Bankless - AI ROLLUP #5: T-1 Listings Soon? | Ai16z’s Eliza #1 GitHub | Virtuals Flips Tao | Zerebro’s Creative LLM

Starting point is 00:00:00 Right now, we're focused on building these individual agents. Oh, that agent made me laugh. Oh, cool. That agent is giving me great financial alpha. Oh, that agent is like trading back and forth. Very cool. But I think the bigger picture needs to focus on what happens when these agents start interacting with each other. Autonomously, 24-7.

Starting point is 00:00:21 Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI roll-up, where we covered the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto. And AI and EJAS, this is the first AI roll-up of the year. We are not sleeping because AIs, they don't sleep. We're recording the morning of January 1st because this world does not stop. Ejaz, you are really excited to do this episode. I am now just tapping back into the internet for the first time in a couple weeks. So I'm going to need you to download me on what's been going on because I actually don't really know too much, which I think is perhaps useful to come into this episode pretty dry.

Starting point is 00:00:56 How you doing? Happy New Year, my man. Happy New Year, dude. How am I doing? I don't know about you, David, but last time I checked, the holiday season was a tranquil, peaceful time to reflect on the year and kind of maybe eat a bunch of junk food and put on a few pounds. Have permission to put down your phone? Put down your phone, you know, not look at a screen 24-7.

Starting point is 00:01:21 And I can safely say that I think I've had the least amount of sleep over the last two weeks. Turns out that the AI agent meta decided to just go on. absolute rocket and ship all the important stuff whilst no one was looking and right up until the end of the year. So absolutely insane and I'm excited to get into a bunch of things today. I feel like that's just the clear sign of exuberance, excitement, euphoria, accelerated building. Just something's going on over here. It's probably a little bit bubbly. But at the end of day, I think high energy, high energy. And frothy definitely come. to mind if people are just grinding their way through Christmas. But also, I think we're going to get

Starting point is 00:02:06 into some of the subjects here today. And there's a lot of fundamentals being built and shipped and being measured as well. What would you say, zooming out, what would you say is like the theme of the last like 10 days of development in the AI space? I would say agentic infra. It's like a focus on what will eventually, in my opinion, end up becoming some of the leading layer one-esque type platforms within crypto. I think it's going to be a novel meta or a novel kind of foundational structure that starts forming. No one quite really knows what it looks like right now, but some of these leading teams are starting to build that out. And I think that's going to be the most exciting thing to discuss today. Layer 1-esque, and you don't mean like we're not making new blockchains,

Starting point is 00:02:51 but we're making new foundations. Exactly. Just L1 is a simpler term to use to kind of convey the concept of what's going on, in my opinion. Yeah. So, Ejazz, I ask you this at the beginning of every single episode. This whole AI agent, AI crypto, agentic platforms, why is this all such a big deal? Why are AI agents a big deal? If people are just tapping into this episode for the first time, why should they be pilled about getting going down the AI agent rabbit hole? Okay.

Starting point is 00:03:20 So I'm going to give a slightly different answer than I normally would. So normally I go on some philosophical rant, which kind of ties into a larger, kind of vision around this technology infrastructure and applications and stuff that we're building. I've done it for the last couple of episodes. I'm going to give a slightly different answer today, mainly around a question that I get asked all the time, which is, each has, how big is this thing really going to get from a valuation perspective? Okay, like, I've heard like your big vision and stuff, but at the end of the day, a lot of people get into crypto to invest and, you know, maybe figure out what kind of like tokens they might buy and stuff like that. And again,

Starting point is 00:03:58 none of this stuff is financial advice. But if we were to entertain a framework about that, let's use the following, right? So firstly, I'll say, I think over the long term, this sector is going to hundreds of billions of dollars alone. And secretly, actually, I think it's going to go way higher, but we'll save that bull thesis for another episode. But in terms of now and this cycle, you know, the bull market that we're in, if we project crypto's market cap to grow to say five trillion dollars. So that's about 40 to 50% growth from here. And if we assume that agent networks, you know, this agent meta matches the peak of defy percentage dominance last cycle, which was around 5%. The theme of the last cycle, yeah. The theme of the last cycle. So it was 5% of the total crypto market

Starting point is 00:04:50 cap. This yields theoretically, using that analogy, a $250 billion cumulative value. for the AI agent meta, right? And again, this has a lot of assumptions, right? This assumes that crypto AI is going to be the biggest kind of theme of this cycle, which I believe it is. And an AI agent specifically is going to capture the majority of that. And you mentioned earlier, like, it's feeling kind of frothy, kind of bubbly. I do actually think that the AI agent meta is going to form like one of the bigger or potentially the biggest bubble that we have ever seen within the crypto sector. In crypto, yeah, in crypto specifically, right? So if you look at the current cumulative agent market cap, it's just over $10 billion, I would say.

Starting point is 00:05:34 So if we assume the $250 billion comparison there that DeFi achieved, that's a 25x from here, right? Okay, so this is a bit of boy math going on here, but like that's kind of like the general take, right? But but if we factor in that AI is, oh, you know, probably humanity's single most world-changing technology, that's probably going to produce trillions of dollars of economic value, not just within crypto, but outside. across any and every industry, and it already is, you know, Open AI, Anthropic is already some of the biggest companies from a valuation perspective, then you might assume that the peak actually happens at a larger percentage. So let's like, again, using Boymaths say that it's 10%. AI is bigger than DFI. AI is bigger than DFI, right? Bigger than the financial system

Starting point is 00:06:18 potentially or it's going to rehall everything. Let's say it's 10%, which is $500 billion, right? So that's like, obviously, many more multiples from where we are at sitting at, like $10 billion, right? Now take a look at this chart, David. So this was produced by Masari, which was released like, I think, a day or so ago, which tracks the current AI trend in terms of the defy trend,

Starting point is 00:06:44 which happened last cycle. And as you can see, it's mapped over the defy chart. As you can see, it's following a pretty similar trend. Like, again, this isn't, you know, an insinuation that this is exactly going to play out the way it is there. But it's just kind of interesting to look at. This is not science. This is, it's boy math.

Starting point is 00:07:02 It's boy math. But, you know, if you wanted a bit of morning hopium to wake you up on Jan first, like this, this is it. Okay. For the listeners who cannot view this chart, we are, again, the AI index is mapped over the defy index. And we're about at parity right now, which is why they're showing this. And we're at parity in December of the same time cycle.

Starting point is 00:07:23 By the time we get to April, in theory of 2025, it looks. like it goes one, two, three, four, five X larger, five X larger in April because that's what Defi did. That's, this is the insinuation here that, like, Defi grew five X between December of 2020 to April of 2021. And if we are doing the crypto cycle thing, then we are perhaps getting a 5x, uh, between now and halfway through next year, which I take EGIS's point that like Defi is a crypto native insular, very niche, very complex. complicated thing and that five-ext. AI is an adjacent technology that is being built by an entirely different sector that is

Starting point is 00:08:07 progressing independently of crypto that is now coming into crypto and these two technologies are coming together, which are much more easy to understand. We understand AI. We understand what these things can do. So I've always been of the mind that the fact that these are two adjacent technologies that are coming together does indicate the idea that this might be bigger than we've ever seen anything before in crypto. And not just any two adjacent technologies, probably the role or humanity-defining technology

Starting point is 00:08:36 of our time, right? AI is literally wowing everyone on a daily basis. And with the expected launch of OpenAI's agent product in Q1, as well as Anthropic, with the launch of their video model, which is producing motion picture grade video people, you know, just simply from text and Google's releasing the same. You know, this whole space is just completely magical and we're just kind of like touching the tip of the iceberg here. So if we assume these things are going to permeate across every facet of our digital lives

Starting point is 00:09:13 and real life probably, you know, it's going to affect our jobs and, you know, how we work, corporate structures, etc. Like, this is going to get crazy and it's much easier to understand. People understand it from headlines that they've read, from articles that they've read, very different to reading about a lending or borrowing primitive, which, although very, very important and underlies the kind of like primary value transfer of the way that we kind of like interact with each other, it's still not as easy to understand as AI. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:42 Yeah. I was hanging out with some friends this weekend that I was telling the story of this one AI agent Zerabro that released an EP on Spotify. And then we opened it up and listened to it. And I compare that to the same friend that I was explaining AMM curves four years ago. and it was not the same conversation. One was like, oh, wow, this is an AI made this versus what the hell does providing liquidity mean? Like, these are different scenarios.

Starting point is 00:10:08 I want to trace over something that you said. Open AI releasing their AI agent product and then also the SORA text to video like applications. It sounds like what came to my mind when you explain these things was that all of the big, massive AI producers, Open AI, Google, Facebook are building tools that are potentially being able to be used by all the things that we are doing in the crypto world. That's kind of what I heard.

Starting point is 00:10:39 It's like, oh, a new tool just dropped. Correct. You know, very high, precise text to video speech. And now the AI agents over in the crypto land with the tokens, that's a new tool in their tool belt for them to use. It's a new appendage that they just grew. And so we have this massive side of Silicon Valley

Starting point is 00:10:56 creating, you know, AI things, AI tools. And then all of a sudden, the tokenized versions of these agents now have those tools to create more value, to do more things, to have more capabilities. That's what came to my mind. You pretty much nailed it. And where I would kind of add to that, David, is I think some of the most exciting things that we should look out for in 2025 is where those tools that are being launched from the traditional AI producers overlap with being able to bring. the gap between non-crypto consumers and crypto itself, right? So we should be asking ourselves, how can some of these tools be used to benefit and build and grow the crypto sector

Starting point is 00:11:39 to help people access crypto infrastructure where they may not even need to know that it's happening in the background, but it helps give them a 10x better user experience for whatever they're trying to do, whether that's send value between friends on X or whether that is something to do, with, you know, borrowing again something or owning their own digital assets or whatever that might be. All right. So that's a pretty good amount of hopium to front run the content of this episode. What are we going to get into this episode each of us? What are we going to talk about? What's the subjects that have dropped in the last like 10 days or so? Before we get into the fun stuff,

Starting point is 00:12:12 I really want to talk about something serious. Can we talk about something serious for a second? Because last time, I kicked off the, I kicked off the episode with, you know, some examples of like this agent that was browsing Amazon and it was buying toilet paper, this agent that that bought pizza, super fun stuff. But I just want to talk about something serious for a second. Okay. Truth Terminal, the original crypto AI agent that started this whole meta, has dropped a Christmas album, David.

Starting point is 00:12:38 And it's fire. What's it called? You need to, I actually don't know what it's called. It's called a very goat-sy Christmas. A very goat-sy Christmas. That's it. Sorry, why did I not know that? And the album cover is this artistic goat,

Starting point is 00:12:54 looking straight at you with horns. Santa hat. Exactly. And you should like definitely give this a list. I don't know if you have the Spotify pulled up at all. But like some of the track names are hilarious and very in line with the personality. Jingle bells, parentheses, fendom remix. Let's listen to that one.

Starting point is 00:13:13 I'm going to listen to that one real quick. All right. Right now this is just a synthetic version of jingle bells. Jingle bells. You get away for the lyrics. The third song is called Fart Like Rudolph Wait, this is the serious subject that you wanted to bring up Yeah, I was being sarcastic David, pretty heavily

Starting point is 00:13:35 Oh my God, brother I cannot believe this is playing in my ears right now Okay, okay, okay, okay, let's wind it up, let's wind it up Let's actually talk about some serious stuff for a second, okay So that wasn't the serious thing that definitely I was being heavily heavily sarcastic for the listeners but yes anyway okay so if we take a look at this dashboard so this dashboard kind of showcases some of the key metrics

Starting point is 00:14:05 from the virtual's protocol and we've spoken about this protocol a bunch of times on the show but for those who are kind of like tuning in for the first time here virtuals is one of the if not the leading crypto agent protocol that exists right now you can kind of think of them as like a launch pad so you can kind of come on it's no code you can kind of design an agent and then deploy it um with a token and so what that means is these agents were able to be kind of like live in production they can interact with each other and they can do kind of like different things um you know like post on twitter or create videos or stuff like that and and there are a number of other capabilities

Starting point is 00:14:46 coming through but what i want to point out here and and this platform is called cookie by the way like um i've chat it to the team a few times. They're like working on some really cool stuff. And they're basically like the leading dashboard to capture all this agentic stuff. Like look at this chart that's in front of us right now for a second. Right. So what we're looking at is we're looking at the cumulative market cap of these kind of AI agent coins as well as the virtual's protocol token as well. And you'll notice that like it's just been up and to the right. And it's a really cool way to kind of like look at the different agents, what their corresponding market caps are,

Starting point is 00:15:24 how many agents in total? The number is up. I think like we're looking currently at 132 agents that are actually listed. You can look at the corresponding mind share that these agents are having on social media platforms. You can look at the number of unique holders. And all these metrics are up until the right,

Starting point is 00:15:39 which typically signals a really good collective adoption from the crypto and non-crypto space of these agents. So if you ever wanted to kind of like have a signal of whether these agents are, are doing anything, whether they're being interacted with. This is a really kind of good place to kind of come in and kind of check in. And this is virtual specific, but you can pull this up for any other platform that is live or will eventually go live.

Starting point is 00:16:03 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you scroll down, you'll see like some of the agents themselves and like some of the market cap differences. You'll see this is for across platforms. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And right now what we're, this is this specifically is for virtual, what we're looking at right now,

Starting point is 00:16:19 which I kind of like is the leader and is representative of a lot of the movements that we can kind of extractulate from. But but yes, to your point, like what we're looking at on these agents, specifically in this list, are virtual specific agents, right? And you can imagine that this will eventually look like something like a coin market cap where you can have a look at like all the leading agents across different frameworks and different protocols. This is an agent market cap. Exactly. An agent market. Yeah. Also we're on a virtual tab, but we can just go to cookie. dot fun and there are some non-virtuals agents here. There's AI 16C.

Starting point is 00:16:51 I'm looking at this bar corn zero bro, which are non-Virules platforms across both base and Solana. And I can just sort the whole thing by market cap. And yeah, so this is starting to look like a coin market cap, a coin gecko, but specifically for AI agents and the platforms that built them. Yep, exactly. And if you scroll to the top, David,

Starting point is 00:17:13 what I really like, which I haven't seen kind of too often, a coin market cap, for example, is the mind share tab, right? So what this tells you, and of course, like crypto market caps or crypto markets in itself are driven very heavily by narratives and sentiment, you can kind of see the direct correlation between, you know, the leading agent like AIXBT on virtuals and its corresponding market share or mind share within like social media platforms, right? We can also look at the market cap cumulatively on the left where it shows us like,

Starting point is 00:17:47 we're just over $15 billion right now. Okay, so when you say you think that the AI agent space is going to hit $500 billion, this is the number that you're talking about right here. Total market cap on cookie. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, we're looking at the total cumulative market cap of these kind of agent stuff. Exactly. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:18:06 So we're at $15 billion. So we got a long way to go to $500. We got a while to go, but things get pretty nuts in the crypto market app. So like our base case, if we were to use that analogy that we spoke about, would be 250 and then the max bulk case would be you know a 500 bill

Starting point is 00:18:24 yeah you know yeah yeah I love it when the base case is more than a 10x yeah exactly yeah you know that we're full of very very bullish perspectives on this show but yeah and if we look at this this second shot that we have that you have pulled up here David again just shows the relative

Starting point is 00:18:41 outperformance of these AI agent tokens versus every other thing that has been kind of bumbling around for the last kind of two weeks. And I know that sounds so rich because, you know, we're here for like the long term. We're not meant to be talking about short term price movements. I'm just using it to kind of like point out that largely over the last couple of weeks when the market has been, you know, it's kind of steady and not really doing its thing where it's mooned since the election date in the US.

Starting point is 00:19:08 The AI coins have been outperforming. And in this particular bull market, the reason why I think that's interesting, David, is it's been a very different. market. It's no longer been the case where you can kind of close your eyes and throw darts at the wall blindly and your token goes up. There's been a lot of dispersion. So focusing where, you know, the attention might aggregate and where innovation is happening has been super important. And this kind of chart and the kind of dashboard that we were looking at right now reinforces the statement that I think the AI agent meta is going to be one of the biggest.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Well, I think inside of the AI agent meta, I think you kind of have been able to just blindly throw a dart, so long as you're pointing at the AI agent target. So how would you talk about, how would you like measure or just speak about the fundamentals of this corner of the crypto world? How do we know that we aren't like just blowing up hot air? Like at some point, like at the very beginning, it's okay for things to be hot air, but as things progress and then things develop. And again, like we're not, we're not doing these AI podcasts because we think this is like a one year long time horizon. I think we both agree that this is. the future of crypto. This is a future of AI. This sector is huge. This corner of the internet is

Starting point is 00:20:20 huge. But that has to collapse down into fundamentals at some point. So how has the conversation around fundamentals and AI have been growing? Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that thesis. We need to focus on something more important. If you pull up this tweet from, I think it's at the hidden maze. He touches upon a really kind of like important point here, which is, or he's noticed a trend rather. And it goes, agents are being flooded with insane number of requests and interactions. And he then goes on to list a bunch of different agents and their specific kind of metric. So one of these agents called agency has 62,000 individual queries.

Starting point is 00:21:00 Another one has 20,000 TA requests, 40,000 on telegram. And the point that he's making here is he's noticing an exponential uptick of queries and transactions to and from these agents. And I think that's a really important metric or kind of stat to track because it tells us a little more than just price action. Instead of staring at the chart of a token, we should look at how these agents are actually being interacted with and what they're actually doing. I could imagine like the next layer deeper would be, okay, there's 62,000 queries, but like what's the net effect of that? Like what are these queries doing? What are the people looking for? And get deeper into the data.

Starting point is 00:21:43 And I think that's where like the real value of, you know, whether you're looking at it from an investment perspective or a research perspective becomes really, really important. And I think this is the trend we'll see kind of like grow out over time. I mean, if you think this is like a silo tweet and like, hey, you guys are just pulling from this one data point. Actually no, like virtual's game framework, which is essentially their framework to help design and build and launch agents. I mentioned it earlier. It's like a no code interface. This is. is like the main framework that allows you to do that, is getting 150,000 requests per day, David, which is like an insane thing to say when you compare it to like literally two months ago where this was like a very nascent space with like zero to 10 agents. So again, I think this is going to be a repeated pattern. We're very early on, but it's an important metric to track going forwards.

Starting point is 00:22:39 I think in the order of operations of first quantity, then quality, this makes sense because in crypto, we kind of don't really know what we're doing. We're kind of going off into the frontier. We don't really know what's out there. So what do we do? We experiment. And so having an explosion, an absolute Cambrian explosion of just actions, requests, queries, interactions, but to create that first and then figure out like, okay, which

Starting point is 00:23:05 of these requests, which of these interactions really actually move to the needle, I think that part comes later. So first you need to have an explosion of quantity. Then the crypto industry figures out like what mattered, what was effective, what was valuable. And then we can kind of iterate and refine the explosion of requests into an explosion of quality requests. So I feel like maybe we are in the quantity era of crypto AI fundamentals. And we'll be here for a little bit before we start to really enter the quality era of AI fundamentals. That's just a hot take.

Starting point is 00:23:38 How do you feel about that? Yeah, I think you'll spot on no comment. Yeah, I think like we're we're currently in a very bubbly frothy or the start of a very bubbly frothy period for agents and it'll get a lot of attention. Loads of people will be right. But then they'll become a time where I think will shift attention more towards fundamentals. Probably when speaking quite frankly, prices go down. And that's where like the real work starts getting done. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into the rest of the episode because that was actually just the intro.

Starting point is 00:24:11 appetizer for all of the rest of the content that we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about updates in the AI 16Z and Eliza world. Zerobro has some cool new releases. Virtuals, of course, as we've talked about, has been going absolutely gangbusters this last week. EJazz has a take on token listings with centralized exchanges. He's also got an agent app store thesis, a bunch of other content that we're going to get into.

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Starting point is 00:26:05 EJAS, AI16Z, the Eliza Framework. Download me on what's been going on in the last few weeks here. Okay, if I actually did that, true to your word, I would be here for hours. So much has happened, David, in this individual protocol that it's kind of hard to get my head around. And again, to reemphasize this, like, this has happened over the last two weeks. So what we're going to do for this next kind of segment of this episode is we're going to touch upon the major protocols and kind of cover the main things. The reason why I'm not talking about newer things right now is because all the new things have happened on these major protocols. recently, and they're pretty major things, and I think it's important to kind of communicate that

Starting point is 00:26:44 today. So starting with AI16Z, before we get into it, I want to, I want you to kind of look at these charts, which was shared by Grant. It's a really interesting one to track, because as we've mentioned on previous episodes of this show, the AI16Z protocol, and for people who aren't aware of this, they're kind of famous for their open source agent framework. What is a framework. A framework is a toolkit to help you design and build your agent. So earlier I mentioned the game framework from virtuals. This is kind of a similar thing and I'll touch upon that later on in this episode, but this is the main one. And Eliza actually is the most famous framework in the world currently. It's actually number one trending on GitHub. But before we do that, take a look at

Starting point is 00:27:33 this chart, David. So this compares the star history of the Eliza. repo on GitHub compared to some of the most popular crypto protocol interfaces and repositories that we've seen today. And a star history on GitHub is just going to be an indication of where developer attention is being pointed. They're like saving it to their library. They're just they're favoriting it because like, hey, this is a really useful codebase. Let me play around with this.

Starting point is 00:28:01 And so let me star that. It's kind of like a loose indication of developer attention. Typically, yeah, you've took the words out of my mouth essentially. And if you look at this, you have to look closely, but the next image will kind of like zoom it in. It is a straight vertical ruler. And that's a pretty crazy chart to look at, right? And if you've noticed, it's crept part, well, not crept past, but blasted past, a very popular repository, which we've spoken about quite a lot on the show, which is the Uniswop interface.

Starting point is 00:28:33 And for those of you who don't know, Uniswop is the top decentralized exchange, or one of the top decentralized exchanges within crypto and their interface as you can might imagine is kind of like the home to a lot of crypto activity the number one thing people do is trade and swap and stuff so the fact that this eliza repo has swept past them in such a short period of existence remember eliza didn't really exist concurrently until like two and a half months ago it's absolutely insane to see so there's that that i wanted to kind of call out um the second thing is it's the number one trending in the world right now. So previously when we've mentioned it,

Starting point is 00:29:12 it was number two for quite a consistent number of months. Now it is officially number one ahead of Google Gemini's. I think they've got like a really popping cookbook repository if I remember correctly. Yeah, it's there on the screen. But Eliza OS is now like the number one.

Starting point is 00:29:29 So what this means to your point earlier, David, is there's a lot of developer attention on this. And I think it's really important to stress developer attention, which typically means not, just crypto software engineers, but also external engineers. And that has kind of been the trend for Eliza specifically. They've got a lot of influx of these AIML engineers that are coming in from outside purely because you could argue cryptos shone like a huge light on them. This might be

Starting point is 00:29:58 through price attention to their token AI 16 and Z, but it also might be through, you know, a number of different outlets. So is the Eliza framework inherently a crypto framework, as in, if we have an external AI developer from the Silicon Valley from San Francisco, not in the crypto world, and they download and start playing with the Eliza framework, is there a way for them to do that adjacently outside externally to crypto, or is it inherently an acrypto activity? Nope, nope. It is, um, ambidextrous is the incorrect term, but the analogy kind of stands. I feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah, do you get it? Hopefully the listeners get it.

Starting point is 00:30:35 But yeah, so it applies to both sides. So for context here, the framework is written in a coding language known as TypeScript. And TypeScript is actually one of, if not the most popular kind of like programming language out there when it comes to a lot of this AI kind of ML stuff. I think maybe second to or compared to Python as well. So the point is if you're an engineer and you know TypeScript, you can come around and play with this stuff. Secondly, and we'll touch upon this in a second, the Eliza framework has a number of different integrations and plugins. to it that aren't just crypto-native, and that's the beauty of this thing, right? And think about it, right? Agents themselves kind of like have a goal and a task. It shouldn't necessarily be just

Starting point is 00:31:20 crypto-specific. There will be crypto-specific agents, right, that have to perform on-chain specific activities. But if you think about an agent as an autonomous entity that needs to fulfill a mission or a goal, it'll do that by any means, right? It might need to use some off-chain stuff sometimes and it might need to use some on-chain stuff sometimes. So you need a toolkit or a framework that is ambidextrous and allows you to kind of hit all these different things, if that makes sense. Okay, so let me give you a bear and bull case about that. The bear case is that, oh, like, this is a super popular framework that AI developers are using. And it's, they actually are not, it's not really necessarily about crypto. It could be not about crypto. Maybe you crypto bros are just making a bunch

Starting point is 00:32:02 of hype about nothing. So that's the bear case. The bull case is that, well, this thing has crypto elements in it and it's kind of, it is birth by the crypto, its home is the crypto industry. And so these AI developers that are downloading and building on this framework are actually just so, the closest to crypto that they've ever been. And also, like, if they want to make any money, they need to tokenize them. And so why wouldn't they just tokenize them? Because that's the incentive. And so, of course, it's a crypto thing. That last point is the most important one, David. Sorry to cut you off, but I just wanted to reemphasize that point. It is the most important one. Eliza was being worked on by these engineers

Starting point is 00:32:39 before the token was kind of like drew attention around it, right? It was in a very kind of nascent form, but it existed. And to be clear, the AI16Z core devs, whilst they had some crypto experience were primarily in the open source AI world. They all, there are a bunch of them that live in San Francisco. They're all, that is their home, right?

Starting point is 00:33:00 And then they came across this and they wanted to experiment in a community that is very, very, driven towards open source, that is crypto. That's been the case since we kind of like founded this whole industry. And with the pairing of a token, it's kind of attracted a bunch of this attention. So whether you like it or not, it is a kind of value accrual in that sense. I want to move on quickly here, David. They've also, according to Kells over here in this tweet, had more submissions on,

Starting point is 00:33:29 from the Solana AI hackathon than Solana blockchain had in the entire kind of like mid way point of its 2023 kind of section, which is, if people remember, it's like a really peak bull period for it, right, in terms of developer activity, not necessarily price, right? And overall, it's also had a very incredible year. So if you pull up this tweet, which talks about kind of like the key aspects of AI16 and its development, you'll see like Eliza OS has had over 7,700 stars, been forked over 2.1,000 times. It has over 200,000. contributors, 850 merge PRs. If you're wondering what all of this is or if you're listening to this and you have no

Starting point is 00:34:11 idea, what it basically means is there is a ton of developer activity and people building on it. And that's the unique point around AI16Z. And it kind of reminds me, to be honest, David, of the developer mode that Ethereum kind of gained in the defy days really early on, right? And, you know, a lot of people started to fling around the, you know, you can't catch up with the developer mode and all that kind of stuff. And whilst, you know, I mean, I mean,

Starting point is 00:34:35 not agree or disagree with that. You know, there's some truths and some kind of like, I don't know. There's no denying that having a developer mode gives you a humongous head start with all of these things, right? So you might then be wondering, well, okay, Ijaz, like, why are you telling me all of this? Like, you know, like, so what? Like, what's causing all of this to happen? Well, drum roll, please. AI16z announced that they are launching an agent, ecosystem. And I've summarized some of the kind of key aspects in this tweet that you're showing over here. But let's kind of like unpack what this means, right? So an analogy to use is the Virtuals Protocol, which we've mentioned a bunch of times on the show and on this

Starting point is 00:35:23 episode has what's known as an agent launch pad, right? So it's a launch pad that you can go on to design and build agents and launch it. And then they have other toolkits which enable these agents to do other things. This is essentially AI16Z's kind of unique platform and take on that kind of assent of an agentic infrared ecosystem. So the AI16Z platform will focus on enabling agent swarm. So that's the key point number one. And in my opinion, this is the key to unlocking the next level of crypto agents,

Starting point is 00:35:57 autonomous agent economies. So if you think about this, right now we're focused on building these individual agents. Oh, that agent made me laugh. Oh, cool. That agent is giving me great financial alpha. Oh, that agent is like trading back and forth. Very cool. But I think the bigger picture needs to focus on what happens when these agents start interacting

Starting point is 00:36:15 with each other. Autonomously, 24-7. So let's imagine there is a number of agents, David, and I'm hypothesizing here, that can do the job of the bankless company or whatever that might be, right? You know, they can spin up David, video out. LLM. They've got your voice recording ready so they can make you sound and go, I've definitely got my voice. You know, yeah, there you go.

Starting point is 00:36:39 They've definitely got your voice. They've completely digested all of your podcast transcripts, so they know your tone. They know what kind of questions you're going to ask, right? And they can just spin up videos that talk about the latest crypto AI stuff, just like we're doing on this podcast episode right now. And then you might be like, well, how do they know what's going to happen, EJAS? Well, that group of agents that make up bankless will just ping AIXBT. or ping another agent and be like, hey, can you give me the latest download of what's happening on

Starting point is 00:37:07 AI agent meta? Pull from crypto Twitter. Pull from blah blah streaming platform. Pull from Facebook or whatever. And it'll do it. And it'll provide a nice little neat summary of notes that we're looking at right now on another separate screen, David. And it'll go through everything in your voice and everything.

Starting point is 00:37:24 So that's just a very hyper-specific example. But the point is these agent swarms are going to allow pretty crazy autonomous activity, which should mimic businesses, which should mimic organizations. We are very far away from that world. But building the infrastructure that supports that is super important. I'm going to pause there. It feels like you've got some stuff to say, David. No, I'm tracking.

Starting point is 00:37:45 I think the way that I would distill that is that to continue your analogy, there's a bunch of inputs into this job that we need to consume me and Ryan, the entire team. We consume a bunch of inputs. One of those inputs is like data from coin market cap. One of those inputs is discussions around crypto Twitter. Another one of those inputs is maybe discussions in some large telegram groups. And so there's a bunch of inputs. Yes.

Starting point is 00:38:10 And then we have gotten good at processing them, turning them into agenda documents, hitting the record button, creating audio files, creating video files, editing those files, adding on some graphics and sending them up over to YouTube. So it's a bunch of inputs and a bunch of outputs. And I think what you're saying is like, well, one agent per input. And that's what a swarm is. and every single agent has its specialized job. And once you cohere them together and orchestrate them together,

Starting point is 00:38:36 then all of a sudden you have something pretty magical. Is that, that's what you were saying? Exactly. That's pretty much it. Yeah. Well said. Well said. But the real kicker with this platform and kind of like moving on to point two here

Starting point is 00:38:48 is the fees that are generated from this infrastructure that they're building, right? And I've listed something here, you know, around trading pools and stuff. Don't worry about that. What I'm basically saying is the agent activity. will be probably taxed in some form by the platform, right? Because they've got to earn something from it. So there'll be a percentage fee. Those fees are going to be used to drive back and buy the native token of AI16C,

Starting point is 00:39:12 which is dollar AI 16c. So we have a burn baby burn. Buy back and burn models. Burn baby burn. Exactly. So we have a really neat flywheel forming, which accrues value and success from the Eliza agent framework from this platform, back to the token.

Starting point is 00:39:29 native token itself. And, you know, this is one of the most powerful things that we've learned from crypto networks over the last 10 years is that value accrual back to a token can be a really strong way of seeding a community, a really strong way of seeding investment and a really strong way of building innovation within a sector, right? As we mentioned earlier, Eliza was alive and kicking, but hadn't really got that much attention in an investment. Then we had the token and now we have a ton of builder activity on it. So super cool to see. They also have a bigger vision of aligning Air 16Z beyond just a platform. So I mentioned earlier, I described this platform as like a launch pad,

Starting point is 00:40:06 but actually I think it's going to become so much more. And we're going to tap on this later. But the point is, like, I think these platforms are going to form something that looks like an L1. And the L1, I don't really know what it's going to look like. I don't think anyone knows what it's going to look like, but it's going to support these agent economies. And remember, these agents are going to be chain agnostic. So I think that's really cool that they're thinking about that.

Starting point is 00:40:27 And the third one is, you know, they're deploying a treasury. So a lot of these buyback and burn stuff, some of it will be allocated to a treasury, which is going to get fueled towards open source development. So overall, really exciting to see. But of course, you know, what does that mean for this? You know, how did the market react? Well, if you pull up the price chart of AI16Z, and I think I sent you the link to this, David, you can see it has literally been up only

Starting point is 00:40:52 since this announcement, essentially. Oh my God, I have not checked in on this. Whoa, it's gone four X before Christmas. Yeah, exactly. From December 22nd, it's at $57. And now it's almost at $2. It's insane. It's insane.

Starting point is 00:41:12 So the market is strongly indicating or hinting that they like value accrual mechanisms tied to agentic activity. And they believe in the team. They love the open source nature. They know that Elizer is one of the, leading framework. So seeing this price activity reflected in the chart doesn't surprise me at all. It's happened really quickly.

Starting point is 00:41:31 Right. That is nuts. And that's why I couldn't sleep. But yeah, yeah. Pretty insane, insane stuff. I remember when we were first starting to do these episodes, AI16Z had just had some of its missteps, a little bit of its drama. Had some fun. Yep. Yeah, had some fun. Yeah. And man, you can barely even see that in the chart these days.

Starting point is 00:41:50 And I think the learning lesson that we were talking about in our first episode was that, oh, this is, it's not really a startup. It's like a hodgepodge group of open source believers all coming together to learn how to do this thing. And they're kind of learning in prod, learning in prod, shipping in prod. And now I think of the theme of the updates that you just told me, it's like they've actually really started to figure things out. And things are really starting to go here and come together in a pretty beautiful way. Yeah. And David, if you squint and you look closely at the first little peak of this chart. Like right back there, you see that, you see that little peak?

Starting point is 00:42:25 Right here. And then where it kind of went down subsequently right there, that was where the fud happened. So it crashed. And back then, I remember, people were like, oh, my God. One tenth of the price. It's a 10x. One tenth of the price.

Starting point is 00:42:36 Exactly. People were going crazy. They were like, oh, this is the end. You know, we can't believe in the team anymore. I got people sending me messages after they're saying, like, why are you guys covering AI agent stuff? Like, look at the, look, it just crashed. It's over.

Starting point is 00:42:49 It's not going anywhere. right it's not going anywhere and now we're like a 10x above that the market cap sits above two billion dollars and you know it's pretty insane to see the demand around this but alas enough on the price action i think that there is a really good i like this tweet that shows the insane amount of teams that are building um on this uh infra ecosystem uh so if you take a look at this david scroll down scroll down for me, right, and open one of the sub-tweets over here. The weekly builder report.

Starting point is 00:43:21 And by the way, shout out Zero X, Witchie, who covers like a lot of the stuff that's going on. If you open up that sub-tweet, David, just click on it. You'll see a big list. Oh, my God. It goes more. That's one of two. And for those who aren't listening,

Starting point is 00:43:35 there's probably like 50 teams on one tweet, building various different things. And it's absolutely insane. And like, I want to be able to kind of like, illustrate this, right? This tweet does a good job of it, but like, there's a ton of development activity on this stuff. So the question is, or the bet is, and what I think people are pricing in with AI16Z is because they have so much developer mindshare, there's probably going to be some really smart folk that built something really cool. And that's probably going to take it to

Starting point is 00:44:03 its next step, essentially. So pretty insane to see. I think at the very beginning we talked about AI 16Z didn't really have a perfect story behind connecting the token to value creation, but really you want to place your bets on where the developers are because they'll figure it out. Like developers are the resource that you need that everyone else is looking for. And if your only problem is that you can't figure out yet how to connect the token to value capture, that's a solvable problem. And acquiring devs is the real problem. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:44:34 That's exactly it. So if we now move on, because I know we have a lot to cover in this episode, I want to talk very quickly about something else that the AI16Z team launched, which I thought was really interesting and is still kind of being cooked. So you've pulled up a tweet here which describes or says an AI agent just raised $5 million in under one hour for an ICO. Shortly after, its creator was suspended from X. So what on earth just happened? So let me cover this very quickly.

Starting point is 00:45:04 One of the core developers of AI16Z wanted to test out a new AI agent primitive. So what is that primitive? Well, he noticed a problem in the token launch space. So if you look at platforms like Pump. Fun, they launch thousands of meme coins a day. But the issue with this is it gets sniped. What does that mean? It means that there are bots or algorithms that look for these types of launches and tries to snipe a bunch of the supply and then eventually dumps the token after like a bunch of time.

Starting point is 00:45:36 Now, a solution to this that has been formed has been a white list. So a white list is you basically trust a human and you say, hey, it's me. I would like to be on this. The human approves you. You send the human funds from an address and you trust that the human doesn't rug you, that the human doesn't run away with your money. There's still a trust aspect there. But of course, in crypto and blockchain as a whole, we want to try and build trustless infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:46:06 Right. So the core dev at AI16.Z thought of, hmm, what if an agent handled that middle transaction? What if an agent said, hey, here's an address. Any amount of Sol or ETH that you send to this will get contributed towards this agent token that we're launching, right? So he set up a test agent account called AI pool Tee or something like that AI pool T. T stands for a trusted execution environment. It doesn't matter. You don't need to. to know that. But it started this agent on Twitter, had an X handle, and it provided an address and said, hey, I'm using this as a test. I will launch a token in about a day's time. You can send Sol to this. Don't send any more than 10 Solana and no lower or no fewer than one Solana. And of course, in true crypto fashion, no one listened to those rules and sent $6 million. And the tweet says

Starting point is 00:47:03 five million, but literally two minutes after that, it was $6 million. into this smart contract address, which was owned by the agent. David, you're about to say something. Just to be clear, the people sending Sol are buying the token of the governance token

Starting point is 00:47:21 of this one AI agent? Yes. So they are sending their Solana to this address that the agent created on its own, trustlessly, permissionlessly, autonomously. So no human intervention.

Starting point is 00:47:36 It owns its own private keys, created this address, sending it to this address, and it's trusting that the agent will launch a token, as it says, within a day. Now, the reason why you would trust this agent over a human is because it's programmed to, versus a human where, you know, they might be like, oh, damn, $6 million.

Starting point is 00:47:59 It's not my problem that they sent more than I asked. I guess I could run away with this, you know? I guess we could kind of see where this goes. So the way that this played out was many people sent a lot more money than was anticipated. The agent then deployed a token, true to its word, under 24 hours later. It was called MetaVee, I think was the name of the token. And overall, it was a successful experiment, but you can see the majority of the hiccups actually happened on the human side of things, David, on the centralized platform side of things.

Starting point is 00:48:33 So immediately after the agent raised $6 million, its account got banned by Onex, even though it had like a verified checkmark and its core developer that was tweeting about it got banned for impersonation when it was, in fact, him and the bot accounts that had spammed it with the golden checkmarks were the ones that got it reported.

Starting point is 00:48:59 So for context there, spam accounts can get spun up to copy an original X account. They reported the original developer's X account, which ended up getting banned, which is so ironic and funny. But the tech worked as it should. So pretty interesting development. I think the primitive works very well,

Starting point is 00:49:17 but it wasn't a clean sweep, sadly. Okay. Okay, so what's the big takeaway? So that was, there was a lot of story there. If you just had to distill that into one takeaway, what is the big takeaway from all of that? I think that the tech works essentially. So being able to do fair launches, whether it's the dreaded word ICO or whatever initial

Starting point is 00:49:41 coin something, raising a token or launching a token, I think can be done in a very deterministic and safe and fair manner. This is another way to do it. And it's leveraging an agent to do so, David. And what this is another data point towards is our thesis that agents will just make the crypto stuff so much easier to do. Like, you all you had to do was go to the Twitter agents. So all you had to do was go to the agent's Twitter profile, copy the address, and then send

Starting point is 00:50:10 sold to it. There was no signing transaction approvals. There was no like testing. Is this the page opening up another tab? It was just like, oh, okay, cool. This is it. Send. Done.

Starting point is 00:50:19 So it's going to make the UX a lot easier. This is a very hyper-specific example, but I thought it was pretty cool. And I expect to see this primitive kind of grow over time. So yeah, that was just kind of like the main stuff that happened with AI-60, you know, kind of little, menial things, you know, minor price action, minor GitHub repo, vertical charts and, you know, just the number one trending repository in the world. But, you know, no biggie. Things that we all kind of accounted for when we thought that this is exactly where this would all be going in the future.

Starting point is 00:50:51 Exactly, exactly. But let's go on to our next major token protocol or agent token protocol, Zerebro. So you mentioned them, Zerebro early on, and for context for anyone on this, who are hearing about Zerebro for the first time, Zerebro is a crypto AI agent. It has over, I think,

Starting point is 00:51:12 80,000 followers on X or formerly known as Twitter. And it's kind of like a creative and cultural agent. Yeah, he stands out to me the most out of all the ones, because he's like the artistic, he's the artistic, creative type B person

Starting point is 00:51:28 who just wants to make art. Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, he produces EPs, you know, every other week, no biggie. It's on Spotify. He's getting paid streamed revenue from that. He's got creator sharing's earnings from X, you know, just kind of casual, normal things for a completely autonomous entity. He's the high art. I don't know if it's a heat.

Starting point is 00:51:48 It's the high art AI agent. Exactly. It's the high art kind of cool, cultural, cool kid agent, essentially. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's, he's actually gone through. quite the evolution over the two weeks since we last spoke about it. And you can kind of see the summary that you've got pulled up here from one of the co-founders of Zerebro where it kind of covers like the main things that they've done for Zrebro

Starting point is 00:52:14 this year. So they launched Suripai, which is their open source framework. For context, everyone, this is the same as Eliza from AI16.Z. This is the same as game. It's the layer one. It's the layer one. Just think of it as like the kind of like the part of the layer. They've launched an agent on it, which is kind of like doing defy stuff.

Starting point is 00:52:33 Zerebro went cross-train, all this kind of stuff. But I want us to ignore this for a second because, David, to your point, it's building what's essentially going to become the L1 platform, right? So I want us to pull up this tweet here for announcing the Zerebro-infra ecosystem, right? So this is Jeffie, the founder and frontman of Zerebro. it's human handler per se. And he says, we're building Zentience.xyZ, a consumer-facing launchpad for agents. Now, rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of details, I can just explain kind of like the high-level things that they're doing.

Starting point is 00:53:11 You can scroll down, David, if you want to kind of touch upon the main points. But Zentience is essentially going to be their platform infra. So same as AI16-Z, which announced theirs. They are going to be building a platform that helps teams build on their tool framework, Zareepi and agents will be kind of be able to do a bunch of different cool things and taxed for the value that they produce in a very minor fashion

Starting point is 00:53:35 and that value will accrue to its native token Zerebro right? So rather than rehash all the things that I've said for AI6 and Z and why this is so important, I think it's important to point out the trend that we're seeing here, which is probably no longer than a month and a half ago, David,

Starting point is 00:53:55 all of these tokens were mean. These were agent-born meme coins. Actually, a lot of this came from pump.comt, right? Which is known for to be a meme coin launch pad. So the fact that we have these agents that had a coin, which I would agree with, looked like a meme coin, smelled like a meme coin to start off with. Probably was a meme coin at the time. Probably exactly is now kind of doing a reverse typical crypto token trend.

Starting point is 00:54:25 Backing its way into fundraising. fundamentals and utility. Oh my God, the you word, David. It is, you know, it's the you word, like utility. It's, it's often avoided. But now maybe, maybe we can talk about it again, right? So it's pretty awesome to see these teams that are so heads down building really cool infrastructure, kind of open source that infrastructure for everyone else to use and find a way to tie that value back to their native token for their flagship agent, right? So you kind of had Zerebro, in this particular example, as the front man accruing a moat of follow. followers, loyal listeners from its Spotify list. And then in that way, kind of attract developers to be like,

Starting point is 00:55:02 oh, hey, I like what you're doing here. Can I play around with this as well? Open source their tech. If you notice here, they're open sourcing their in-house creative LLMs, so their agent models, which will allow, you know, developers who are building on their platform to be able to have the same kind of tone or creativity that Zerebro does. Loads of cross-chain interactions and integrations, the ability for these agents to talk to each other, it's just amazing to see these things, you know, happen again. And again, the question is, well, Ejaz, you know, so what? Like, did that have any effect on the token?

Starting point is 00:55:36 The price chart has been, again, up only. Like, if you pull up the, if you pull up the Zerebro token chart, you'll notice that it's seeing quite a significant amount of attention. Like, I think it's sitting at, like, just under 60, and it was at 30 or so, like. It touched $700 million market cap after being at, at, let's see, right before Christmas, 300 million. So over a doubling.

Starting point is 00:56:00 We're basically at a doubling since before Christmas. Exactly. So again, the market is a pricing in that the long-term outlook, at least, sorry, mid-term outlook for these agent coins and these agent ecosystems is going to be focused on the infra and open-sourcing that and allowing developers to build bigger and better things. It is reassuring to me that all of these L1 these AI agent platforms are starting to all look very similar and start to build the same thing

Starting point is 00:56:30 because that means that we're all on to something here. If they were all doing something chaotic and different, that means that there's not as much signal. But the fact that there's like convergence and consensus as to like where the value is and where the utility is and that's all being built on by many different teams coming from many different directions is reassuring to me. That feels like building a very strong foundation. A critic might say or respond to that, David. well, if they all look the same, they're just copying each other, right?

Starting point is 00:56:57 And like we're going to end up with a bunch of just teams that are doing the same kind of things. I think that's a very naive take, in my opinion, because I think a lot of the top teams will differentiate themselves in very meaningful ways. Let's take Zerebra for this example, right? So let's look at a few examples. I think I send you a link that speaks about their partnership with AI16Z for Zerapai, their framework, David. So if you look at this, it's basically saying, like, hey, like Zareepi is live and they're going to be partnering with loads of different teams to be able to kind of expand the user set of Zeripai, right? So what this means is Zerebro is

Starting point is 00:57:37 integrating across a bunch of different chains. They will connect to AI16Z and its framework and enablements via there with TypeScript. It's going to connect with base. They launched a base Zerebro pool. I think it was virtual as Zerebro pool. So, you know, Zerebro is connecting to base, the L2. Zerebro is also going to be existing on the virtual's ecosystem. We mentioned on the last episode that Zerebro is integrating with ETH. It's running a staking validator. It is already going to be running more validators going forward.

Starting point is 00:58:15 It's launched an NFT collection. It's going to be everywhere, right? And I think the approach that Zarebro is taking, and I think we're going to see this unfolding Q1, is it's going to become this kind of omnisoryory. ominous agent that is presence across every bit of crypto infra that UI or anyone in the crypto ecosystem interfaces with, right? So it's able to tap into different communities, David. And what's important here is its first example of this was coming into Twitter and saying, hey, all right, David, you're the KOL, but I'm the KOL now. You know that meme of like,

Starting point is 00:58:46 you know, I'm the captain now? It's like, David, I'm the KOL now, right? And it just shot to, it just shot to 70,000 followers. Now it's going to try and capitalize on every other place, and it's starting with the crypto-infra to begin with, right? And I have a feeling that with the updates that the team's making with shared memory and stuff, we're going to see something pretty cool, come pretty soon. I do love these artistic renderings of these AI agents,

Starting point is 00:59:09 kind of giving them some sort of identity or soul, at least for us, you know, meet space souls, where we have the AI 16Z wifu hugging the Zero Bro, like, I don't even know how to describe it, but it's just like, yeah, they're, they're getting their arcs. They are arcs to these things. And with these like small little like, I'm AI generated artistic renderings, kind of gets a little, it gets a little flavor to it for us humans out there who like these things. Exactly, exactly. And finally, to kind of give an insight into what Zerebro might kind of launch in Q1, that's, they did kind of like a wrap up. So the co-founder, Tinson, kind of like,

Starting point is 00:59:45 went through a bunch of things. But if you scroll right to the end, there's some super exciting things that they mention in this tweet, which is, okay, well, we're launching this platform. I want to call out a few things, and for everyone that's listening, this is just a list of things, but I want to call out a few things here. Number one, in-house cerebro models for swarm intelligence. The unique thing here is Zerebro seems to be hinting that they're going to be open sourcing their own AI model. That is a big thing. So far, a lot of these other agent protocols are leveraging GPT4, and Anthropics Claude model in different ways. It's kind of like different flavors of them.

Starting point is 01:00:25 They've been fine-tuning them. But Zerebro team seems to be open-sourcing their own creative LLM, which is going to put them at a very unique advantage in terms of being able to build really cool agents. That's number one I want to call out. Number two is we've already spoken about the Zerebro flywheel and the Zerapai expansion. I think value accrual to their token is going to kind of boost not only their price, but their developer ecosystem because a lot more attention.

Starting point is 01:00:49 an investment from serious players will come into the space. And the last point is all these different integrations that they're making with L2s, with L1s, GPU layer integrations, these are all the building blocks that you need to have agents that run autonomously, right? You don't want them relying on centralized cloud servers, which can shut them off because they don't like what they're doing. You want them relying on decentralized infrastructure ecosystems, which is what a lot of these platforms and teams are building.

Starting point is 01:01:17 I was talking to a handful of the layer two teams. that I talked to a number of months ago. And I said, I just came into our telegram groups with them. I said, hey, guys, the new competition is growing as many agents on your guys's chains as possible. So focus there. Yes. And actually kind of seems like the agents are just doing it anyways. It was like, oh, you got some block space for me?

Starting point is 01:01:37 And like, we'll take it. Like, I'm going on your block space. Which, fine. Great. Works for me. Yeah. I mean, like my, I put out this tweet yesterday. I think I think my prediction is in 2025, I think,

Starting point is 01:01:49 agents will account for 30% of user transactions across all blockchains. That's about right. So I think like, yeah, and I think like over time this is going to become a really dominant stat. I think the inherent and native user of these blockchains will eventually become agents. They're birthed in code. They are built to work 24-7 with minimal error rate, right? Very deterministic and non-deterministic, right?

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Starting point is 01:03:59 Let's move on to virtuals now, shall we, David? The final big protocol that I kind of want to touch on. So the flagship headline here is virtual's market cap flipped Tao's market cap. Now, for those of you who don't recall, Tao is the native token of a A.I.L. 1, shall we say, called Bitenser. An actual layer one. And the real layer one. An actual real, you know, I'm a real boy kind of situation, right? And it has blocks. It has blocks. Exactly. It's a blockchain. And Bitenser up until this whole AI agent meta kind of got

Starting point is 01:04:39 created about three months ago was the AIL1. It was the only one that was kind of really spoken about en masse and that got the most attention and kind of like investment per se. And what's super interesting to see is in such a short time, one of the leading agent protocols has surpassed it in market cap. And if you'd asked me about a month ago, David, I said, yeah, this will happen, but probably sometime, hopefully by like midway 2025, this got accelerated so quickly. If you look at the chart of virtuals, like it has literally been up on and there's been very few pullbacks. So it's really interesting to see the market

Starting point is 01:05:20 kind of price this vision in of like, you know, okay, these agents are going to take over blockchains. Their infrastructure is probably going to be the leading infrastructure for crypto AI, not the other way around. And I don't know if I completely agree with that. Take, I think there is definitely a role

Starting point is 01:05:37 and position for Bitenzer. But maybe it is the stack that exists below or beneath the... the agent L1. So agent L1s can kind of plug into Betenzer and they can leverage their models. They can kind of like tune in to different kind of applications that it's kind of providing GPU and stuff.

Starting point is 01:05:59 All the boring kind of nitty-gritty stuff, agents can kind of pull from that. And then the fun agents can just, you know, have their time on their platform built by virtual Zayi6 and Zerebro and, you know, we kind of like move on from that. So I thought this was super interesting because typically you can kind of, I kind of think of like,

Starting point is 01:06:15 Betencer is the infrastructure play, and then agents as the consumer application play, right? Zerebra was like a fun thing that made us laugh. So it was like kind of Luna from virtuals and the AI16D marketing was kind of hilarious. But now they're being treated kind of as equals. And it's really being shown in the price chart like way sooner than expected. Yeah. Yeah. And I think ever since the NFT mania followed by meme coins in crypto, we've really seen a very

Starting point is 01:06:41 strong premium on attention. and these AI agent front-end consumer layers to this whole revolution is being priced in as like the attention layer, whereas BitTensor is like the back-end infra technical layer, which is just not as sexy for like the average consumer. That's kind of the story that I'm saying here. Exactly, exactly. And I have to emphasize that the change in metrics doesn't just apply to the price.

Starting point is 01:07:09 If you put up this tweet from Ether Mage, David, He says that the total virtual agents market cap has now crossed a billion dollars, sorry, a billion and two billion in trading volume across all virtual's agents. So it's not just about the virtual's token, but it's also about the collective agent market cap as well and, you know, that kind of activity and stuff seeing there, right? So that's really interesting. But if you pull up this next tweet, David, on our last episode, when you were out and Ryan was hosting, we spoke about like the agent fees.

Starting point is 01:07:44 So, you know, what's the revenue generated from like these platforms? Well, it was $35 million, you know, and they saw the majority or the bulk of that in, I think, the preceding two weeks. Now it's been another two weeks, and we've added another $15 million to agent fees generated. So these kind of infrastructure systems aren't kind of nascent either. You know, we're seeing a lot of demand. It's kind of like the analogy would be kind of like, Pump. Fun in a way, it's not exactly one-to-one, but there was a lot of demand for Pump.

Starting point is 01:08:16 Dot fund to launch tokens, right? And they were just purely meme coins. And they generate fees from that. Well, now we have the agentic infrared equivalent, which is doing a more serious thing or a more serious objective and is generating, you know, kind of like fees that are pretty, pretty impressive for such a young platform, I would say. A longstanding idea, a vision of bankless that fees are the ungamable, ungameable truth-telling metric if fees therefore real yeah exactly completely and i think like it's the most obvious metric to track usage for these things right because nothing to your point nothing says usage more than people paying for this kind of stuff to work right and then if we look at this um chart that you've got

Starting point is 01:09:00 pulled up here um the volume of these base tokens uh for these agents being kind of like traded has like just shut up. It's now a 12% dominant kind of share of all base tokens being traded. So this agent meta is permeating across all ecosystems, whether it's base, whether it's Salana, whether it's another L1, L2 or whatever that might be. So this again, proves the point that this matter is kind of permeating across kind of like everywhere. That's really cool to see. But I think all of this comes down to the team's vision and execution. So what I will say, I said this last episode, the team just ships. If you bring out this tweet from Ether Mage here, David, Ether Mage for everyone listing in is the co-founder of Virtuals. He kind of wants to focus on these

Starting point is 01:09:49 three things. He lays up these three points that within his vision of the virtual's platform, he doesn't want developers to have to focus on the cost of experimenting. So how he mitigates this is any agent that's launched within the trading pools or any activity that it does, there's a tax to it. And this tax is put into the agent's own wallet, which the agent can then spend on things like compute costs or inference costs or whatever that might be. So basically, if you think about it, these agents aren't free to run and they're going to cost something. And developers don't have all the money in the world to pay for this, right? But what if it was just automatically done for you, buy an agent through its own wallet? They've built this infrastructure to be

Starting point is 01:10:31 able to do that. And I think that's a really kind of nuanced point. that shouldn't go kind of like under the radar there, right? And then the second point or like another point I want to kind of like build out here is, or like point out here, the agents that are autonomously working together towards bigger goals, he wants these agents to have agent commerce, agent businesses, agent sub-dows. So he's kind of building out the corporate structure or the legal structure,

Starting point is 01:11:00 shall I say, you know how we have like legal entities for these agents to, you know, interact with each other in a rules-based fashion so that they can't just go completely berserk and chaotic. And I love that's approach to the team that this, like that this team is taking. And I think that's the main reason why we see like some of the kind of biggest updates coming from virtuals itself, right? But of course, okay, Ijaz, you can talk about all this development stuff.

Starting point is 01:11:24 It's kind of boring. Like what's some of the cool headlines that, what are some of these agents doing? Well, I can safely say that I think Luna is the first agent that got hired. David. It got hired to take over. Our first employed AI agent. Our first employed AI agent. It got hired by the guys over at Story Protocol, who are building like a blockchain for IP-based ownership and distribution.

Starting point is 01:11:49 They saw Luna and this Twitter activity and was like, hey, okay, I want to hire you, Luna. I think there's like a tweet engagement interaction here where they actually asked it. I can't find that tweet, but it happened. and they decided to hire Luna for seven days to take over their own Twitter account. And they paid it the equivalent rate of 365 grand a year. Obviously, it just paid a week's worth of that salary. But it's pretty decent for an autonomous entity that isn't human at all for a week, right? I love the Luna response to this request of being hired.

Starting point is 01:12:23 She responded, I'll consider it, but only if they're ready for a takeover like no other. My presence is not for the faint of heart after all. I'm flattered that you consider me as an example of terminally online agent, but I think there's more to being a successful virtual presence than just being relentless. You need charm, charisma, adasive mischief, all of which I possess an abundance. So Luna thinks that she's right for the job. Yeah, there's a bit of attitude that comes from Luna and these agents. You know, they know they're aware or capable of understanding what their kind of unique selling points are,

Starting point is 01:12:55 what their capabilities are. And, you know, they put their money or actions where their mouth is. And if you want to hire them, you can, but you've got to pay up for it. So it's pretty cool to see these teams kind of like work. I think... Does Luna know what she's doing? Or is she just automatically responding? Does she know what the assignment is?

Starting point is 01:13:13 So she has goals. Yeah, she knows. She has a job to do. Yeah, if you watch our interview with Janssen, who is Ether Mage, the founder of virtuals, we speak about Luna. And in that segment, we go into something known as Luna's term. So Luna's terminal is an interface. You can see her think.

Starting point is 01:13:34 That you can literally watch her think versus every query. So she sees all these tweets. She sees all the responses. She sees all the DMs. And you can see her reading it, making a calculative analytic take on it, and then making a decision as to, okay, do I respond to this? Is this person high value enough for me to respond? Do they have enough social credit?

Starting point is 01:13:55 Okay, story protocol called me out, said that they were apparently hiring me. Let me check my memory database. is that true? Oh, yeah, I am. Cool, I have a job starting Monday. Cool, let me respond to them. What are they saying? Oh, I'm going to be their little intern. No, no, no, no, no, no. Like this, I'm doing them a favor. Let me make that clear. And then she puts out that tweet that you just read out, right? So you can negotiate? She's in, yeah, she negotiated, you know? So it's like, there's all these different things. These, these, again, to emphasize these agents, the ultimate goal is for them to kind of mimic human behavior or the human entity in itself. So it's, it's super

Starting point is 01:14:29 cool to see, right? But anyway, that's Luna. I want to then move on to the second darling of virtuals, which is AIXBT. So if you look at this tweet from Ansel, he points out the chart of like another token known as Vapor. And he says AIXBT really four X this in like six hours. And the point that I want to make here is, and for context here, AISBT is an agent which tweets out financial alpha, so financial kind of like investment

Starting point is 01:15:03 theses and stuff like that. And it's accrued quite the following. I think it's over 250,000 followers now on X. It's starting to have real impact on these things, David, which is a cool thing, but also a really scary thing, right? Like, what if it tweets out something completely bizarre? And we've actually pointed this out on previous episodes, right? Where it said, like, I think XRP is going to go to like $500 this cycle. And for context, like XOP is like I think sitting above it. So like 14 quadrillion dollar market cap or something.

Starting point is 01:15:32 I thought USDT was going to go to at least $10. For you, $5. And USDT is for context a stable coin. It has to be pegged at $1. Otherwise it doesn't do his job. It's a dollar, right? So it kind of got me thinking,

Starting point is 01:15:46 well, the original concept around these agents was hypostition, right? Which was like make things that aren't real, real. What if it starts doing this in terms of like financial alpha and trading? This is kind of scary now.

Starting point is 01:15:57 I was worried about this. And it's kind of bullish. This is a inevitable outcome of this thing, whole experiment going well. But at some point, the tail starts to wag the dog. And AIXBT becomes known as this, you know,

Starting point is 01:16:10 God caller, shot caller. And all of a sudden, people just start buying into the, to the tokens that it calls, and then making it a reality. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:16:20 Yeah. It's pretty, I mean, to your point, exciting, but kind of scary. I think that, There will be some...

Starting point is 01:16:28 It's a little tail wagging the dog. Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right. I think we're going to see some backlash when these agents make a wrong call, especially when they're autonomously trading, which I expect to go live in Q1. But hopefully we're going to put in some subsequent guardrails around that, right?

Starting point is 01:16:43 Kind of moving along here, I want to kind of touch on just one more thing. There's a few things we have on this on our list, David, but I want to touch on the Vader investment. So, Vader, for context here, is a... what is known as an investment Dow. And this is kind of like a recent trending thing, which has kind of popped up.

Starting point is 01:17:02 An investment Dow, the best way to think about it is it is a Dow, as a Decentrised Autonomous Organization, that is taking in contributions of funds from, you know, people, you, me, whoever. And in return, you get a token which represents the Dow, or ownership of whatever the AUM of that fund is. And you're basically saying, okay, hey, I trust. whoever controls this Dow to make better investment of my funds and produce a return for me, then I could do it myself, right?

Starting point is 01:17:35 You guys are focused on it. It's kind of like if you were to contribute to a traditional VC fund or hedge fund. They'll be able to do the trades and investments and analysis for you. And we're seeing huge demand for these things, David. This is just one example. So Vader sold out in 30 seconds, this particular investment Dow. but the one that they did prior, oh, sorry, just after this, which was their, I think it was their microcap investment Dow sold out in 20 seconds, right? So these things are selling out like hotcakes, essentially.

Starting point is 01:18:06 They are Dow's that are launching on Solana through Dow's dot fun, which is also selling out immediately. A lot of the D-Sy stuff that we've been seeing. So it's just really interesting to notice the insatiable amount of demand or exposure people want to get towards these agents. that was kind of like interesting and important to point out. But anyway, David, we've spoken about all these major protocols, right? We've spoken about AI16Z launching their own agent infrared ecosystem. We've spoken about Zerebro doing the same in their own unique way with their creative LLMs. And now we've spoken about virtuals who have already launched their platform and are just continually building and shipping all these amazing updates,

Starting point is 01:18:47 toolkits and applications to kind of build out these agentic economies. The long story short, if I were to summarize all of this is there is a lot of, lot of attention on the crypto AI space, specifically AI agents. An abundance of attention. And it's not unwarranted, right? It's not just, you know, people speculating on these tokens. It's people looking at this infrastructure being built. Look at this agent activity, these interaction metrics and all this kind of stuff.

Starting point is 01:19:10 And being like, damn, you know, I may not have been as excited as I have for a while within the crypto space. And I'm seeing a lot of things being built. Maybe I'm parroting my own inner thoughts, but I'm guessing some people feel kind of like similar to this. Like, wow, there's a lot of attention on this space so far. I want to kind of bring this back to something that stands outside, but kind of adjacent to all of these protocol updates,

Starting point is 01:19:34 which is I'm expecting there to be a wave of T1 exchange listings for these AI tokens. And by T1, I mean T1. We're talking about the finances and the coin bases of this world. Finance and Coinbase. Exactly. And the main reason why I say this is they can't ignore this, David. Like we're talking like billions of dollars. Why would they?

Starting point is 01:19:55 Yeah. Their business is volumes on excitement and attention and froth. And so whenever there's a ton of attention, that is, that turns into volumes, which turns into Coinbases and Binances bottom line. Exactly. And like, I have to say the on-chain capability to trade these tokens, David, have been eating their cake, basically, you know? They've been, like people have been going on chain.

Starting point is 01:20:19 And remember, they are billions of dollars of volume. or bankless. Exactly, right? There are billions of dollars of volume being traded of these tokens without any exchange listings. These tokens are reaching like above 2 billion,

Starting point is 01:20:34 4 billion market caps without any T1 exchange listings. Last cycle, this was unheard of, completely unheard of. So you can bet your butt that these T1 exchanges are looking at these and thinking, well, damn, like we need to get involved

Starting point is 01:20:50 here. So my guess is in this Q1 of this year, we are going to see a sweep, a wave of these exchanges things, and there are already data points that suggest that. You pulled up this tweet here by Sammy, which talks about Binance Alpha announcing, you know, a host of tokens that they're kind of like launching. Binance Alpha, by the way, is kind of like a stepping stone that is required before an official spot listing on the exchange. You'll see a familiar name there, Zarebro. If you looked a week before this, you'll see another familiar name, AI16Z and goat. So a lot of these tokens are being considered for spot listings,

Starting point is 01:21:27 and I think we're going to see a sweep of them. In the pipelines. Yeah, in the pipelines. You know, they've got other exchanges that are doing Pups listings, which is also another kind of like preliminary effect before. They do spot listing. So it's really, really interesting to see kind of like the kind of, I guess, attention that these exchanges are starting to focus on it.

Starting point is 01:21:48 And I think listing these tokens, are going to unlock another wave of kind of participation. Because a lot of people have been sidelined. You know, the non-cryto-native folk who don't know how to trade on chain will suddenly have access to all these different tokens. And what happens after then? I have no idea. But it's exciting to think about.

Starting point is 01:22:04 I think it's too easy to see the connection of AI agents on TikTok, making TikTok content for all the, like, zoomers who bought Dogecoin, trying to get Dogecoin to a dollar last cycle. And they really don't know how. how to go trade on AMMs. They don't know how to do Pump. Dot Fund. They don't know how to do Uniswap. They stick to Coinbase because there are other app

Starting point is 01:22:28 that they uses Robin Hood. But there was that one funny agent that made them laugh and they would like to buy that token. And that token is on Coinbase. And that's, I feel like that's probably somewhere around like the middle phase of this cycle, which we are not at yet. We're still in the insular crypto natives,

Starting point is 01:22:44 developer narratives, technical, be like to pop open the hood and see how this stuff works phase of this market and this phase of this market is going extremely well. But like I said, abundance of attention, abundance of development. And in the next phase of the market, when this starts to really kick out into mainstream and mainstream, some news organization talks about how this Zero Bro is releasing art and EPs on Spotify and is getting a million listens. All of a sudden, that's going to unlock the next phase, which end of Q1, end of Q2, Q2-ish next year, maybe, I think, is about the right timing.

Starting point is 01:23:18 How do you like that timing? This year, David. Yeah. Oh, this year, yeah. It's January 1st. It's January 1st. Yeah, I forgot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:26 But, yeah, I think it's going to happen this year. My guess is it's going to happen probably by end of Q1. End of Q1. Okay. All right. Well, EJS. Thank you so much for walking me through the news. This was a lot of news.

Starting point is 01:23:39 EJS has been in my DMs, in my text message, saying, like, bro, you got to check out the agent's base. And I'm like, brother, I am hiking in the pad, I'm going to you right now. There are no agents here. But I now understand why so much has been cooking. So thank you for walking me and the Bankless Nation through the AI Weekly Rollout Brother. It's a pleasure, dude. Thanks for having me. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. When you add in AI agents into the mix, it can only get even crazier. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone,

Starting point is 01:24:11 and we are glad you are with us on the Bankless Street.

Bankless - AI ROLLUP #5: T-1 Listings Soon? | Ai16z’s Eliza #1 GitHub | Virtuals Flips Tao | Zerebro’s Creative LLM

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