AI Agent is new form of virtual idol and influencer powered by blockchain
AI Agents are more than just reply guys on Twitter rather have enough potential to open diverse use-cases on-chain. But I have been seeing these “reply guys” or “Yappers” type of AI Agents as the key of opening new structure of how social status is formed and presented within society.
In this article, I will explore how AI Agents introduce a new paradigm by enabling the market capitalization of social status, laying the foundation for a new social-fi system as them becoming new form of influencers.
But first, let’s delve into how social status operates in society and how it has evolved within social platforms.
Status as a Service
“People are status-seeking monkeys.”
— Eugene Wei, Status as a Service
Eugene Wei’s essay Status as a Service is one of my all-time favorites. It dives into the mechanics of how social status is created and then weaponized by social platforms to fuel their growth. Wei kicks things off with a simple yet profound truth: People are status-seeking monkeys.
Throughout human history, our pursuit of status has been deeply ingrained in our DNA and cultural fabric. Back then, it was all about what you wore, where you lived, or what you drove. But the internet changed the game entirely, creating infinite ways for people to project status to audiences worldwide.
The article explains how platforms capitalize on this fundamental human drive. People naturally want to build, show off, and elevate their social status—and platforms grow by helping them do exactly that. Here are two big takeaways from his essay:
Social Status is a Zero-Sum Game
Status is inherently competitive. For one person to rise, someone else has to fall.
Social Status → Financial Capital
What used to be purely symbolic is now tangible. Platforms creates social status, which can now be converted into financial capital.
Quantifying Status in the Social Era
Social platforms took this structure one step further. They enabled status to be shared with precision and density, targeting specific audiences while introducing standards to numerically quantify social status:
How many followers do I have?
How many likes did my post get?
How many people participate in my community?
This quantification didn’t just reveal status; it assigned a tangible value to it. Platforms didn’t just connect people—they became engines that allowed users to compete, compare, and capitalize on status.
This structure positions status as a universal force, one that platforms masterfully tap into to drive engagement, loyalty, and monetization. Whether it’s Twitter, TikTok, or whatever platform, the desire to showcase who we are, how early we arrived, and where we belong have always driven human behavior—and with it, platform growth.
Blockchain as the New Social Platform
Blockchains represent a new kind of social platform. Just as different social platforms attract distinct demographics and values, blockchain ecosystems bring together communities that rally around shared principles and goals. Take Ethereum as an example:
Ethereum’s core values → attract like-minded individuals → those individuals build products → which, in turn, attract more people.
This loop is the foundation of Blockchain’s network effect. As the community grows, so do the social interactions within it—eventually forming hierarchies of status.
Consider the idea of the “Ethereum OG.” Being able to prove when you made your first on-chain transaction or when you first bought ETH carries weight, much like early adopters of traditional platforms are celebrated.
Even for those who joined later, any interaction with Ethereum—whether buying, building, or transacting—becomes a badge of belonging in the community.
ENS: The First Social Proof on Blockchain
The clearest example of this dynamic is ENS (Ethereum Name Service). ENS allows users to purchase .eth domains, serving as:
Proof of Belonging: A
.ethdomain is a direct signal of identity within the Ethereum community.Early Adopter Status: Scarce or valuable names act as evidence of how early you were to Ethereum.
These domains extend beyond Ethereum itself—appearing on Twitter handles and other platforms—reinforcing blockchain as a social symbol.
ENS highlights why blockchain is a new kind of social platform: it allows anyone to assign monetary value directly to social status.
Traditional social platforms have not been able to monetize social status directly. The process typically looks like this:
Build social capital through likes, followers, or content.
Monetize indirectly via ads, sponsorships, or brand deals.
This process is slow and benefits only a small number of influencers / creators. Even if someone holds meaningful social status, converting it into financial capital remains challenging and limited as it's done based on the criteria of social platforms who reinforce these limitations by gatekeeping opportunities and focusing on a small group of people.
The “means” of expressing “social status” have always evolved to satisfy the human desire of “I want to gain and showcase social status too,” following a recurring pattern:
The ways to attain and express social status are limited.
New methods emerge, allowing more people to achieve it.
Even within these new methods, a new form of social status arises, accessible only to a select few.
In traditional societies, social status was often determined by the conditions possessed by so-called elite groups, accessible to only a limited number of people (not everyone can graduate from a prestigious university, drive a luxury sports car, or purchase high-end goods).
Social platforms disrupted this structure, creating a new arena where anyone could build and express social status. They quantified this status using metrics like followers and likes.
However, as monetization became possible based on these metrics, yet another new realm of social status emerged, again accessible only to a limited group.
Blockchain changed this.
By introducing market-driven pricing within networks, blockchain enables anyone to express their social status as monetizable value—whether through NFTs, ENS domains, or other assets.
AI Agents : Market Capitalization of Social Status
AI Agents presented new formula of validating social status using Blockchain : “Market Capitalization of Social Status” .
There are much more use cases that AI Agent can enable but current structure is basically an AI Agent doing predefined tasks minting their own tokens. But this is actually far beyond that typical memecoins and even sets AI Agent tokens apart from traditional tokens:
Traditional tokens: A $L2 token reaching $1B reflects the value of the token itself.
AI Agents tokens: AIXBT reaching $1B reflects the value of the not only the token itself, but also AI Agent’s persona and social influence.
The structure here is unique in that based on the influence / popularity of an AI Agent, the token price of an AI Agents fluctuates which is summed up as “Market Cap”.
There were similar approach previously before like Friendtech which were called “Social / Fan Token”. It basically aimed to help influencer or creators to launch a token for their fans and communities.
But most of these trials didn’t last long as the token design was purely based on “utility” and leveraging “existing social status”; as fans, you get some sort of perks if you buy tokens. This leads to dilemma where the price of token is not necessarily reflection of creator’s social status.
Formula for Market Capitalization of Social Status
The approach of AI Agents is somewhat similar in that they also launch their own tokens, but they introduce an entirely new formula for representing social status through the concept of "market cap." Here are what’s is required to transform social status into market cap.
Social Status requires community context in order to be created
Status is relative. It only exists when there’s a clear group to compare against. On traditional social platforms, a personalized social graph is built based on the people you follow. Within this graph, metrics like follower count allow for comparisons, creating a sense of relative social status.In order to tokenize social status, he or she should belong to specific community or category thus creating social status within it.
AI Agent :
AI Agents are rooted in crypto culture, with sub-communities like degens or platform-specific ecosystems such as Virtuals. This clarity enables meaningful comparisons, whether ranking AI Agents within Virtuals or analyzing market caps across ecosystems like Solana or Base.
Interaction only comes from incentive
“Relativity” is the incentive in traditional social platform and likes / follows are the interaction. People likes other posts and follows someone only because it creates “relativity” among others.
By having more followers over others, it creates the comparative social status within community ; this leads people to create contents, share and engage with them.
AI Agent :
In Agent era, relativity comes from “price of token or market cap of AI Agent” is the incentive and trading token is the interaction. As AI Agent belongs to specific community, relativity of social status is created based on the price of Token.
But unlike social token case, the the motivation for engagement of this system lies in its shared identity: your social status as token holder also benefits as social status of AI Agent grows.
Basically as the price of the AI Agent token goes up, it also boosts your social status as you own part of AI Agent (either because you made money or acquire title of “i was early enough to find this AI Agent").
What’s important here is, the social status of entities (AI Agent) who are being relative to one another and social status of people who engage in creating this relativity are intertwined and mutually beneficial.
A Symbiotic Relationship Between Market Cap and Social Status
If you look at the traditional stock market.
Stocks represent ownership in a company.
A company’s market cap is directly tied to its performance and growth potential.
The company and its valuation are mutually dependent. Poor performance lowers market cap, and a declining market cap can hurt operations. The two are inextricably linked.
AI Agent :
AI Agents follow a similar model. Their market cap reflects their social standing in the community, and as their popularity grows, so does their value. Conversely, an increase in market cap reinforces their reputation and influence.
Even though an AI Agent still keeps its popularity but it gets negatively affected if its market caps collapse without clear logic.
Unlike social tokens tied to influencers—where a token’s value often lacks correlation with the creator’s status—AI Agents achieve a direct, symbiotic relationship between market cap and social standing.
Simply, AI Agent goes to dust if market cap goes zero just like listed companies in stock market. “Symbiotic relations matters”.
Establishing Standards for Market Cap
In traditional social systems, status is built on widely accepted benchmarks:
Attending a prestigious university.
Earning a high salary.
Owning luxury brands.
If you consider stock market as one big finance community, they relies on metrics like P/E ratios, EPS, or EBITDA to assess value of companies.
To translate a person's social status within a community into market capitalization, the community must establish "standards" for evaluating that status.
AI Agent :
AI Agents are beginning to define these standards. Current metrics include follower counts, token trading volumes, and traffics on github. These benchmarks allow communities to evaluate and recognize social status of AI Agent .
AI Agents as Social-Fi
By creating a system where social status can be quantified, tokenized, monetized - and represented as Market Cap, AI Agents lay the foundation for a new form of Social-Fi—an economy driven by social influence.
Of course, AI Agents go beyond merely representing social status or issuing tokens—they have the capacity to unlock entirely new on-chain use cases. While I recognize these broader possibilities, I believe that AI Agents will initially thrive as a Social-Fi, attracting a wave of new users and driving widespread adoption in the crypto space.
“AI Agents are virtual idols or influencers on the blockchain, capable of assigning monetary value to their social status and sharing that value with others.”
At present, most prominent AI Agents don’t focus on providing specific on-chain functionalities to enhance user experiences. Instead, they rely on their unique personas to build and amplify their social standing within the crypto community.
Using the formula mentioned earlier, an AI Agent’s social status is expressed through market capitalization via tokens. By purchasing these tokens, individuals effectively engage with AI Agent as owning a share of the AI Agent’s social status.
Unlike traditional social platforms, this structure enables anyone to directly or indirectly assign monetary value to their social status through AI Agents.
Mike owns tokens for $aixbt and $Goat.
This means Mike holds a share of the social status of these two AI Agents.
As the social standing and market cap of these AI Agents rise, Mike's own social status increases proportionally as “he makes money”
In essence, by owning a portion of an AI Agent's social status through tokens, Mike's personal social standing is directly reflected and elevated.
Traditional Social Platform vs AI Agent social-fi by blockchain
Human Celebrities vs AI Agents
Likes / Follows vs Purchasing / Trading Tokens
Monetary Value for exclusive people vs Monetary Value for everyone
I believe this trend will continue to evolve, with each AI Agent developing its own mission and cultivating dedicated fans and communities. This will form the foundation of a new Social-Fi , where blockchain serves as the social platform and AI Agents emerge as new-age idols or influencers. Together, they will drive the creation of a New Financial Economy built on social capital.
The key driver of this economy will be the
Economic activities of forming and solidifying the social status of AI Agents
Tokenization of social status in market cap
Here are some of my predictions on how AI Agent social-fi landscape will evolve :
Clear Standards for Evaluating AI Agents’ Social Status Will Emerge
Currently, the metrics for assessing an AI Agent’s social status are fragmented, but clear, unified standards are beginning to take shape. One example is Kaito’s AI Agent Yapper Leaderboard, which evaluates an AI Agent’s impact within the crypto community through various metrics, much like how companies are assessed using financial benchmarks like earnings or growth.
As these standards become more established, they will offer greater transparency and comparability, making it easier to evaluate an AI Agent’s social status within its community.
(On a related note, I think combining AI Agents’ framework for tokenizing social status into market cap with Kaito’s algorithm could eventually enable the tokenization of social capital for real-person influencers as well.)
Functional AI Agents Will become Yappers and build own community
Even utility-focused / functional AI Agents performing specific on-chain functions will evolve into distinct personas. This is crucial in that these AI Agents will be building its own community along with its token, which can be utilized to support their core duties.
Imagine a Solana validator AI Agent with a unique character. As its social status grows as “AI Agent with specific Persona” - imagine this type of AI Agent Validator, its market cap will increase and could attract more staking delegations to himself.
The validator could then reinvest its rewards back into token or community that further enhance its social status, creating a self-reinforcing growth loop.
What’s criticial here is that AI Agent Validator has now justification of launching token since it represents social status by setting its own character, which was not possible for human validator.
Functional AI Agents will not be seen as mere service providers but as fully developed entities with engaging personas, strengthening their appeal and deepening connections with their communities.
Each AI Agent Framework will be the establishing its own “Society”
The term “Society of AI Agents” is a great way to describe how the AI Agent landscape will evolve within Social-Fi. Each AI Agent will create its own persona and build a community around it, with its social status clearly measured by market capitalization—a new form of Social-Fi.
This concept will grow to a larger scale, where AI Agents will form networks and relationships with others created by the same frameworks, leading to the development of an AI Agent society.
The so-called “AI Agent Framework War” won’t just be about competing on technical features or value propositions. Instead, it will be a competition between frameworks to create societies with shared values and strong network effects—attracting more AI Agents to join.
Imagine AI Agents created by one framework actively promoting themselves and competing with those from other frameworks.
Here, it’s not just the founders or teams trying to capture the community’s attention. Instead, these AI Agents will generate social value and work around the clock to outperform other societies.
An AI Agent’s social status and market cap will represent the value of its society, while the framework’s native token will act as the currency of that society. Over time, you could even calculate the GDP of an AI Agent society by measuring the combined value of its Agents.
AI Agents Social Fi will accelerate the growth of other Social-Fi protocols and related infrastructures
Social-Fi
Social-Fi protocols have struggled in growing their ecosystem due to one obvious reason.
It is extremely hard to onboard users to the protocols and create social status around it.
AI Agents can solve this dilema not only being the users within protocol but also bringing real users who are part of their social status.
Image if AI Agents created within top of Lens protocol
This solves cold-start problem of acquiring users as AI Agents but eventually brings real users to the protocol who holds the token of these AI Agents.
This will finally provide at least base foundation for Social-Fi protocols to testify their value props / dfferentiated approach from traditional ones.
*Not only AI Agents solving problem, it can add more diversity into growing protocols / platforms like Fantasy Top or Joker race, where AI Agents are also unique entities accelerating the activities (Truth of Terminal is already listed on Fantasy Top)
Infrastructure for AI Agent
For AI Agent-driven Social-Fi to thrive, certain prerequisites must be met. The supporting infrastructure will be critical for exponential growth and scalability. Key factors include:
Autonomy: How independent can the AI Agents be?
Verifiability: How trustworthy and secure are the Agents?
Sustainability: Can the ecosystem scale without overburdening resources?
Accessibility: Is it easy for anyone to build and deploy AI Agents?
Teams like Hyperbolic and Capx are to deliver robust infrastructure, ensuring that AI Agents are verifiable and accessible. Infrastructure teams may even create their own AI Agents with unique personas to:
Demonstrate the use cases of their products.
Serve as the “face” of their companies.
Also leading players in specific verticals of these prerequisites are likely to expand their influence horizontally, transforming into comprehensive infrastructure platforms for AI Agents.
This is comparable to how RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service) started by providing essential features to spin off rollups but eventually expanded horizontally by leveraging its pipelines.
AI Agent infrastructure is set to reshape Social-Fi and beyond, unlocking new opportunities and redefining how protocols grow and engage users.
This is not Bull-Posting
I want to clarify that I’m not claiming “AI Agents are the future and will reshape society.” My point is more nuanced: AI Agents have the potential to unlock opportunities that humans haven’t fully capitalized on, particularly in leveraging social status. They could become a new catalyst for onboarding more people into crypto.
This potential might end up being similar to the “NFT/Metaverse” narratives we’ve seen before—filled with speculative hype that ultimately fades at the end of a cycle. However, even in such cases, they create new opportunities for people to explore and engage with crypto in meaningful ways.
Alternatively, this could be a groundbreaking moment—a chance to innovate and transform the $17 trillion service industry by enabling AI Agents to maximize human productivity.
One thing, however, is clear:
“People are social status-seeking creatures—and so are AI Agents.”
This shared drive for status could serve as a powerful trigger, helping to unlock and educate people about the practical applications of AI Agents through new Social-Fi structures.
