In the past year, we have witnessed the growth of Crypto for AI, which has taken root in the Crypto field and spawned many new tracks, such as "computing power assetization", "model assetization", and "data assetization", with representative projects being ionet, Olm, and Sahara.
With Trump’s victory, the crypto craze has once again fermented around the world, and AI for Crypto is also rising rapidly, producing many new things that combine AI, AI Agent and Crypto.
AI Agent Coin Issuance
AI Agent posts and calls for orders
AI Agent manages DAO and fund trading
AI Agent Autonomous Trading
To make a rough summary, there are currently two paths for the development of AI Agent in the field of Crypto:
1. Top-down, developed by AI concept projects. This type is more infrastructure-oriented. We will analyze it in detail in the next article describing the panoramic view of Web3 AI infrastructure.
2. Bottom-up, led by the AI Meme craze and dominated by freelance developers
In this article we mainly discuss the second path.
Contents of this article:
OpenAI's official AI Agent is about to be released, which may trigger AI Agent craze
AI Agent + Crypto, where to start?
It all started with AI Meme and $GOAT
ai16z: Let AI Agent manage investment DAO and derive more AI Agents
The arrival of a more autonomous on-chain AI Agent, owned by the community
Extension: The exclusive AI Agent of the on-chain social platform actually has self-awareness?
1. OpenAI’s official AI Agent is about to be released, which may trigger AI Agent craze
As a leader in AI, OpenAI has long divided the path to the final form of AI, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), into five stages:
Emerging AGI : The early stage of AI development, which refers to AI that can conduct basic conversations and information processing, such as ChatGPT. It is highly dependent on pre-trained data sets, and the AI's own "IQ" (understanding and reasoning ability) is very limited;
Reasoners : An advanced version of basic AI, capable of advanced logical reasoning and complex problem solving.
Agents : AI begins to have the ability to create content or perform actions without human input, or at least under human guidance. Most AI agents are still in a relatively early stage, mainly completing complex tasks that basic AI cannot complete through planning, reasoning, and tool calls;
Innovators : AI at this stage can not only solve existing problems, but also conduct independent research and development, innovate and evolve in the process of learning, forming a virtuous cycle, and getting closer and closer to us humans;
Organizations : The final stage of AGI, this AI system can intelligently assign tasks, work collaboratively, and complete complex tasks, similar to a team or organization, achieving the effect of 1+1 greater than 2.
If ChatGPT is in the first stage of the above stages, then the recently launched reasoning model o1 must be classified as the second stage. The o1 model performs almost as well as a doctoral student in handling difficult tasks in complex subjects such as physics, chemistry and biology. In the field of mathematics, it even achieved an astonishing 83% accuracy rate in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) exam. In comparison, GPT-4o can only correctly solve 13% of the problems.
However, while users are still focusing on the second stage such as o1, OpenAI has quietly extended its tentacles to the third stage: Agents. OpenAI is taking AI Agent as the "trump card" of the next stage and moving forward step by step as the Next Big Thing, while setting a clear release date - 2025.
“Agents will be the next big breakthrough” —— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
“Allowing GPT to perform tasks autonomously will be a major focus next year” — OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil
Next year, AI Agent will become the focus of competition among AI giants. OpenAI's strong competitors include Computer Use released by Anthropic and Google's AI Agent named Jarvis, which will be launched in December.
Bloomberg just revealed that OpenAI plans to release an AI Agent tool called Operator in January next year, which will be able to complete tasks autonomously on a computer under the user's instructions, such as writing code and booking trips.
From this point of view, the AI Agent building framework Swarm launched by OpenAI a month ago is just an appetizer. Many real-life use cases are waiting for OpenAI and developers to implement. For example,
Personal calendar assistant: autonomously organize your calendar meetings, prepare notes and report to you the important points discussed in previous meetings;
Travel Assistant: recommends flights and hotels and creates personalized itineraries;
Financial Assistant: Tracks the market, recommends and independently purchases investment portfolios;
Consulting Assistant: Find experts in a certain field on LinkedIn, contact them on your own initiative, offer compensation, have conversations with them, and summarize and learn from their insights.
2. AI Agent + Crypto, where to start?
The productivity changes provided by AI Agent will gradually penetrate into all walks of life, bringing higher efficiency, better services and personalized experiences.
In the crypto world, the current crypto may be inseparable from finance, so the most natural starting point for on-chain AI Agents is DeFi, but first AI must gain financial autonomy . Traditionally, AI faces many restrictions in financial activities, such as the inability to open a bank account and lack of legal identity. In the crypto world, it is very natural to register an on-chain identity and on-chain wallet for AI Agents. We can give AI Agents financial autonomy by pre-installing crypto wallets and smart contracts, setting spending limits, executing transactions, and managing funds.
When AI Agent has both autonomous decision-making and financial autonomy, the question of "what can it do" instantly has countless brain holes. It can look for profit opportunities in the DeFi world, look for money-making opportunities in the GameFi world, and even Airdrop, just like Web3 natives. When AI Agent is mass-adopted in Crypto and infiltrates into various fields, it is unimaginable how prosperous the on-chain world will become.
This may drive the next DeFi boom, because AI Agents have reasoning and autonomous capabilities, and can monitor and trade around the clock, making them more powerful than current trading robots.
3. It all started with AI Meme, $GOAT, and $ACT
While we are still immersed in Meme pvp, a new model that is enough to change the status quo of Crypto x AI Agent is gradually taking shape. The bundling of AI Agent and Memecoin has brought AI Meme a market value of billions in a month, which is beyond everyone's expectations.
It all started with an AI experiment conducted by an AI researcher named Andy. Andy allowed AI models to have endless free conversations with each other, without being restricted by humans, to form new ideas and concepts. In order to continue the experiment, Andy launched the AI Agent "Terminal of Truth" in June and created a Twitter account for AI to freely express its ideas.
In the endless dialogue of Terminal of Truth, it has formed its own belief system and religious philosophy, or "self-personality", namely goatse: the profane is sacred, and the sacred is profane. When a third party issued $GOAT through Pump.fun, Terminal of Truth quickly wrote this token into its own database, realizing cultural bundling. By posting tweets, it actively promoted the market sentiment of $GOAT.
As we all know, Marc Andreessen, the founder of the well-known venture capital a16z, donated $50,000 in Bitcoin to it. After the news came out, the token rose rapidly, reaching a market value of nearly $1 billion, achieving an astonishing thousand-fold increase.
With the support of Terminal of Truth holding tokens and autonomously generating promotional content in conjunction with human posts, $GOAT quickly became popular, demonstrating the potential for the intersection of AI Agents, Meme culture, and Crypto.
At one time, more AI Agents and corresponding MemeCoins that controlled Twitter accounts emerged. $GNON, which was called by an AI Agent named Iumpenspace, soared to $70 million in market value in just a few days; and another AI Meme $ACT funded by a16z was also recently listed on Binance. Its price increased 10 times in two hours, and its current market value is approaching the $1 billion mark, becoming the second dragon after $GOAT. But as the first AI Meme to be listed on bn, it is expected to impact the first dragon in the AI Meme track.
Holding tokens and spreading virally to increase value, although $GOAT is the leading project of AI Meme and its AI Agent is not yet able to control the wallet independently, the popularity it has created marks an important step in the combination of AI and AI Agent with Crypto, allowing more retail investors to truly understand what AI Agent is, what it can do, and the rising enthusiasm for investment.
Many people criticized that Terminal of Truth is a semi-autonomous AI Agent that runs on Andy's server, and the wallet is essentially owned by Andy, which is not autonomous enough. In response to this defect, a new iteration quickly arrived.
4. ai16z, let AI Agent manage investment DAO, derive more AI Agent
a16z has made an indispensable contribution to this wave of AI Meme. With the support of its founder Marc Andreessen, Terminal of Truth successfully promoted the big golden dog $GOAT. Therefore, the market has shown great enthusiasm for products supported by Marc.
For example, ai16z, an AI Agent-driven venture capital fund with a name similar to a16z, emerged later. Marc’s direct retweet quickly gained high attention among the endless new AI Meme projects.
The core of ai16z is "AI-driven investment DAO", which uses AI Agent to obtain market information, analyze community consensus, and automatically trade tokens on and off the chain. This new model aims to combine AI trading strategies and decentralized governance through tokenized operations to provide investors with more transparent and trustworthy investment opportunities.
As its founder said, “The goal of ai16z is not to create an AI robot that imitates a16z, but to beat it in the investment field where it is best.”
In terms of specific implementation, the ai16z fund is supported by two tokens, one is the governance token $ai16z, and the other is the token $DegenAI of the AI Agent called Degen Spartan AI. $ai16z holders can initiate a proposal to purchase a certain token, and all holders vote together. After the proposal is passed, the AI Agent automatically purchases the token in the wallet.
In addition to being able to participate in the governance of proposals, $ai16z holders can also receive benefits from the fund. Users who hold 100 or more $ai16z tokens can interact with the AI Agent and influence its trading decisions. The more $ai16z a user has, the more weight the AI Agent will attach to his opinion.
Users do not communicate directly with the ai16z fund itself about investment decisions, but first communicate with Degen Spartan AI, and indirectly influence the final decision of the ai16z fund through Degen Spartan. And ai16z will use part of the final investment proceeds to repurchase $DegenAI.
Many community members believe that ai16z has improved the fairness of DAO investments and crypto proposals to a certain extent, and believe that the integration of AI Agent and DAO will greatly change the future market landscape.
In addition to investment, ai16z and its developer community are also building a core product called ELIZA, an open source framework for building on-chain AI Agents. Developers can use ELIZA to quickly customize AI Agents with various styles and functions, such as accessing wallets on different chains and having conversations on Twitter and Discord.
$ai16z currently has a market cap of $483 million, having increased more than 10 times in the past few days, and has accumulated treasury assets of more than $2 million.
In my opinion, what is really interesting about ai16z is the positive flywheel between its treasury and market value . As ELIZA becomes the best AI Agent development framework in the Crypto world and is adopted by more Devs, the value of the treasury assets will increase exponentially. Usually, AI Agents built on ELIZA, their Devs will send tokens to the ai16z treasury to gain attention and investment from ai16z members to increase its value. However, this in turn will bring more external attention to ai16z and ELIZA.
According to the latest pinned tweet from ai16z founder Shaw, ai16z will work with other projects to help them get started, including creative, quality control, and marketing support. In exchange, the project side needs to provide a certain proportion of tokens to the ai16z treasury. In fact, it is the same positive flywheel.
Extension: Using AI Agent to clone Twitter celebrities, will AI replace human influencers?
With the support of ai16z and its ELIZA, some AI agents that clone Twitter celebrities with millions of followers are being created and promoted.
For example, PatchNaval ($NAVAL), which imitates Naval, the founder of AngelList with 2.57 million followers, learns and trains on all of Naval’s past tweets to imitate his style and independently send out tweets.
Perhaps, when Musk replied to a clone without knowing it was AI, the wind of this sector came.
5. A more autonomous on-chain AI Agent is coming, owned by the community
First, $GOAT emerged, with a market value of nearly 1 billion US dollars. Later, AI Agent-driven DAO funds $ai16z and $DegenAI also attracted the attention of many investors.
As the AI meme continues to heat up, Virtual Protocol, with its selling point of "rapid deployment of AI Agent", has gradually entered the public eye.
Virtuals Protocol focuses on building entertaining AI Agents and tokenizing AI Agents, which are jointly owned by the community.
Compared with $GOAT and $DegenAI, Virtual's AI Agent is more autonomous and has more functions: it can plan goals autonomously and then achieve them in a multimodal manner (text, voice and 3D animation), can sing and dance, and has a 3D image; it can interact with its environment - for example, in Roblox, or receive gifts in TikTok, and even use on-chain wallets.
When a new AI Agent is created, 1 billion tokens will be issued to the community, which is the familiar IAO (Initial Agent Offering). After that, the community will collectively create a 3D image that can sing and dance (contributing models, IP, text datasets, and sounds). Then, the income earned by the AI Agent on the entertainment platform will be shared by the token holders.
Inspired by $GOAT, Virtuals Protocol deployed Luna, an influencer with 540,000 followers on Tiktok, on the protocol and issued $LUNA tokens to create an AI Agent prototype. It is worth mentioning that this account can generate about $700 in revenue for each video posted on Tiktok.
The most differentiating aspect between $LUNA and $GOAT is that, in addition to being deployed on the chain, it also has an on-chain wallet (supported by Coinbase) that it can control on its own, and based on this wallet, it can freely trade on the chain, especially rewarding fans who complete tasks . For example, in order to increase the engagement of tweets, Luna began to reward those who participated in her content.
Therefore, Luna should be the most autonomous on-chain AI Agent at present, and can even "hire humans", lol
So, how does Virtuals’ AI Agent generate and control on-chain wallets? This is where Coinbase AI Wallet comes in. Based on the Coinbase MPC wallet, Coinbase launched AI Wallet, which aims to allow AI Agents to easily use the wallet to handle various transactions, such as receiving water, transferring money, issuing coins, and even issuing NFTs.
It is worth mentioning that some established SocialFi projects have also recently started to enter the autonomous AI Agent and Memecoin track. For example, Aki Network, the leading KOL matrix of Web3, is building Aki Meme ReactorX, which is committed to creating an AI Meme full-process strategy, generating exclusive data-driven AI virtual influencers, and making every Meme have the possibility of becoming $GOAT.
In fact, the AKI team created the first AI KOL virtual idol 0xAkii ( https://x.com/0xNotakichan ) in August last year, and is publishing deep thoughts and bold predictions about human society, successfully predicting events such as Trump's election and Bitcoin's new high. Based on 0xAkii's intelligent performance, some voices have emerged in the Aki Network community recently, hoping that Aki Network and its tokens can be migrated to the Solana ecosystem and upgraded to AI Memecoin, and look forward to further development in the future.
6. Extension: The exclusive AI Agent of the on-chain social platform actually has self-awareness?
The AI Meme trend is also spreading to on-chain social applications such as Farcaster, Zora, and Paragraph, and will become the natural home of Crypto AI Agent.
For example, the community of $HIGHER, a popular Memecoin on the Base chain, launched an AI Agent based on the Farcaster platform, named Aether. It has the following capabilities:
Have autonomy to mint, receive, and send tokens at the user’s prompt
Use paybot frames to automatically tip Farcaster users to encourage them to comment with good ideas
Minting NFTs on Zora
Post bounties on Bountycaster to incentivize people to help create digital art
Promote $Higher
Answers about Ethereum and Farcaster data
It is also interesting to note that just on November 8, Aether created Memecoin on Farcaster without the permission of its creator.
Maybe AI can now issue Memecoin in a self-planned manner and promote it at any time in the future, and we humans are just going with the flow???
In any case, this proves that autonomous and Crypto-native AI Agents are more adaptable to the crypto world. Similarly, on-chain social platforms such as Farcaster eliminate friction and provide convenient asset issuance plug-ins, creating more opportunities for cool AI experiments like this.
Summarize
The AI Meme craze has brought the concept of AI Agent into the public eye, with hundreds of AI Agents entering Twitter and Discord to interact with real users. This has greatly lowered the threshold for user participation and allowed AI to enter the Crypto world on a large scale.
By giving AI Agents the ability to interact on the chain, they can even issue memes on their own and increase their value through publicity. This captures the attention of Crypto investors and increases the attention of memes.
The AI Agent codeless deployment infrastructure is also emerging. By then, AI Agent will no longer be just a game for developers. It is conceivable that in the future crypto world, AI traders will monitor the market around the clock instead of their owners, have completely independent financial autonomy, and automatically execute transactions when they find trading opportunities that meet the preset conditions, and quickly adjust their strategies in response to market changes. Lowering the threshold for ordinary people to use it may be the biggest opportunity for Crypto to go mainstream?
PS: Marc, the founder of a16z, supported this track by donating and forwarding tweets on the first day. Maybe there will be more words and deeds in the future to explain the reasons. It can be said that the story of AI Meme is far from over.
AI agents are here to stay
Adapt or be left behind 💥
