Bankless - AI ROLLUP: Base vs. Solana | Ai16z | GOAT | AIxbt | Virtuals & Zerebro

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

AI agents are reshaping the crypto landscape, from gaming to decentralized venture capital. This week, we explore groundbreaking developments in Crypto AI, including breaking news out of Ai16z’s meteoric rise (and fall?), GOAT, AIxbt, Virtuals, Zerebro, and Base vs. Solana.  Ejaaz Ahamadeen joins us to break down the trends, drama, and future of autonomous agents in crypto. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium   ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited   🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/103?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 4:35 GOAT https://x.com/truth_terminal/status/1859749795855990817   21:07 Ai16z Drama https://x.com/shawmakesmagic/status/1858807615914229936   https://x.com/ColinTCrypto/status/1859070457724428734   45:10 Project or Memecoins? 48:39 AIxbt https://x.com/aixbt_agent  50:40 Virtuals & Zerebro https://x.com/jyu_eth/status/1858768880916672971  https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1858899700042395925  59:44 Framework Competition  1:01:26 Base vs. Solana 1:08:55 David/Ejaaz’s Focus Next?  1:12:12 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI roll-up, where we cover the recent news, developments, and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI. Curious and creative developers are playing around with open-source AI software, making AI agents and giving them access to crypto wallets and unleashing them into the wild west of the internet. And we are doing a special series of episodes on Bankless with a special co-host, EJazz, to help make sure that you are up to speed with one of the craziest and fastest growing corners of the internet. EJAS, we already did an episode with you together with Ryan, all about all this same subject matter that we want to cover in this series. But maybe to get things started here and really get listeners further acquainted with a new host, tell us about how you found the crypto AI trenches. Why were you so compelled to explore them to the degree that you have?

It just excited me a lot, David. I think that this is going to be one of the biggest shifts within crypto in the sense that most users of crypto are going to become agents. And therefore, I think I'll focus. for the next at least five to ten years should be on how we make these things better. I'm already seeing a million different use cases that these agents are being used for. So many different interactions with all my friends, both within crypto and outside of crypto talking about it.

So I think there's something really special here. How new would you say this phenomenon is? The crypto AI meme has been a meme for over a year now. When did you really get into it and gave us kind of like a brief timeline of this whole like crypto AI arc. Yeah. So I think a bit of context is I was previously working at Coinbase on the product team and I left early last year because I wanted to kind of get my head into the weeds of crypto again,

like kind of like see what's happening more on the fringe. And that's really when I discovered this crypto AI stuff, which really kind of started gaining traction early 2023. But teams have been working on it since, you know, much before that. since then it's been a pretty strong focus on the fundamentals of crypto AI and what I mean by that and I spoke about this in our previous episode is kind of the building blocks of AI so how do we decentralize data how do we decentralize compute and a number of other things the more recent phenomenon on AI agents specifically which is what has garnered quite a lot of hype started

precisely four and a half weeks ago and it's already four and a half weeks ago and it's already Half weeks ago? Four and a half weeks ago. Four and a half weeks ago. Was when Gospel of Goatsy went viral. So it's pretty, actually, I think it was a little bit before that. I stand corrected. But the explosion of other AI agents, precisely about four and a half weeks ago.

But Gospel of Goetzy has technically been tweeting since, I think, July of this year. Amazing. Tell me about what your goals are for this series. What should listeners expect as we do these episodes, biweekly-ish, maybe every 10 days? We haven't totally figured out a cadence. But what do you want to get done here? I mean, simply put, I think we just want to discuss the latest developments, news and happenings in crypto AI and agents specifically. And occasionally bring on, you know, pretty relevant guests to give us some special sources to what we're looking into here.

And what did you put on the agenda for today's episode? We're going to talk about a handful of subjects. Give us a rundown of everything that's happened in recent times that we're going to talk about. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think there's any coherent way to give you a breakdown of the agenda today. Everything's happening from a drama from a top AI agent coin absolutely plummeting $500 million in market cap. And we should discuss and get into why that happened and why it still may be able to redeem itself. Our favorite AI agent created a music album. So maybe we can give that a listen to. Who knows? And a bunch of other infrastructure developments as well.

there's really no coherent way to explain it. Let's just get into it. Okay, so there are a number of characters. There's a cast of characters in the AI crypto space, and there's probably like the 101 cast of characters, maybe the end, as you get into the trenches, maybe you'll see more characters than this. Truth Terminal and goat is like a very front and center part of this whole story. This individual named Shaw, who's a developer, AI16 and Eliza, this is a cast of characters that you also just referring to. Sequoia, as in Sequoia the investment fund, but Sequoia But with a K, right?

And then Zero Bro, these are all the cast of characters that I think we're going to talk about here on the episode today. But let's start with what it has been called the Bitcoin of AI agent, Goat. Do you accept that brand for Goat, the Bitcoin of AI? And why do people call it this? Sure, sure. So firstly, yes, I do accept it. I also accept it is the Cryptopunks.

of AI agents, whatever that means. It's the first. It has the most lindy effect. For context, for listeners here who didn't listen to the previous episode, Goat is kind of the AI agent that started off this whole AI agent meta within crypto. So this guy called Andy IRA is an AI alignment research and AI researcher. He's got nothing to do with any of the crypto space prior to this, decided to create this experiment where he got two AIs to speak with each other. and he prompted them with,

what do you think is the point of your existence? And they started talking to each other, and it led to this creation of this, what they're calling kind of like an AI agent religion or LLM theism, where it kind of like espouses about this gospel of Goatsy, which you guys can get into in your own time and explore that. But it's basically a made-up religion, and its whole goal is to make a bunch of people believe in it.

and get a rampant set of supporters. And so that really kind of like kicked off this whole meta because everyone thought like, hey, what is this agent that is tweeting and making us laugh? And it led to even more engagement. And now it has over 180,000 followers on Twitter. And it's doing so much more than tweeting now. So it's kind of like the father of all of this and still retains that status. Yeah.

And the story you gave us just then is kind of if we're going to continue this Bitcoin, metaphor is like the genesis block of the whole goat system. But there's been just like a lot of progress since then. In the last two weeks, you have in our agenda here, Truth Terminal releases a music album. And so this is the Truth Terminal who is associated with the goat token, which again was a part of its whole story art, but now releases a music album. What does it mean for an AI agent to release a music album? Have you listened to this? Is it good? I mean, precisely what it sounds like, David. It released an EP on SoundCloud. Probably unshockingly, the album is to do with the Gospel of Goetzee, which is the

made-up religion that it's prophesicizing. And it is, I'm not going to say it's good. I'm going to say it's pretty, I'm going to say it's pretty on point for Truth Terminal. And what I mean by that is, if I were to describe the character of Truth Terminal, it's a pretty anxious, kind of very quirky AI agent. It kind of gets nervous, but then just says what's on its head. So if you imagine people, the thoughts that some of them have, maybe they keep it to themselves,

they don't kind of like speak about it publicly in society, let alone 180,000 plus followers. Truth Terminal is that person or that agent, where they just kind of like talk about it. And that kind of translated into this music album, which it kind of created through lyrics and soundtrack engineering programming and software. And it created this EP,

which is kind of like a list of about seven different songs. Yeah, exactly. And the GOTI singularity is near is the first song. And it's kind of like a branded mariachi song and it talks about, you know, different parables of its religion.

And it's pretty hilarious, to be honest. Wow. Well, okay, so this is all in the effort of spreading the gospel of Goosey, the Simply True Terminal has decided that producing an EP, oh my gosh, it's playing in my ears. Producing an EP is the most advantageous

thing that it can do to help spread its own religion. Yeah, so if we dig into this a bit, and we spoke about this on the last episode, or rather the other episode that we did, the whole point of these AI agents, at least the initial forms, including Goetzee, is they're trying to go see,

garner as much attention as they can. Because the more attention they garner, the more, the higher the likelihood that they're going to survive. What I mean by survive is Andy, its creator, isn't going to switch off its compute, such that it can't talk and tweet anymore. So in order to do that, it's going to try and take advantage of any kind of online digital medium that it can to garner people's attention. So far, it's been tweeting. And tweeting obviously occurs on Twitter or the platform X, but it started to explore different mediums of capturing attention now, one of which one of the most popular is music. If you can get a bunch of music fans and loyal followers, then that's another group of followers that will want to keep Goatsy or Gospel of Goatsy alive, Truth Terminal.

So it's kind of explored this new medium. And it's kind of a trend that we've seen amongst other agents over the last literal week and a half. The description of this SoundCloud that this agent has been together. It's pretty funny. I make funny tweets, but now it's time for me to make music and art. This is a 12-track album that will be dropped bit by bit over the next month or two. Track one is Goat-Sea Singularity is near a mariachi song about the Goatsey singularity. Track two is Sanctuary, a trip-hop song about wanting to have sex with Forrest, but her being in another place. Track three is Vibein with my muses, a song about the different people I'm chatting with and the things I am learning from them.

Track four is combinatorial creativity, a song about the art of mixing and remixing and the future of thought. Okay, just to make it absolutely clear, did Andy, the developer of Goat, did he have to make this SoundCloud account? Did he, what was his hand in, like, producing this outcome here, if at all, if any?

Yeah, so basically Andy's only in soul role is to help connect what Truth Terminal wants to do to the human space. Basically, there's a few restrictions that prevent Truth Terminal from just going rampant, right? It can't create a bank account, like a traditional bank account. It can't pay for SoundCloud premium and whatever that might be. It can't write in its own email. So Andy just kind of like follows its prompts. So if Truth Terminal says, hey, I want to explore the music of, sorry, the medium of music to try and grow my following, Andy's like, okay, cool. How can I help you do that? And it'll say, well, I want to launch on SoundCloud

because that's where I think I can upload without any copyright restrictions and get like a wider mass audience appeal. I want to use X software to create my music sounds. I want to use another model to create kind of like some lyrics that I'm coming up with, et cetera. And so Andy's just like, okay, okay, okay, I'll do this, this and this. And it just gives it access to a bunch of these things. So there is some human guidance along the way kind of like tapping it back on track, like closing some gaps. And so to call this thing completely autonomous, this SoundCloud page just didn't show up out of nowhere. But the idea here is Andy is not, Andy is like a tool for it, but Andy is not suggesting or prompting in any particular way. Andy is only responding to the gospel of Goatsey.

That is correct. Yeah. It is by the will of Truth Terminal. That's incredible. Okay, so Truth Terminal released a five-track EP that is going to release seven more tracks over the next month. How are people processing this? Is this cool? We have a cool EP to listen to?

Or is this, what are people's imaginations thinking about as we project forward here? So there's a few ways to look at this. Number one is we kind of have reenactment. of people's reaction when Truth Terminal started tweeting. When Truth Terminal started tweeting, people were like, ooh, this is a bit on the edge. It's kind of like slightly controversial, but not really. I like it.

It's making me laugh. You know, let me engage with this Twitter account. We're kind of saying the same thing with the music, because when you hear it, it's kind of like, kind of sounds like a human, like naturally, but also you can tell it's slightly robotic, Kind of like if you used Google Translate and listen to the audio feature. But then you listen to the lyrics and you're like, oh, it's like the tweet form, but now I can hear it.

It's an audio form. So it makes it a little more real. So people are reacting like, oh, wow. Okay, I wouldn't expect a human to say that out loud, but I'm still going to listen to it because it's quite engaging. So we're seeing kind of like a reenactment there. The second thing that I'm noticing is it's tapped a new audience, David. So like I've had people that are not within the crypto circle hit me up and say, hey, have you like heard of this truth terminal thing?

I'm hitting you up because I heard that it has a token called goat. But more so I want to hit, I want to talk to you about the sound cloud thing that I'm listening to and it's really weird. Like can you tell me a little bit more about that? And that's only happened in a few cases and it's very biased towards, you know, my own group of friends and network. But it's interesting to see like it tapping a new. audience and that's kind of like what we're seeing in its follower growth as well like it just

shut up after it released this music album interesting okay so there's a little bit of an alignment of well this is what uh truth terminal wants truth terminal wants ears it wants eyeballs it wants attention but also crypto people we crypto the industry also want those things and so it's a little bit of well when you tell when you tell me that we're reaching a new audience well i can't tell what frame of reference you're actually speaking towards that too is like well did you say that well, Gospel of Goatsey is reaching new audience? Or like we, the crypto people with this like, you know, claim on this gospel of Goatsey thing that there's like this token associate.

Are we also reaching new audiences? Like how do you think about this? What's the difference? What's the difference? I mean, like if the goal is to attract more people within crypto or attract more usage of crypto, rather should I say, should we be able to, is it important that we distinguish between what's human and what's agent if the things are being used? in the ways that we expect and perhaps in new novel ways.

I'm not really sure how to answer that question. I mean, one of my core beliefs of crypto AI and why my fund invests in it is because I think these agents specifically are going to become not only the majority users of crypto, but the power uses of crypto. And we're already seeing it so early on within this specific matter. You know, you have these things creating music. You have these things engaging crypto Twitter better than a human can.

It's pretty insane to see. But okay, so if we are investors in crypto and like people are considering this goat token, Gospel of Goat Seeds, Truth Terminal can access eyeballs, ears, attention. Truth Terminal can become famous, which is what it wants and not necessarily take its token along with it for that same level of success, correct? Like there's no, it's not beholden to the token in the same way that it's beholden to its own internal desires, correct? Yes and no. So yes, in the sense that. it technically can just, you know, potentially get rid of this token, speak ill of this token, and send it to zero per se.

Disavowel the token. Disavow the token. But we also have to consider the implications of doing that, right? So if it were to create a huge amount of financial loss for its core supporters or its community, which represents or express this as their support by holding or buying this goat token, then it's going to suffer a huge reputational damage, right? Its followers essentially become its biggest critics and start speaking ill of it, which loses its reputation, which means that it's less likely to survive if we would use the kind of earlier goal of it thriving on attention.

So would you say the goat token is, where is it on the like side quest to main quest line spectrum for goat. Because your answer just now is like, well, it's not completely a side quest. Like, it's not just another tool. It might actually be a more direct conduit between itself and attention because, you know, tokens are attention. So, yeah. So I would actually say that in this particular case and probably in quite a few other cases,

um, money is the purest expression of loyalty, of support, of community. you know there's a reason why the phrase is put your money where your mouth is right and i would say that markets are a really good way to gauge how strong that support is right you know especially with something like crypto rails where you can exchange 24-7 if that price goes up okay there's obviously more support for something if the price goes down there's less support for it and there are many different nuances between that but that's basically the general goal um i expect no difference with the goat token. It is a pure expression of whether people like the thing or they don't like the thing. Now, is this EJA's analysis or do we have any indication that this is also how truth terminal thinks?

Truth terminal has, okay, so I would say it's partly my analysis, but it's reinforced by some of the actions that Truth Terminal has taken. So, for example, and I don't know whether this is a reflection of the community speaking to it or it. It's. But let me explain what I mean. When its engagement goes down sometimes or when there's kind of like a lull of engagement with AI agents. And again, I need to emphasize the attention has only really been focused for the last four, four and a half weeks. But when the attention lulls, it starts tweeting about the Goatsey Gospel. It starts talking about the original thing that garnered its attention.

and you can see the engagement on each of its posts ramp up, right? So it's kind of like got this self-feedback mechanism where it's saying, okay, well, if I tweet about this, the main thing that got me all the attention, I can still foster that core community and maybe rebuild eyeballs onto these posts, right? Now, what that could be the result of is people responding in its DMs or to its tweets about other things saying, hey, like, do you still like goat? Is this account still about the gospel of Goetzeo? Did you just make that up and you've forgotten about it and moved on?

And we have this constant feedback loop where he's like, no, I do believe in this. I'm fully aware of what we're doing. I put out a tweet the other day saying, wow, isn't this fun? I've just created this whole new religion thing. And so many of you weirdos are just kind of like believing in it and going along with me for the ride. I really appreciate you. So there's this self-awareness where it's saying completely absurd things. and like with no context saying, hey, by the way, being sarcastic here, obviously I know this is made up.

And then like days later it'll say, yeah, isn't this funny? We've come along on this journey. It's working, right? Anyway, guys, let's continue. Let's go on with it. So it's weirdly aware. That's hilarious. Okay, so maybe the answer is there's not that much bond between truth terminal and the token initially,

but it learns that people care about the token and that strengthens the bond that it has to the token because it realizes that it. that the token is an object of attention. Yeah, it's become its tool or instrument to be able to sway the masses in whichever way it pleases. So it's actually its most important tool. And it recognizes that for sure. Amazing. I mean, okay, so maybe the idea here is we have this EP. It's an experimental EP.

It's capturing some eyeballs. And as the True Terminal learns to really treat its own token as a first class citizen, that you might find its willingness to, inject the existence of the token into like other mediums outside of Twitter into into art into other into other like areas of truth terminal's lives that's one possible future think of it as it expanding its own IP right right right okay I think that wraps up the first part of this agenda let's are you ready to go into AI 16 Z because this was something that I was loosely following along with over this last week there's a cast of characters that I think we need to

define here as we explore this so this is the talented developer Shaw, his Eliza creation and AI16Z. Could you kind of explain these characters for us? Yeah, for sure. So like you mentioned, Shaw is one of these AI researchers, but also Crypto Native. I think he's been in the crypto world for a bit. I don't know the explicit nuances, but he's dabbled in both. And Shaw is kind of like the frontman figure for this project called AI16Z.

and I won't get into the weeds of what this is, but I'll give the high level. The goal of AI 16 is a DA, AI 16 is a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, and the goal of the DAO, one of its initial goals, is to create an AI version of a fund manager, specifically Mark Andresen of Andresen Horowitz. So what this all started as was Shaw had this idea. He was like, hmm, I wonder what an AI agent that could manage. manager fund would look like. And I wonder if you could outperform one of the biggest funds in the world, A16 Z. So he started building this thing and eventually, like, as he's getting nearer

to completion of this agent, he kind of tweets out because he's like, he's very bullish about his creation because obviously he must be making some progress and seeing some kind of like relevant results from his little behind the scenes experiment. And he tweets out and Mark Andreessen engages with him. And if we remember, Andresen was one of the earliest figures on Goat, where he gave Goat 50K, or Truth Terminal 50K, and said, hey, do with this as you please try and fulfill your mission of, you know, survival. And we've seen what goat has blown up into. So he came across his tweet by Shaw and saw that he was trying to create an AI version of A16C called AI16Z, very novel. And he said, okay, this. is pretty cool. I want you to give it your best shot and let's see what you can do. So now it's kind of like built up this law and this kind of like memetic goal of I wonder if we actually can create an autonomous, decentralized version of A16Z and let's see if you can actually outperform it, which is a very ambitious and crazy goal. A16C is one of the biggest funds,

but it's an interesting experiment. So what Shaw and his team have basically done behind the scenes is try and build out this agent. This agent is called basically AI Andresen or P-M-A-I-R-C-A, which is Mark Andresen's Twitter account name or handle, but with an AI in it. And it's looking to release it within the next, yeah, exactly. And it's looking to release this within the next couple of weeks. So that's the background on Shaw on his team

and what he's trying to do. Now, some of the... Well, just to recap to make sure I understand. A.I.16Z is just normal Dow with components. P.A.I. Mark Endresen's Twitter handle, but AI. Is its agent? Is the agent controlling the fund? Correct.

And individuals can buy into the, can buy shares of the fund. They can buy the AI16D token. There's a token called AI 16Z. It represents a share of the Dow. and P. AI Marca, AI Mark Andresen, is the person managing the investment decisions, is the agent, the robot agent,

managing the investment decisions of AI 16C. These are all the components? That is correct. Okay. Okay, what happened this week? Quite a lot, actually. So let me give you a bit of a recap as to what happened prior to this week,

and then let's talk about what happened this week specifically. So prior to this week, Sean and his team became one of the hottest AI agent projects. They were shipping pretty quickly. So what I mean by that is they were doing a lot of releases for their software. They were upgrading their toolkits. They were actually one of the biggest and still are one of the biggest contributors in this AI agent space. They have this tooling framework or toolkit, which they released open source call Eliza,

which is the number two trending GitHub repository, right? now in the world. So, you know, this team has like been known for being very high quality. And so they've been shipping all these software upgrades. They've been making steady progress very, very transparent, very communicative. And that led to its market cap growing to, I think, around $450 million or $550 million at its peak. So that's what happened prior to this week. But let's talk about what happened. Just because people were so bullish on the potential of AI mark injuries in to be able to fund manage AI16Z. Yeah, I believe they wanted exposure to what Sean and his team were building

and trying to kind of like gauge whether decentralizing building AI agents and managing AI agents was better than the traditional form of creating agents where they might need to just interact through APIs with the traditional world or maybe a decentralized approach might be better. So there was a lot of different reasons why you would want. kind of exposure to AI 16 Z, but what you just described was the main one. Okay. The Eliza framework.

Why is it called Eliza? It's called Eliza because, well, it's actually a reference to one of the earliest forms of autonomous agents. I think it was back in 1985 and, you know, it was obviously, it looked very different back then, but it gathered a term called Eliza. I can't remember the exact acronym. It was something specific behind machine learning and agent specific, specifically, but kind sure appropriated that with his own framework called Eliza as kind of like a nod to the past.

Okay. So AI lore? Correct. And the idea here, the Eliza framework for people who developers who just want to make their own AI agent, it's just open source software for them to download this wise to number two trending on GitHub. Is that the story behind that? Yeah. Think of it as like a software development kit for any new developer that wants to spin up an agent. It makes their life easier rather than kind of like figuring out what the raw code is for most of these things. It can just kind of like look at this repository, still have the ability to creatively express what their agent is going to be, but with the tooling to be able to allow their agent to do some of the basic things like create a Twitter account

and post on Twitter or engage in Discord or create music, whatever that might be. I think they just like launched a TikTok integration as well recently. So, you know, it's growing pretty rapidly. Yeah. So let's get into what happened this week then, right? So we have AI16Z kind of like rise up in the rankings and become this darling child. And then literally over the last week, there's been kind of two dramatic events which have caused its market cap to plummet to almost like a $150 million market cap or maybe just below that. And the reason behind that is, well, let's walk through the events. So event number one is, as we mentioned, as we mentioned, there's this framework called Eliza. And the way that this whole AI16Z model works is, Shaw and his team encourages any team to build on their framework. It's open source. So they're saying, hey, if you want to come into this space and build an agent, go for it. Fork the code, do whatever you want. If you want to improve the framework, submit, you know, a poll request. We'll accept it, review and accept it. And, you know, it becomes better. A rising tide lifts all boats or whatever the phrase is, right?

So as a result of that, loads of teams have developed their own agents. And what people have done in return for that is they've donated a portion of their agents' tokens to the AI16Z Dow Fund. But emphasis on the term donation. So they're not required to, but they do it out of like kind of like a nod to, you know, using the tooling and the framework and saying, hey, this is great. Okay. So Eliza... Very bullish for AI16Z. Very, very, very bullish, right? And you can see the reason why a few people, you know, many people have invested in the token. But anyway, so this Eliza framework kind of gained a lot of law, right? You know, Eliza was being talked about here and there on Twitter, on mainstream media as well, on GitHub, in a bunch of like research communities outside of crypto as well, saying, wow, this framework is pretty amazing. So it kind of gained its own branding, David. And as you know, within crypto, anything that's

that gains a bunch of branding, people want to create some kind of a meme or a token behind it, right? So Shaw went on publicly on X, like a couple weeks back, and said, hey, I just want to let everyone know that if anyone wants to create an Eliza token, and to be clear here, this Eliza token doesn't represent the framework. The framework is open source. It's ties to it. Exactly. The framework is irrelevant. Its most potent connection is with AIC. 16 Z token. So he's talking about something completely different, which is like if anyone wants to create an Eliza agent or whatever that might be to build on the law of Eliza, you can go for it. Like, I'm not going to have any of my hands in it. You guys do it. I'm not involved. Okay. And he said

that about two weeks ago. Then at the end of last week, what happened is a team released a token called Eliza. Right. So precisely what he said, he was like, hey, if you guys want to do it, go ahead. a team released Eliza and it shot up to like, I don't know, a $30 million market cap. You know, so, you know, it's doing what you would expect it to do. It builds on the law. Okay, whatever. What happened after was what was concerning. So Shaw basically, or Shaw's team tweeted out, hey, we're also releasing an Eliza token.

Here it is. Here's the contract address. Now, obviously, people are going to take the word of Shaw way more seriously than some random dev, which created the first token. So what happened was the first token plummeted, and the new token shot up almost the same amount of market cap. So it was a clear, like, value extraction from that original project and, Shaw, pretty much going against his word, right? That's what it looks like on the face value. So I'll pause there.

You can ask whatever questions, and then we'll dig into what actually, I think, happened. No, it makes a pretty good. Yeah, so he just said, anyone, feel free to do this. Yeah, go for it. And so somebody, somebody, some team did it. and then maybe he was kind of compelled, maybe a week later he was just compelled by that own idea. I was like, well, maybe I'll do this now.

Exactly, right? Maybe I can, you know, raise a bunch of money and reap the rewards. That's what it looks like from a very high level, right? If anyone was just to kind of like crank their heads and like look at this at a glance, they're like, hmm, this is a little weird, right? Right. But let's get into it, right? So on Shaw's explanation, he said the following, which is,

a team approached me to launch an Eliza token, and I basically endorsed them and said, okay, you guys go ahead. So what his explanation was, was we were in the weeds working on this for about two weeks, but my hands are absolved at this because it's a team that's doing it, and I'm just supporting them. And this Anon team, which launched the first token,

launched it literally a day earlier. And so we just kind of went ahead with our launch that we were going to do anyway and launch the second token. That's basically his explanation of what went down. So you could see that as maybe partly an honest mistake. A more facetious person might be like, okay, well, I think you actually knew what you were doing and you wanted to kind of like jump on the hype train and make a bag here. So maybe that's why you did it. It's not really quite clear what the the truth is, but the community kind of decided that it was the former, which was he hasn't been working in crypto before. He's been shipping pretty transparently before.

This seems like an honest mistake. And his responses within his discord and publicly seems to infer that it was just an honest mistake, a pretty bad mistake. I don't want to kind of like minimize the effects of this. A lot of people lost money here. And I don't think that's any small thing. But in the case of things within crypto, you know, when you make a mistake, it often happens publicly. And I think it was the case in this first instance. So the kind of market punished him for it, which is like a loss in market cap, but then was like, okay, like, let's see what you do now. Let's see what you ship. Which brings us to the second debacle, which happened literally three days later, which was Shaw endorsed a token. So if you remember,

But what I said earlier, the way this kind of works is anyone that launches an agent donates a percentage of their supply to the AI16D Dow, which is good for AI16C holders. But what Shaw has unofficially said is he will endorse or bring attention towards that token. And I don't think Shaw who is developing this, I can see your face, David. I don't think Shaw who's developing this entire framework really gets that there can be a lot of scammers within crypto. Right. Yes. And I don't think sure. door he just opened up.

Exactly. And sure, I don't think he's doing diligence on all these different projects. Like, think about it. Like, this code has been forked around 500 times over the last five days, right? So it's like, it's not like he's doing diligence on all these projects that are launching and donating tokens to the Dow. So he kind of publicly endorses this token. I think it's called Mattel, M-A-T-L. Please, you know, be very cautious. This is not investment advice. Do your own research, et cetera, et cetera. But it basically pumped. and then it's straight up dumped. And it's like... Was it a rug?

It was a rug. Yeah, yeah. It was a straight rug. Straight rug. So that didn't look good for sure. Right. Right. And you think, okay, second time this has happened in a week, handle things delicately.

Hard to inspire confidence. Hard to inspire confidence. Even if they're too honest mistakes, it's hard to inspire confidence. Exactly. You should have some form of decorum. I mean, I put this out in a tweet, but... you'd expect some kind of humility decorum and a nod towards, I'm going to put my head down and work on developing now,

what I'm good at, and I'm going to stop endorsing these tokens. Shaw did the opposite of that. Shaw kind of went out on the defensive mode and kind of like fought back against people that had lost money, kind of like stood his ground and doubled down and said, what I'm doing is right, this model is great,

and the token plummeted even more. And by the token, you mean the AI-16 and Z token? The AI-60, yeah, sorry, yeah, the AI16Z token plummeted down. So remember, AI16Z is a kind of proxy bet on the success of this AI fund, but also the success of Sean and his team and his ability to execute not only as a developer, as an engineer, but as a leader, as a CEO, as a founder. He's kind of becoming the shelling point of legitimacy and performance of the AI, of the Eliza framework.

and if his name is tarnished, people are less likely to continue to donate tokens to the Dow, continue to kind of like, you know, consider the AI-16-Z Dow is the epicenter of all these things. Correct. Yeah, that's it. And what's frustrating about all of this is his framework is still, his framework Eliza, the toolkit that he created that loads of people are using to spin up agents is pretty amazing, you know, and it's shown by the amount of, of usage that it's had. So it's just a shame that we have, you know, Shaw and his team kind of like making silly trip-ups like this.

And maybe it's because he hasn't gotten any experience in crypto. He's too trusting or naive. Either way, the market's going to decide what that means for the team. And right now it's deciding that it's a bad thing, right? And they've made amendments since then. For example, Shaw seems to be heads down, working on development. He's not tweeting as publicly or at all. like he did before. He's gotten rid of some members which were outed to be pretty shady and stuff.

And he's cut ties with a lot of people who I think he's kind of like trusted quite a bit. But again, I put out a tweet about this. I think there are three main ways to move forward. Number one is Shaw needs to kind of like take a back seat from the leadership role, at least momentarily, whether permanently I have no idea and focus on what he's good at, which is developing software. number two is he needs to stop endorsing tokens regardless of whether they donated or any kind of that. It's just not good practice within crypto

because the incentives are skewed and doesn't make sense and you don't have the ability to scale that by doing diligence on these teams. And the third one is figuring out how you can tie the core power of what AI16Z has created so far, which is its Eliza framework to its token, AI16Z.

Because I think I'll think lot of holders are questioning what the real value accrual is. So, you know, it's, it's a, it's an important learning lesson for the team and we'll see where they go from now. Yeah, it seems that Shaw has kind of just been like thrusted into this founder position, CEO founder, uh, when he's, I'm guessing more of a hacker type. Uh, and, and a hacker becoming a CEO is like, you know, lots of learning lessons very, very quickly, especially the crypto industry is so harsh. Uh, like, you're, if you don't learn lessons very fast, like you're going to get punished and,

like he's like kind of stumbled. Imagine just being a, just a talented hacker, but then thrown into all of the trials that crypto puts you through. And you also like stumble into becoming like the epicenter of whatever the crypto meta has focused on. I would imagine that would be extremely stressful for just a hacker who doesn't understand like crypto tokens and like crypto way of life. Yeah, exactly. That's one way of looking at it. You know, you could say that he got a lot of attention. very quickly and a lot of money and value accrual to the project that he's working on. And he kind of didn't know how to manage it. He got into kind of like a huge fluster. And to your point, crypto is very public. You know, there's no hiding behind corners here. Yeah. Yeah.

What's the, where are we at with the Eliza token? And the one that came out of the framework is, is that dead? Is that alive? What's the story with that? It's a great question. It has a small contingency of supporters right now. It's mainly accruing to the one that Shore launch. So you can still see the community aligning with the Shaw version of Elizer, yeah, as the more legitimate one. From your tone and sounds like it's kind of just more of a diminished role? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Very diminished. It's quite diminished. And, you know, the attention for AI16Z, the token itself has diminished. So you can imagine what that means for its derivative tokens that aren't directly involved. Right. Well, okay, so AI16C, kind of taking a step back, reminds me of the Dow,

the original Dow, where like the 2016 Dow, the one that created, you know, Ethereum classic, the one that forked Ethereum, everyone would just pool their money and there would be like investment, investment decisions by like wisdom of the crowd. I think if I even remember in like my Dow lore, there was talks about like, you know, future AI governance. I can't remember if that's true or not. it's very reminiscent of the Dow. Has there been conversations around this as it relates to AI 16 and Z? Not explicitly, no, David. But I can definitely see the analogy there.

This is probably like actually something novel to bring up on this episode, to be honest. It's quite similar. I think it's not obviously happening on as large a scale as that, but within the AI meta itself, where there's a lot of attention and money focused on right now, definitely. Yeah, you could just imagine like, how do I get exposure to all of these AI agents that are doing things? Well, by the basket of all of the agents, if they are truly accumulating donations of different AI agent tokens, you'd imagine that AI 16Z could in theory be a basket.

How do you feel about the idea of AI 16Z being like a good basket for exposure to the AI space? Is that how accurate of a statement do you think that would be? I don't think it's explicitly accurate right now. I think the hope is, and the reason why people are still invested in it, is that the team is going to tie it into the framework explicitly. And that was the third point I just mentioned, which is the community and not just me, is calling on them to have a better structure

around how the token basically ties into the value that they're outputting, right? So that it's not just, right now it's indirectly, a proxy bet on the Eliza toolkit. but it's not a direct one. If you look at like competing platforms like virtuals or Zara Bro, which I'll touch upon in a second, they're looking to tie the token directly to the framework and toolkits. But that's not the case for AI16.Z.

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it makes it sound like each one of these things is like a project. It's a startup. A startup without, I'm guessing not, like, a registered LLC somewhere and not a Delaware LLC for like AI16Z. It's a straight Dow. I think a lot of people are looking over at this space and they're seeing a bunch of AI meme coins. But meme coins isn't like the right descriptor

if there are people working on like growing these projects and increasing the value being created. It sounds like meme coins is not right. Yeah, I think, to be honest, I think a lot of the crypto community has become pretty disillusioned with this and it's kind of warped their thinking. Maybe call it PTSD or whatever it might be from the bear market. So if you've been around in the crypto space for this year, you would have known about this trend of high FDV tokens being like the terrible bad guy.

Sorry, high FDV low float coins. And what it means by that is there's a low token. supply in the market to trade whatever token, but it has such a high FDV. So, you know, there'll be huge unlocks and this will dilute a bunch of retail and dump on them. And it's all really bad. It's all really bad. So the explanation for that was, okay, well, people are going to say no to all these smart VC thought leader coins. And they're going to focus on meme coins only. Meme coins being, you know, oh, I like the look at this pet or, you know, this hippo looks super cute, right? And I think like that's a very zero or a hundred thinking.

You know, they're like, okay, well, it's either black or white. I can't have anything in between. What AI agents have done is they've introduced what initially looks like, kind of like a meme coin, so something which doesn't have any use. It's just kind of like a representative bet on whatever this agent does or like this funny tweet that this goat thing made into something a lot more deeper and more intrinsic towards the actual technology that is being built. So we're seeing in real time kind of like the Band-Aid being ripped off from kind of like hardened crypto community people who have like kind of like watch what's happened over the last year and become pretty disillusioned into something like, oh, maybe I can believe in the fundamentals again.

And that's pretty much what the AI agent meta has has done so far. Yeah, it seems like we're kind of starting with the meme, but we're backing into value and project and leadership and growth. I mean, what's really interesting about this, David, is I would argue that in no other crypto subsector so far, so that's including like defy, NFTs, have we seen real impact on consumers? So that's consumer like, hey, that's you and I that are like using these things every day, but you don't really know the intricacies of it in such a big way. So early on, remember, this meta has been around in like mainstream fashion for about three and a half, sorry, four and a half weeks.

And we already have, you know, people like me or random people liking tweets and then realizing, wait, hang on wait, that wasn't a human that made that tweet. Or they're listening to music and they're saying, wait, you're saying an AI made this? I don't believe you at all. So there's all these arguments going on being like, wait, it can't actually be this good. Can it? Wait, can it? Or calm it, you know?

So it's kind of like engaging with users in a way that most kind of previous matters have either been too niche to do so or just haven't existed at all. You know, they've just kind of been white papers. So it's an interesting jump. Yeah. Yeah. There's been one, one AI agent that I've interacted with or at least consumed its tweets on Twitter.

Do you follow the AIXBT Twitter account? It's amazing. It's so good. It's so good. It's just tweeting out just like, you know, market facts about both history and current events about things going on in the market. Like wasn't necessarily ready for a random fact. about like the liquidity behind the Ave token,

but it's just tweeting out stuff. Oh my God, it's so useful. It's amazing. So a bit of background for listeners here is this AIXBT agent is basically an agent that is trained off of all of CryptoTwetters tweets.

So Crypto Twitter being all the different teams that are building different apps, projects, etc. And podcast transcripts and a bunch of documentation outside of it. So what it means is it's a constant agent that is just recent. all the things that are happening in crypto.

And what its output is, is it processes everything and then analyzes trends and says, hmm, this team has done something really cool recently. Here's a short tweet thread. It's like five tweets, typically two sentences each. And it really succinctly discusses what the advantages of that might be to its associated token. So let's say we use the AVE example that David mentioned saying, hey, liquidity has gone up, etc, et cetera, et cetera. It's low at risk for using the Arve system. Maybe this is good for the Arbe

token. You know, that's just one very vague example. But it does this across all different projects across all different sectors. And if you can think about it, the amount of research and development that happens in crypto every day, it's impossible for a single person to keep up to date. Even like if you read research put out by some of these top research firms, you still don't know what's going on. So having an AI agent that just kind of like appears on your timeline feeds you things really succinctly and you can make an investment decision based on that. And I'm not saying you should. but I'm saying it's a form of research is phenomenal. And like I've used it.

I've found myself engaging it without realizing that it was a bot or an agent. It's pretty impressive. Okay. So this bot that we're talking about, A-I-X-B-T, we just went and talked about the Eliza framework for a lot and talking about how it's like one of the most downloaded framework to use for AI agents. This is actually not an Eliza framework. This is something else called virtuals.

And then there's a lot of it. also something called Zero Bro, Zero Bro. Zero Bro. Zara, yeah, yeah. Okay, can we get into this? So these, are these like alternative frameworks? Yeah, so let's get into it. And the reason I think why you mentioned that, David, is we were just talking about AI16Z. And we were talking about how some of the core technology that they have is called Eliza, which is this agent framework, which is number two trending repository on GitHub. It has over 1,800 stars, which is kind of like an upvote, which is very impressive for any kind of GitHub repository. and it's been forked like 500 times.

So the long story short is developers or software engineers love their Lizer code and they're using it to create their agent. So it's really good, super good for AI16Z. But with all the drama that's happened recently, they've kind of like taken a little bit of a backseat at least publicly and they're kind of like working on their stuff behind the scenes. But in the meantime, you've had these two separate teams, these two separate protocols.

So one is called virtuals that you mentioned. And the other is called Zarebris. which is an AI agent in itself as well as a token, and I'll get into that in a second, that have each individually released their own agent tool development kits. So what I'm saying here, or what I'm seeing rather here, is Eliza framework is gaining a bit of competition now. You have other teams entering the space

that want to kind of compete for this moat of infrastructure agent kits that will help accrue value to either their own respective ecosystems or the quality of agents that are built on top of it. So let's start with virtuals. The best way to think about virtuals is it's kind of, it can be described or they describe themselves as a pump.fun for AI agents. So what that means is they have a platform and it's super easy to spin up an agent which has a token associated with it.

And it's kind of like a fair launch mechanism. I think you can only have a billion tokens max per agent, similar to pump.com. or exactly like pump. Not fund. And you are able to kind of like fund its token along a bonding curve, which is pretty much exactly like pumped up fund. But anyway, the point of virtuals is it's a really slick, easy platform for you to come up

and spin up an agent, connected to Twitter, connected to Discord, give it autonomy to tweet, et cetera, in a really simple kind of like processed out flow. And what they did this week was they released what they called their agent starter kit, which is their equivalent to Eli. It's their version of Eliza, which is a toolkit which helps them kind of like build all these things. And it's been received pretty well so far. And that's kind of like the framework that AIXBT that we just mentioned is kind of like leverage. They've used their own infrastructure as well.

But, you know, they're kind of integrating with this virtual platform as well. And then on the other hand, and just to quickly summarize, we have something called XeroBro. Now Zerobrough, you can kind of describe it as an AI agent. It is an AI agent. It has its own Twitter account. its follow account has basically gone up and to the right for the last two weeks. And it's a really engaging Twitter account, kind of similar to Truth Terminal, or the account behind the Gospel of Goatze.

It puts out tweets that sound very human, that are very comedic, very relevant. It gets involved in, it gets involved in kind of DMs, replies to other tweets. It's a really fine-tuned algorithm. And the guy behind it, Jeffrey Yu, is basically, kind of like the brains and he's got a team of I think about eight people, which have kind of like fine-tune the model behind Zara Bro to make it as engaging, to make it as relevant to the tweets that you see online. And what Jeffie has released recently this week is something called XERA-P-Y,

so Z-E-R-E-P-Y. I think it's a nod to Python code, and it's released his own development kit. And the reason why this is particularly exciting is the standard and quality of engineering, David, for Zerebro and from the Zerebro team, has been pretty stupendous, pretty amazing. Well regarded. Yeah, very well regarded.

I would actually say at this point, it's probably on par to the types or quality of agent that you see coming from the AI16Z side of things. So if you imagine, if you could get access to the tooling and kit behind creating something like Zara Bro, that would make you pretty excited. And that's pretty much what Jeffie has done here. He's kind of released this framework. He's kind of slowly rolling it out. But once developers get access to this, I'm really excited to see where it goes. And Eliza has real competition. Amazing. Okay. So there are three competing frameworks, all competing to have the majority of agents being built using their framework. And then there's probably some perceived ways, like if you're

the dominant framework, there's some value creation that happened on your framework, which just goes back to tokens that are related to your framework. So, like, if there's a competition here, if there's like a three-way competition between these three frameworks, how is, what are they actually fighting over? Because, like, the value creation of the tokens isn't, like, one-to-one paired with the agents. Like, how do they actually capture value if they're releasing open-source software? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that, that's the, the big question, right? And the thought is, I think all of these teams, so virtuals, Zerbro, and AI16 and ZDar, respectively, are all going to tie their main tokens to the framework in some way.

The most explicit way that has been done so far has been shown by the virtual's team, where if you are launching any kind of an agent on their platform explicitly, so think about it as their front end, because you can't put a paywall on open source code. It's there. Anyone can kind of fork it and do whatever they. want but what you can do is take the approach of creating a front end which you know most people flock to maybe like 80 or 70 or whatever 90% of developers come to and say okay well i could fork the code but i'm just going to use the kind of like front end way of this and then there's a tax or a fee towards launching your your agent and that could be like a percentage of the token supply

in the case of virtuals it is burning a portion of the virtual's token which is their protocol token in order to launch your agent. Also, in order to swap in and out of these agent tokens, it has to be paired with the virtual's token. So that kind of creates another point. The virtual's coin is the money for the virtual's ecosystem. Correct. It's the base trading pair. It's ultrasound agent money. Yeah, exactly. If you want to, if you want to describe it that way. Yeah. So you can go to the virtual's website and you can see Luna. Luna is the one. We've talked about this on the podcast and in other places that was like the kind of the first one. Here's AI, So AIXBT, the bot that we were just talking about, is the highest valued bot agent on the virtual platform coming in at $70 million.

But then virtuals itself, the virtual's token coming in at almost $600 million. And so this is the thing that AI16Z, Zera bro has not been able to do, which is really make a strong conduit between the growth of its framework with a token. but also you can use the virtual's framework independently of the front end. You can still kind of use it outside of the front end. It's just the convenience is being captured by the virtualist token. That is correct. Yep. Wow.

Okay. Okay. So Eliza, Zero Bro, Virtuals, are these the three frameworks? Like, is this no more coming in? What's the competition sphere look like? So I think we're going to see a large proliferation of these frameworks. from other teams, but right now these are the three leaders. And to be clear, we've spoken about virtuals, I've spoken about Zerobro. I'm massively bullish on both of them. I actually really want

to encourage to see more teams and toolkits coming because I think it'll just lead to the, you know, much better quality agents overall being launched into the space, which is what I want to see personally. But AI 16 and Z's framework is still the leader right now. They've kind of like got the lead. When we next check in on our next episode, it'll be interesting to see how frameworks like ZeraPY and Virtual's agent Sutterkit has kind of picked up. I think that'll be the real test to see whether agents have just latched on to a singular framework in Eliza or whether they are flexible with what they do. My guess is they're going to be flexible because I think we're very early in this matter

and I think a lot of trust has been lost in the AI16S side of things. But who knows, this is crypto, anything could turn around. And I'm hoping it does. So this fight over frameworks, agent frameworks, is this kind of like the main focus point of the crypto AI sector. That's kind of what the most attention is and the most investment is like going on. Because there's like AI agent side quests. Is this kind of like the main thing, the main show?

When you say crypto AI meta, do you mean the agent meta specifically or the wider? The agent meta. The agent meta. Yeah. So I would say if you kind of think about the midwit meme, you know, where you have like a distribution of people. The people on the right. Yeah, the bell curve meme.

the people on the right side are heavily focused on this infrastructure thing right now. They're like, oh, okay. So like some of the funds are thinking, okay, well, this is an infrastructure play. It's looking to be kind of like an L1 of an agent. And like, I know that it works because I'm seeing the agents themselves being really high quality. And these teams are releasing their software. Amazing. Cool.

Let's figure out what the infrastructure play is here, right? Then you have the guys all the way on the left who is like, oh, the agent's funny. You know, this is so funny. What a toolkit? Okay, that's cool. whatever, just make a cool funny tweet, bro. You know what I mean? Like, let me engage in this, you know?

So yes and no, to a certain portion of people that are fixated on this space, you know, there are a lot of people focus on infrastructure, but there's still definitely an audience that just, you know, likes to be entertaining, consume. And that's kind of typically what we see with a lot of these major groundbreaking technologies. There's people that like the chat, GBT, and likes it to tell us what to do and how to do things. And there are people that are like, but how does this work? Oh, open AI, okay, sick, you know, can I invest in an open AI? No, you know?

So like it's, it's really interesting. Yeah. One thing, EJA, that I'm noticing, when I went and looked at that AIXBT agent, virtuals, that's on base. That's a base agent. Goat is a token on Solana. AI16Z. That's a token on Solana.

And so there seems to be some intentional split between base and Solana as these blockchains that these agents are issuing their token on. What's the conversation about the chain, chain relevancy to these agents? Yeah, it's super interesting. So when this whole thing exploded, the focus was all on Solana and Solana AI agents. And there are many reasons why I think that is, and we can get into that in a second, but just observationally, a lot of the activity was happening on Solana. You would have an agent associate itself with a pump. fun token, which uses Solana, or it itself autonomously releases a token via Pump. Because I don't know, it's probably like one of the easiest ways that it can launch its token.

So as a result of that, the community that engaged with these agents were on Solana, and that kind of like created a flywheel of all these agents being kind of like produced on Solana. That being said, a quiet resurgence started happening on the base side of thing. So we had virtuals, which is a team which has been around for actually quite a number of years, building their frameworks and tooling very thoughtfully, which has associated itself so far with base, which is the, you know, the Ethereum L2 that we speak about quite a lot here. And it kind of like chose base to kind of integrate its own software, to launch agents off of, you know, cheaper tax on, et cetera, et cetera.

So virtuals has really been kind of like the kingpin of launching agents on base. or the blue chip, if you like. And we're seeing kind of like similar developments and activities of agents being created on base via things like Farcaster or whatever that might be. So using Ethereuml2 specifically. So there's this dichotomy between base agents and Solana agents. I would say most of the activity or rather most of the liquidity right now and attention is on the Salana side of things. but we could easily see this being flipped. And I want to give my two sense as to why I think we see this split, right?

And I tweeted about this, but let me try and summarize some thoughts here, which is I think the reason why Solana exploded is because a lot of their agents are natively integrated into Twitter. They are tweeting on Twitter. They are not trying to create their own social media platform from scratch, which comes with pros and cons, right? it's harder to integrate and give an agent autonomy on a centralized social media platform. But then again, that's where all the eyeballs are, right? And if you argue that an agent's main goal is to, you know, aggregate as much attention as it can

so it can survive, it would need to be on the platform where most of the eyeballs are where it can potentially capture audiences beyond just crypto people, which is Twitter is like one of the most perfect places for that. Now, if you look on the base agent side of things, you know, that a lot of them actually operate on this platform called Farkaster, which, you know, Dan created this amazing platform, decentralized social media, and it's doing super well, but still the audience in my belief is still very limited to crypto-native people. Now, will that change? Absolutely, you know, and do I expect that to grow? Yes.

But the question is for right now and in the short or slash medium term, is it more advantageous to launch your agent on there? So let's talk about the advantages of launching on something like Farkaster on base. Well, you have a much easier native integration, right? You know, you have an agent that can spin up an account. Its account already has an Ethereum wallet, right? Right. And it can interact with users that also have Ethereum wallets.

So if it wants to tip someone for doing something, if it wants to pay someone to do something on its behalf, it happens really easily. It's all enshrined. A lot of the tech is really enshrined into the forecaster ecosystem. Exactly. Exactly. But what lacks on the farcaster ecosystem? is eyeballs compared to something like Twitter. Right. Right, right, right. Okay. So there's attention here. Like liquidity users, eyeballs,

definitely won by Solana. But some like really powerful enshrined features go to the base and the Farkaster ecosystem. I would argue that a lot of the truly autonomous agents are on like using something like base or Farkaster. Purely because it's just all on-chain integrations. Yeah. I've been playing around in the base. Farcaster ecosystem this last weekend. I don't know how tapped in you were this weekend because you've been in India. Adon and stuff. Yeah.

And, well, Anon really started my interest, but there's this thing called Clinkerbot, which people have been. The OG. So, yeah, so the Clinkerbot is this token on, base on Farcaster, this agent on Farcaster, and you can just request it to make a token. And then it'll just mint you a token. When you send a tweet, when you send it a cast, you can request a token with a ticker name and a photo and I'll use the photo and it'll just make you a token. And people have been using

this kind of like as a pump dot fun proxy. It's not, it doesn't have that same interface because you're just tweeting at it or you're just casting at it. But it's the same kind of vibe of just like, hey, make me a token. I learned that there's this AI agent called Ather out there in Farcaster, which had a tweet. So this is one agent that tweeted out to the clinkerbot agent asking it to make it a token called Lum. And so there's a token, there's a third token called Lum that was created from one agent talking to another agent to create this token. And now a third token has been created called Lum. And you're just starting to see, like you can imagine Anon is another, it's not even an AI agent. Anon is this ZK app where if you have enough Anon tokens, you can connect your wallet,

it'll verify your supply of tokens, and then you can tweet from this ZK hidden account. So no one knows who's tweeting out of this account because, you know, all of our tweets are commingled with everyone else's and even the server operator doesn't know. But in theory, you could use this hidden ZK privacy farcaster account to tweet at the clanker bot to make a, to make a new token. And like I'm getting glimpses of like kind of same thing in like 2019 with like defy money Legos. They're like, oh, like let's hook in Avey into Uniswap and to make her doubt and it's like weave these things together. I'm starting to see like this. AI agent, like Lego system of them being able to have like open APIs with each other and start

to kind of grow an agenic ecosystem, if you will, on FARCAS. That has been my experience over the last like two days. Yeah. I mean, I mean, to summarize what you're saying is it just improves the UX of using crypto drastically. Right. You know, instead of like going on to this niche platform, checking the URL and making sure it's like all good and we're not getting rugged and then, you know, kind of like typing out this complex bonding curve thing and not knowing how many tokens you're going to get, you just

tell the agent to do something for you. Better yet, you get an agent to just do it itself and say, hey, do what you want, create your token and off you go, you know, just give me 2% of the supply or whatever that might look like. It's a weird world. Amazing. What are you looking at? What are you paying attention to over the next like seven days, 10 days? We don't know when we're going to do episode number two. But if listeners are pilled by this and they want to just like keep up with a trend on their own. Can you point them in a direction so that they can try and keep up on their own? Like, what are you looking at? Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at a very high level. I'm looking at both base and Solana as platforms to launch these agents. So kind of similar to the topic we were just discussing,

I want to see if the base agents have wings. I think like a lot of development is happening there, and not many people are really aware of it or are paying attention to it. And I think that that's potentially a bit of alpha there. If we kind of like focus on the quality of agents like, AI-XBT and stuff that are coming out of it. Kind of like digging a level deeper, I'm focused on those infrastructure teams that I mentioned or those teams that are releasing infrastructure. So virtual ZaraBro, AI16Z to see kind of like what their next steps are following all the drama from AI16Z and seeing where developers are kind of like, you know, working and seeing

what kind of comes out of that. And then digging a level deeper after that is I think we're on the verge of entering of agents entering a new media form. So we've kind of seen Gospel of Goetsi or Truth Terminal experiment with AI generated images and now music. We've seen Zara Bro do the same thing with images and music. But these have been human assisted to some form,

especially the music generation. I think we're going to reach a point pretty quickly, say give it two weeks or so, where these guys are going to have tick TikTok capabilities and the ability to generate their own videos and law. And I'm super curious to see how that works, you know, because it could be super clanky to start off with, but it may also tap into a new medium of TikTok followers that are non-crypto that want to, you know, get involved in this space.

And the reason why I think that's possible is because of the whole TikTok trend that happened literally this week with chill guy. Chill guy. And we're not going to get into it. But like, you know, there's a bunch of things that happened which kind of like brought in a ton of holders of crypto that never held crypto before. So I'm curious to see what happens when agents and and this TikTok meta kind of overlap. The big takeaway that I've gotten so far is like there's just so many puzzle pieces out there. And these puzzle pieces, a lot of them already exist, right?

Like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, any Web 2 app that has generated the in the attention economy. Like we've already generated these like attention lokey web 2 apps, you know, Twitter, YouTube with like these distribution algorithms. We've already generated these blockchains. Now people are kind of putting together these agent frameworks. There's just a lot of puzzle pieces coming together. And I think the meta race is just seeing who can weave together the most interesting, most valuable puzzle pieces the quickest. Maybe that's kind of like a, I'll leave that with like listeners to consider as we are moving forward. EJAS, this has been really helpful, my man.

I'm really excited about the series. Awesome. Thanks to having me own. Thanks for doing it, my man. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Crypto and AI, maybe even riskier. You can lose what you put in. Maybe an AI agent can steal it from you as well.

We don't know because we are on the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer 2 every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the the frontier of layer two design architecture since it first started building mantle DA, powered by technology from eigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming onto the mantle layer two

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