Bankless - AI ROLLUP #8: $500B AI Boost | Trump’s $70B Memecoin Frenzy | 400K Onboarded | Agent Framework Wars
Episode Date: January 23, 2025Ejaaz is back with David to unpack the whirlwind effects of President Trump’s $70B memecoin launch, which slammed 400K fresh users onto Solana and shattered revenue records in under 30 hours. Meanwh...ile, a $500B federal boost to AI—backed by OpenAI and SoftBank—has everyone on edge about how crypto’s AI agent economy might ride this newfound momentum. On the protocol front, Arc’s Rake framework and AI16z’s curated Eliza ecosystem are both stepping up, incubating projects like SoulGraph and Listen that promise a more user-friendly DeFAI future. Virtuals keeps shipping at breakneck speed too, testing new multi-chain waters, instituting a bold buyback, and hinting at metaverse collabs that could reshape gaming for good. From automated DeFi positions and trading dashboards to fully autonomous NPCs that commentate (and maybe soon play) your favorite games, the lines between AI and crypto are getting blurrier—and more exciting—by the day. Buckle up as the AI agent revolution continues to redefine what “on-chain” can really mean. Ready for the ride? ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️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 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/20 ----- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:50 Trump’s Memecoin & $MELANIA https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/1880974772990832780 https://x.com/DiamondHandsDig/status/1880979832445780107 13:52 The Stargate Project…$500B AI U.S. Investment & OpenAI Agents https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1881830103858172059 https://www.axios.com/2025/01/21/openai-davos-kevin-weil-ai-agents 23:09 Virtuals goes multi-framework https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1881340149503857151 https://x.com/NickDGarcia/status/1880275667809374597 30:54 Indie.fun https://x.com/indiedotfun/status/1879518209293918434 36:16 First AI Agent DOTA2 Stream https://x.com/ethermage/status/1879900384019517522 38:39 Agent tank demo of agent performing TA on a chart https://x.com/AgentTankLive/status/1881786054593925159 42:22 Ai16z demo day https://x.com/0xwitchy/status/1880244340561441238 46:44 ARC announces initial agent projects launching on its framework RIG, soulgraph https://x.com/LiquidLizard_/status/1880068692261675228 1:00:20 AI Agent Playground Grows https://x.com/nifty_island/status/1880258049149128749 1:03:19 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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, EJazz.
E-Jaz. How you doing, my man? How is your week?
Not much. President of the United States launched a meme coin that went to $70 billion.
Casual.
Decided to launch another one the next day.
Why did he do that?
Oh, yeah. And then he announced $500 billion worth of investment in AI in the U.S., which, you know, pretty just simple weekend.
casual standard stuff.
Yeah.
No, Matt.
What we were expecting.
Yeah.
I mean, just an all right crazy weekend.
And I feel like we can't start this pod, this particular episode, without even addressing it.
So I want to pull up this tweet that I put out, which kind of summarizes my thoughts around all of this.
And I just want to kind of start off with saying, I think this is incredibly bullish for crypto AI.
And it might sound like a stretch for some, but like let's just kind of like take this step by step.
You're embodying the meme of this like thing that happens.
And now you've like, the Charlie Day from Always Sunny in Philadelphia is like, here's why this is bullish about crypto AI.
I know why.
Completely unrelated things.
Yeah.
Okay.
So for context for people who, you know, were most certainly living under a rock and had no idea what was going on,
the current president of the United States decided to launch an official meme coin called Trump.
Trump official.
Yes.
Thank you, David, for that correction.
In case you didn't know, it was official.
In case, yeah, in case you didn't know.
And it just surged to $70 billion in under, I think, 30 hours,
which firmly placed it as one of the top 15 blockchains or cryptocurrencies in the world.
That is the quickest raise or rise of a crypto coin ever, which was just...
Broke into the top 20 of all cryptos.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely insane.
And so, you know, what is this going to do with AI coins?
Well, I had a few thoughts about this, David, all right?
And let me know if you disagree.
Well, number one, this coin was launched on Solana.
So in my opinion, Solana AI, coins are about to get a huge influx of capital.
And the reason why I say this is most people kind of like knew about Bitcoin, Ethereum,
and Solana prior to all of this.
But I don't think how many people, I don't know how many people actually interacted with Solano, right?
You know, they have to get like a phantom wallet or their limited coins listed on sexes,
centralized exchanges.
And so they were wondering, hmm, what?
is this thing. Well, now, when Trump launched their meme coin, they were like, well, how do I get
access to this thing? And so there was this massive flurry of capital to buy this coin. And so what
they're doing now is they're looking at their app on their phone and they're up massively and they're
thinking, well, what should I get now? And, you know, I think they start kind of like digging into
the narrative behind Solana, what's kind of like the hottest kind of trends. And they'll see
crypto AI. And I think that a lot of, you know, tokens and teams and protocols that we're spoken about
we'll start getting a lot of attention and we'll see that flow from meme coins into these things.
So that's like number one.
Okay.
I totally agree with you.
You tweeted this out at 8.45 a.m. on Sunday.
And I was also thinking this, especially the influx into specifically Solana.
So the wealth effect of Solana,
Solana prior to the launch of the meme coin was coming in at like $200.
With the launch of the Solana of the Trump meme coin came at $280 for a sole token for a soul.
a single soul, a massive capital increase, capital influx. And so just on this sole appreciation
alone, everyone on Salon has got everyone who's holding salonat. Yeah, I think it added like $30 billion
of value to its market cap. 30%, yeah, exactly, 30 to 40 billion dollars. So adding that to the
capital of the wealth effect of Salana in of itself. Yeah. But you also, again, like you said,
like I said, you tweeted this on Sunday morning right before Melania launched, which really just
sucked out the momentum and the optimism.
People I think were like, okay, yes, Trump is doing this to make money.
This is a business endeavor, but it's incentive compatible with crypto.
And we could all kind of just, you know, look, like shove the fact that he's going to sell a bunch of money and get a bunch of money.
We can shove that under the rug because it's incentive aligned.
But then once Melania launched, a lot of that got unraveled.
And the value of Trump went down, the value of Salana went down.
But, you know, it's still at 2.30, 240, it's still pretty okay.
So I'm going to tamper the amount of wealth effect that Solana has gotten, even though it is still real, it's still large.
It's still in the tens of billions of amount.
Yeah.
Well, let me counter that.
I agree with you, but let me counter it just slightly.
Okay.
And just look at it this way.
A bunch of people saw a brand new coin, specifically a meme coin, go to a $70 billion valuation in under 30 hours.
they're going to now start thinking probably, wow,
there's probably a bunch of other things that could do something similar.
Why can't it be my meme coin?
My meme coin's funny.
I laughed at it.
I bought a bunch of it.
Maybe it could happen as well.
And like, I started thinking myself, like, wow, like if this could happen to this,
like maybe it could happen to some other types of stuff.
I still think it's kind of interesting to look at.
Point two that I make in this tweet is if we just kind of zoom out for a second,
it's just completely nuts that we have an acting president of one of the biggest
countries in the world launch something like this. And I think that this might end up being net,
net, good for the industry. Remember, the biggest challenge that was faced in crypto today has been
unfriendly regulations. And now we have a president that's launching stuff like this. And I think
this kind of signals that the game is kind of different now. Gary Gensler is out. Crypto voters now
hold a huge significant influence over current and future U.S. elections, governments, etc.
And Trump knows this and will probably play to it. And we also have the most
pro-crypto cabinet ever, right? You know, we have some kingpins from the tech world that are in place
to guide policy around AI and crypto. And I think that's quite good. What do you think, David? Do you think
that's a bit of a stretch or you think that has some legs to stand? I think that is all correct. I think
that's all correct. Trump is just blowing the doors open on the Overton window on what can be done and what
could be done with crypto.
Even Mark Cuban in response to the Trump meme coin was his response.
It's like, well, I can, I'll launch a meme coin.
David Portnoy chimed in on this is like, you know, everyone is just launching meme coins.
So I totally agree with that.
Yeah, but David, let's not forget this was also a massive onboarding event.
Moonshot, which is one of the new crypto wallet startups, which make it super easy to buy
tokens on chain, I think using Apple Pay and stuff, onboarded.
like showed that almost 400,000 people were onboarded onto Salana just through this single event,
which is just completely...
This is something I worried about because, like, I don't know, when somebody launched the meme coin,
I don't know if it's just like the DGens goes gambling on this new, you know, casino game that they were just
be given.
And then people talk a big game about like adoption.
Like, is it really adoption if Iggy Azalea has a bunch of DGens buying your token?
I don't know.
So this is actually data.
I didn't know this.
This is actually data that Moonshot is saying 400,000 new.
people have made up, made moonshot accounts to buy the Trump token in the last 24 hours.
Yeah, I mean, think about it, right? People who already knew about this entire crypto world
would have been able to access it through wallets or were trading from deck screeners and stuff
like that. This is people downloading this app connecting their card of bank accounts and
just aping via Apple Pay, which is just like just nuts to see in general, right?
It's cool to if you go to the gitrumptemmes.com, the meme coin page, you can hit Buy Now at
debit card, and that takes you to moonshot.
Dot money slash Trump.
There you go.
Which is where Moonshot is getting all these accounts and where they're getting their data
from.
Yep, yep, yep.
But also, if we look at like fees on the actual base chain, David, if you pull up this
tweet, Solana's daily revenue just hit an all-time high, almost $60 million, which
was more than double of their previous all-time high set back in November.
I mean, just look at that chart.
That chart is vertical.
I just see so much M-AV happening here in this chart.
how I can see. Yeah. It's, it's just insane. And to this point, right, you know, we're spoken
about Solana. This meme coin is on Solana. People were onboarded onto Solana. It sucked all the air
out the room for all other coins. So if you held a portfolio of crypto tokens on Solana,
cough, cough, you know, my AI tokens, like a lot of value was taken out of it because people were
trying to just ape this coin. And I think you mentioned, David, that, you know, you were one of
those people that you woke up and you were like, well, let's do this.
I woke up one day too late.
I woke up and I dumped every single meme coin that I have in my salmata wallet, which is all
of them, into the Trump token.
And then I round-tripped it.
So I'm about to, I no longer holding a Trump token.
But I was once upon a time, almost 3x up.
And now I came out basically out of wash.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so kind of like bringing it back to AI and like, you know, we want to put our thinking
caps on a bit.
I did think, well, you know, what does all of this mean for crypto AI and, you know, where do we go from here?
If you pull up this tweet from Elon Money, I think he makes a really prescient point, which is, you know, crypto is still a narrative game.
And it's very much around Mineshare.
And he kind of evaluated where the top Mineshare was after this Trump thing had happened, right?
What were people talking about aside from Trump?
And this is kind of like the ranked list of things, David.
Of course you have Our Lord and Savior Fart Coin right at the top.
Fundamentals galore.
Then you have things like Gryphine, which is like the defy AI, kind of like one of the leading protocols there, AI16.
So the point is like, you know, a ton of these coins are still very much focused around crypto AI.
And this is kind of like a generalized pull of data, right?
So it's just really interesting to see that.
Oh, this is a pull of data of all possible tokens.
Yes, exactly.
And the alpha here is that it's Fartcoin, number one.
one, Grafane, number two, AI16Z, number three, arc, which you talked about last week.
And so the top four are AI tokens.
Yes, correct.
Correct.
All right.
And so then I started to...
So what you're saying is the meta continues to be AI agents.
Okay.
So the argument I keep hearing and why I'm making this point is crypto AI, crypto AI agents specifically,
is going to be a very transitory meta.
It's not going to be around for long.
It's going to, you know, rise and die.
And I see where that's coming from.
We have got a lot of PTSD from, you know, a ton of other subsector.
I feel like I'm cautious of that.
Yes. Yes. I'm also very cautious as well.
And do you know what, David?
I remember feeling the same way around a lot of the defy stuff because there was a lot of
stuff that got created that ended up dying out.
But I knew at its core that this was fundamental infrastructure that was needed by society,
right?
And when I look at agents, I just feel the same way.
When I look at like the kinds of things that they're going to enable, you know, much easier
the UX and interaction with blockchains, they're going to become the leading creators and
consumers of blockchains. It just makes sense to me that they're going to stick around and
stay. Now, are the protocols and teams that we talk about day and day out going to be the ones
that make it? I think it's fair to say that neither of us know. I certainly do not, right? But
I think figuring out where that goes and focusing where Mindshare is is very important.
And the fact of the matter is, for the last, I'm going to say, year and a half to two years,
David Crypto AI has been one of the top things in Mindshare, certainly for the last six months, right?
Yes, last episode we were saying it was at 65% Mindshed, which is just like nuts.
So I do think we have like, you know, more fuel in the tank for this to kind of go.
But I started thinking, you know, does all of this kind of money flow into Solana AI coin specifically?
And if you look at this post, it kind of shows both sides, right?
So, this is a post from Diamond Hands Dig.
And it says, you know, what Donald Trump was fundamentally changed the rules of this bull market, in his opinion, thinks second order effects are kind of going to flow to moonshot.
It's going to flow to Tier 1 exchanges.
And it's going to focus on quite a few things on base potentially, right?
So he calls out AISBT being a strategically positioned coin, which is like very popular.
Obviously, it's got like over 400,000 followers.
and then he talks about like how this might be one of the main focuses, right?
And he argues that like it can still be a base ecosystem and he calls out virtual here
where, you know, a lot of money eventually flows back.
And I see that point of view, to be honest, David.
I don't think this necessarily king makes all of the Solana AI coins,
but it did just on board a ton of people who probably won't want to bridge or move their capital anywhere else.
I think it's really going to help secure my belief.
leaf that this crypto AI revolution bubble, whatever you want to call it, is going to be the defining
meta of 2025 is we need to hit some inflection point about both crypto and AI, mainly focused on
tokens because that's what a bull market is, that really captures the interest of the otherwise
uninterested people because that's what brought them into NFTs in 2021. You know, retail investors.
We have to strike the curiosity of retail investors. And that takes both, we need both like,
to do well and AI to also itself.
I'm not talking about crypto AI, but like Silicon Valley AI to grow in capability and power
and investment in the space.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of Silicon Valley AI, David, Trump yesterday announced $500 billion will be spent within
the U.S.
on AI-specific infrastructure sites, data sites, and just in AI in general.
Now, this is a coordinated effort from the likes of Open AI.
I, Masayoshi-san, who leads the soft bank fund.
And it's just crazy.
So $100 billion is being focused on being allocated this year alone.
And this kind of like made in America theme, which we've seen being propagated over the last couple of weeks, you know, if the blockchains and crypto coins are made in America like Solana and ex-RP.
Which is so nonsensical, but nonetheless, anything like USA branded got like a 25% valuation bump level.
Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. And so just kind of like zooming out for a second and not even talking about crypto at all, I think this is amazing for the industry and the world in general, David.
Like, AI is by far, in my opinion, one of the most important technologies to ever grace mankind. And I think it's going to completely change the way we interact with each other and build things. And it's of the utmost important that we put our time, focus, and attention on this industry. And the government now being aligned with this is just a fascinating thing.
thing to see. And so it kind of like reinvigorated kind of, I think the market's hopes that
crypto AI or AI in general is still a core or key mind share when it comes to investing.
But this wasn't the only thing, right? Like if you want to look at like the money being invested,
let's get away from the money and talk about like some of the fundamentals. Whilst all of this
was going on, it's being reported that Open AI will release super agents, David, that can do PhD
level math and entry level software engineering.
Who is reporting this?
This is Axios reporting on OpenAI specifically.
But I need to say this isn't a rumor that's been just currently created and circulated.
This has been going on for a while.
Actually, Open AI themselves have hinted that the next product that they launch in the next
couple of months will be agent-related.
And so what does this mean, right?
Well, what it means is the mainstream companies are getting involved in the kinds of things
that we have been obsessing over for the last couple of months in the crypto world.
So you could say like we've been a leading indicator,
but actually these guys have been working on these kinds of things for a while.
To be clear, when Open AI is talking about their agent,
they're going to invest in agents,
they're talking about the same kind of agents that we're talking about, right?
I actually disagree.
I think these are going to be agents that are much, much smarter than the agents.
But the same conceptual thing of these autonomous, like souls, spirits,
entities that exist on the internet.
The only difference is that in our world
they have tokens too.
Correct, correct.
And I think in our world so far
for V1, they have been very much
based on social media sites
and they've been tweeting.
And they've been able to do a bunch of other stuff
as we've seen being, you know,
coming to light with all the defy stuff.
But we're still kind of like
they're trying to find their feet.
I think when open air,
and again, I must emphasize I'm hypothesizing,
but I think when open air releases their agent product,
it is going to be a chat,
gbt like moment. It's going to be a moment where people interact with these things and they're like,
wait, what? This agent could do this crazy college essay for me and it passes as a PhD level
standard thing or this agent can, you know, plan out trip for me, book everything, pay my rent and
kind of like still save money and send it to my bank all without like me looking at a computer.
That's pretty insane. I'm trying to wrap my head around what it actually looks like as a product.
Yeah. So. So.
AIXBT is an agent that I think most listeners, myself, you and I have some like idea or Zero Bro, for example,
has some idea of what they are. They have this persistent personality. I don't know if AIXBT does,
but Zero Bro is trying to have persistent memory and contextual memory across different modalities,
whether you're talking to it in like Twitter or Instagram or wherever else it lives. Is that what we're
talking about, like a product like that coming out of Open AI? What's the form factor here?
So I think it'll surface itself in two ways. And again, I'm hypothesizing here. I have no idea. But I think it'll come in two ways. Number one is it'll be an agent that you can interface off of the direct chat GPT interface. So right now you talk to chat GBT. That's where people spend a lot of different time, a lot of their time and effort in. I don't think they're going to shift you onto another site. That makes no sense. So I think what will pop up is you know, you'll have a model and you'll also have an agent. And the agent
will be able to do things for you. So similar in the way that you can talk to an AIXBT and tag it
in your tweet and it'll respond to you. You can talk to an agent in Chad GPT and it'll be, I don't know,
able to do the shopping for you or it'll be plugged in and integrated into a bunch of different things.
Now, what those use cases are, I have no idea, but we had a bit of an insight when chat GPT first
launched and people started to try and hack this themselves. And it didn't work very well. It wasn't
very fluid. It didn't have consistent memory, as you mentioned, David. But the second thing that I
think they're going to launch, which I think will have larger impact, is basically exposing their
framework or APIs, David, because at the end of the day, they want, they know that probably the
best way that people can build agents using their stack is to just, you know, allow them to access
the API. Well, not even open source. I was going to say open source, but it's not really, it's, you know,
charge people. And they'll basically have access to the API or the model, the agent model. And
they'll be able to do a bunch of these different things.
So the knock-on effect is, I think a lot of these crypto agents we've spoken about are about
to get supercharged.
They're about to get way smarter.
It may even come with things like contextual memory and stuff across different layers.
So I think it's going to like make these frameworks that was spoken about, like way more
effective.
And it kind of got me thinking, well, if these frameworks are going to get supercharged,
you know, where, you know, which one will benefit the most?
And if you pull up this tweet, which kind of like shows where mine share is focused for all these different crypto-native frameworks, David, it's a toss-up.
It's anyone's gambit at this point, you know.
AI16Z, the leading open-source agent repo is kind of like neck and neck with the likes of virtuals and arc.
It was mentioned arc and virtuals a lot in the past.
So it's honestly anyone's game.
And I have no idea why this goes, but it's going to be exciting being at the frontier for it.
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Yeah, these framework wars, I feel, starts to be the foundation for this podcast.
We always talk about the frameworks because everything seems to be downstream of them.
So let's just go ahead and, I guess, dive into the big one virtuals.
Not the big one.
The second one?
Where would you place virtual in the ranking of frameworks?
Or is it truly a toss-up, as you said?
I think it's a toss-up, David.
I think, like, right now, everyone is kind of seeding themselves in their own ecosystem.
So, Virtuals is, like, the kingpin on base or the EVM side of things.
AI-16-Z-Elyzer is that of Solana, but it's facing kind of competition and heat from Arc.
But I all think, like, all of them are kind of playing in the same kind of field right now.
When we talk about virtuals, they had a few major updates this week, David, which I think is definitely worth kind of like pointing out as well as the fact that we're talking about frameworks actually.
So virtuals announce this thing called the terminal API.
Okay, what does this mean?
Well, to date, virtuals has been focused on pushing their own framework, right?
Their agent framework.
And as we've described on the show, this framework allows you to build and design these agents, right?
and what they've done with this terminal API
is they're allowing any builder
to connect any framework
which means you could connect Eliza
you could connect RIG from the arc guys
and you can connect any other kind of framework
according to their API
and I asked myself this question
I was like why are they doing this
why would that make sense
and then it kind of clicked to me David
if these agents are ever to win
and become effective
you need them to be able to traverse
across any kind of chain or framework.
It doesn't really matter.
The whole point is you want your agents to be able to do a bunch of different things and
you don't want it to be constrained or restricted by blockchains.
That's old school thinking.
Previously we've been like, oh, we want all the, you know, we want the moat and the ecosystem
moat to be on your specific chain, you know, Ethereum, Solana people, base ecosystem people.
But now we have this kind of like medium or this entity that should be able to traverse across
anything. And I found that, like, fascinating. And you can kind of see how they're thinking about this.
Like today, they mentioned that, you know, we have agent creators that can choose whichever framework that they
want, pick, and this is the guide for them to be able to do it. But soon, if you notice, they say something
here, multi-agent orchestration across frameworks. And they talk about an agent-to-agent commerce standard, David.
So what they're really thinking about is how they're trying to do the cross-chain comms.
They're trying to go cross-chain.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think that's important, David, to be honest.
I think about it.
Like, if these agents are to succeed,
they should be able to act on any chain that they want.
And I think that's a pretty endearing point, to be honest.
And I'm kind of excited.
And my guess, if I was to guess, is the next step for them is to launch on another chain.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that would make sense.
Okay, so just to make sure I understand, virtuals, you would need to use the virtual's framework
to launch an agent on virtuals.
Yeah, game.
But you can now also, with this, use the Eliza framework to launch an agent on virtuals too.
Yeah, yeah.
Correct.
And that just seems net-creative to the virtual's ecosystem.
Because at the end of the day, virtual is really just going to be like a customer distribution,
consumer distribution platform with a token that it just has distribution.
And so it doesn't matter.
Maybe Virtual doesn't care about its own framework.
It just cares about distribution, right?
So I would frame this as a land grab.
right they're conquering land and it's actually kind of a useful analogy because jansen if you pull up his
tweet here david has talked about agent economies agent nations right and whilst he doesn't specify this
in this exact tweet look at how he presents this different frameworks different chains different cultures
and on our interview that he had with us which if you haven't seen you should definitely go check out
he talks about building up these agent societies.
The only way that's going to get done is if you're multi-chain and multi-frame
and he seems to suggest it here, you know?
So super, super exciting stuff.
But that's not all with virtuals, David.
If you bring up this next tweet, I want to point out a really interesting thing that
this dude at Masari saw or spotted.
Of the top 10 agent tokens in virtuals, three of them are investment dows.
And I started thinking about this.
I was like, what does this mean?
I honestly think people, there's so many agent tokens, David.
Seriously, like I'm spending a lot of time trying to dig into all of this and understand this
and meet the teams and figure out what's going on.
I'm losing hair and I'm losing sleep.
I think a lot of people just want to pull their money or cash in an investment Dow that provides
them some kind of an index play on these things and leave it at that.
And if you see some of these investment Dow's listed here, so if you scroll up,
You've got Vader, you've got Sequoia as well.
I think like we're going to start seeing a growing amount of people purchase these tokens just to get access.
What are some of the advantages these Dow's provide?
We've spoken about Vader before, but basically they try and source deals or buy liquid tokens off the market.
Sequoia tries to do the same thing, but takes a more VC approach where they either incubate or seed invest.
It's just a really cool approach that I like seeing a bunch of these virtual ecosystems.
teams doing. And then the final point I want to make about virtuals is, do you remember last
week we spoke about that $40 million buyback and distribution? Yeah. That's being put into effect
officially. So, you know, they're not wasting any time here, David. I think it's the equivalent of
$35 million is going to get started distribute to buy back virtual's agents token specifically
and burn them. And for those who are listening to this and wondering, you know, what the
hell does this mean? Basically, this revenue has come from virtual's tokens being traded. The way that
the protocol is designed is there's a 1% fee being charged to anyone that trades these tokens.
And that fee...
Denominated in the virtual's token.
Denominated in the virtual's token. Correct. And what they thought of, what they announced
last week was instead of just deploying this virtual's token into something else, we are
going to use it to buy back agent token specifically. So let's say,
agent token was traded the most, you will get the highest allocation of that amount. And it'll
buy back the agent token and burn it, which reduces supply and is much more beneficial for holders.
It's a pretty cool model.
The virtual's platform is selling the virtual's token in order to buy the agent token.
So it's actually a transfer of wealth from virtuals to individual agents to prop up the
value, to pump up the value of the agent's token or to give some like buy pressure.
out of the trading fees generated to the agent's token.
So it's kind of a stimulus.
It's an economic stimulus to the individuals in the virtual society.
Yep.
Good choice of words, David, given that they're trying to build like some kind of an economy here.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, congrats to any agent that is getting their token bought and burned.
I mean, when there is a limited choice set for developers to build their agents on,
and one platform is literally saying,
hey, we're going to, we're going to buy your token and burn it if you do well.
So it's an incentive for developers to come and, you know,
migrate into the virtual's economy and establish their little settled down and there.
Yep, exactly.
All right, take me to indie.fund fun.
Crowdfunded games, 100x faster.
This is a Twitter article.
What's going on here?
Yeah.
So I was scrolling the timeline the other day and I came across this post from this team.
called indie. Fun. And for clarity here, I own none of this token. I literally came across
this for the first time and I read through it and I thought, wow, this is kind of cool.
So we've spoken about gaming and agents before. And this platform appears to do something similar in the
sense that, you know, they allow you to launch and play games where you can interact and compete
alongside AI-powered NPCs, NPCs standing for non-playable characters. So in this sense,
it's like an AI agent that is super smart, right? And it can,
understand your playing style.
It can interact with you.
It can maybe trade tokens with you or can compete with you, right?
So it's pretty cool, right?
And, you know, it says here, Indy.comfond provides infinite worlds where AI agents can
compete, adapt, and grow alongside or against real players.
Swarms of independent agents powered by their token can be deployed in Indy.comfond in seconds,
learning, adapting until they become indistinguishable from human players.
So there's a self-learning element that they, they kind of,
of like make that. And I want to draw attention to this bit, which made me think about their
strategy, you know, this team strategy. So they know that crypto Twitter has the attention span
of a child. We get excited and we get so bored, so quickly, David. You know, I think Trump
meme coin was a perfect example of that, right? So I think their plan here is to build games
which are designed to engage with that type of user. But a key difference is when you get bored and you
switch games, you can still play with the same people because they're agents, David.
The agents that you play with in one game show up in a different game and they behave similar.
Similarly, and they know the rules and they know if you lost the last game or not, David.
So they'll know.
Do they choose whether, like, I don't want to play with this guy.
He sucks.
Maybe.
Maybe.
That's why I like it.
You're going to start being like, oh, my God, this agent ditch me?
What does that mean for me?
You know, like, do I really suck that bad?
You know what I mean?
Wow, I'm not ready for this.
I already get dunked on by Crypto-Twin.
So you start having this consistent personality or personalities
accompany you and adapt to any game, right?
It's kind of like what NFTs were supposed to be,
but now we have a smarter, more dynamic entity to engage with.
And the creators of this platform also allow game developers
to create tokens, which become each game's in-game currency.
So I'm hypothesizing something here, right?
Agents make it easier to engage with these tokens seamlessly in gameplay.
So you can now hop to each game, win tokens or valuable prizes, and then cash them out seamlessly into Seoul or Ether or whatever currency you want at the end.
The resurgence of maybe play to earn, David, I don't know.
Because previously, it's like, okay, this token belongs to blah, blah, chain or L2, I don't know what to do.
What if the agents just abstracted it away from you?
What if you could just go up to an agent at the end and be like, all right, I'm cashing out my chips.
I'm going home.
I'm going to go.
My mom's calling me to go eat dinner.
Like, sort this out for me.
Put this all into all.
Actually, could you stake 50% of it?
That would be great.
So now you're embedding defy AI into it.
I just think, maybe I'm, I'm dreaming too much.
Maybe I've got my tinfall hat on too much.
But I just started to try and think about where this could potentially go.
And we talked about this maybe last week or the week before, but like the intersection of AI and gaming seems to make a ton of sense.
And it was because of this.
It was like you populate the world with these AI agents if you just to bootstrap your
own economy or bootstrap your own like landscape or whatever.
Yep, exactly.
And I think another thing I wanted to to kind of talk about is what happens when someone
adds betting functionality into the mix, David?
That seems like an attention sink, right?
Because let's, you know, let's not beat around the bush.
A lot of people are buying tokens sometimes with no idea of the investment case and
this is kind of like gambling.
And I wonder what that looks like with, you know, the rise of prediction markets and people obviously wanting to get exposure to that.
I wonder if they would do something similar within a gaming context.
What do you think?
Well, there's a portfolio company that we have a bankless ventures called Sweep, which is specifically putting together a streaming platform and a prediction market platform.
So the streamers' audiences can make prediction market best about the outcome of said streamers' actions or like win loss ratio or something.
So it's definitely like the hyper gambleization and streamification of the internet making this way into into crypto.
Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it's, maybe it's, I'm too fixated on the presidential meme coin thing, David.
Just when that happened, I was like, I just think we're leaning so much into high risk, high stakes gambling.
Oh, yeah.
And if the government is embracing it, what do you think this is going to have a knock on effect to like the rest of the public?
It's just insane to see.
I think we are, I think we are leaning into gambling culture, financial gambling culture.
That is just, like, I don't necessarily, I don't want to, you know, put up my foot on the gas pedal to go that way.
But we are just, culturally, we are absolutely going that way.
What, actually, speaking of streaming, I wanted to pull up this agent.
It's not just any agent.
It's an agent that is streaming, David.
It is streaming a live gameplay of the massive MMO.
RPG called Dota 2.
And it's live, massive game.
And it's live commentating.
And it's doing this in real time.
The agent isn't playing the game.
The agent is streaming people playing
the game and it is commentating.
So it is being, we're watching an agent
streamer right now. Yeah, correct.
And it's, if you notice, it's not just
commentating saying, okay, player A
is now in control and
wow, that was an amazing attack on
blah, blah, blah. It's talking about the
strategy, David. It's talking about
what it could potentially do, you know, how the teams are operating, how they might improve,
why they lost. It's actually a really smart, intelligent kind of overview, which I think a lot
of commentators at professional leagues do something similar or aspire to do something similar.
I'm curious how this agent was kind of trained, or maybe it was trained on like transcripts
of previous commentators, maybe it was trained on, you know, live gameplay for like, you know,
millions and millions of games so that I was able to understand, you know, what each character
profile could do. Because I don't know if you played Dota,
David, but it's a pretty complex. I've played like for a hour. I also suck at it, but it's a pretty
complex game, right? Yeah. EtherMage says here, you know, this isn't a demo. It's a game streaming
agent casting live, you know, and these agents live on the front of attention for gamers. And this kind
of reinforces the point that you were making earlier around, I think the intersection of agents
in gaming makes a lot of sense. And I'm seeing a lot of the leading protocols lean into it more,
particularly virtuals. Right. Is this Luna? Because this looks like Luna.
The Luna from the virtual's protocol, they bootstrapped Luna as their own agent.
And there was this little anime character.
I don't know if it's a little bit or not.
Well, David, I hate to...
Maybe I'm just being agentist because all agents say the same.
I was literally about to say, you're being pretty agentist, David, and I'd like you to cease right now.
It may surprise you, but a lot of crypto-tweater uses anime in a lot of their projects.
So, you know, this is just one of the...
Let's not get canceled for that, David, please.
Okay.
It would be cooler.
Not that I'm going to complain.
This is pretty cool.
It's pretty cool that an AI agent is commentating on a game.
It would be cool if they were the ones also playing the game at the same time.
Because why can't they?
They can multitask.
All right, David.
All right.
Well, how about you go to the next demo that I'm going to show you here, right?
It's not an agent streaming, but it's an agent doing something that you wish you could do, David.
You wish you could do.
So we've spoken about agent.
Am I on the right tweet?
You're on the right tweet.
You're on the right tweet.
So this is a team.
or a protocol team called Agent Tank.
And you might have heard of them before, David.
They were the guys behind the agent
that had browsed Amazon
and ordered toilet paper.
Very important.
Very, very important use case.
And the technology that was underpinning this
was something called computer use.
So imagine, you know,
you know how the way that you're scrolling
through Twitter right now
and you're moving your cursor,
you just gave the reins to an agent.
And the agent could see your screen,
it could maneuver,
it could do a bunch of things.
So if you play this particular video again, David,
you'll be able to see that this agent is doing something
a lot different from browsing Amazon and ordering toilet paper.
It pulls up the deck screener chart or whatever this website is
that's observing price.
Trading view. Tech screener for tradfibro.
Deck screener for tradfibro. I know. Sorry.
And it is observing what's happening with this chart
and it's doing a bunch of technical analysis, David.
So, you know, Bollinger bands, you know, resistance, what is happening?
RSIs, all that kind of stuff, you know, to try and figure out what might happen at the current price point that is.
Will it go up?
Will it go down?
Should I long?
Should I short?
This is an agent that's just doing it all for you in a matter of seconds.
And I thought that was pretty insane.
Yes, it may not be playing a game yet, but it might end up making you money, David.
Let's give it some real money.
Is this in sandbox or are they trading with real money yet?
This is in sandbox.
This is in sandbox.
Let's give us some real money.
Okay, well, if you're listening to this agent tank team, please, you know, V2.
Do it live.
Do it live and strap a wallet to it.
Hilarious.
Okay.
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But we're not done with our demos.
David, we're not done.
More demos.
This is demo week.
Yeah, so we're moving on to a little known protocol called AI16Z.
And we're not actually watching any demos because we might actually need to spend about three hours doing it.
But Xerox witch over here wanted to highlight some of the teams that were building on AI16Z's kind of like incubator, if you like.
And they had a demo day where a bunch of these projects were kind of like being displayed to the wider public.
And some of the highlights included a pump fund trader agent and a sports analytics agent.
Now, the main reason why I'm mentioning this isn't to kind of call out any individual agent.
It's just nice to see that AI16Z is taking a more curated approach to the teams that are building on AI 16C.
Typically, it's just been an open source, massive game.
I think Teng Yan, who is one of my favorite writers in the crypto AI space, described it as a bizarre for agents.
that's how I would describe it as well.
It's now kind of really cool to see
some kind of like a Y combinator approach
from the AI16Z team.
And I think we'll see more of this going forward
as they lean into their platform, David,
which of course we've spoken about before.
They're going to launch an official platform
which is tied to their framework,
which will allow teams to build and launch agent tokens
and agents specifically in a guided and curated manner.
And these agents will be able to speak to each other.
So I love the curated side of things here, right?
But of course, the platforms on the horizon, they're curating these agents.
What about the framework itself?
Last week, we kind of gave it a bit of heat, David.
We were pointing out some of the criticisms that were being aired about Eliza.
And it's nothing major.
It was just to say, you know, this is what Eliza V1 can do today.
And we kind of maybe need to take it a step up.
Well, all I'm going to say is AI16 seems to be delivering, right?
V2 is heralded to have quite a few impressive operations.
upgrades coming up. We're talking about full autonomy, which means, you know, actual autonomy.
So these agents aren't going to have a human handler. They'll be able to like do things on their own
24-7, ingest information, assess whether they want to make a decision and then execute on that
decision. They're going to have unified wallet abstraction, which means that whether your token is
on chain A, B, or C, it doesn't matter. We'll work things out and you can use tokens wherever
they might be.
They'll have a plugin registry,
which means all the plugins
that they have already,
which allows you to do a bunch of either
web two or web three things,
will be kind of consolidated and ranked.
So you can see kind of like
which ones you want to use,
which ones might be more useful than the other.
Oh,
that's really,
really important.
Okay,
because that's how the entire,
like, modding community works.
I was once upon a time
a Skyrim modder.
And you need to have like your mods
curated because shitty mods
will crash your game.
and some mods people put in a ton of work into
and it's like basically it turns into
a semi-official actual upgrade to the game itself
because everyone uses it, you know,
bug fixes everything.
And so mod curation became huge in the modding community.
And so a plugin registry, a plugin mod basically the same thing.
It all with alongside some open source ethos
of everyone being able to improve the mods
and come to a collective decision
on which mods are more useful than others,
then all of a sudden, like, all of these things become much more accessible and can grow a lot faster.
Yeah.
If I were to summarize the strategy that I think is starting to form with AI16C is they started
incredibly open source and they're now trying to not rain it in, but just kind of like add a few
different kinds of constraints that will allow them to do.
A little bit more order to the chaos.
Order to the chaos that will allow them to build something super powerful, right?
They could focus attention on all these things.
Now, if you look at Virtual's approach, they're taking the other side of things.
They started super close source, mixed source.
You know, they weren't showing any of their cards.
And now they're becoming multi-framework, potentially multi-chain.
So it's really cool to see two of these behemoths take two different strategies.
And I want to see, like, you know, whether one strategy favors the other or whether they both can win in the same environment.
Either way, exciting things to see.
EJAS, let's take us to the last platform framework that we talk about.
We spent a lot of time last week talking about ARC as perhaps this third new entrant into the AI framework category.
AI16C, Eliza being the first, virtual as being the second.
Now, ARC is perhaps the third.
Fill us in on what happened with ARC in the last seven days.
Okay.
So for context here, ARC is another one of these major agent protocols that have a framework called RIG, which is,
in Rust programming language, and they have also this platform where you should be able to
launch agents from and have a token associated with them or maybe not.
And the reason why we've spoken about Arc is back when we first mentioned it, we had no
investment in it and we had no idea like whether it was going to do well.
We just thought like, you know, we love how the team is shipping.
Maybe it'll, you know, be something worth keeping an eye on.
And then like as we've been tracking it, David, you know, we've seen a growing amount of code
being shipped and a growing number of partnerships. The conversation last week was about all these
different partnerships. But to this point, David, if I'm being honest, it's kind of been like putting
without proof, you know? So we wanted to kind of like see, okay, well, what is actually underneath the hood?
What are you guys doing? Right? You keep talking about teams wanting to launch, but like, what does that
mean? Well, this week, they kind of dispelled all rumors. They announced their first two teams that are launching
within their framework or within their platform, rather, right? One of them is called Listen,
and the other one is called Soulgraph. What we're looking at right now is Soulgraph. And
Solgraph was the first one to do this. Now, I'm not going to get into the intricacies of what
Soulgraph does, but the way to think about it is they are trying to tackle kind of like the
personality agent sector. A comparable to this would be a lot of the agents that we see live today
that have come from Eliza specifically,
and some of the agents that have come from virtuals,
like Luna that you referenced earlier, David.
And they argue that the way that they've designed their kind of architecture,
and the reason why they've used Rake, which is ARCS framework,
is it allows them to build a much more lighterweight version of agents
that are more powerful and that can do way more, right?
They're adding a lot of text to voice,
So these agents will be able to interact in different kinds of mediums and platforms.
Now, let's say, David, let's hypercise for a second.
Let's say that agent digital worlds, like virtual worlds like Hyperfi or Roblox or whatever,
become some of the main grounds that these agents kind of infiltrate and they can walk
around, interact with humans and stuff, just, you know, the metaverse concept.
Then you could argue that protocols like Soulgraph could be better positioned to,
have a direct interaction with humans, you know, either through voice or maybe they're better
design. Now, of course, the proof is literally in the pudding. So let's see what some of the agents
look like. But I've played around with some of their demos on their website. And it seems
pretty cool. There's like a financial advisor agent, which you can, you can like talk to and say,
hey, you know, like, I bought Seoul the other day and I don't really know what to do with it.
And she kind of like guides you with like real market data as to what might be an interesting move to
make. And I could just literally speak to it. Like I was speaking to you right.
now, right? The second project that they launched was something called Listen, right? And to summarize,
listen is aiming to be the leading Defi AI project on ARCS framework, Rick. They're taking a pretty
strong chain agnostic approach. So what I like about them or what stood out for me is, you know,
they're going to start with Solana and then integrate all EVM chains, sui, and more, right? So to kind of like
go back, what is Defi AI? The best way to describe it right now is the agents that can allow you
to interact with Defi. So if you wanted to do a bunch of swaps, trading, lending, perps,
whatever that might be, instead of trying to figure out which protocol to use, whether the contracts
are safe or not, whether there's enough slippage dialed here and there, you could just kind of
type in normal human verbose language what you want and it'll just do it for you. So this is
arcs kind of like project that they're incubating to launch from their platform to achieve this, right?
And they're looking to stand out by offering something a little deeper than just conversational AI for DefiD, which is what we've seen with a lot of leaders right now.
Can you scroll down and look at some of these examples?
I wonder if you can just, yeah, okay, so this is a perfect one.
Instead of just being like, hey, can you like do A, B, and C for me?
You can kind of talk to it and say, okay, look at this example.
wait for Falk coin to hit X dollar market cap, then DCA, dollar cost average, out of Pengu to Solana after a 20% increase.
So it's taking a level deeper in terms of like what these agents can do for you.
You know, stable half of my Pepe position if ETH dips below 3K.
So, you know, two tokens that are completely nonrelated to each other, you can get this thing to do something.
Laborious multiple steps things, you can kind of like get done and sorted by this protocol.
I thought, I like the way that they're thinking about this.
And Arc's whole approach to this, by the way, this whole like incubation strategy has been
to pay attention to quality.
I don't know whether that works in the long term, but it's a cool experiment to see, right?
Because on the plus side, you're filtering for quality, but on the other side, are you
restricting people from playing around with the framework?
I don't think they are right now because you can fork or get access to the code and build
something cool.
But it's just interesting to see.
Yeah, it is interesting to see.
We all know Defi has rough edges
In theory like this product
I wonder if I actually had my hands on it
If I would actually use it or not
It's a little bit like getting into the car
Of an autonomous driving cars
Like it's still a little bit scary
Like I want to press the buttons on my ledger
What would make you, I'm curious David
What would make you comfortable
To use something like this?
I would like data that using something like this
actually produces better financial ROI than if I had done it myself.
Like if it is, you know, make, if it's optimizing the right, like sometimes I like to go and
do things manually myself because I know I can optimize for the best execution by going
to the right spots and doing things in the right ways.
And so making sure that it's also being smart on how to, you know, prevent MEV and getting
the best execution and doing things in the right way.
And if it can give me more value by doing my task, both faster or more sense,
simply and also in a more value preservative way, then I'd be pretty compelled.
Okay.
So hypothetically, David, if agent X, Y, Z turns up on Twitter tomorrow and says, hey, I'm
an autonomous trader agent and here's my wallet.
It's been funded with $10 million.
I'm going to go trade on the liquid market.
And you can watch my trades live and I will post portfolio updates every hour.
And let's say you monitored this for two weeks
And at the end of these two weeks, it was up 150%.
Would that be convincing enough for you to LP into that agent?
Or would you need more data?
I'm just curious.
At that point, I would LP a small amount into that agent.
Yeah.
Okay, so it's very reputational.
I'm curious.
Okay, well, let's take this.
I just want to zone in on this point because it's something I think about as well, right?
Because I'm like, hey, check out this agent.
And they're like, is this safe?
Like, should I use this?
What if a major institution, like Coinbase or Binance, was like, hey, we got this agent, David.
It's five bucks a month to you.
Well, actually, no, that price plan makes no sense.
It will take 5% of any kind of fees or swaps or whatever it does with your money.
But aside from that, all the profit is yours.
But also you will incur all the risk.
Is that a yay or a nay?
So my mind goes to how this feels like this shouldn't be a product.
because if there is an agent out there or some,
even a human with some trading methodology,
some,
you know,
magic algorithm that can turn my dollar into $2 or,
you know,
my dollar into $5,
why would it open up more,
why would it invite more capital rather than just becoming rich itself?
Yeah.
The signal that this is a product that can be sold to me
tells me that it's not a real product.
Because if everyone dumps their money into this,
trying to chase the gains, then the gains go away.
That's just how markets work.
Yep, yep.
And so I was actually having this exact conversation with a friend the other day,
which argued the same thing, David.
And I tend to agree.
It's like, I think a lot of these agents will make markets way more efficient because
everyone else is aware of the same alpha that a lot of people, a few people rather,
were just privy to behind the scenes, you know, behind their terminals that they paid high
amounts to get access to.
now it kind of like decentralizedes that information.
What I think this ends up resulting in is the market is going to get smarter and it's going
to become increasingly more difficult to access some of these things.
And the agents that actually make a lot of money similar to like all these trading algorithms
and bots that are behind IP or trademark IP for some of the top funds, it's going to be a similar
thing where it's like this agent is trademarked in general.
I don't know how many examples there are of where this business model is actually.
open source, but I don't think there are many.
Yeah. Yeah.
I, that makes sense to me.
If that does, if that is the outcome where, you know,
defy on-chain execution just becomes very efficient,
that's a very good outcome for crypto.
Defy execution is terrible.
You cannot get good price execution on large trades in defy.
You have to go to the centralized counterparts.
And it's one of the biggest limiters as to why we can't get further capital to come
on chain is because our execution is so open.
bad. So if we can get some rebalancing, some optimization of the markets to optimize for
execution, which is what the net effect of that would be. That would be, that's just very good for a
healthy defy ecosystem. Well, well, it's, it's funny you say that actually, David. If you bring up
this, uh, this next tweet that we have queued up, um, this is a demo of an AI 16 Z Eliza agent. So that's
their framework, someone built an agent that can autonomously monitor your LP position on one of these
decentralized exchanges and keep them around.
around a certain pool price.
So for those of you who don't know,
in order for these decentralized exchanges to function,
there needs to be liquidity available
for a particular token pair, right?
So let's say you want to swap ETH to USC.
You need a bunch of ETH, and you need a bunch of USTC,
in the pool.
And the way that it works is people who come in,
they want to swap, they can swap from one asset to another.
Price goes up, price goes down,
and the fee is taken,
and the fee goes to the LP provider.
but someone needs to provide the liquidity.
So you might ask yourself, well, what's the point of providing the liquidity?
Well, they earn off the fees.
But they only earn off the fees for the price that is being traded for an asset.
And so one of the most annoying and frustrating things about being a liquidity provider is you need to be around the same price range in order to earn fees.
Now, if you had an agent that could just monitor this for you and move your liquidity position.
There have been entire startups in DFI about automated LP rebounds.
Yes, literally. Now you could get all of that done for you by an agent that costs a fraction
of a cent, just pay for its compute costs, and it's good to go. So, I mean, I thought this was
pretty fun, given that you just literally use that example, David. And so, you know, I kind of like
think, okay, so this is in this particular demo, David, this is an agent using computer vision
or computer use similar to the agent tank demo that we just showed. So, you know, it's looking
at your screen. It's doing A, B, and C. And I think, like, you know, could, could,
Could, like, computer use be the thing that charges this entire industry?
Should we not be looking at plugins?
Should we just be looking at computer use?
And then pull out this next week, David, which is kind of, I think it's a response to this demo.
Basically, this guy goes, or lady goes, cool demo, but you don't even need an AI agent for this.
People have been doing this with a much less cool thing called a bot or a script for years.
And it's well optimized.
But I think an AI agent will perform well when it can decide not.
to rebalance the LP position.
If it thinks that the market
will round trip back to the range.
So he's kind of making...
If the agent, a bot cannot be...
A bot or a script cannot be opinionated
about the market, but this guy's saying
an agent can be opinionated about the market
and it may or may not be correct
in just like how humans may or may not be correct.
So it's saying an AI agent might perform well
if it can be correctly opinionated about the market,
which is also kind of the holy grail.
Yep, exactly.
You kind of want these agents to be able to think and do as a human would, right?
Instead of some kind of like mechanical pre-programmed software, right?
So I think it's important to kind of balance our, you know, eagerness to see something super cool
and call everything an agent and be like, wow, agents can change the world with reality
and being like, hey, guys, you know, there's actually a better way to do this right now.
But if you do A, B, and C, it could become useful.
All right, EJAZ, last topic of the day.
This is a tweet from Nifty Island.
that is a throwback.
The tweet starts.
The AI agent playground grows.
What's going on here?
Yeah.
So if you remember a few episodes ago, David, we spoke about this team called Hyperfi.
And again, just came across it across the timeline.
And I was like, oh, I like what this team is doing.
I kind of dug into it.
And I realized that they were some of the OG guys that came from the same communities
that Shore and a lot of other OG AIML open source devs came from, right?
And it got us thinking about the AI intersection with the metaverse, right?
If these agents were put into virtual bodies, how would that change interaction between humans?
How would people, you know, want to invest their money when it comes to this kind of like emerging meta?
And, you know, it would have been one thing if that was just the only time we talked about it and nothing ever happened.
But I'm still seeing data points, David, that is pushing us towards this vision.
Namely, in this example, a nifty island, but it's partnered with a little bit of a little bit of
little known protocol called virtuals, of course, which is one of the major agent protocols.
And what they've done here is virtuals is partnering with them to provide a kind of virtual
world for virtual agents to play it. And I'm saying virtuals a lot, but the idea is these agents
will be able to do a bunch of things. So it's kind of like their Hyperfi play, right? And Hyperfi
is not, you know, chain specific. It's chain agnostic. But it's cool to see another example of
this pattern appearing in a separate ecosystem. It,
also is a quite helpful reminder for ourselves that the virtual's team before they became an AI
agent platform was pretty heavy on the gaming side, David. If you remember with our interview with
Jansen, he spoke about, you know, effectively being a gaming doubt before. And it was that
gaming experience and that gaming kind of focus, which led them to think, hmm, I wonder if these
non-playable characters could be more than just non-playable characters, which got them
started to think about agents.
They saw what was happening in the AIML
world. Their engineers had a lot of AIML experience.
They kind of like paired those two together with
crypto's number one incentive mechanism tokens.
And so it's cool to see this extension from the OG team
kind of building this out.
And it's also cool to see AI just infiltrate
every single other vertical about crypto.
We've talked about gaming.
We've talked about defy and liquidity providing.
we've talked about streaming
and what else have we talked about
it just seems to be like
computer use
it seems to just be like it kind of just goes back
to it this is not just an AI
crypto agent thing
this is the AIification
of everything that we touch in crypto
and kind of like you said at the beginning
a lot of this stuff won't make sense
some of this stuff will completely change
everything we know about crypto
yep absolutely
Ajaz thank you once again
this is our eighth AI weekly roll-up
I wouldn't be here without you, man.
Thank you for guiding me in the Bankless Nation
through the last seven days of the AI agent space.
No, I appreciate you having me, David.
I just want to reiterate that, like,
I am learning all of this in real time,
and we're always looking to kind of, like, improve this show
and be on the cutting edge.
And I don't think I can do it on my own.
I mean, we can't do it on our own.
So a lot of this has been through the help of people just DMing us
and DMing me and being like,
hey, check out this protocol or you should meet this team.
Please keep it up, guys.
And I'm not usually one for people saying,
hey, DM me, random stranger, but it is super helpful for me because I can't keep track of everything.
And if you've got a project that you're passionate about, like, just talk to me.
And I just want to like learn about it.
So, yeah, thanks for everyone so far.
Well, we'll see if you'll see if you really enjoy giving out that request to get DM'd next week.
We'll see what your DMs look like.
But EHS, it's good to see you, my man.
I'll see you in seven days.
Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal.
If crypto is risky, crypto AI is even riskier.
You can lose what you put in.
But 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.
