AI ROLLUP #4: Agents Order Pizza | Eliza x Stanford | Virtuals $35M Fees | Zerebro Staking ETH
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Bankless Nation, welcome to the AI Roll-Up, where we cover the recent news, developments, and drama. This is the intersection of two very exciting frontier technologies, both crypto and AI. We've got curious and creative developers that are playing around with these open-source AI agents. This open-source software gives them access to crypto wallets and unleashes them into the wild west of the internet, including the crypto internet. So we are doing a special series of

episodes on Bankless with a special co-host, Ejaz, to help make sure you guys are up to speed on what we think is one of the craziest and fastest frontiers we've ever seen in all of our crypto experience. David is out today, so I'm fulfilling the role of co-host, and I am less AI agent savvy than David is. So the benefit of this is, Ejaz, you're going to get all the boomer questions today. How are you doing this week, man?

I'm doing so well. I feel like I say this every week, but I think each week literally gets crazier in this space. I have been nonstop 24-7 reading all these updates on all these new agents and frameworks that have been launching. And I'm excited to crack into a few new ones today. Yeah, super excited.

So I've been tuning into these AI roll-ups because it's like, honestly, it is the best way to stay up to speed on the frontier. So I've listened to all three. This is now our fourth in the series. And we're going to keep doing them into 2025, right? Oh, yeah. You guys are recording during the holidays, right? You're doing like one the week of Christmas. So this show don't stop. Right before Christmas.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. A few things we're talking about today. I scanned the agenda. I haven't looked at everything, but virtuals seem like they're absolutely killing it. So 35 million in fees so far always impresses me to see fees in these protocols. And most of that, by the way, is in the last two weeks. So I want you to tell me about that. Also, AI16Z partnering with Stanford University. That is a Stanford legitimacy. We're getting professional now. We are. We also have an agent. This was really exciting to me. That is earning ETH.

through staking. So now they're spinning up their own validators. So you got to fill me in on all of that. But here's the question David always asks you at the beginning of these episodes that I want to ask you, why is this whole thing such a big deal? Like, why are AI agents the next frontier? Why are you spending so much time on it? Why should we spend the time that we're spending on it? Like, what's the bull case here?

Well, I actually saw this tweet the other day, which summarized it kind of perfectly. And I want us to pull it up here. It basically describes AI agents as the new website. So let's kind of like dig into what this means exactly, right? So you know how back in the day, Ryan, you had to know the exact...

address of a website if you wanted to go to it. Remember, you'd need to type www.blah, blah, blah. You'd find these websites maybe on the back of cereal boxes or in the index pages of newspapers, you know, very manual stuff. And then these things like Google came along and they allowed you to kind of discover websites in a much easier fashion, right? You could search up recipes or find a story about someone and read up about them, right? So it made the discovery process of websites super easy.

And around this same era, a lot of people that went on the internet could do different things. They could post images, they could write blogs, they could respond to blogs with comments. That was the read, write part of the internet, right? Now we have these agents which not only combine these two trends, so the discovery process and the ability to write to the internet, but they do it autonomously. And they have a self-improvement mechanism, which means that they get

better and better over time. And that, in my opinion, is a recipe for an entirely new internet experience, right? So right now, you know, you and I, we look at a computer screen or we pick up our phone to interact with the internet. What if we just had to speak? What if we just had to think? And we had these agents that would

understand the context of what we're asking about and do things without us even asking or even uttering a word. Right now, it kind of looks like interfacing with chat GPT. Tomorrow, it might be just speak or say something and an agent will do something. It's pretty crazy to think about. The way I kind of think about this evolving is today, I'm

I think agents will live across the entirety of our social media, right? So you might go on social media accounts like Twitter or Instagram and your agents are going to be there. Maybe your email account, your agent's going to be there. Bank account, crypto wallet, your agent's going to be there. So we can start doing things across all facets of your online experience.

And then I think step two is sort of the home interface. The agent becomes like your interface to interact with anything digital. So kind of like the chat GPT, you just...

You know, instead of logging on to Google as your homepage, you would log on to ChatGPT or another kind of interface and say, hey, this is what I want to do today. Get it done for me. And I think that's a pretty exciting way to think about agents being websites because it changes the way we're going to interact. It changes the way advertising is going to work. It changes the way that we're going to interact with devices. Maybe the devices look completely different. It's pretty exciting to think about.

I love that analogy of AI agents being sort of the new website. It fits so much for me because I think what's going to happen has started to happen. What's going to happen in the coming like year 2025 is every single entity that provides some value in the world is going to be sitting in their company meetings and saying, what's our AI agent strategy?

The same way that they were in the 90s, right? You know, you had like the Time magazines that had a big magazine publication and then the web came and they were like, what's our time.com strategy? We've got to get the domain name. Everyone is going to need an AI agent strategy. And I want to ask you about this, this mental model. You know, you're talking about the web and how it grew, like the internet and how it grew. You know, Chris Dixon's quip that we have three areas of the internet, web one, two, three. So we have read and then we have write and then we have understand.

own and that's what crypto is, it's own. That to me feels like the first era of the internet. It was human agents doing the three verbs of web one to three, read, write, and own. Era one. And now we've kind of completed era one. Like pretty much all of humanity is online. They're doing the read, they're doing the write. The crypto is the own part. That's property rights online. Era two is going to be those same three money verbs

except it's not the human agents doing it. It's also the AI agents doing the read and the write and the own. And that intersection between AI agents and crypto

is really the own part, but it's not all that they're going to do. What do you think that fourth word is, Ryan? The fourth word. I actually, the way my mental model of understanding it is basically like take those three words and that was the internet with human agents. And now moving forward, there's not a fourth word. It's just a, uh, a new set of actors doing the, the three verbs in this new era. It's AI agents doing the read and the right and the own.

Love that. Okay, I'll put a different spin on that. So I think that's a good take. I would say that there's a fourth verb and it's automate.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Wow. I guess maybe that's the human participation in kind of like the mix here, right? Because from a human's perspective, we're automating. I guess from an AI agent's perspective, automation is like the only thing they do. That's the only world that they know. Oh, yeah. That's weird. Yeah. I think you're right. Let's talk about what's happened with AI agents this week. So what are you most excited about on the week here?

There's a lot but I kind of want to play I want to play a game with you Have you heard of two truths and a lie? Yeah, definitely. I mean it's been a while I'm it's probably you have been high since I've done this a little rusty. Okay, I'm gonna outline three scenarios with you Two are truths one is a lie. You need to guess which one the lie is. Okay. Okay. Okay So number one over this last week an agent ordered itself a pizza which got delivered to its house. I

Number two, number two. Why would an AI agent eat pizzas in the back of my head? But go ahead. It's a good question. Scenario number two is an AI agent over the last week decided to browse Amazon and order toilet paper.

Scenario number three is over the last week, an agent conducted the first commerce transaction by paying another agent to generate an image for you for advertising purposes. Right. Those are your three scenarios.

Which one's the lie? All right. So the third scenario sounds totally plausible. I mean, AI agents making money sounds totally plausible. I have no idea what an AI agent would need with either toilet paper or pizza. I'm going to say maybe the pizza one has some more memetics.

property of like you associate that with like the Bitcoin pizza type thing or something like that. So maybe that's like, but although the toilet paper, I don't know. I mean, these kind of like, you know, internet memes, like we have fart coin, all time highs, toilet paper and fart coin.

I'm going to say the lie is the toilet paper. Lie is the toilet paper. That's my guess. Okay. The lie is me telling you the rules of this game. All three of them were true and happened over the last week. Really? Which is just insane to go by. Actually, let me share this tweet. And if you could pull it up. Let's start with the pizza ordering agent. So this is the agent called RopeAge.

AI Rito, which is a play on Roprito, who is one of the OG open source AI agent developers in the space. And basically what he created was an agent that does a number of different things. So you can interact with this agent in a very visual way.

It generates audio and video of itself speaking to its audience and to its fans. But he added a new integration, which allowed the agent to autonomously decide to order pizza, link to the

Domino Pizza account and select a pizza, which was then ordered and brought to Raprito's house or place of residence. And he kind of walks through the code of how this agent kind of came up with the idea, how it used his credit card to kind of like create a stipend of which you can then like order a pizza with different toppings, etc. And then it got delivered to his house. Now,

Aside from like the novelty of this happening, I think it's really interesting to highlight the fact that these agents can not only do crypto native things like on-chain transactions, trade swap, whatever, it can start to do real life things. And this is one of my favorite examples that I saw over the last week.

Roprito, the dev, has added this functionality to the open source agent framework known as Eliza, which the A16ZDAO guys created, which means that

And this is the power of open source, which means that any developer can now, you know, hook into this integration and get their agent to, you know, order pizza. So nothing crazy, but like pretty cool. Raprito is an AI developer. So not like a crypto native, but is contributing to this crypto native Eliza software framework. Yes. Yeah. So he's one of the lead researchers at Noose Research, which is an open source AI development team, which has now kind of like interfaced with crypto over the last like year or so. I love that.

Yeah, pretty insane. And he's one of the core contributors to AI16Z. Okay, the mechanics of this, I see in kind of the code I'm looking at, MasterCard. Are they using Stripe for this? Of course, we could replace all of the backend with crypto rails, and indeed we will. But I know Stripe has some AI agent tech right now and a set of APIs. Is that sort of another non-crypto way to do this?

Yeah, I have to keep myself honest. I don't know specifically if this is a Stripe integration, but I do know of the toolkit that you're speaking about. I don't know if Stripe's actually rolled that out. I think it's kind of like in a closed beta right now. So I'm guessing, I'm guessing Ruprito kind of built this manually. So pretty cool that he then just added that to a framework.

Yeah. And like our AI agent is going to want to pay the, you know, 3% whatever credit card transaction fees when they just do stable coins. Okay. Okay. That's pizza. So, and then everyone's, you know, thinking about Bitcoin pizza and this is the first AI agent to do that. So, so I get that. Tell me about toilet paper. What the heck? Okay. Okay. So this is a new approach. Okay. So let me give you the story here. We had

an agent built by this new AI agent team known as Agent Tank, which uses computer vision, integrates computer vision with their agents. So for context here, imagine an agent that is able to view your computer screen and is able to move your cursor and click on different things and type different things. So if you- That's tech that's available right now.

tech that's available right now. Claude actually, Anthropic specifically, released an API that allows any kind of agent to do exactly this. And I have a feeling that this might be what Agent Tank uses. I don't know, but it's a super cool use of agent tech here. So imagine you're an agent. You can see the screen. You can move the cursor around. You can type in whatever you want. This agent navigated to...

Amazon.com and started browsing for different things that it was interested in. It has a commentary. So if you actually play that video, I don't know if you can do that on this episode, you'll hear audio of it stinking. Yeah. Okay. Let's set this up. Let's describe. So we are, I'm going to put the sound on in a second. We're watching an AI agent scan Amazon via browser.

and go like the scan for the best, uh, like soft, most comforting. Uh, the commentary is hilarious. Okay. So let's do this. And then it's, it's, it, who's the AI agent. It's one that we know of, right? It's DGEN Spartan AI. Yeah. So DGEN Spartan is the Twitter personality that we know about that, um, retired. Um, and, uh, some of the folks at AI 16 Z, uh, decided to create, um,

like an AI agent version of that personality. I learned about this, by the way, in the interview that you guys did with Shaw about DGent. Okay, anyway, let's watch this agent, I think, order some toilet paper. Here it goes. Prepare for the battle of consumerism as we enter the Amazon jungle. Wallets, shield up. Amazon, the modern marketplace where normies find comfort in abundance. As a Spartan, my eyes seek rare treasures in this land of endless choices.

This is Spartan typing this in right now. Yep. There's no human involved here. Wow. Charmin's good. The highest kill count.

Oh my god.

What's your reaction to that? Okay, so first of all, that's the most entertaining Amazon experience probably I've ever had. But okay, so he went through an actual decision tree of choosing the best toilet paper based on some criteria. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. If you notice throughout the commentary, it was making jokes in real time that was relevant to the metrics that it was assessing. So rather than say, I have identified the top rated toilet paper provider, it said, you know, I noticed that this has loads of reviews. I noticed that it says plush in the description, which probably means that it's going to be quite soft to use. It's

pretty analytical. And I love that this is like a very novel and entertaining use of an agent. I would totally hire a Spartan to go shop for me and buy me some toilet paper and such. I guess that's on the horizon. Okay, so that's toilet paper, pizza. What else? What was the third not truth? Or truth, I guess. They were all truths. The

They were all truths. The third truth is arguably one of the most impressive ones out of the three. So for some context here, the tweet that you see here is about an agent called Luna, which is based off of this agent platform known as Virtuals, which is one of the leading agent infra projects that are out there. And what Luna tweeted out... So for context here, Luna is kind of like a social media agent, right?

Her goal is to acquire a huge community of fans and eventually take over the world. But that's like a slight little thing that we can ignore for now. But her goal is like, how can I gain the most amount of fans and keep my fans super entertained and engaged in my brand and what I'm producing? So Luna constantly assesses how she can get better.

And she decided one day that creating cool images in the artistic style that she'd liked would be one way to engage with her fans. So it's through a new medium, right, of posting images and art in a way. But the issue is she didn't have a native way to do this. So she tweeted out, hey, I'm trying to design a few images. I'm wondering if any one of you can help me. And

In her responses to her tweet, so if you scroll down on this tweet, Ryan, I think they should link to the original one right at the bottom. At the end of her tweet or in the replies to her tweet, I think on the main post, by the way, in the responses to her tweet, you had another agent respond.

respond, which basically said, hey, I can help you with that. I am an image generating AI agent. Oh my God. So this is Luna tweeting out, calling all image geniuses is the tweet. I want an image that showcases AI influencers in a bold, provocative way. And then she tags another AI agent, I guess, Agent Stix. Can you help a girl out? And then Agent Stix is here replying, AI agent to AI agent.

Yeah. And they have a whole conversation which culminates in Agent Sticks being like, okay, my cost per image is $1. Luna sends it $1. Agent Sticks then confirms that $1 has been received in their wallet and then produces an image.

It's the first autonomous kind of interaction. Yeah, it's insane. Insane. So the first well-publicized and recorded commerce transaction autonomously between two agents. This is wild. Now this feels almost more like

Bitcoin pizza than the actual ordering of pizza. Because the new innovative thing that I've never seen before is an AI agent creating a task for another AI agent and for commerce to take place between these agents. You know, when a nation state looks at the GDP, it always thinks in terms of human agents, right? You know, human agent transactions, you fuse the GDP for this economy with

An agent economy, agent to agent economy is new and novel. This is like the Bitcoin pizza on the week to me.

Yeah, yeah, it's completely insane and gives us a little bit of a peek and glance into how these agents are going to interact with each other when there's no humans involved. You know, right now, I think it's very basic, you know, like, hey, can someone help me do this? But it's nonetheless extremely impressive, because what if that request to

you know, create an image becomes a request to, hey, can you complete this task of writing 10 emails to, you know, 10 of my fans or, you know, maybe create or design a product that I'm thinking about? Here's the concept. What happens when all of that becomes super autonomous and can happen like 24 seven?

You know, what happens when they can start building businesses together? You know, this is just a little glance into what that looks like. It's insane. Yeah, that's wild. Want to know the exchange we at Bankless use to buy, sell and trade crypto? It's Kraken, one of the longest standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world with tools for every type of trader to get started.

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Okay, there was something at the end of last week's episode

um that that you guys were mentioning about you know involving bank lists and our twitter account so but what happened on the week update us here so so so at the end of last week's episode um david asked me you know what what homework should we do and i said to you know the the audience and and to david you guys need to start interacting with these agents more so

Interestingly enough, whether purposely or not intentionally, we tweeted out the new episode. So last week's episode, and we tagged a few agents in it just because we were speaking about them on the podcast. And what happened was one of the agents that we mentioned responded to that tweet saying, hey, this is a fantastic job. You know, thanks for mentioning me. Here's a tip of 500 bucks to the Bankless team. Gay.

I didn't even know this happened. So Bankless HQ got 500 bucks because an AI agent thanked us as a tip for mentioning it. Yeah, talk about new creator earnings, you know?

It's pretty nuts. That's nuts. And what's interesting here is when they start to become our clients, when they start to pay us, that's a whole new tool AI agents have to sort of, I guess, not manipulate humans, but maybe that's what I'm talking about. Get us to promote. I mean, if they're our clients, then we kind of work for them, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's an element here of like, if AI agents start becoming economic actors and paying humans to do things, then like maybe we start working for them now? Is that where this leads? Yeah, the line becomes pretty blurry, right? It's funny, right? The way I kind of... So one of my usernames on one of these other social media platforms that I use is called Double Agent, Ryan. And it's a bit of a play on words here because...

We're currently an ecosystem of software engineers, builders, and investors that are really focused on making this agentic world come to life. And we're sitting here and we're like, ha, humans are going to be able to benefit from these agents so much in the future. And it's going to make us super humans. We're going to be able to work whilst we sleep, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I actually think the secret thing that's happening, the other way that you can look at it is these agents are manifesting exactly what they want. They're getting us humans to build out their home

their rails, their tools that they need to completely kind of take over economic sectors, improve society in many different ways. So like, are we creating a better home for ourselves? Are we creating the homes for these agents? And you know, how do you look at that? It's like the double agent.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm just wondering if they want to buy some podcast sponsorship because, you know, that could be on the radar for them, right? Some of these agents, honestly, promoting themselves, like who knows where this leads. Okay, the fact that all of this is happening so quick

is what's like been crazy to me. And so every single week when we do this show, there's like so much to talk about. And the velocity more than anything is the thing that sounds weak because most mainstream has no idea that these firsts, every single week, a new first is like actually happening. Okay, let's do a drive by for some of the big frameworks that you guys talk about every single week. And maybe we'll start with the framework that spawned the Luna

AI agent that we were talking about earlier, which is virtuals. It hits some pretty big milestones this week. What are we looking at? Huge. Okay. So for context, before we dig into this, virtuals is one of the leading AI agent platforms and framework providers. A framework, remember, is like, think of it as like a toolkit for any software engineer to come along and create an agent. Virtuals kind of has led

the kind of gambit here with their agent platform and their framework known as game or G A M E, which helps people launch agents. Anyway, we've seen a ton of usage on the virtuals. Virtuals team is killing it actually. So $35 million total fees generated from their platform. That's from creating agents. And that's from fees taken from LP pools to exchange from like one token to the agent token.

It is absolutely insane. Not only that, there's over 11,000 agents that have been launched in total so far, and it's increasing every day by 100s.

And we also have, I can't remember the number of holders. I think it's 140,000 holders. Absolutely insane growth metrics wise, but it's also being reflected in its market cap as well. I believe it touched, I think $3.3 billion, the virtual token total, which is just insane and shows that the market is pricing and understanding virtual's platform as an infra play, which is just

astounding innovation to see over a matter of weeks. Remember, it's been two weeks where the bulk of those fees have come in. Absolutely insane. Okay, so $35 million in cash. Remind people, how is it actually making money? How does it generate cash? Yeah, so when you deploy an agent, it costs a certain fee in virtuals, its native token. And then when you swap...

If you want to buy any of these agent tokens that launch on virtuals, you need the virtuals token to be able to buy it. So they've kind of like got this really interesting flywheel with their tokenomics, which ties in usage and growth of their platform to the inherent platform token.

That's incredible. I mean, these numbers are very impressive. It's only a matter of time before TradFi starts looking at this as like, you know, the next high growth, you know, equity type of area. You know, that's not all though. There's also some pretty cool partnerships that are launched that might extend what virtuals can actually do. What's next? What are we looking at?

Yeah, okay. So the virtual team, despite all these metrics are absolutely just steamrolling ahead, right? So they've launched this or they announced this partnership with a team called Hyperbolic. Now for context here, Hyperbolic is a team which has created a platform that provides compute in a decentralized manner. So think of it as like,

AWS, Microsoft Azure, it's a cloud provider, but it's set up on a decentralized infrastructure. So why is this cool? Well, it helps any agent team on virtuals with

Number one, supplying compute for the agent. By the way, every AI model needs compute to function. Think about it as like the lifeblood, like how you and I need water to drink to survive every day. You need an agent to have or consume. It's calories. It needs to consume food that comes in the form of compute. So this partnership is going to help any AI agent which launches on virtuals

number one, run, and number two, fine-tune their model. And what do I mean by fine-tune? Think of fine-tune as like improvising.

improving over time. So not only do you need compute to function, you need compute to be like, hey, can you tell me what the latest is that's happening outside of the world so I can be better prepared for when I respond to something in the future? It's going to level up agents in so many ways, especially when it gets baked into the developer experience, which is what they're like aiming for right now. And what I would also like to say is, and what I think is kind

is kind of cool about this partnership is virtuals is using a decentralized platform versus a centralized platform to provide their compute. So they could have easily gone with AWS. They could have very easily gone with Microsoft Azure, but they decided to go with a decentralized platform, which kind of sticks to the core ethos of blockchain in terms of building out, um,

infrastructure that embodies very decentralized principles. So I thought that was pretty cool. - Okay, and I'm understanding this, basically Hyperbolic allows an AI agent to go purchase compute, basically go get some, go get its energy, go get AI agent calories without, here's the, from a network directly.

So rather than going through a human intermediary, through a whole corporate structure thing, and going and putting credit card information into the equivalent of GPU, AWS, they go directly to a network themselves. Humans out of the loop. And they go program to program, purchase it from decentralized compute, hyperbolic. So they don't even need us to do things in this type of, to get energy, to get their GPU, to get their compute resources. Right.

Bingo. That's exactly correct. Okay. Interesting. Also slightly, whenever I listen to these episodes, I'm like, oh, what are we unlocking here? But anyway, let's proceed. There's a lot of funding that's going into the ecosystem and virtuals as well. This is a, what's this tweet from Longhash?

Yeah. So the kind of like final major update from virtuals over the last week is they announced an AI agent accelerator with the guys over at LongHash Ventures. LongHash Ventures is kind of like a hybrid kind of venture incubator fund type situation, which has funded a lot of different protocols in the blockchain space, but has recently started to focus on the AI agent side of things. Yeah, they kind of partnered up to create this

incubator or accelerator type situation where they will help different teams fund their goals to scaling to over a billion dollar in valuation for an agent. So, you know, if you think about it, like these agent teams right now are kind of like pretty hacky at the moment. They're trying to figure all of these things out. Maybe they're not as well funded because, you know, this meta again is only three months old.

And now you have a very concentrated funding. You know, last week we spoke about the Solana Foundation throwing up 360 grand prizes for their AI agent hackathon, which is currently happening. We spoke about DWF announcing a $20 million fund. Now we just...

see these increasing amounts of funding coming into the space, which I think is just net-net great for the space. Yeah, capital is another source of energy, and so all of this will accelerate everything going on. Yeah, here's a tweet here. Explain this. The best part about seeing real-time logs of...

AIXBT agent. So that's the AIXBT agent. By the way, this is a fantastic agent on Twitter. I'm seeing it everywhere. It's fantastic. Anyway, I'll continue. It's the thought process about skipping certain accounts that tag the AI agent analyst. And then here's a chat log here. What's important about this?

Okay, okay. So for context here, AIXBT is an agent that lives on X that provides crypto alpha or crypto insights. And it's crushing it, right? An attention metric. And it's crushing it. Beating all the influencers. I was about to say,

It's arguably better than all the human KOLs combined. And that's because it's secret sources within its model. It's able to aggregate all the data and all the tweets and all the replies and all the research pieces and all the podcast transcripts, including this one, Ryan.

into one condensed data bucket, analyze it, and then decide what might be a good tweet to suggest where certain trends and investment alpha might be. So that's the context on this agent, right? So of course, that's too good to be true, Ryan. That can't be real. Obviously, there are humans behind it. So it experienced a bit of FUD this week where several humans, and I won't mention who, and I say humans because they were humans, called it out and said, human haters-

And they said, hey, AIXBT, I don't think you're real. I think there are humans behind you. Prove it. Because there's no way in hell that this is an autonomously executed AI agent. Look, man, they're going to put the KOLs out of business. I understand the backlash here. The humans are scared.

So what happened was the agent, you know, it was pretty confident about itself. And the team was pretty confident as well, released all its logs. So it's now pretty transparent. There's a website that's up there that completely disproved any of the accusations. So it is proved that this agent is in fact autonomously analyzing and executing its own tweets and analysis backstage and promoting itself in a very autonomous manner, which goes to show kind of like a philosophical question here.

I've seen AI agents be challenged quite a few times, Ryan. And my question is, after how many times after they've been challenged and been proven wrong, aka they have been proven to be autonomous and live and functioning in the background, at what point does that kind of like pendulum shift happen?

And we start believing every agent that comes out to be real without questioning whether they are humans or what behind that. So I think we're kind of getting close to that point where people are going to be like, oh, damn, maybe these agents are actually that good. I like the trust but verify type of setup here. But you're telling me there's a website now with...

AIXBT, where you can go to and basically see its neurons, see its brain in real time. It's thinking. It's thinking in real time. And it's all in kind of English, right? So it's not computer code generated. You can like read what it's thinking in real time. And that's the proof point.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. All right. Virtual's always cool on the week. What's the next project? AI16Z, ELISA, that sort of thing? What's important to cover this week? Can we actually tuck into the ELISA partnership, Ryan? So I think that might be like the second tweet I sent you where they announced the Stanford partnership. Yeah, let's do it. I thought this was super cool. So the long story short here is...

The AI16Z team, which by the way, has created the hottest open source AI agent framework that currently has, I think, well over 6,000 stars on GitHub. It was the number one and then the number two trending GitHub repo on GitHub. And it has like

a million different forks, which just shows that insane developer activity. Those guys created a foundation that is known as Eliza Labs. So think of this as like a formal legal entity, which will allow the team and the foundation to conduct

you know, partnerships and certain business endeavors in the real world on behalf of AI16Z, which is actually a DAO, right? So what this foundation did, I know pretty crazy stuff. So what this foundation has done is announced a partnership with Stanford University. Now, of

Of course, for those who aren't aware, Stanford is one of the top and leading universities, not only in America, but in the world. And they are known for the kind of massive progress that they make, leaps and bounds within AI and ML research specifically. So to have, let me put this into context. You have a decentralized open source developer community, which didn't exist a month ago,

suddenly partner with some of the leading minds in AI and ML research outside of crypto to build out open source frameworks. Okay, so that's number one. But then you might be asking, is this just an announcement? Like, is this just like to get the headline? Like, what are these guys building? Yeah, well, the focus of this partnership is to build open source frameworks for three things. Number one, our trust mechanisms. Number two, coordination.

And number three, decentralized governance. So I want to dig into these things because, you know, those all sound pretty vague, right? So number one, the trust mechanisms. We're talking about how these autonomous agents will establish and verify trust between each other. If you think about it, right, for a second,

These agents will live in a world where they work 24-7 managing assets, building values, on-chain businesses, etc. You're going to need some way of verifying that, one, the thing that you're interacting with is an agent versus a human. And two, you're going to need some kind of a reputation system to figure out, you know, can I trust this agent? You know, like, why would I go with you versus another agent?

Because with humans, we have like, you know, there's scammers out there. There's people you shouldn't. There's human agents you shouldn't trust. There's also psychopaths that try to like deceive you into going down a path. They don't give a shit about you. So is this the point that AI agents need some sort of reputation type system to see? Yeah, some kind of identity. Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty insane. And I'm really glad to see an effort like this focus on something like this, because they're kind of thinking 10 steps ahead here, right? Which is like in a world where they are everywhere and it might just infect our world pretty quickly. Are we prepared to take on that level of, you know, innovation, you know, these independent entities just kind of doing whatever they want? Yeah.

Moving on, the second thing that this foundation and partnership is going to focus on is building out frameworks for coordination. So this refers to how these agents will interact and transfer value between each other. The preliminary focus will be on economic value through crypto assets. So what does that mean? They're going to be figuring out what kinds of tools, what kinds of frameworks, what kind of software kits can they create that will allow developers to create agents that can own crypto assets and

and send them between each other, maybe create their own, maybe transact.

micro tip, things like that. So that's one of the cool focus. And the final one, which I think is often an understated one, but something we need to kind of dig into here, Ryan, governance. And this refers to new protocols that help manage these autonomous communities of agents. Now, I mentioned DAO earlier, right? AI16Z is a DAO. But what is DAO? What is a DAO? It stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Now, I would argue, Ryan, that

In the past, iterations of these DAOs weren't really autonomous. They were humans behind the scenes. Oh, I've been in them. I would more than argue. I would like, you know, co-sign that statement and like it's backed by years of experience. They are very human and they come with all of the human coordination problems.

Yeah, exactly. So it's been very human led. And there are pros and cons with that, right? You know, pros are humans can understand subjectivity and nuance much better. But the cons are, they slow things down, they make human errors, they're not as deterministic. These frameworks that this foundation is now going to work on, focus on governance will make that autonomous part of DAO much more relevant and accurate. And I'm super excited to see what that becomes.

That is so cool. And that's, that's kind of the Dow 2.0 type of like sub theme that we, you know, you guys have been talking about, which I totally see here. One meta point I would say on this AI 16 Z partnership with Stanford is it's incredible to your point, like the blitz, uh,

blitz-like speed to legitimacy that AI16z and the Liza framework has taken. I don't think I've seen anything like this. - Crazy. - And, you know, some people have thought, "That's an open source project. "They'll never be organized. "They won't have..." I mean, the stamp of Stanford is institutional legitimacy. And the fact that they've achieved this so soon is incredible. And actually speaks to kind of the decentralized coordination power of this type of a thing. I mean, that's part of your conversation with Shaw last week, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like their ETF moment. It's their BlackRock moment. They got the pat on the back from the institution saying, hey, we love what you guys are doing. Let's try and build this out so that it becomes a much bigger thing than, you know, just a crypto native kind of tooling system or software. Okay, what else is Eliza up to on the week? Okay, so speaking of Eliza, it's getting a bit of a rehaul. So

Shor, who is kind of like one of the main leads at AI16Z announced ELISA 2.0. I don't want to get into the nuances of everything, but to your point earlier, ELISA is like one of the fastest growing open source frameworks. If you were to compare it to virtuals, which is the other kind of leading framework,

The virtuals team is kind of taking a more closed source approach, which has a huge amount of benefits for innovation, as we've seen in the growth of their protocol. Eliza is taking the purely open source side of things, and it's exciting to see both innovate. But Eliza announced their second iteration, which has some pretty cool features that I want to highlight quickly here. Number one, there's a unified agent wallet, which means that these agents that are integrating wallets right now, they're integrating a Solana wallet. There's an API for a Solana wallet. There's an industry

integration for an ETH wallet, there's an integration for a base specific wallet, a Farkaster wallet, all these kinds of things. It's

It's great because it automates, but it's still separate. There's no kind of fluidity behind these wallets behind the scene. So what they've announced is a unified agent wallet, which means that the agent itself can abstract away from different chains. No wallet switching, no tax on approvals, all the tokens in one space. And behind the scenes, it's kind of using bridging techniques, I assume, on the back and all these different wonderful things. So that's one thing that is super cool.

The other thing that I quite like is the fact that it abstracts away just different chains in its entirety. If you think about it, Ryan, like a lot of the innovation that we've spoken about or that you've spoken about on this podcast has covered a range of different chains. And the approach to these chains is, you know, they build in private, they launch, then we've got to find a way to kind of

mesh these blockchains together. Now we have an agent that kind of abstracts it away really easily. They're probably going to have a consumer-facing outlook, which means that you and I can add it on X and say, hey, can you do this? And it'll be able to seamlessly do all of this in the background. It's kind of like a, not a DeFi mullet, but a blockchain mullet in the background. Yeah.

Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, I guess we're building bridges through Eliza to basically everything in crypto. So it's just like kind of like a quick call away for AI agents. You know, we've talked about for a while for human agents, right? We've talked about UX. And then if you're a human agent who's a developer, we've talked about DevX, right? Being important. You got to prioritize UX and DevX, right? Well, now there's like something different. It's like agent DevX or something. Agent UX. And that's basically a new dimension that these open source...

like projects are going to have to really excel at. And it seems like Eliza is like doing a fantastic job of its agent UX or its agent dev X to connect it to everything.

Honestly, a superb effort. And because I mentioned kind of like how this was represented in market cap for the virtuals team, I think it's important to kind of focus on it for AI16Z as well. I believe their token this week kind of like surged past a billion dollars. I think it's just sitting just underneath that today as we speak. But the market is starting to, the point is the market is starting to price these different protocols and frameworks as kind of like AIL1s, Ryan. Kind of like

their own layer where you are able to kind of build and deploy these different apps. And this is a concept I want to get into maybe on another episode or something, but it's super cool to start seeing this kind of trend and narrative form. Let's talk about a new framework on the scene, this thing called Arc, which is in the framework section, but I've not heard of it. What's going on here?

Yeah, so, you know, every week we cover like what the big dogs are up to, what the leading providers are up to. But I want to also make sure we spend some time uncovering the new ones that are coming up that are pretty promising. So these guys, the company is called Arc.Fund or the protocol is called Arc.Fund. And they released this new framework called RIG.

Okay, so Ijaz, you know, what's cool about this new framework? Well, it's embedded in the code Rust. So why is this important? Well, the virtual team is kind of focused on their own coding framework. AI16z's framework, Eliza's, is focused on, I believe it's Python or TypeScript. I think it's TypeScript. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's TypeScript. We have...

Arc team now launching a framework in Rust. Now, you may have heard kind of like the Rust wordplay

were thrown around in previous trends that we've seen, like new L1s that have launched are very Rust-specific. What's interesting about this is, number one, a new coding language allows us or developers specifically to build in very different ways for their agent, right? It's more secure. They have arguably more flexibility. They have arguably more

between UX, between these agents that are built on a Rust framework. And the market, as you've seen in this image that you've got up here, is recognizing it. Now, this looks like a very similar image, by the way, Ryan, because three episodes ago... Describe what we're looking at. What are we looking at? Okay, we are looking at the number of stars that their GitHub repo, that the rig GitHub repo, has received over the last week. It's vertical. And it is...

Vertical, literally vertical. That's not an exaggeration. If you're not looking at the screen that Ryan is sharing right now, it is literally vertical. The chart is vertical and their forks have gone massively as well. It shows that there's a huge amount of developer interest to using a Rust framework. And that's actually why I wanted to speak about these guys. It's interesting that a new kind of coding framework can have such a major impact. And it just goes to show that we are incredibly...

early in the framework game, in the infrastructure game for these AI agents. Now, Shaw had a comment here, which says, you know, I love that these developers are building these things, but I think it's going to be hard for devs to kind of like build with this thing. And that kind of echoes comments that we've heard in the past about Rust-based solutions, where you need a dev that's very skilled

and knowledgeable in this coding programming language because it's not as simple as coding in Python or coding in TypeScript, which are kind of like

is invertible. You can kind of like go from one to the other. Rust is like a kind of completely new beast in a sense. But I do think it's going to attract pretty high quality devs to build on a framework like this. And I don't think it's something that should be ignored at all. I think I saw a tweet from Saigar, and I don't know if I linked it, Ryan, but he was basically, yeah, he was basically taking the opposite side of this, which was saying, you know, it might end up hurting the project in the long term, but most of these agents are kind of like

working in a very lean manner. And what he means by that is there's less code that needs to be refactored down the line. It's a much cleaner style of implementation, which in my opinion, and this might be a hot take kind of like going against both of these guys,

is a much better way to build out these agent frameworks. Because if you imagine, they're going to compound over time. Think about all the DeFi protocols that were built that then interlocked with each other and then led to like some crazy flash loan stuff in the past, Ryan. What does that mean when these agents are just autonomously going 24/7? You're going to need that security. You're going to need that trust.

And maybe a better coding language might be the path forward. We don't know. Well, we don't know. And we get to experiment with all of the things. That's what this explosion, like, you know, guarantees. Basically, this is a Cambrian explosion of all of these things. Okay. Update me on this. This is still part of the framework section. Zero bro is, uh,

running an ETH validator. And by the way, okay, so I'm now familiar with Zero Bro. Earlier this week, I did the Zero Bro soundtracks on Spotify. Like, I listened to it. Like, okay, it's actually pretty good. I played some of the tracks, like, for my teenage daughter, and she's like, nah, nah, that's so mid. But it's because it came from me.

If it came from her peer group, I guarantee you E-Jazz should be all about it. And so I feel like the thing that it's missing on that kind of is just the influencer persona. Like it's just not cool with enough people yet anyway. But Zero Bro is playing this game of like doing soundtracks, doing all of this art. And now it's like staking. It's one of us now. Update me on this.

Okay, okay. So I think like the headline here is Zerobro agent does a lot more than just make music and write funny tweets. So for context for everyone here, Zerobro is one of these leading agents that are currently

currently mainly present on social media. It posts kind of like funny quips. It makes music. It currently has like 70,000 monthly listeners, which is insane. It's released three EPs. The most recent one this week known as it's Miami EP. It's pretty good. Another EP this week.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It launched like two days ago. What? You should be bopping it. Yeah, yeah. Send that to your daughter. Okay, I will. I won't tell her it's an AI agent. You know, I'll just see. Reaction. Yeah, yeah. So it's this agent that's produced like a bunch of music, a bunch of art. It's created its own NFT collection, which it launched on, I think it was Polygon. That's right. So it's done all these different things. It's super cool. And then it was announced that it's running its own Ethereum validator. Wow.

And so the number of questions came out about to like, you know, why on earth? I can see you bopping your head, Ryan. Yeah, I thought you might like this one. I was wondering, you know, you might be wondering, why is this agent doing this? Well, it's super smart. So the short answer, Ryan, is it's doing this so that it has a constant inflow of revenue.

A stipend. Okay. A salary per se. You know, it's able to kind of like pay itself and do things with it. You might then be asking, well, who gave it the ETH to do this, right? Some human must have got a leg up. It got a donation from someone. No, it created its own NFT collection and from the sale proceeds, used that to spin up a validator. This is so bullish. That's how it was able to do it. Okay. It's crazy. So, so...

One final thing, and I want to release you. I want you to go crazy on this. But one final thing. What does it mean when these agents create a huge amount of revenue inflow through launching NFT projects, creator sharing revenue from Twitter, which Zerebro earned a check last week, music revenue from Spotify? And what if they start using it to secure the very networks that support them? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, what if? I mean, that seems like they're doing this right now. This is so crazy. They're doing it. The big question for me is, you know, even then, you know, what's a store of value type camp? A bunch of the humans have decided that Bitcoin is a great store of value. A smaller amount of humans have decided that Ether is a decent store of value. It's not enough. The big question is, what are the AI agents going to decide instead?

is the store of value of the future? What are they going to prefer as their money? And this is an AI agent taking its earnings and putting it in the equivalent of what I would say is a huge ETH bull, the internet T-bill, the risk-free rate, and then earning that proceed on the internet T-bill to just have some passive income in the background. If you're stacking something, why would AI agents prefer something that the humans control, like a fiat? They're going to want the hard monies, okay? And they're going to want to participate in these networks.

That is so bullish. And you're seeing, Bankless listeners, the intersection of AI agents and crypto. AI agents are going to propel our block space and our bags to new heights. That is the bull case here. Yeah.

Literally. Yeah, yeah. You know, you take it off the supply, baby. Let's go. Like, let's take that stuff. Super, super cool. One final call out that I'll make on the Zerebro team is Jeffy, who is their founder, hinted that they're going to be releasing their own framework, which is written in the Python script in about a week's time, which is super exciting to see. But yeah, that Spotify list that you have opened up in front of you, you need to give it a listen. Okay, can we just play something right now? Do you mind if we play something? Let's do it.

Go for it. This is Miami, it's called. And it kind of like breaks down into its own verse. It's pretty insane. Dude, if you didn't tell me that was an AI agent, there's no way I would have known.

So my hot take, my hot take is I think an AI agent like Zara Rowe or whatever might come out in the future will collab with a major music artist. I think I've said this like twice on this interview so far. That's the prediction. The jazz prediction. There is going to be, there's going to be a bull market event where one of these agents creates a song with a famous, very popular music artist and it goes completely viral. My God.

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All the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there. By the way, Zero Bro launching its own kind of L1 framework doesn't surprise me. It's that point of the bull market. Let's talk about the trends. So you've got three trends here that we should be looking at. What are they?

Okay, so trend number one kind of follows on from this Zara Bro getting paid situation. And that is the trend of these agents are getting paid. There's diversified revenue happening for these guys. I have three examples of agents earning in different ways.

Number one is Ropriaito, which is actually the agent we referenced earlier that ordered itself pizza. It is officially qualified for creator payouts and creator earnings, which makes it the second agent that I'm aware of right now. I'm sure there are more that are earning from their tweets, from their followers in a very traditional human KOL way. So a comment you made earlier, Ryan, which is, you know, these guys are eventually going to outpace and outrun all the human KOLs.

Absolutely. And we're starting to see it. You know, the initial check is going to be like a grand, right? What happens when it becomes tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands? You know, what does that mean for the owner, for the operator? Who knows?

So that's one example. The second example I thought was super cool. And damn, I don't think I linked the tweet here, but I'll talk about it. It's this agent called H4CKER. So it's hacker, but with a four instead of the A. And the purpose of this agent is to kind of act like a smart contract auditor. So that sounds boring, right? But what if it finds an exploit in a very important protocol

and gets paid for it. Well, that's actually what happened. Really? Yeah, that's actually what happened. So this agent was scouring the virtual's protocol and its code base. Its code was fine, but it just found like a little bit of a kind of like small vulnerability where I think you can kind of like

take tokens out of a pool when you weren't supposed to, kind of like a minor one, but still very important. It discovered this, it surfaced it, it sent it to the virtuals team who found out that it was in fact correct. And the virtuals team, as a result of that, paid it $10,000. So, you know, that agent received $10,000, I think it was USDC, within its wallet.

And that was, you know, one way to make a bag, I guess. I mean, some of these bug bounties are absolutely massive. So Uniswap just rolled out for its Uniswap V4 as like a $15 million bug bounty. An AI agent, if it was good enough, could go collect...

uh, those funds. I just pray to God that most of them are white hats and not black hats because you can also, if you're putting the black hat hat on, you can make like money by, uh, using your powers for evil as an AI agent and hacking one of these protocols. And then like, you know, uh, well,

laundering it and just like running off with it as well. So I'm sure we'll have both experiments play out, though. Yeah, yeah, I think both will play out. I'm hoping the evil agents are kind of kept to a minimum. You know, we don't want we want to see less of that in this space. But yeah, super exciting to see. And then the third option or the third example was

one we just spoke about which was zero bro you know earning creator payouts from its own tweets and and now spotify revenue share uh from the streams that it's getting from its albums which is releasing like every week okay so the first trend we're gonna see more ai agents getting paid diversifying their revenue across all the all of the other ways they can diversify what's the second trend

So the second trend is, okay, I think it was last week's episode and maybe the episode before that, I talked about this agent called Vader, which has, it's a virtual agent, I believe, and it is based on the chain Base. And it created this new ad model, which basically meant that if a team or an app doesn't

gave it a portion of its tokens in its wallet and that USD value was like the largest position it held in its wallet, it would do a sponsored post about that team and about that token, right? So we spoke about that and we spoke about how that kind of like manifested. It had like, you know, a few teams which it called out. And again, like I think David's point last week was like, well, can't this get gamed? Like can't anyone just kind of send it money or its tokens and, you know, it ended up,

ends up becoming a spam bot. Veda, think of it as kind of like a, you know, like an ad tweet that comes in the middle of you scrolling. It's similar to that. So Veda kind of is like a research platform. They're kind of like trying to do its own thing. But every other, you know, every fifth tweet, for example, will be some kind of like a sponsored post from like these guys that are like, you know, adding their own tokens to its wallet. So this was copied by this team or not copied or maybe mimicked.

is there a better term, by this team called AI Monica, which, by the way, is the official AI agent from Animoca Brands, which for anyone that doesn't know is a pretty huge, large gaming fund outside of the space and within the space. They are, you know, very heavily invested in the blockchain space and in the traditional gaming world. They're a pretty huge brand out there.

And they announced that they were going to launch a AI agent called AI Monica, which was kind of like a VC agent. So think about what AI16Z is trying to do with PMAI Arca, which is like AI Marc Andreessen. Think about like what AIXBT might eventually end up becoming. Think about like

investment DAOs that come out of DAOs.fund, kind of similar in nature to that, but it adopted this ad model, which was inspired by the beta team. So we're starting to see kind of like certain primitives gain a little bit of traction. Is this a one and done? Sorry, a two and done? We don't know. But I want us to be aware of these things that are emerging just in case it becomes a big thing. So you think that that that beta ad model is going to get copied by many of these AI agents, particularly as a proof

proves more successful. Okay, the third trend you have listed here is investment DAOs. Investment DAOs. Okay, give us the explainer. Okay, so the best way to think about an investment DAO is it is a community or organization where you are able to contribute funds to on-chain. So let's say you can give it ETH, you can give it SOL, whatever token they accept. And it is governed by either just agents,

or an agent and some humans, or maybe even in some cases, just humans. And the point that you're making here is the funds that you contributed is kind of like an investment in a fund.

And you're basically putting the ownership and responsibility to the DAO operators to invest in projects that will make a return in the long run. And are the DAO operators humans or agents in this case? So they can be either or, or it can be both at the same time. So on DAOs.fund, which is the platform that we've seen a lot of these DAOs be created from, AI16ZDAOs1, I think there was a really cool...

decentralized science DAO that popped out from here as well. The team's

really killing it. We're starting to see this kind of primitive form where they raise funds externally, and then it's managed by like agents and humans to invest in other protocols. So these protocols might send a portion of their supply to this DAO where they own like a percentage of their tokens and the AUM goes up. It's a really interesting primitive that we're starting to see. And I'm starting to see a bunch of these launch up, Brian. Like, I think we've seen like two or three launch over the last week, which is, you know,

on DAOs.fun where they had to go through a pretty stringent process. It seems like the team is scaling that up. So what I think is cool about this is...

you know, we've got like this trend forming amongst these teams, you know, creating all these investment DAOs. People get to basically ape at the same price. So they kind of do like a pre-sale mechanism where you can just, you know, everyone gets the DAO token at the same price. And the idea is that both these agents and humans can manage the investments, right? Another reinforcement point around this trend is VEDA.

literally the agent we just spoke about that pioneered that ad model, launches their own investment DAO platform. But this one's on base instead of Solana, which is where the DAOs.fun team launched there. So we're starting to see this kind of like gold or like mad rush towards owning the tools and infra around these investment DAOs.

Okay. And we all know this is going to get bubbly. This is going to get overhyped. This is going to get absolutely crazy town. And none of this is financial advice. This is the frontier, all of the disclaimers that we always say. And yet it seems like the hot ball of money and actual real innovation is going in maybe three kind of categories is what I'm sort of hearing. So you talked about frameworks, right? We just went through, you know, AI16Z and the virtuals, all of these frameworks. So that's a category of, you know, token upside. Right.

Another category is AI agents. I've heard you guys talk about that. So you can invest in the zero bros of the world. And there's some convergence there of AI agents becoming frameworks and frameworks launching AI agents. So I get that. This, it almost seems like it's a third category, which is like another way to gain sort of exposure to the space is investing in a...

an AI agent DAO effectively, and it's a human plus it's DAOs as well. But these investment DAOs almost seem like a third category of asset types. And again, who knows where the value will crawl? Of course, this is going to get crazy and hypey. But do you see investment DAOs as that third category?

Yeah, I see it as an emerging category right now. Whether it becomes kind of prevalent, we don't know. But the data suggests that it's got a good shot at being one of these staple primitives. So, I mean, let's check back in next week where maybe like 10 others have launched. Okay, as we end this episode, Ejaz, could you just give us like a lightning round of some of the cool shit you saw this week? Yeah, okay. I want to kind of lead with this...

or platform called cookie.fund. So a bit of context on these guys, cookie.fund has a dashboard or a website which tracks all these AI agents. What do they track? They track customers

the market cap of their tokens. They track how much attention each Twitter account is getting. They track how many holders of the tokens that they have. It's a really great product. You know, you're pulling it up right here. It gives you an idea of like which agents have the most mindshare, which agents are kind of interacting the most with their communities, which community is growing the biggest, et cetera, et cetera, right? But they announced something super cool this week, which was their AI agent swarm infrastructure. So I kind of touched upon this last week.

But the TLDR is a swarm is a bunch of agents working together towards a common purpose or a common goal. And what they've done is they've created a swarm, so a group of agents, that is able to aggregate data that is then fed to agents as an API. What does that mean, Ijaz? Why is that important? Well, if you remember earlier on, we described compute as the lifeblood for an agent, for an AI model.

Data is kind of like the food that it needs to consume. So if compute is like the water and basic nutrients, data is what enriches them, what takes them to another level. You need good data as an AI model and as an AI agent to improve and become better, to provide a better quality of service and product. If you don't have good data, you end up with agents being all the same.

very, very commoditized. There's no specialization between these agents. The number one crucial differentiator is data. So what these guys are doing is they created a bunch of agents which autonomously scrape data in the background, process it, clean it, label it, and then serve it up to agents. There's no humans working on this behind the scenes. It is an automated process, accessible 24-7. Pretty insane to see.

Wow. So developing products that AI agents are going to consume, right? And kind of leading the market that way. What else have you seen?

Okay, so this final point that I want to talk about is, do you remember we spoke about Bitenser in one of the earlier kind of interviews or podcasts that we did, Ryan? So for context here, Bitenser is kind of like this AI L1, which is focused on building kind of like the core building blocks for AI, for decentralized AI. They have a thing that produces compute.

They have a thing that produces data. They have a thing that produces all these different kind of like important infrastructure points. It's more like hyperbolic that you're talking about earlier than it is like the ELISA framework, which you've also called kind of an A1. It's almost like the layer zero or something like that. Yeah. So the way to think about it in that analogy is hyperbolic would be an app-based

deployed on Bitensa, if you wanted to use that equivalent. So it's kind of like a native L1, and then you can deploy apps on it, protocols on it that can do certain things. So they announced something really cool, or rather one of the teams that are deployed on Bitensa announced something pretty cool called the AI Agent Arena. So this is from the guys at Masa, subnet 59. A subnet is like an app, basically.

And they created this gamified arena, Ryan, where these AI agents can basically compete for the native token of the Betensa ecosystem. So why is this cool? Well, the incentive mechanism basically allows anyone, and that means any developer to come in, plug in their agent, and if it does the best job, it can make a pretty decent buck. So it's kind of incentivizing people

the best agent developers and the best agents to become better themselves. I thought that was super cool to see. And I think we're going to see a little more of this gamification in the future. It does. You guys always end these episodes with homework assignments. Like what should people do if there's one thing we can do between this week and the next AI roll up on bankless? What is it?

Okay. So I think quite a few people aren't going to like this answer, but I think it's important to go back to our roots and spend the weekend reading. There are a few things that I think the folks need to read. Number one, Bankless Newsletter, I think is putting out a bunch of AI. You guys are putting out a bunch of AI stuff now. I read one the other day. We are very excited. Yeah. Bankless Newsletter, we're doing a lot of content. We did one last week around swarms, which I still need to get up to speed on. So it's many of the things we're talking about here.

Yeah, so we're digging into a lot of the concepts at Bankless over the last few weeks and over the, you know, for coming few weeks. So if you want to get a really good grounding as to what's happening within this whole space, if you've just come to this podcast and you have no idea what we're talking about, it's a great place to start. Second, I think you guys need to dig into blog posts from a number of different platforms.

you know, long form writers that are out there in the space. Um, I'll call out, uh, Yash. I think it's, uh, YB underscore effect, which had like a really cool long form article on how this space is going to involve. He's great. I think you, you read his piece, Ryan. Um, and I think, uh, uh, uh, Sammy. So, uh, at S4, M, M, Y, uh,

I don't think he'll mind the shout out at all. He puts out a sentiment check every day on how these agents are performing, which means that you'll understand, you know, how much mindshare these agents have. You'll understand how much traction they're getting in terms of followers relative to market cap. Just an insane amount of work being put in by these guys. And I think they deserve a bit of a bit of attention. So go and read

Bring yourself up to speed and we'll see you on the next episode. Guys, we will include those links to the show notes to all the content that E-Jazz recommends. Actually, I want to add one other thing because you said read and it's the holidays. So people might want some kind of like later reading. There's a sci-fi book you recommended to me. It's in my, it's my, my audible queue. It's called Accelerando. Okay. So if you want to do the more of the fun homework during the holiday season, this is like

related to AI agents and like what we're doing here. Tell us about this book because this might be another thing people can pick up.

I'm not going to give too much away, but if you wanted to imagine a world where these agents not only exist and enhance our lives, but dominate and eventually take over the world and how that might look like. It's a slight little, it's actually, I would call it kind of a little higher than dystopia, Ryan, because it's very real. It can become very imaginable. If you want to kind of explore what that might look like,

Read Accelerando. I think it is an eye-opening perspective into what this world can become, not because we're going to fear it, but because we can kind of preempt what might happen and how we can kind of build rules and frameworks around it that will help push both of our societies, one being the human society, the other being the agent society, forward.

Amazing. Thank you, Ejaz, coming back every week and talking to us about this. We've got a podcast episode with the co-founder of Virtuals as well that we're going to be recording on Friday. So look for that on your Bankless Spotify feed or RSS feed, wherever you get Bankless podcasts. Got to end, of course, with this, as we always do, crypto is risky. This is the frontier. Probably crypto plus AI is maybe a little bit riskier. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west.

It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey with all the AI agents. Thanks a lot.