys have probably seen in the last week or so, we onboarded, like, seven or eight new non dollar stables.

So the Ripu stables, which, you know, cover Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, I'm looking up here, Colombia, Chile, Peru, so all these stablecoins. And then this morning, super exciting, a fiat backed Nigerian c g... CNGN that also went live. And, you know, now you actually have... You have spot markets. Right? You still don't have, like, you know, sort of yield curves and future markets to do some of the more advanced derivative stuff that, you know, I I think will happen.

But at least now, yeah, this stuff is happening, and you can actually do more interesting things. I think what TaxTal is doing particularly in Nigeria where, you know, they're already working with, like... I think it's, like, close to 80 OTC and cross border payment companies on, like, hedging, right, and sort of naira to dollars. That's that's super fascinating. You know, I feel like we're talking about this stuff back in 2018, and it's it's really starting to happen now.

And so sometimes you just have to be comfortable with an idea taking, you know, close to ten years to come to fruition. But it's exciting. And for Seller, we've always been focused on that. And so it's it's particularly cool to see it now really, really happen at at at at this kind of big scale. And I think this is where, you know, with this with this partnership with Google and Tethr now, it's also a testament to the team just, you know, through the bear market, through all the ups and downs, just executing. Right?

We're now... And for Tether, we're driving 27% or so of their kind of global transaction counts. Right? So, you know, across all chains, all ecosystems... Let me make sure get the number right. 28% of UCT transfers happen on Seller, right, which is which is massive. And I think we're we're the biggest with 90% market share in terms of number of holders for their Tethr Gold product. Right?

So it's it's just like, you know, these things don't happen overnight, and they're sort of a function of working with, you know, big partners in market, like, you know, through Opera, with Minipay, and and others to to really build up an ecosystem and distribution and and and, you know, quite frankly, use cases that anchor stablecoin usage in the real world... In in the real world, right, not just for sort of huddling and getting some yield, but but actually payments and commerce.

So in in some ways, a lot of this ends up tying tying together. Right? Because you you do need identity. You do need sort of the agentic infrastructure because a lot of the the future sort of volume, right, in terms of on chain transactions, even in FX, will likely just be driven by by agents. And so it's a little bit like, you know, putting the different pieces in place and making sure you have whatever it takes to to validate a certain use case and then and then grow it from there.

**Host** (15:11)

So is it lot of network

**Host** (15:14)

and just, like, volume. Like you said, it was you said it was 28% or 26% of of Tethr's total volume is on... Or USDT transfers are on sellout. Did I get that right?

**Rene Reinsberg** (15:26)

Yes. I looked I looked it up just now. 28% of USDT transfers across all blockchains are on sell out. So it's not the dollar volume amount because that, you know, obviously, also, you know, depends a little bit on, you know, what chains the exchanges work with. But if you look at sort of individual holders, wallets, right, transacting in USDT and look at sort of all the trend... The transfers that are happening, that's... Yeah. It's like 28% market share, which is is super exciting.

And, you know, we're definitely in our sort of... As we look at success, what success looks like. Right? It looks it looks at, like, real people transacting in stablecoins. Right? Whether... You know? And and this obviously, you know, is is kind of a... So where self comes in because we know, for example, behind every Opera Mini Pay user, there's a real human. Right? Because we we, you know, we've gone through, like, a self verification,

**Host** (16:19)

either lightweight or sort of the full the full NFC one. I wanted to ask little bit to Opera. Sorry, Zach. My bad. You're good. Speak a little bit. To... Like, Opera has been such a interesting company to follow. Like, Charles was one of our first ever podcast interviews, like, back in 2024. And I know that Opera and MiniPay has had such a embedded relationship and meaningful relationship to the Celo blockchain.

Speak a little bit about the the work with with Charles and team, and then also, like, yeah, putting a bow on how a relationship like that really positions self. Because from what I'm gathering, just knowing your role at Cello, the really interesting, like, vantage point you have with what you've mentioned with Tethr and the ecosystem that Cello provides and distribution it gives, like, it seems like a really interesting example from, like, a built...

Baked in distribution point of view for self to have all of these kind of perfect customers kind of ready to go. Speak a little bit to the relationship with Opera as, like, a leading indicator.

**Rene Reinsberg** (17:28)

Yeah. Absolutely. No. You're you're totally right. And, you know, we... When we launched Opelous back in, you know, gearing up for launch twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, we went out and talked to a lot of people about building Opelous and doing stuff. And Opera was a part of the sort of initial cohort of sort of bigger corporate... Corporations that were interested in exploring use cases. Right? And so the the relationship goes back. Think, you know, sort of maybe officially we signed something back in 2021 or so.

So... But it's, you know, it's a it's a good five years of, like, working together. And there are lot of other companies who came to us along the way and were like, hey. We wanna do stuff. Right? And I think what I will say to Accra's credit from the beginning, they're very focused on solving their users' problems. Right? It's like, okay. Well, we don't just wanna kind of launch a wallet. We wanna make sure this wallet makes... You know, like, helps our users, you know, make payments or get remittances coming in.

Right? And it was... It it started with, like, some very clear value propositions. And and over time, based on what users were doing, right, adding other features. And and I think especially in crypto, right, you oftentimes, you know, you have a hot narrative. Right? It's like NFTs or meme coins. Right? And people jump on it, but, you know, it's it's not clear there's real product market fit from a sort of, you know, average user perspective. Right? Everybody's just, like, trying it out, playing with it. Right?

And and and to to our gross credit, throughout all these ups and downs, they didn't get distracted. Right? They just focused on what's probably become the best stablecoin wallet out there in the world. And so... And we've worked closely with them. You know, we have across the team, you know, several working sessions a week for, you know, the last few years. And, obviously, they're now one of the biggest holders of Cello.

So there's beyond sort of mini pay, there's a lot of things we're doing with with with the company and they're doing with Cello and even just you know, I don't know if you guys know this, but if you're if you're using Opera, if you're like a a loyal Opera user, you're actually getting rewards in Sello. Right? And you can use those then to, you know, buy digital goods, you know, for example, change your browser background, stuff like that.

So there's there's a real economy that's that's been sort of formed around, you know, the the products they've been building with us. So I think that's that's super exciting. I think, you know, you had Charles on. Their team also is is, you know, crypto native. They get it. Right? They they didn't source out building this product. They built it in house, which I think is really just a testament for how forward thinking they are. So they're they're kind of the perfect partner.

We've tried replicating this with others. And the truth is, you know, it's it's hard to find a company that's, like, gonna be dedicated and for multiple years. Right? It still feels like we're early sort of innings of sort of where this can go given their their scale of 500,000,000 plus active users. Right? We're we're still early. But, obviously, it's attracted a lot more partners coming to the ecosystem now.

And I I do feel like, you know, despite sort of the maybe public sentiment around crypto, there is a bit of a second, you know, sort of momentum spring of of big corporations looking at this technology and saying, oh, you know, this is actually, like, battle tested now, and what can we do? And so I almost feel like, yeah, just looking at our sort of pipeline on the seller side and the and the partners that we're talking to, there's there's gonna be some surprises here, right, as as you'll you'll see sort of...

Even sort of big traditional companies embrace this much more than than they ever have in this... In these last ten years of people trying to onboard onboard companies to crypto. And and stablecoins stablecoins are sort of the the killer the killer use case for that. Right? I think tokens are just a bit more complicated. Right? And I I think it's just not even getting into the regulatory side of it. Right? You know, it's...

**Host** (21:46)

This is a much more straightforward use case. One of the last things I wanted to ask you about while we have you on, Rene, is you commented on the World Bank being right about the AI lifeline. You wrote something about not turning into a leash. I thought that was a pretty interesting perspective, particularly for regions like Sub Saharan Africa, other developing regions, the real AI opportunity. Maybe Drew will pull this up. Yeah. Just tell us a little bit about this because this was...

This is a pretty interesting thing to read through a little bit.

**Rene Reinsberg** (22:15)

Yeah. So, I mean, look, this goes back to, I think, probably one of the biggest shifts that we we see right now in in AI, right, where, you know, obviously, everybody very happily, very quickly onboarded and, you know, it's like using Claude and, like, you know, using ChatGPT. Right? And I think it's it's working great for a lot of people, for a lot of use cases even in enterprises. Right? But people are wondering, well, wait a second. You know, this is, like, happening in in big companies.

This is happening at the at the sovereign... At the government level. Right? Well, what what happens with our data? Right? What happens maybe even if access to, you know, one of the models we're using gets gets turned off again? And and so this this aspect of sovereignty of owning your data, of being in control of your data, of controlling what of your data actually gets fed into an LLM, I think these are the questions that are gonna drive sort of the next phase of of sort of AI adoption.

And I think this is where self plays such a critical role. Right? Because we have both the tools around kind of, you know, in a way, like, what you kind of provide to to a system. Right? So for example, I give you an example. If you if you're, you know, if you don't want your chatbots to know everything about you. Right? But you want a proof to your chatbot that you're over 18. Right?

Sharing a zero knowledge proof that you're over 18 that's based on an ID is really powerful instead of uploading a picture of your ID where suddenly all that content on the ID sits in the context. Right? And that's a very simple example. Right? And it's like one everybody understands, but you can expand that conceptually to all, you know, data of an organization. Right?

And I think this is where I think a lot of organizations have been very, you know, late in a way to adopting things like agents or or AI more broadly. Right? Because they don't wanna... They don't want their data to leave their premises, right, and sort of be be fed into these systems. And I think we're seeing this as like... I think there's a lot of tooling that is yet to be built. We're we're trying to build some of it with self. But I think this is the next big wave. Right?

Because clearly, the models itself have gotten so good that they can solve much harder problems. And now that the missing piece is really what data are you feeding them to to actually get even more value out of them. And so that's really where where I see self fit. And and more broadly, right, where I think cryptography and sort of the the systems, the technologies we as an industry have developed in the last ten years or so will become really valuable.

And so I I, you know, I think early early days of AI, when people like, oh, you know, there isn't too much overlap between crypto and AI. And, you know, people are wondering about this. Right? What is the overlap? And then you had some projects, and then we were trying to force that overlap, and you had pictures of, like, AI plus crypto, and they didn't really make sense. Now it's like, no. Actually, this makes sense. Right? We... This is AI, and crypto kind of brings brings sort of the guardrails to control system.

And so I think it's very positive for for crypto as an industry to lean into that. This... You know, so much of sort of future growth will come will come from AI, and and crypto can be such a useful piece of infrastructure around it. So that's that's a little bit where where that post goes. And we're, you know... I mean, the amount of conversations I have on a on a daily, weekly basis with people in government, like people at big companies, that's that's top of mind right now for everyone.

It's like, you know, what is happening? How should we think about how our data shows up in these systems? What are the risks? How do we control, you know, who has access to what? How do we know, you know, like, this... Like, all these agents kind of popping up. Who is... You know, who's controlling them? What access rights do they have?

I think these are sort of the big questions of our time, and I think there's plenty of space for for founders, for entrepreneurs to come in and start really interesting companies at that intersection.

**Host** (26:29)

I love it, including yourself. Sounds like you guys are one to watch. We'll we'll be keeping our eye on you. This was an awesome deep dive. Thank you, Rene, for taking us on it, helping us with the sell o self intersection, and also the intersection of AI and amount of money, which we're really excited to keep digging into. That's right. I appreciate you guys. Thank you for having me. Take care. Thanks. Good to meet you.