In this episode of The Blockopedia podcast, Venom Foundation CEO Christopher Lewis sat down with The Blockopedia’s co founder Mohammad Ahmad Khan to trace a career that runs from building Apple’s earliest software duplication systems in the 1980s through chip design, medical devices, and now institutional blockchain infrastructure, and to explain why he thinks the biggest skill for the next five years is simply knowing how to use AI well.
Lewis has spent, by his own reluctant admission, more than four decades in technology, starting at Apple Computer in the 1980s building the rack systems that duplicated floppy disks loaded with operating software. From there his path wound through Texas Instruments, where he helped design some of the earliest single chip mobile phones, a set top box startup in London that pivoted its entire business model based on a single newspaper headline about UK spectrum regulation, a medical device company that has since treated more than 120 million dental patients, and eventually into blockchain through Bitcoin, which he first encountered around 2015.
Here are the moments from the conversation worth sitting with.
1. Apple’s early culture shaped how he thinks about distributed systems today. Lewis described a young, entrepreneurial environment where a new hire with an untested idea could get a budget and a green light within days. That same distributed computing philosophy, he argued, echoes directly in how Venom‘s blockchain architecture spreads computational work rather than concentrating it, a thread he traced explicitly back to his earliest Apple projects.
2. A newspaper headline once saved his company. In the 1990s, Lewis and his co-founder were deep into building internet browsing boxes when they read a Financial Times report suggesting the UK government would shut down terrestrial TV bandwidth far sooner than expected. They pivoted immediately, built inexpensive set top boxes instead, sold millions through supermarkets, and turned that decision into the exit that eventually let Lewis retire to Switzerland. He offered it as a case study in reading market signals fast enough to act on them before they become obvious to everyone else.
3. Venom exists to be financial infrastructure for institutions and sovereign nations, not another consumer ecosystem. Lewis was clear that Venom deliberately pivoted away from the games, NFTs and general purpose ecosystem features it launched with between 2022 and 2023, refocusing entirely on financial infrastructure by 2024. The goal, he said, is enabling central banks and commercial banks to settle value over blockchain rather than legacy rails like Swift, at speeds and reliability levels that scale to hundreds of millions of users.
4. The recent Triko migration standardizes Venom on the TON network’s virtual machine. Built on the same cell based architecture developed by the Durov brothers, the migration took over a year of testing and gave outside engineers, including those building on Telegram and TON, a shared toolset to build on Venom directly. Lewis does not see TVM and EVM as competing standards long term; he expects both to coexist, much like Mac and Windows both running the same Word document.
5. He believes AI agents will soon transact with each other directly on blockchain, in fractions of a cent. Lewis pointed to Jack Dorsey’s old prediction that Bitcoin would become the money of the internet, arguing it is finally becoming visible: AI agents negotiating and paying each other in nano-value transactions too small for traditional payment rails to handle economically.
6. His advice to builders has shifted in the last two years. Where he once would have led with adaptability and letting go of a flawed thesis, Lewis now puts AI fluency first, warning that treating AI as a buzzword to bolt onto a pitch deck is the modern equivalent of slapping “.com” onto a business name in the 1990s. He urged founders to focus tightly on their actual area of expertise rather than chasing every trend at once.
7. Off-ramps, not on-ramps, are what Venom most wants builders to solve. Asked what kind of projects would most excite him, Lewis named the friction of converting crypto back into usable, spendable value as the single biggest pain point left in the ecosystem, and one he expects to matter even more once regulatory clarity fully lands.
Lewis closed by describing a document Venom has just finished on standardizing how blockchain transaction speed is measured, an attempt, he said, to give the industry something like a common speedometer so competing throughput claims can actually be compared apples to apples.
Watch the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WarBTGYsdso
