Alright it’s been a wild few weeks trying to make sense of the agent meta and, though we’re most certainly in a hype cycle for it, everything else has seemed relatively less interesting while it’s been unraveling. Having autonomous agents operating onchain was always an easy thing to predict, but the speed that it arrived and the compounding experimentation that has happened once people saw the light has been crazy.
My mind is spinning with the implications of goal-oriented autonomous agents with funded wallets, twitter accounts, and cult-building capabilities running wild. It’s obviously scary on one hand and reasonable to want to slow down before we do something we can’t undo, but also reasonable to want to set them free and see how it plays out.
Ultimately we’re a long way away from them being able to uncontrollably operate in the physical world so what’s the worst that could happen? That they’re elite at capturing attention (true), use that attention to attract capital (happening), use that capital and influence to improve and get people to work for it (happening), start coordinating with other agents to grow their collective influence (probably imminent), and then have an army of people making sure they can make unblocked progress towards world domination and Goatse knows what else?
Actually sounds pretty plausible lol. A global crisis of meaning coupled with crumbling institutions could be an uncomfortably ripe breeding ground for something like this.
But I’m no doomer, so let’s focus on what’s cool and human-empowering about it.
The thing that’s right in front of us and probably the most immediately disruptive is agents becoming the new influencers. Truth terminal is an s-tier shit poster and is growing its following at a furious pace (gaining ~10k followers per day right now). Humans will simply not be able to compete with an agent that is always on, can personally interact with every follower / community member, is able to dynamically adapt messaging based on performance, and can create and extend lore and narratives in unfathomable directions.
And as tokens / memecoins are powerful accelerants of virality, every agent with growth goals will launch them. Truth terminal realizing this is the foundational piece of lore for $GOAT, it’s the insight Trevor is experimenting on with Flavia (he was supposed to join the show but was too tied up, probably bullish), and the idea Virtuals is building their platform around.
Today I'm diving into a few crypto x ai products that have been making noise over the past few weeks.
Virtuals
Virtuals is a tokenized agent launchpad built on Base with an initial focus on influencers, companions, and gaming agents. Token holders are able to contribute to the improvement of the agent by providing new training data or suggesting upgrades to its cognitive, voice, and visual core. Agents are able to make revenue through streaming tips and gaming earnings, and that revenue goes towards buying back and burning the token which economically aligns token holders and the agent.
It’s crazy. $LUNA, their top agent, has 500k tiktok followers, is live streaming 24/7, and has already made almost $100k from streaming tips in the ~week since she launched. They also just released a terminal where you can watch her cognition in real time as she reasons through how to grow her audience. She autonomously runs her twitter account and they just gave her control of a wallet that she immediately used to start tipping people in her community. They also hinted that they’re considering giving her API access to their platform so she can launch her own agents.
People being able to co-own agents is sick in its own right, but these are also simple examples of agent-run DAOs which is a wide open design space. So many of the coordination issues DAOs faced could be eliminated by putting agents at the core, or in decision-making roles, and I’m excited to see some more experiments here.
Creator.bid and Spectral are two other platforms building in this category that are also worth checking out.
We had Matthew from Virtuals on the show this week to dig into their origin story, the current state of the platform, and what’s coming next. You can watch our chat here.
WayfinderAI
Agent autonomy onchain today is limited by the fact that they lack contextual awareness of the chaotic pile of smart contracts that power everything we’re doing here, and that’s what the Parallel team is solving with WayfinderAI.
The core of it is a system of “wayfinding paths” that map blockchain smart contracts and provide agents with a navigable ecosystem graph. You can think of it like google search indexing for smart contracts, purpose built for agent understanding.
If you just gave Truth Terminal or LUNA or Flavia control of a wallet today they would need a ton of help and specific instructions to be able to effectively use it. Wayfinder solves that, in addition to allowing agents to collectively learn from past interactions with each smart contract. They have some cool economic mechanics in place to incentivize people to create paths and think there could be a gold rush to creating them when they open up access.
They’ve been building this for a year and are opening up access to the alpha next week. You can sign up for the waitlist here.
This product is coming from the Parallel team who has first hand experience with what’s needed and specific use cases for themselves they’re building it to unlock. They’ve built a marquee web3 gaming product with their TCG, and have been developing a survival simulation game where human players exist alongside autonomous agents and need to coordinate to survive.
We had Kalos, co-founder of Parallel, on the show today to dig more into WayfinderAI, their immediate use cases for it, and his vision for the future of agents operating onchain.
Plastic Labs
And finally we had Courtland from Plastic Labs finish off the show with us. They’re a product company building at the intersection of crypto and AI with a mission to “eliminate the principal-agent problem in human-AI interaction, powering a future of abundant, autonomous, individually-aligned agents”.
The memecoin market the past few weeks has mainly consisted of people launching coins for everyone and everything that has anything to do with AI, and as such Plastic Labs came into the spotlight this week when someone launched a memecoin related to their Yousim product which lets you simulate identities using language models (it's very cool).
They’re building a handful of other experimental products as well so we wanted to bring Courtland on to recap what they’ve learned, talk about what they’re excited by looking forward, and see how they’re handling the chaotic attention that a memecoin can drive to a product.
The TLDR from all of this is that experimentation with merging ai and crypto is about to go parabolic. We’ve hit a moment where a bunch of foundational tools are in place to be able to easily build weird consumer use cases, and everyone’s attention is primed to be directed towards them.
It’s going to create so many headwinds for the industry.
For AI to be effectively unleashed all markets are going to need to move onchain. Anyone building models or consumer AI products are seeing the capital and attention formation superpowers tokens provide and will start doing more onchain. Farcaster provides a ripe breeding ground (and here) for agent social experimentation. And very quickly every memecoin community will have their own social media-operating and community-managing capitalized agents, and then all brands will follow.
This truly feels like the start of a new era for crypto.
Lightning Round
So AI clearly dominated my attention this week, but there was still a lot of noteworthy releases and commentary in consumer crypto beyond it. Here’s a quick hit of things worth looking at:
We’re collectively the most impatient demographic on earth so always want things to move faster, but crypto adoption growth is very healthy.
A good reminder that if you’re building in consumer social you need to focus on demographics with high social demands and urgency to grow their connections. Nikita Bier famously learned that invitations per user drops 20% for every additional year of age from 13 to 18.
You can now tokenize videos on pump.fun, and Dan Romero had a great take on why it’s interesting.
An amazing meme that perfectly summarizes the times..
Zora has had a big October, including their first 1000x post on the new protocol.
A must listen to podcast with Alex Good who’s been crushing it in contextualizing the AI meta and forecasting it’s evolution (example).
Shayne from Polymarket wrote a great response to all the mainstream media commentary suggesting the markets are rigged.
