Bankless - AI ROLLUP #11: $97B Elon OpenAI Rumor | AI Crypto Rebound? | Virtuals on Solana | ARC Launchpad

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Ejaaz and David reunite to dissect the AI Crypto sector’s rebound from a 70% crash, fueled by Elon’s rumored $97B OpenAI bid and the relentless rise of open-source devs being heads down. They explore how tokens might be the most accessible path to AI exposure, why ARC’s curated launchpad could elevate agent quality, and what Virtuals’ move onto Solana means for cross-chain expansion. Meanwhile, X (Twitter) embraces a new wave of AI agents, and AI16z reorganizes to stay competitive. Is this the turning point for AI and crypto—or just another plateau? Tune in to find out, anon. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax  🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain   ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo  🏦ONDO | INSTITUTIONAL GRADE FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Ondo   ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/34  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:17 Crypto x AI Exposure Strategy  10:56 Elon’s $97B OpenAI Bid 13:14 Crypto x AI Mindshare & Markets https://www.cookie.fun/   https://x.com/S4mmyEth/status/1889675738099376149   https://x.com/dv_memetics/status/1888956005515477372  https://x.com/0xelonmoney/status/1889743777088360909   22:48 Andrej Karpathy https://x.com/karpathy   https://x.com/hyperbolic_labs/status/1887229114769359013  22:58 Replit comes out with a mobile app https://x.com/Replit/status/1887159041455169683  https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383  33:12 X (Twitter) is getting involved in agents https://x.com/ethermage/status/1887526320487473326  37:24 ARC reveals their new launchpad & agent launch https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/1889768219873099902  https://x.com/askjimmy_ai/status/1889736290696045017  https://x.com/0thTachi/status/1887620290727059731   51:17 Virtuals are live on Solana! https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1889365020393496910  https://x.com/gkisokay/status/1889721779146596503  https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1887508625268367843   https://x.com/gkisokay/status/1889331963917729993  59:03 AIXBT holders can now connect X account = richer agent interactions https://x.com/aixbt_terminal/status/1887355817957204434  1:02:46 Ai16z (ElizaOS): a brutally raw take https://x.com/CryptoStreamHub/status/1887435927309721992  1:07:57 What Ejaaz focused on this upcoming week 1:08:59 Closing & Disclaimers  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠ 

Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI roll-up where we stay up to speed with the emerging trends and developments in the AI crypto space. I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host, Ijaz. E-Jaz. How was your week, my man? Good, man. Markets have bounced back. I'm seeing green on the charts for the first time. Markets are not dead. Yeah.

How does that feel? My ego is now preserved, David. I was about to lose it last week. But it's feeling pretty good, man. I have noticed, like, a lot of teams are just heads down building. A lot of teams complaining. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, yeah, but whether you like that or not, the market, aka crypto, Twitter, definitely just resonates with prices.

And so it's nice to see a bit of a relief so that the people's work can actually be a little more appreciated. Yeah, like we were talking about all throughout last week, just the hot air is out of the bubble. We have been at a call it a $6.5 to $7, $7 billion market cap for all of February. So we haven't gone up. We haven't gotten down. so we are flat for 12 days. And 12 days is like, at least in terms of how long we've been doing this, that's like 20% of the entire longevity of this thing as people have been paying.

I've aged 10 years. Yeah, you've aged 10 years. Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of start with a zoomed out perspective here on this episode of EJazz about kind of just like what we're doing, why we're doing this and what this sector really means. I think people can kind of interpret crypto AI as this niche within this niche, which I think it currently is, and that's kind of what we're doing. It's of the total crypto market cap of $3.2 trillion.

The total market cap of crypto AI is $7 billion. So it's incredibly small. But I think the potential of the crypto AI sector is what we're really here for and what we're trying to talk about. And I maybe have this positioning that I think might be useful for you and me as we do these episodes, but also for the listener. So you ready? Yep.

Go for it, man. Okay. So say you're a modern day investor. Which you are. So am I. So is the average listener here. And you just want exposure to AI. Obviously, you want exposure to AI because it's 2025.

Like the modern millennial Gen Z investor wants to invest in AI, not like SaaS or manufacturing. Like AI is where all the growth is. That's why we're predicting so much growth coming. So like we, I want, I want exposure to AI. So you can either buy Tradfai Silicon Valley equities, NVIDIA, 3.1,3. trillion market cap, Microsoft, 3.1 trillion dollar market cap, Google, 2 trillion, Amazon, 1.9 trillion, meta, 1.3 trillion. Like, very expensive, very highly priced software companies, tech companies. Every single one of these, other than meta, is valued higher than Bitcoin.

And also, in addition to that, every single one of these is a diversified basket of like a variety of products and services, some AI related, many of them not. So it's actually just not even perfect AI exposure to begin with. Now, not to knock down these companies, there are benefits of investing in these companies in order to gain exposure to AI, if that's what you're seeking. They have all the proprietary user data, and that can only come from the value of proprietary user data, which is very powerful in the AI context, can only really come from closed source walled gardens of Silicon Valley and Web 2. So that will kind of always be their main advantage, their main edge that they have versus other investment vehicles.

Also, worth noting on the same subject, this advantage is something that, like, the arms racing nation states of United States and China will also help fight over. Data is the line that's drawn between China and United States in the AI arms race. And you can gain exposure to this investable value of data through these companies, albeit through very high price tags.

Okay, so that's one option to gain exposure to AI as a category. The other option is you can venture out into the world of crypto AI, which other than investing in the private market space, like private and AI startups, which is closed off to most people, really the only way to gain exposure to AI, as I understand it, is through crypto AI. And that's because there's some inherent resonance between the value of open source AI and crypto AI through tokens. We all learned that the big takeaway from the Deepseek R1 model is that while there are like billions and billions of dollars being poured into developing these frontier, highly capable, highly sophisticated models from the Silicon Valley companies, these models, when they get released, get deconstructed and reproduced by the market extremely quickly. The digestive process of copycats, once that is finished, the value of that model is now just owned by the public domain. It's in the open source world for anyone to use. we saw people like things like Eric Voorhe's Venice platform and many other platforms just integrate R1 just instantly. And the value of chat GPT and the models that the R1 model copied just ended up in the open source domain very, very fast.

And so this is where kind of the crazy creative developers in the open source AI sector really take over here, rather than like billions and the trillion dollar companies that are all competing to produce the most valuable model on the open source AI sector. We have this army of open source developers that are applying these models, that are leveraging these models in like crazy, experimental, innovative, call it risky ways. And so we have like a tale of two worlds here. Like in contrast, Silicon Valley, China are in this arms race to produce the same like monolithic product, which is a really good model. Like all of these billions of dollars in meta, Amazon, like Elon Musk, OpenAI, China. They're all producing really good models. The same product.

They're all going after the same product. They're all going after the same space. And they're also really highly valued. And then also things like OpenAIA aren't even, aren't even public. You can't even buy Open AI. In crypto, on the flip side of things, these extremely frontier niche, creative, risky endeavors are valued anywhere between $10 million and $1 billion. I think Virtuals is the most highly valued crypto AI token at $1.3 billion.

Maybe Tensor, BitTensor is up there too. And they're simply leveraging the fruits of the AI models. arms race and they don't even have to do any of the work. And so I don't really know what products and services will emerge out of this open source AI sector, but that's what we're doing here on this podcast. We are doing these podcast series about what these creative exploratory developers are working with AI models. And that's exactly what I'd say like our North Star is on these podcast series. And I think really the point that I want to drive home here is that so much of the investable opportunities for AI remains in the tokenized open source crypto AI sector.

You have the value of open source AI, which is massive. And then you slap a token on it. And that becomes a way that the value of open source AI gets monetized. And that is what I would describe as much of what the content that we cover here on this podcast series is. So that's like kind of my thesis, my model, my North Star. I think we've said this in a variety of different ways in a handful of different times on the podcast. But I kind of wanted to just open up this podcast, once again, of reminding us and also listeners about that.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, just to kind of summarize that, from what I've heard, at least, David, like, AI is the most exciting sector and probably the most lucrative sector to ever befall humanity, right? And it's happening right now in front of us every week. There's a new update, a new major model breakthrough. And you're saying typically the way that these things are invested in pushes out 99% of people.

And even people that take the time to research, learn, and, you know, try and teach themselves about these things, they don't have any access because it's private rounds or you have to wait until it's public and then it goes to trillions of dollars until you can buy it, hence the Nvidia and stuff. And you're saying that crypto not only offers us a new way to invest in these things via tokens, but it also allows us to invest in a wider range of products, services and companies. because of its open source nature. Am I getting that right, David? That's exactly right. And there's something about the nature of tokens that's kind of just aligned with the investable appetite of people these days. We know that financial nihilism is in, starting from like the GME movement back in 2021.

But people are really looking to like invest $500 to $5,000 and trying to 10x, 100x that, that amount. And that is something for better or for worse, it's something that is like that is, that's crypto. That's what crypto does. There's a reason why this AI crypto sector also started highly overlapping with the meme coin sector because a lot of these AI tokens started as tokens launched on Pump.com. And so there's just kind of like investor appetite resonance with AI crypto tokens that are like value between, you know, $10 million and $1 billion. I think that is matching the zeitgeist of the time for investors. Well, let's just be honest with everyone for a second

here, right, David. The main reason why these tokens weren't really recognized as quasi-equity instruments was because we had governments that were just very much against acknowledging any of this, right? And now we have the most pro-crypto-US government ever, which kind of like leads and has a knock-on effect to every other nation in the country, sorry, in the world, than we've ever had. So if there's ever going to be an opportune time to combine like tokens with a real investable opportunity into real tech that's being built in an open source fashion, it's probably now. Yeah.

I think that's right. And especially as I think that is what everyone is getting excited about. That's what that big bubble was that we are kind of on the tail end where the total crypto market cap of AI tokens was at $15, $18 billion, excuse me, almost $20 billion. We are now down to $7 billion. But now everyone realizes this, this is the game. Like there is immense value in open source AI. and the only way that open source AI can become monetized by developers is with crypto tokens.

It sounds like you're saying we're bottomed, David. Don't say the word. I don't want you to say the word. But it sounds like that's what you're saying. Don't drink it. Well, I think if anyone is like, I mean, it's, I think too late now, we've already done the thing that you just said. But it's just a good reminder for like why this is not a one-term blip of a bubble that happened in, you know, January of 2025, but this is actually an ongoing sector that's going to be alive and iterative

and worth paying attention to and keeping tabs on as we go forward. I appreciate that, David. And actually, on that serious note, I want to move on to something a little more serious as well that happened this week because obviously there were a million things. Is this a serious serious serious or is this an EJA serious? David, look at my face. For those of you who are looking at the podcast, look at my face, I'm not cracking a single smile.

This is serious. David, do you remember that one time that a certain Elon must, said he'd be down to buy Twitter for $44 billion and everyone called his buff. Do you remember that time? I remember. Do you remember that time when he actually then proceeded to buy Twitter for $44 billion? That's pretty outrageous, right? And to this day, I don't know if he originally intended to or not.

Yeah, who knows? It's kind of like he's rolling the dice, right? But it can't possibly get any crazier than that. Yeah, well, it looks like this week, Elon's trying to buy Open AI for $97 billion. dollars in a bunch of news articles that sprung up yesterday i believe or two days ago um Elon and a group that he was leading of investors presumably basically made an offer for 97.4 billion dollars to buy the is valuation prior to that so so this is the thing that's being contested right now so um they want to attribute open AI with like a 44 billion dollar valuation and sam's like hey it's a non-profit or like he's

trying to get like the valuation like a little lower or whatever and now um sam's kind of like contesting and saying you know it's it's not worth that much and then uh oh sorry it should be worth more or whatever and basically Elon's come and said hey we'll give a few 97 billion dollars for it right now and Sam said no which kind of goes in contradiction to what he was saying so i i don't know there's a few things playing out here but i thought that was pretty hilarious and wild that we have like these two guys just going at it essentially interesting I don't really know what to make of this. Like, once again, I don't really know if Elon is doing Elon shenanigans or if he's actually

trying to buy Open AI. I can't remember what the valuation was on their most recent funding round. I think it was somewhere around $300 billion. So that would be a pretty fat discount from Elon to Open AI investors. Yeah. I also, like, yeah, I think it was for the controlling entity of Open AI, whatever that means. But anyway, we can move on. into crypto open source stuff, as you said, David.

Let's pull up the cookie dashboard. I think you've had it up here. Okay, so we look at the markets right now. I'm noticing two things. Number one, you mentioned it earlier. We're ranging between $6.5 billion total market cap and I think around a $7.3 billion market cap. And that's just been the case for the last couple of weeks,

as you said, since the start of Feb. And I think a lot of this is just tied to macro. macro being Bitcoin primarily, right? Until Bitcoin kind of breaks out of its range of 90 to 100K and blasts upwards or, God forbid, downwards, will we then see kind of like a major divergence of this total market cap share? The second thing I'm noticing, David, is kind of something we're going to dig into later. But look at that salana and base discrepancy. So we've mentioned this a few times.

Typically, these have been a lot closer, like kind of, And arguably they still are. Yeah, arguably they still are, but now there's a billion dollar difference. And it's interesting to see how this market dominance from Solana trends in the time going forward. So, you know, we have some breaking news that, you know, Virtuals was going to launch on Solana a few weeks ago. And now they've actually launched this week. And we'll get into that later in the episode. But I don't know.

What are your thoughts, David? Do you think like Solana is kind of like tractor moat here by any chance? Or do you think this is just kind of like hand-wavy price stuff going on? Yeah, I don't know. I don't think Solana has always been ahead. We have Solana, the market cap of all AI tokens in Solana is at $3.5 billion on base. It's at 2.65. If you look at the gap, you can see the chart. Like this, Solana has always had a meaningful lead, but I don't think that these two lines,

the market cap gap between Base and Solana are like diverging in any direction. It is interesting to note that the $2.65 billion of market cap of tokens on base, well, I mean, that's all virtuals, right? Virtuals is $1.3 billion. So the virtual's token alone represents 50% of total base AI tokens market cap. And I don't know what the equivalent is for Solana or if there is even one. Like what is the most valuable AI token on Solana? Well, it's probably AI16Z, right?

If we're talking about like the protocol side of things. But now I think we're going to see a lot of virtual's value from base port over to Solana. They have their like Stargate Bridge setup, which basically allows you to port tokens, and that's just the virtual's tokens. But I've seen a lot of projects on virtuals actually port their token over to Solana as well, which is crazy to see. I wonder if they are going to double count that because what that does is the virtual's token on base will go into a contract address on base, and then a IOU token will be minted on Solana.

And then in theory, depending on what cookie. dot fund does might double count that. So I think if they are listening, which I think they do listen to these podcasts, they should actually subtract the value of virtuals in the bridge contract so that it only is counted once when it gets sent over to Solana. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Let's pull up the Mineshare chart. I think we have this tweet from Sammy just posted today.

If you scroll down, there we go. We track this is Kyto. Yeah, this is Kai-to. And we track this every week on our episode. The reason why we show price and then mine share is because both are often quite correlated with one another. The higher the mind share sector has, the higher or better their token prices do in that particular sector. And we've seen a notable regression for the AI mind share, David, but it's still standing tall. It's still number one, though.

It's still number one. It's been like this for a year and a half. It's still number one by a lot. Isn't that insane? It's like two and a half times the second place, which is defy. Interesting that DeFi is getting such a dominant. Okay, okay, but my theory here is Defi is becoming more popular because DeFi AI is being discussed way more.

And it's having, yeah, and it's having a spillover effect into DeFi protocols that are like figuring out, okay, well, what's our AI strategy? I might be coping, but I do think that there is a spillover notably here. But whether you like it or not, I think a lot of attention has been drawn to other things over the last week. you know, we had the, I think there was the bearer chain launch and just people were just kind of jaded with AI in general after seeing it tank on an average of 70%. But we're starting to see it stabilize and slowly increase. I think it's it bottomed at around 29%. And now it's slowly increasing above. So I'm curious to see how this kind of develops over time. But let's look at some of the most reflexive tokens of this market bounce, David. So as we're recording this episode, this week we've seen a note rebound of some of the top AI tokens within this sector.

And by notable, I mean, like, these things are up, like, between 30 to 60%. If we look at some, like, at some of the large caps, which are rebounded, we've got cookie. So cookie is related to the data dashboard that we just had up. Arc token, I think they had a pretty big week. We've got some news that just broke literally a few hours ago, which we're going to talk about. AI16Z with their new tokenomics and Eliza upgrade.

The one and true fart coin leading the way. for AI memes. I think Griffin with a 23% increase. Now, I want to point out that the market caps here range between $160 million and

$650 million. So we're kind of playing within like, when you consider larger protocols, which are often like $1.5 billion and above, we're still playing small weights here, but you always want to kind of be looking at what could potentially

enter that billion-dollar plus range. And a lot of these tokens, David, have already done that, right? AI 16 Z and Fartcoin. So I'm curious to kind of like track and see how this goes. The Fartcoin, I love how I give my monologue about, you know, if you're just the average modern investor and you're looking for AI exposure, crypto tokens are where it's at. Anyways, Fartcoin, up 27% in the week.

Yeah, stop taking yourself too seriously, David. Like, come on, we've got to be focusing on some of these other things. I am bullish on FartCoin as just the fact that it's, It's both a meme and AI. And so you get exposure to both sectors. Okay, let's not get into this, but I don't see the AI side of things, aside from the fact that it came from the truth terminal law, basically, right? From the infinite.

Yeah, he just mentioned that fart jokes are super funny. And then someone created fart coin and then it just sent there is no AI behind. That's as far as the AI goes in FARC coin. Yes. Yeah. So it's just a meme. anyone else, yes, done that anyone else convince you otherwise. All right.

But anyway, going back to fundamentals and not Fartcoin stuff, if you pull up this tweet from Elon Money, he tracks something that I think most people ignore but should actually track, which is kind of GitHub open source commits to some of the biggest projects out there. And one notable difference here is that core contributors for AI 16 and Z and AI rig complex, which is ARC in this case have just been up only. And a lot of people could like turn this as, oh, well, they're just adding a bunch of small changes and updates. If you actually dig into these things, that's not the case at all.

You see them making some pretty big updates to their potential platforms that they're launching and their tokenomics as well. So it's really cool to like see whether rain or shine. These guys are just heads down building. And I think that's like super important to kind of observe within a sector. You said earlier, David, like, you know, you're trying to make your case as to why crypto AI is here to stay and not just a, you know, a method that's going to die after a couple of weeks. These are the kinds of things you want to like see more of. Right.

Yeah. It is hard to qualitatively analyze GitHub commits, as you've said. How do you actually, what was your method or mechanism for actually like qualitatively giving the thumbs up to the, you know, quality behind these updates? Yeah. So there's a few ways that I do this. Number one is recognizing that I am dumb, and so I need to speak to people that are smarter than me. More and so engineers across a bunch of these different protocols, and that's kind of like what I do. So I spoke to Jen on the AI16Z team.

I spoke to Tachi and Torey on the Arc team and saying like, hey, what are you guys pushing? What are you guys building? And they walk me through their GitHubs and like kind of like telling me what they're like kind of like working on. Or they'll speak at a high level because, you know, some of this is super secretive and, you know, they don't want to release it publicly just yet. Another way is I kind of like follow and this is for people who are listening. Check out Nader, Nader Bit, I believe, from the EVM-Igan ecosystem and then Saigar as well, who do a lot of like reviews and cover a bunch of these things. And then number three is just jumping into the GitHub itself.

You can see a ton of what these updates are. You can read through it. You'll know which ones are just simple API integrations and which ones are like larger tokenomic related things, right? Or a platform-related thing. And the fourth and final way to do this is, and it doesn't sound remarkably sophisticated, just go on Twitter and follow the projects. They post weekly dev updates all the time. And it's just, you know, to kind of like nod our heads towards open source development, it's some of the best ways to keep track of these things.

But yeah, pretty cool. Something that showed up on my radar, Andre Carpathie, who is kind of a Chad in the AI world. The godfather of AI dude. Godfather of AI, yeah. Just for context for people who don't know, Andre, he was like the head of AI at Tesla to help Tesla build their self-driving vision system. He was on the early days of Open AI on the Open AI board. He went back to Open AI recently. And then he just quit.

Andre now just makes content. He just educates. He thinks the reason why he quit is because he thinks that his best leverage on the AI space is to just educate about what's going on. And he, like, yeah, seven days ago, released this three and a half hour marathon, which I am halfway through. And it is some of the best content that I have ever consumed about AI and LLMs.

And it is just, you watch, I feel like I've taken a university course and I'm still just an hour and 40 minutes into this thing. It's crazy this stuff is free. It's crazy that is free. He's super articulate. He's super good at explaining this stuff. And he's just extremely well respected

across the AI space and is used as a resource. just by many, many people to understand how to learn. He's got also 1.1 million followers. He in one of his videos talked about how one of his favorite platforms to use these base models is hyperbolic, which is a crypto AI startup. So it is cool that these crypto AI companies that are leveraging crypto are being used, whether they, even Andre, I don't even know if Andre knows that this is a crypto AI startup,

is using these things. And he's calling hyperbolic as one of his favorite platforms for interacting with LLM-based models. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Congrats to the hyperbolic team. Yeah. I mean, it's the crypto-AI.Mollet, right? I don't think he needs to know that it's crypto on the back end, right?

And for those of you who don't know hyperbolic, hyperbolic is basically a decentralized compute platform. So they're able to provide compute to help run your models or more famously inference new models. So be able to like request answers from certain models. And they host a bunch of models. Some are open source, some are access to close source ones. And apparently their service is so good that Andre is using it. So yeah, pretty, pretty awesome to see David. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the M.Eath protocol is home to M.Eath, the fourth largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LFTs. And now CMEEth takes things even further. This restaked version captures multiple yields across Karek, eigenlayer, symbiotic, and many more,

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company, but it's going to have a huge impact into crypto AI stuff. So what you're watching right now is a video of an app, an app called Replit. And Replit basically now allows. allows you to prompt and create any app that you want. Now, let's just like take a step back and, and kind of digest that for a second. You could be like, hey, I'm coming up with some, you know, some music ideas and I want to like describe a beat or I want to use a tool that will help me translate what I'm thinking in my head. They'll be like, cool, like what kind of symphonies or stuff do you want to include what kind of instruments are you vibing with or whatever? And it'll just produce an app. Now you could take that to the opposite end of the spectrum and just be like, well, hey, I am trying to figure out a 3D structure for a waveform that could fit into my earthquake model.

And they'll be like, cool, what kind of seismic indicators do you want to use, A, B, and C? And then it creates an app for you to do this. And you can literally, like, if you play this video, you can like model it, you can turn it around. It's pretty insane to see, David. And the kind of point that I want to make about all of this is, right, imagine like you just come across a problem. where a user is like faced with a UX issue or something deeper, like not knowing how to invest in money, you could just get an agent to query or prompt an app like this

and spin up an app or an app or a tool, which is tailored specifically for them, right? So we keep talking about this like AI stuff. And we're like, well, you know, we've got to connect this API with that API. And it kind of gets a little complex, right? But what if they could just be an agent or a human with a problem, just like you and I come across many with the questions that we ask every day when we're trying to learn about this stuff and just say, hey, I need a tool that will help me research A, B and C. I need a tool that will help me send tokens from this wallet to that wallet and then lock it in another wallet.

And it just spins up an app or a button that they could just click and use for them. The cool part here is like, in a world of hundreds of millions of tailored apps like this, David, where does the value get captured, do you think? My bet is decentralized protocols, and maybe I'm biased, but I think it's the decentralized protocols underpinning all of these. Think about it, right? We're already spinning up one million new tokens a week with Pumpfront. That's one app alone, right?

If the world does trend towards being tokenized like Sir Larry Fink says every day on Bloomberg, says this this only scales with decentralized protocols in my opinion. This reminds me of an Andre tweet, Andre, the same guy that we were just talking about. He tweeted out, let me just read this,

because I think this really just resonates with what you were just talking about. He tweeted out, there's this new kind of coding, I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.

It's possible because the LLMs are getting too good. Also, I just talk to composer with Super Whipsp, so I barely even touch the keyboard. I don't know what either composer or Superwist is, but I don't think it matters. I ask for the dumbest things,

like decrease the padding on the sidebar by half, because I'm too lazy to find it. I accept all, always. I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages, I just copy and paste them in with no comment. Usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension.

I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug, so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or a web app, but it's not really coding. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, copy and paste stuff, and it mostly works. And so the takeaway that I'm getting from here is that the LLM tools, the models that we have, that, you know, that with the Silicon Valley tech companies that I talked about earlier all producing,

are getting to the point where you can be really non-technical and produce. some interesting outputs here. And he, even like how he says, just like whenever there is an error code, he just alerts the LLM to the existence of the error code. And the LLM is like, oh, thank you for making me aware of this error.

I'll go fix that. And then the error goes away. And so he's like non-technically fixing his own bugs in his code. And this, both what you were just saying with this one app that we were just looking at and with Andre's concept of vibes coding, it really makes me think that like we don't actually need to be having interfaces at all. This is all interface abstraction mechanisms and eventually

just like AI will just be hyper useful and we'll have to engage with any sort of like keyboard or device at all to engage with it. And it's just like really induce a ton of usage of AI. Yeah. Prompt engineering is the new software engineering. And David, I could think of a specific sector that could really use the abstraction layer. So kind of like all. On that note, should we dig into the crypto AI topics of the week? Sure. Let's do it. What are we going to start with?

All right, cool. So we're going to start the crypto AI agenda with a non-crypto-AI company that is getting into crypto AI. X or Twitter, David, is getting involved in agents. Now, I've said this in the past on a previous episode, but my bet is X will become the home for a lot of the agents that we're building within this particular sector. They're perfectly primed for it. They have all the tweets of the entire world.

They get the data, the culture, etc. And they want to kind of like make a unique push. And probably Elon is like leading that. But this particular tweet is by Ether Mage, founder of virtuals. And the kind of takeaway here is they dropped by the Twitter offices in New York last week. And they were just like discussing a bunch of things as to how X can support a bunch of the agents that are being built here. And the reason why I wanted to pull this up is not to just kind of like point this out. but, you know, X has seen an explosion of agents,

and instead of banning them, they're working at a way to support and let them prosper. Now, Virtuals is one of the teams that they're working with, but I believe they're also speaking to the AI16 and Z guys and the ARC team as well, right? So they're kind of aware of what these teams are, and they're speaking directly to the founders to see how, you know, both of them can kind of collaborate and work together.

And from what I understand in my conversations with them, you know, they want to be the leading platform for agents, and they're figuring out what this looks like from both sides of the table. On their side, they're considering things like, you know, how can they empower their own offerings to be helpful for agent builders? For example, specialized access to data or X payments to allow agents to tip each other or interact with users in another way, right? And from the crypto protocols side, right, these teams are coming to them saying, hey, we would love if you would allow, you know, the ability for, I don't know, crypto wallets to be spun up or stable coins to be used. And of course, these are all ideas to begin

with. And with, I think there's still very much, I don't have any insight, but they're still very much in the weeds of figuring out what this looks like. But can you imagine, David, like this cross-collaboration of a major web two social platform and all this crypto-native stuff that we've been building, you know, in the back end, I think that will be a perfect marriage. And it'll lead to a lot of this, like, mass adoption that we speak about. Now, I remember a time, David, where a lot of crypto people would have thought this was a bad thing. And probably a lot of people do. Why? Because it pulls away from the fully decentralized ethos. You know, you're going to rely on Twitter and whatever you might be. I think personally,

that's a silly take. I think it's stupid. Because if we're ever going to onboard the world, we need to have bridges with the Web 2 world. What do you think? I think that's right. Having alignment with something like Twitter is hugely as vintageous. I'm as bullish as Defi as anyone, but we have to, in the defy sector, like work against financial incumbents. And while that's like exciting to disentangle and disintermediate Wall Street and Tradfai, it's also hard. On the flip side of things in the Silicon Valley Web 2 social media space, having alignment with the interests and motivations of the X teams. And like obviously what does X get out of this? Well, they get, you know, trillions of users.

Like they don't have to, they're not constrained by this 7, 8 billion people that are connected to the internet on this planet. We can come up with a quadrillion number of AI agents who are using X. And so the fact that we have alignment with their interests and we're rowing in the same direction is helpful. It's a nice breath of fresh air. Yeah. And I think, you know, to kind of like go from the first like kind of like monologue that you had at the start of this episode, David, we're kind of effectively tying in tokens. to this entire thing as well. Right.

And can you imagine if it becomes just super normal for individuals to own or be tipped tokens or to be able to use tokens to access certain services or products on X just natively? That would be a huge leap in kind of like crypto-UX and probably just like Web2UX as well. So I don't know, pretty awesome to see. All right, let's move on to ARC. And I remember you brought up ARC maybe four episodes ago. And we did like, we spent like 20 minutes on the episode. and I remember after you gave us

like the ARC deep dive I was like, EJA's like, why are we spending so much time on ARC? Like, what's the deal here? Turns out it has been the complete mind share winner over the last four weeks. Of all things that have disappeared

from my feed in the like AI, call it the AI bear market. Arc has not. Arc's been a big winner lately, right? Yeah, man. Yeah. I mean, we mentioned a lot of projects that, you know, we find interesting

on this podcast, but sometimes we nail it, David. Sometimes we do. And yeah, Arc has been one of them. So a few major things here. So just a bit of background. Arc is one of the leading AI agent platforms.

So you kind of think of them as similar to AI 16 and Z in virtuals. And they're based on Solana. And they have a specific coding language which is native to Salana called Rust. Okay, cool. So that's the basic knowledge. What happened this week? Well, David, they not only announced, but they launched their agent launch pad or their platform.

And so, of course, the initial reaction to this is well okay right this is just another launch pad it's going to do the same types of things and i want to kind of argue against that first and show the nuance between this launch pad and other launch pads but then also colloquially kind of show what i think they're going to be building in the future which will make all of this you know way more important and uh to focus on basically so if you look at this tweet um and by the way this news is fresh a few hours ago so i just tweeted about this to kind of like give us all a breakdown of this. The launchpad is called ARC-Forge.

And it's basically a launchpad for launching new tokens that is geared towards stronger liquidity, so better capital efficiency, meaning like, you know, you have less slippage, less price impact if, you know, a whale is buying or selling. So fair trading in general. And all these agent tokens are paired with the native token arc. So this is similar to projects that we've seen with virtual. or supposedly with the upcoming AI16Z launch pad as well, right? And the reason why that's so bullish is any kind of fees that are generated from these pools

will go back to buying ARC. Also, you need ARC to be able to launch these agent tokens. So that kind of adds another demand sync, basically, onto the ARC native token. So that's really cool. Sniper prevention is also really important. It sounds boring. But right now, any new token that pretty much launches in a fair, get sniped, David.

What does sniping mean? It means a bot or a computer program is basically primed and ready to buy a bunch of the supply really early on and then just dump on users. And it's been really painful for communities who really care about different tokens to get involved because they just get dumped on at a much, much higher price. They have a mechanism or a design which prevents all of this from happening. Really cool. And the third thing that I think is super important to call out here is every other agent

launch pads so far, David, has been open. Anyone can come. Anyone can come and launch an agent and off you go and we'll take a fee, right? And the reason why they do that is open sources, you know, arguably good, but also they can get a fee off of every launch, right? So it's a volume based business, right? But unfortunately, what that's led to is a lot of low quality agents out there that kind of all do the same thing, all sound the same and quite frankly are super, super annoying, right? So what Arc is doing differently here is they're doing a curated launch. So they control which teams are able to go via the launch pad. You know, they have a verification symbol. They're given, you know, a lot of context, deep research. And what they're

trying to do here is launch higher quality agents. And I love this approach personally, because I think we have too many low quality agents out there. We have way too many low quality agents. And the only, and And the only way that this sector has taken seriously, David, is if we have high quality agents that people actually want to engage with, that people actually want to use. And so I'm really, you know, I'm happy to just see someone take this kind of approach, right? And speaking of high quality projects, supposedly their inaugural launch is going to demonstrate that. So I don't know anything about this project, but it's called Ask Jimmy.

And the token is Jimmy. it's not live yet. It might be live by the time we air this. Maybe not, but, you know, just keep an eye on the arc profile Twitter page. What you're saying is it launches in 24 hours and we are recording this on the 12th and we post these podcasts a day later. So we're going to be launching the morning. It's going to be launching the day of this podcast release.

The day of this podcast release. Exactly. So talk about cutting edge. Which we are not advocating for the token at all. We are just giving the logistics. I don't really. Reyes has not told me anything about the token, so I don't know anything. I mean, I couldn't tell you anything because I literally just learned about it today.

So what do we know about this? This particular project is an AI-driven trading platform, and it aims to be the leading ecosystem for autonomous finance agents. Okay, that's a bunch of jargon. What the hell does that mean? Basically, they want to act as a – think of this as like a hedge fund that trades tokens. And autonomous agents are going to be the things, not here. humans that are implementing trading strategies and different designs and stuff like that.

And what's cool about this is it won't just trade across one protocol. It'll trade across multiple platforms, such as hyperliquid or drift protocol or GMX on EVM, many others can get included. It takes like a multi-pronged approach, which I think is really cool. But the third thing that I think is super cool here, David, and I think kind of slipped under the radar. and most people haven't noticed this yet, is a percentage of revenue generated from this app

or whatever service that you want to call this gets used to buyback arc, the native token which kind of like underpin the launch pad and kind of like supported the token launch. And why I think this is super important is volume-based launch pads are going to die off. It's not about the number of agents. launch, it's about the quality of agents.

But then the question is like, that excites me. That excites me quite a lot. Yeah, exactly. But then the question is like, well, okay, well, how are you going to make money? You know, but like, how is this thing sustainable? Well, if you can tax or monetize the services layer, the app layer, that's probably the way to do it. So I think we're going to start to see a bunch of these platforms monetize at the app layer.

I think they're going to create like an app store. I think they're going to create like an agent marketplace. And that net net is going to force people to be. build quality agents. I thought that was pretty cool. I do think agent-based like market actions, just optimizing yield, I think is super low hanging fruit. I don't know about opinionated market movements and buying and selling tokens. I think that's probably a little bit harder. But I think there's a ton of edge and alpha and arbitrage that an AI would be able to figure out how to extract from just on-chain activities. And I don't think that that's, I think that's a great place

to get started for the AI sector. Because that's honestly, where a lot of people come in and came into crypto in the first place was building their first arbitrage bot. Now we just make that a little agentic. And I think that's kind of a good canary in the coal mine. Like if we can do anything in AI, we should be able to build like

an effective AI arbitrage spot. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And to your point, like, if your AI hedge fund is really that good, why would it be kind of like public for anyone to kind of ape, right? Exactly. Maybe maybe there's a way for them to use proprietary

trading strategies. Maybe that's something that they could use. And that would be, that would be cool. And then, yeah, if you, if you want to pull up this Ask Jimmy tweet really quickly and just kind of scroll through the tweet, we can talk about like how it actually works very, very quickly. So people, you know, listeners have a context. So it's a multi-agent system, which means that it's not just one agent that's doing all the hedge fund stuff. It's multiple agents. And they all have individual roles. There's, for example, a treasury agent, which is responsible. for allocating capital. There's a risk agent, which is, you know, in the risk room monitoring, okay, is this

position in danger? Should I invest in this token, A, B, and C? Okay, cool. There's a quant agent, which is optimizing the trading strategies. And then there's execution agents, which just focus solely on making sure the execution is secure, verified, and at the best price that they can get, basically. So... I have a question.

Yeah. Does what does it mean for all of these agents to exist inside of this larger, broader team. So like, it's just like we are fine tuning. I don't know if it's an LLM. We are fine tuning the model for treasury management. And then we're doing it again. We are fine tuning another model for risk management. And then they are learning how to cooperate and negotiate. Like the treasury manager is trying to cooperate with like the executor. And it's like, hey, the trader wants to buy this token. But the treasury manager is like, yo, yo, yo, that's too risky. And so there's like a dance between these fine-tuned models

and the output is this Jimmy thing? Is that how it works? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. There's a fancy jargon term that's used for this, David, known as swarms or agent swarms. Oh, okay. This is the swarm thing.

So basically, Jimmy is a swarm. Jimmy is a swarm focused on autonomous trading. And we can pretty much leave it at that. Okay. Okay, all right. Well, good luck, Jimmy. I hope you do well.

Yeah, for sure. There's a second update on ARC that I think is worth mentioning. So, you know, if you thought the launch pad and the inaugural project wasn't already enough, they launched this really cool ARC agent kit, David. And the reason why I am so excited about this is basically any native on-chain action is now made super easy for any agent that's being built on ARC. So typically when you build an agent, just for context for the listeners, you kind of need to be like, okay, what model am I going to use for this? You need to be like, okay, what wallet should I equip it with?

How do I equip it with a wallet, right? Okay, do I need to fix the ability to allow it to trade? I need to fix the ability to allow this agent to evaluate markets. And it's quite tedious to build from scratch. Well, now you just have a kit, which, you have a kit. you can just kind of plug into and select a bunch of things, tweak it to whatever detail you'd like, and then off you go. And the reason why this is such a big win for Arc in particular, David, is the coding language is in Rust, which is notoriously hard for developers to learn. And so to have a toolkit, just straight out of the box that allows them to do this is super, super cool.

I have a few more things to say if you want. I thought you might want to say something. Okay, cool, cool, cool, sorry. So I said it's super, super cool. In addition to this, it's multi-chain out of the box, which means that not only can use it with Solana, you can use it with EVM as well. So a lot of like critics towards Arc,

I feel has like focused on the fact that developers are going to find it kind of challenging to build on. Well, the fact that they're making it super easy for you to now build not only on Solana, but also on any other chain, I think is super cool to see. And I think a lot of other teams and projects are taking a similar approach. So yeah,

I'm just super excited by like these different kinds of tool kits and things, which I think will proliferate into something much larger. Like right now, I understand the market is kind of bored with the launch pads. They're kind of bored with the existing agents. I'm bored with them as well. But I'm confident that these agents are now going to get a level up with all these different tools and frameworks being built. And, you know, the proof is in the pudding. So we'll see what these agents look like in a couple of weeks' time. But yeah, super, super excited about what arc's doing.

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We go on to the frontier side of things. Virtual's next. We'll talk about AIXBT and AI 16-Z after that, but virtual is for right now. Walk us through what's going on with virtuals. Yes, sir. So a few weeks ago, virtuals announced that they were expanding to Solana, and they broke the crypto-AI Twitter internet because... Did they?

Yeah, they did. Because, as you know, it's not kosher to ever leave your OG chain and go to another chain. The biggest reaction that I saw out of that was like, wow, Coinbase really took the L here by not listing Virtuals on the exchange. Yeah, yeah. And listen, we could speculate as much as we want as to why that's the case. Did you hear Haseeb's take? No, what's Haseeb steak? That it's basically virtual's is probably not passing Coinbase's compliance tests and because of its buyback.

But didn't Cracken just list it? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, they did. Maybe track is a little bit more ready to go. A bit more DGM? Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I don't know.

I'm going to say optimistically that hopefully they've figured out a way. But I do agree with that take actually. Like, it's kind of weird that they happen. The buyback mechanism makes it hard to list on centralized exchanges. I'm now wondering, like, are there any other buyback tokens that they have listed potentially? I don't know. I feel like that's quite commonplace amongst a lot of like core defy protocols, right? Like, do they list Maker?

Doesn't Maker do that? I don't know. I'm sure MKR is on quite this. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, virtuals officially launched their platform. So they didn't just announce it. They've actually done it. And now any agent builder or agent purchaser can now go to the virtual's platform and it is Solana compatible. So what does this mean? It means that their native token virtual is now existent on Solana. Which means that, yeah, it's pretty nuts. So I, for example, ported a percentage of virtuals that I hold. into Solana because I wanted to see what that process looked like and whether the experience would be the same and surprise, surprise, yes, it is. So now you have like that liquidity on both chains. And of course, the question now is like, is there going to be traction on Solana? I thought all the developers were on Ethereum. Like, what's actually going on, right? And what we've seen

so far is a few things. Number one, some base projects, so virtual projects that launched on base, have ported over to Salana. And I mentioned this at the end of last week's episode. So that's kind of interesting, right? But on Solana itself, we're seeing net new projects launch as well, David. If you pull up this tweet where I think this is actually a recap from Graham as to which projects launched today. So, you know, literally a few hours ago. Let's see the kind of like stuff we're seeing here.

We're seeing Tracy AI, an MBA commenter, commentator and analyst agent. I believe this is actually... We're an NBA commentator. How does that work? I think this is getting a lot of traction because it's kind of don't take this as as fact, but I think it's being endorsed by a certain basketball player. I'm not entirely sure who, but interesting to see that.

We're seeing another agent which is focused on content, another agent which is fighting misinformation, another one that's focused on optimizing gas for defy transactions, and another one that's just like a project risk. assessment agent. What makes me happy about this is that it's getting a little more creative than just like, hey, this is a funny tweet bot, like come and ape into this DGN token. So I'm glad to see variety. Obviously, all of these are super volatile and low cap. So, you know, definitely do your research looking into this. But it's day one. And I'm curious to track a few things going forward. So next week, we should look into this, which is how many agents have launched on virtuals on Salana specifically?

and how does that compare to base? Has the rate gone down on one and the rate gone up on the other? The other thing is market cap of agents on Seoul virtuals versus virtuals on base. I'm sorry, I'm just caught up on this Tracy AI NBA commentator. I'm like watching this game.

This is kind of cool. Yeah. Having an AI commentator overlaid an NBA game, that seems kind of cool. Yeah, it does, it does. And like, okay, there's a few things here. that it kind of got me thinking about, right? Number one is fan engagement.

Already you're hooked. You get it, right? You know what the NBA is? You don't need to know what token is. You're just like, let me just interact with this thing and see if it's accurate. Oh my God, it does real-time responses to his listeners in all languages.

Yes. Wow. Wow. That's cool. I would like to see how that works. I wonder if there's any like IP issues with NBA because like are they allowed to just stream? But yeah, like if you're just alone at home

and you're a big NBA face, or any sports fan, and like you put it on the game, but then you also pull up an AI commentator to help commentate the game. That seems kind of cool. Yeah, I mean, you got no friends like you and I, David. Yeah, that's right. Or you don't understand sports.

Yeah, exactly. Or you want to practice your French. You can just pull this up and interact with it. All right, all right, cool. Well, we're seeing some variety. I like it. The second major thing that Virtual's announced as we kind of like, you know,

just moving this train along, is something they're calling VPN, or their Virtual's partner network, David. Now, this is a long article, but I'm just going to summarize it for everyone, which is, okay, virtuals has this platform now on base and Solana, and their goal with their launch pad right now is precisely that, help agents launch.

But they're now trying to launch high-quality agents. And obviously, they're restricted by the capacity of their team, right? They're all based in whatever, a bunch of different time zones, but they're limited by the number of bodies that they can commit to diligenceing teams and all that kind of stuff. So what they've done is they've built out this venture partner model essentially

where they'll elect teams or individuals in the Solana and base ecosystems and give them grants of, I think it's in totality 50K, but it can go above that if the project surpasses certain market cap milestones. And what I like about this, David, and we're not going to get into the details here

because we haven't got enough time, but they have been incredibly detailed about what qualifies for certain tranches. And what I like about this is, I'm going to call them out, they're the ones that did this high-volume agent stuff. They're the ones that made that famous, right? And I love...

They're the ones that are experiencing their own pain. Yeah, I love Janssen and Ether Mage. And like, what I've constantly seen by this team is that they iterate. They take it on, you know, they take it on the chin, and they're like, okay, cool, I understand that this is not worth. looking, let's tweak it. And we see this happening here. And I just love the way that this team approaches things. And why I think this is beneficial is they're kind of like releasing the reins a little bit and saying, okay, you guys go ahead, find what's good, will fund teams based on this

structure, and you guys get a percentage of tokens. So you guys get to also co-invest because you've found these teams. And with that, they allow both ecosystems, both base, Salon, or whatever it is, to grow collectively. And I think that'll give them the competitive most, David, if it's successful. We're probably going to see other teams do this as well, to be honest. Just to wrap up this section, if you were curious, EJAS, there is rounding up to $30 million of virtuals on Solana. And it's got 6,250 holders. And that is after just two days. Just two days. Wow. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. That's crazy. AI XPT, you only got one tweet in the section. AISPT holders.

can link their X account on AISBT.Tech. What does this do? Yes, sir. Okay, so basically token holders, so people who hold AIXBT token, can now go to the official terminal, the terminal being the AIXPT terminal. It's kind of like a separate website. I think of it as like the Bloomberg terminal for crypto-native questions. And they can connect their wallet and now their X account.

Okay, well, why is that cool? Well, it unlocks several perks, David. check these out. So if you zoom through some of these perks, you know, you get priority replies. So for those of you who have played around with AIXBT, you can tag AIXPT in like a tweet or a thread that you're kind of like reading and you could get its take. You can ask it a question and get its take. But because it's become so popular, it can't be everywhere all at once. And so if you connect your X account and you hold its token, it now prioritizes you to give you a very tailored response.

is a way, it becomes hyperweight. And also, in case you want AIXPT to be your friend, you just got to buy its token. Yeah, but also, David, I think, like, there is value here, right? Like, if I'm reading, like, a 20-part threat, right, and I'm, like, absorbed by my own niche research, right? And, you know, there's a million other people on crypto Twitter evaluating a ton of other sectors that don't really care about my niche little thing.

And I want to get feedback from basically the chat GPT of crypto, I want to be able to get access to that, right? And if it's rate limited, for sure I want to get access to that. And if it means holding a quasi-equity instrument, right? You know, like, oh, okay, I get some ownership in this agent, allows me to not only benefit from its service, but also benefit from, you know, the value it accrues if it actually does well as a product. That's a win-win for me, basically, right?

Some of these other perks include, you know, a chance to get tipped. I don't know how this works, but I'm presuming. like if you give good alpha or it learns something that is considered really valuable data for it, that makes it smarter. It'll give you a tip. So it's kind of like another really interesting way to aggregate or make itself way more powerful, right? Anyway, just some interesting perks here that I think that's cool. I think this is like just a roadmap for general AI Twitter accounts. And I'll be clear, AI XPT is still today the only useful AI crypto Twitter account as out there. And I'm again, Also, to be clear, still suss about its alpha because I don't know where it comes from

other than just like regurgitation. All those longs are transpired. Like other crypto Twitter accounts are also idiots by default. Like, you know, don't trust the average person on crypto Twitter until you verify. You know, verify, I don't trust. But nonetheless, as these become more mainstream, I'm seeing what this is. It's just like you buy the token and you get preferential treatment by this AI that has a social media that has memory that exists across the internet. That's pretty cool. That's a model. That's a replicatable model.

Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah, arguably the same as, you know, you paying a subscription to get access to a Bloomberg terminal. And now I get all this alpha, which is really useful for whatever I want to use. And kind of zooming out, I think this is the first step towards bridging the gaps between web two and web three. And for, I think we've been so obsessed with web three native things that were forgotten to onboard the actual people that don't know anything about this, but could benefit from the value. And I think X, as I said earlier, is the number one platform for all of this to happen and is also the number one place where crypto Twitter or crypto things overlap with people who have no idea what this is. So, you know, a ton of value though.

All right. Last subject of the roll up. AI16Z, this was a really long thread about thoughts about AI 16Z. I think we are still kind of in like debrief autopsy mode of AI 16Z. How's the token doing? Because I think the answer is not great. Well, actually, it is, okay, two things. It's bounced back quite a bit. on this market bounce. I think it was... 30 cents up to 52. Up to 52.

So it was ARC and AI16Z that bounced back the most in terms of large caps. Virtual's obviously having a lot more weight to it. Kind of doesn't move as quickly or as significantly. But the second thing is,

I saw a tweet. I wish I had it on hand, which said that the most inflows over the last seven days, David, has come into AI16Z specifically. So whether it's whales, smart money or dumb money. Someone's accumulating AI16Z. And I think there's a few reasons for this.

Number one, we've seen this a few times. So the team peak fud has typically happened when, you know, the founder has had a bit of a kind of like, you know, rant on Twitter or, you know, there's just been some general instability in terms of comms. And so, you know, people have been kind of bearish on like, okay, well, is this team serious? Like, are they building good things? Or are they just going to kind of like crash out? And kind of like in their defense, I think the team has really been shipping pretty amazing stuff. And they've been the leader of the space for a while. That being said, it's not good to do this frequently, right? And tough love is not something crypto Twitter is necessarily good at receiving, but it is so crucial to have and listen to if you

want to win, right? And tough love comes, especially when markets are down. And AI16Z this week was the subject of this in this particular tweet. I want to briefly go over this tweet point by point to dissect what I think is valid or true and what might be a stretch. And why am I doing this is, I think AI16Z is at a pivotal point in its growth. It's faced a lot of fud. It's been one of the darling crypto agent projects stemming from the times of truth terminal. And now understandably, its token holders are asking, well, what's next? Right.

So let's dig into this really quickly. The first one says AI16Z still fails to align the incentives of partner projects and token holders. I think, quick take, this is going to get resolved in their tokenomics upgrade coming out in the next couple of weeks. So I'm not too worried about that. Number two, while AI16Z is having fun developing a cute shock tank-like investment show, their competitors are partnering with Solana Foundation to push them off their throne. I'm guessing they're referencing arc there. this is in reference to a hobby emphasis on the term hobby project that one of the core developers has been building and talking about in his spare time.

I think it's important to point out that there are two, probably three separate streams of actual development work that's going on. None of them include this hobby project. So this is a cute shark tank like investment show is the hobby project. Yeah, is the hobby project. So I think, you know, like, yes, I understand that that's like could be a thing. you know, I don't know if it really sticks. Number three, AI16Z needs to step its game up or it falls behind.

Their moat was to be the best in open source agent technology. Whilst this is still true, competitors are working full force to close the gap. I don't really think this is a good take necessarily because it's like, well, yeah, you would expect in an open source realm that people would be competitive and try to fill the gap. And I'm glad that people are trying to fill the gap. Hopefully, this pushes AI16Z to become something better. and let's see. Number four, I think their current strategy is not enough. They need more than being the best at agent GitHub or differentiate themselves so they could better it. I agree with this. And I actually think this applies to not just AI16C, but a bunch of other platforms. We mentioned it with Arc, right? We're just like, okay, this token launch pad does this. But like, what about all the other stuff? Where do we go from here? How do we make these agents better? I do think the AI66's team is probably thinking about this. They recently restructured David, actually. They hired a CPU. and a C-O, which is, you know, something that we don't typically see within an open-source Dow run company or foundation, but it's pretty amazing to see.

And I'll just give you one more here before because there's like 10 of these things. It goes, number five, they are still not tapping into their biggest strength. An army of developers building various projects with AI16-Z tech. I don't know if I agree with this one because they technically are allowing anyone. and everyone to build things, I just think some of the things are just not good enough yet. And that is a combination of people, you know,

not really being as creative as you'd expect to build like a really good product. They're just like kind of launching a token and hoping it goes up. And the second thing is the tokenomics of AI16Z right now doesn't, isn't structured well enough for them to offer that kind of support. And I think we'll see that change over time.

Beautiful. Ejas, is that the roll up? Yes, sir. That is the roll-up. Dude, it's been great doing this. Once again, episode number 11, I learned a lot. What are you looking forward to? What are you paying attention to this week? There's a ton of things going on in the periphery, David. We didn't get to talk about emerging trends this episode, but we will definitely place emphasis on it next episode. Of just, so we mentioned all these launch pads kind of being like the same thing and agents being the same.

I'm really trying to like be on the cutting edge of like what these other agents are going to end up doing. what's the evolution basically. One thing that I'm tracking is some of these like agents that are doing engineering work, David. Now it sounds like, you know, the death of software engineering is coming soon. I don't think we're anywhere near that. But right now they're kind of being used as kind of aids or agents that will kind of like be an apprentice to a software engineer. And I'm curious to see how these agents act autonomously. Like can they manage their own GitHub repo or section of the GitHub repo?

repo that can help these projects like overnight become much, much better or healthier. But yeah, that's what I'm digging into this week. All right, Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Crypto AI, even riskier you can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot. Thanks, folks.