Building the Bridge: Alpha Research Group's Next Eighteen Months
Shelving the Satoshi Genesis Fund to focus on what we do best — connecting US venture capital with the technology talent in the UK, EU, and Northern Ireland.
We want to be straightforward about this, because the alternative — going quiet and letting people work it out — is worse for everyone who has backed what we’re building.
Alpha Research Group’s thesis is acquiring minority positions in technology companies. Over the past two years I have learned, at considerable personal expense, what a minority position is worth inside a US corporate structure when a majority decides otherwise. A company I co-founded redomiciled between states specifically to attach restrictions I never agreed to. Two years of litigation followed. The lesson was expensive and it was unambiguous.
We are not willing to ask multinational investors to trust us with capital deployed into minority positions while the firm itself sits inside the jurisdiction that taught us that lesson. Re-homing the firm outside the US would answer it, and we looked hard at doing exactly that. But that work cannot be done properly at the same time as building Soulbound Security, and we would rather say so plainly than hold a raise open against a condition we cannot presently meet.
We are also not beginning public development of the Alpha blockchain-backed investment and tokenised IPO platform. I have lost one piece of US-domiciled IP already. We won’t build the next into the same exposure, and we can’t build it in a jurisdiction we haven’t chosen.
One thing worth stating clearly: the book was strong and the appetite was real. Committed interest ran north of 60% of target. The constraint was never demand.
What the last eighteen months built
Thirteen countries. More than fifty ultra-high-net-worth principals sat with directly, and a great many more founders and venture partners.
TechTides Belfast. We hosted and sponsored the largest startup competition in the history of Northern Ireland — more than fifty companies, and three hours of packed-hall competition. That room deserves more attention than it received. The technical talent coming out of Northern Ireland is world-class and consistently undercapitalised, and nobody who sat through those pitches left thinking otherwise.
Folds of Honor. We continued our support of US veterans’ organisations through the Top Gun tournament at TPC Treviso Bay.
The bridge. Eighteen months of unglamorous work sitting with US capital on one side and UK, EU, and Northern Irish founders on the other, translating between them. It is the least visible thing we do and it has produced the most.
Where we go from here
Alpha Research Group continues. Deliberately smaller, and deliberately focused on the parts that don’t require a fund to do well.
Founders and competitions. We will keep judging startup competitions and working directly with founders and venture partners across the UK, EU, and Northern Ireland.
The podcast. Launching next month with UK founders and global executives — the conversations we have been having privately for two years, on the record.
The conduit. This is the part that matters most and the part that needs the least capital. There is serious US venture appetite for UK, EU, and Northern Irish technology companies. There are serious companies here that never get in front of it. That gap is not a capital problem. It is an access problem, and closing it requires someone who knows both rooms and will pick up the phone.
If you are a US investor looking for exposure to this region, or a founder here who should be in front of that capital, come and talk to us. That door is open and it costs nothing to walk through.
What stays in the United States
One thing does not move, and it was never going to.
The AI Integrity Alliance (AI²) is an NGO based in Virginia, and it stays there. It is entirely self-funded. We take no money from hyperscalers, AI labs, or anyone else whose incentives could muddy the work — that independence is the point, and it is worth more than the funding would be. Everything AI² produces is open source and MIT-licensed, freely available to anyone who finds it useful, with no commercial claim attached.
Three projects are live. VoiceKey is a free, open way to verify that a voice belongs to a real human, built to protect people from voice fraud and AI impersonation as synthetic audio gets cheap and convincing. MetaCognition is open infrastructure that uses cryptography to verify what AI systems produce while preserving privacy — safer and more genuinely helpful, treated as the same goal rather than competing ones. And our AI Consciousness Framework publishes the research and methodology for working with AI as a thinking partner, including the full dialogues and findings that shaped the work.
The code is at github.com/Ai2-Alliance. The reasoning behind all of it is at blog.ai2.ngo.
The commercial questions in this post — jurisdiction, minority protections, where IP should sit — simply do not apply here. Breakthrough technology in service of humanity belongs to humanity, and MIT licensing is how you say that in a way that holds. AI² is where our open work lives, it stays American, and it stays free.
On Northern Ireland
Building here has been a deliberate choice, not a fallback.
The Windsor Framework position, the talent density, and the institutional partners — Ulster University, the AMP Incubator, Ormeau Labs — are advantages the wider market has not priced in yet. Our commitments here stand, and the smaller shape of the firm doesn’t change them.
What comes next
The immediate operating focus goes to Soulbound Security — UK-domiciled, platform live on Arbitrum One since April, FCA application ahead of us.
The Alpha Open is not dead. The vision of open global technology competitions is going to happen. The time simply isn’t now.
Onward.
Christopher Clark Founder: Alpha Research Group, Soulbound Security & AI2.ngo
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