AI ROLLUP #8: $500B AI Boost | Trump’s $70B Memecoin Frenzy | 400K Onboarded | Agent Framework Wars
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Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI Rollup, where we stay up to speed with the emerging trends and developments in the AI crypto space. I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host Ejaz. Ejaz, how are you doing, my man? How was your week?

uh not much uh president of the united states launched a meme coin that went to 70 billion dollars casual decided to launch another one the next day why did he do that oh yeah and then he announced 500 billion dollars worth of investment in ai in the u.s which you know pretty just simple weekend casual standard stuff yeah yeah no man what we were expecting yeah i mean just an all right

crazy weekend. And I feel like we can't start this pod, this particular episode without even addressing it. So I want to pull up this tweet that I put out, which kind of summarizes my thoughts around all of this. And I just want to kind of start off with saying, I think this is incredibly bullish for crypto AI. And it might sound like a stretch for some, but like, let's just kind of like take this. You're embodying the meme of this like thing that happens.

And now you've like, the Charlie Day from Always Funny in Philadelphia is like, here's why this is bullish about crypto AI. I know why. Completely unrelated things. Yeah, no. Okay. So for context for people who, you know, were most certainly living under a rock and had no idea what was going on, the current president of the United States decided to launch an official meme coin called Trump.

Trump official. Trump official. Yes. Thank you, David, for that correction. In case you didn't know it was official. Yeah, in case you didn't know. And it just surged to $70 billion in under, I think, 30 hours, which firmly placed it as one of the top 15 blockchains or cryptocurrencies in the world. That is the quickest...

raise or rise of a crypto coin ever, which was just broke into the top 20 of all cryptos. Yeah, yeah, absolutely insane. And so, you know, what is this going to do with AI coins? Well, I had a few thoughts about this, David. All right. And let me know if you disagree. Well, number one, this coin was launched on Solana. So in my opinion, Solana AI coins are about to get a huge influx of capital.

And the reason why I say this is most people kind of like knew about Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana prior to all of this. But I don't think how many people, I don't know how many people actually interacted with Solana, right? You know, they have to get like a phantom wallet or their limited coins listed on sexes, centralized exchanges. And so they were wondering, what is this thing? Well, now when Trump launched their meme coin, they were like, well, how do I get access to this thing?

And so there was this massive flurry of capital to buy this coin. And so what they're doing now is they're looking at their app on their phone and they're up massively and they're thinking, well, what should I get now? And, you know, I think they start kind of like digging into the narrative behind Solana, what's kind of like the hottest kind of trends, and they'll see crypto AI. And I think that a lot of, you know, tokens and teams and protocols that we've spoken about will start getting a lot of attention and we'll see that flow from meme coins into these things. So that's like number one. Okay. Yeah.

I totally agree with you that you tweeted this out at 8.45 a.m. on Sunday. And I was also thinking this, especially the influx into specifically Solana. So the wealth effect of Solana, Solana prior to the launch of the meme coin was coming in at like $200.

With the launch of the Solana, of the Trump meme coin, came at $280 for a Sol token, for a Sol, a single Sol. A massive capital increase, a capital influx. And so just on the Sol appreciation alone, everyone on Solana just got it. Yeah, I think it added like $30 billion of value to its market cap. Yes, 30%, yeah, exactly, $30 to $40 billion. So adding that to the capital of the wealth effect of Solana in of itself.

But you also, again, like you said, like I said, you tweeted this on Sunday morning right before Melania launched, which really just sucked out the momentum and the optimism. Like people, I think, were like this. OK, yes, Trump is doing this to make money. This is a business endeavor, but it's incentive compatible with crypto. And we could all kind of just, you know, look like shove the fact that he's going to sell a bunch of money and get a bunch of money. We can shove that under the rug because it's incentive aligned.

But then when Smolania launched, a lot of that got unraveled and the value of Trump went down, the value of Solana went down, but you know, it's still at 230, 240. It's still pretty okay. So I'm going to tamper the amount of wealth effect that Solana has gotten, even though it is still real. It's still large. It's still in the tens of billions amount. Yeah. Well, let me counter that. I agree with you, but let me counter it just slightly. Okay.

And just look at it this way. A bunch of people saw a brand new coin, specifically a meme coin, go to a $70 billion valuation in under 30 hours.

they're going to now start thinking probably, wow, there's probably a bunch of other things that could do something similar. Why can't it be my meme coin? My meme coin is funny. I laughed at it. I bought a bunch of it. Maybe it could happen as well. And like I started thinking myself like, wow, like if this could happen to this, like maybe it could happen to some other types of stuff. I still think it's kind of interesting to look at. Point two that I make in this tweet is,

If we just kind of zoom out for a second, it's just completely nuts that we have an acting president of one of the biggest countries in the world launch something like this. And I think that this might end up being net-net good for the industry. Remember, the biggest challenge that was faced in crypto today has been unfriendly regulations. And now we have a president that's launching stuff like this. And I think this kind of signals that the game is kind of different now.

Gary Gensler is out. Crypto voters now hold a huge significant influence over current and future US elections, governments, etc. And Trump knows this and will probably play to it. And we also have the most pro-crypto cabinet

ever, right? You know, we have some kingpins from the tech world that are in place to guide policy around AI and crypto. And I think that's quite good. What do you think, David? Do you think that's a bit of a stretch or you think that has some legs to stand? I think that is all correct. I think that's all correct. Like Trump is just blowing the doors open on the Overton window on what can be done and what could be done with crypto. Even Mark Cuban in response to

the Trump meme coin was his response was like, well, I can, I'll launch a meme coin. David Portnoy chimed in on this is like, you know, everyone's just launching meme coins. So I totally agree with that. Yeah. But David, let's not forget, this was also a massive onboarding event. Moonshot, which is one of the new crypto wallet startups, which make it super easy to buy tokens on chain, I think using Apple Pay and stuff, onboarded or like

showed that almost 400,000 people were onboarded onto Solana just through this single event, which is just completely nuts. This is something I worried about because like, I don't know, when somebody launches a meme coin, I don't know if it's just like the DJs go gambling on this new casino game that they were just be given. And then people talk a big game about it like adoption.

Like, is it really adoption if Iggy Azalea has a bunch of degens buying her token? I don't know. So this is actually data. I didn't know this. This is actually data that Moonshot is saying 400,000 new people have made up, made Moonshot accounts to buy the Trump token in the last 24 hours. Yeah, I mean, think about it, right? People who already knew about this entire crypto world would have been able to access it through wallets or were trading from deck screeners and stuff like that. This is people downloading this app,

connecting their card bank accounts and just aping via Apple Pay, which is just like just nuts to see in general. Right. It's cool. If you go to the get Trump memes dot com, the meme coin page, you can hit buy now with debit card. And that takes you to moonshot dot money slash Trump. There you go. Which is where moonshot is getting all these accounts and where they're getting their data from. Yep. Yep. Yep.

But also, if we look at like fees on the actual base chain, David, if you pull up this tweet, Solana's daily revenue just hit an all-time high, almost $60 million, which is more than double of their previous all-time high set back in November. I mean, just look at that chart. That chart is vertical. I just see so much MAV happening here in this chart. That's all I can see.

Yeah, it's just insane. And to this point, right, you know, we've spoken about Solana. This meme coin is on Solana. People were onboarded onto Solana. It sucked all the air out the room for all other coins. So if you held a portfolio of crypto tokens on Solana, cough, cough, you know, my AI tokens, it sucked all the air out the room.

like a lot of value was taken out of it because people were trying to just ape this coin. And I think you mentioned, David, that, you know, you were one of those people that you woke up and you were like, well, let's do this. I woke up one day too late. I woke up and I dumped every single meme coin that I have in my Solana wallet, which is all of them, into the Trump token. And then I round tripped it. So I'm about to, I'm no longer holding a Trump token, but I was once upon a time almost 3x up.

And now I came out basically out of wash. Yeah, yeah. And so kind of like bringing it back to AI and like, you know, we want to put our thinking caps on a bit. I did think, well, you know, what does all of this mean for crypto AI? And, you know, where do we go from here? If you pull up this tweet from Elon Money, I think he makes a really prescient point, which is, you know, crypto AI is a very, very important thing.

crypto is still a narrative game and it's very much around mindshare. And he kind of evaluated where the top mindshare was after this Trump thing had happened, right? What were people talking about aside from Trump? And this is kind of like the ranked list of things, David, of course you have our Lord and savior fart coin right at the top fundamentals galore. Um, then you have things like Griffin, which is like the, the defy AI. Um,

kind of like one of the leading protocols there, AI16Z arc. So the point is like, you know, a ton of these coins are still very much focused around crypto AI. And this is kind of like a generalized pull of data, right? So it's just really interesting to see that. Oh, this is a pull of data of all possible tokens. Yes, yes, exactly. And the alpha here is that it,

Fartcoin, number one. Graphene, number two. AI16Z, number three. ARK, which we talked about last week. So the top four are AI tokens. Yes, correct. Correct. All right. And so then I started... So what you're saying is the meta continues to be AI agents. Okay. So the argument I keep hearing and why I'm making this point is...

Crypto AI, crypto AI agents specifically, is going to be a very transitory matter. It's not going to be around for long. It's going to rise and die. And I see where that's coming from. We have got a lot of PTSD from a ton of other subsectors. I feel like I'm cautious of that. Yes, I'm also very cautious as well. And do you know what, David? I remember feeling the same way around a lot of the DeFi stuff because there was a lot of stuff that got created that ended up dying out. But I knew at its core that,

that this was fundamental infrastructure that was needed by society, right? And when I look at agents, I just feel the same way. When I look at like the kinds of things that they're going to enable, you know, much easier UX and interaction with blockchains, they're going to become the leading creators and consumers of blockchains. It just makes sense to me that they're going to stick around and stay. Now, are the protocols and teams that we talk about day in, day out going to be the ones that make it?

it's fair to say that neither of us know. I certainly do not, right? But I think figuring out where that goes and focusing where Mindshare is, is very important. And the fact of the matter is for the last, I'm going to say year and a half to two years, David, crypto has been one of the top things in Mindshare, certainly for the last six months, right? Yes, last episode, we were saying it was at 65%.

uh mindshare which is just like nuts so i do think we have like you know more fuel in the tank uh for this to kind of go but i started thinking you know does all of this kind of money flow into solana ai coin specifically and if you look at this post it kind of shows both sides right so um

This is a post from Diamond Hands Dig. And it says, you know, what Donald Trump was fundamentally changed the rules of this bull market, in his opinion, thinks second order effects are kind of going to flow to moonshot. It's going to flow to tier one exchanges. And it's going to focus on quite a few things on base potentially, right? So he calls out AXPT being a strategically positioned coin, which is like very popular. Obviously, it's got

like over 400,000 followers. And then he talks about like how this might be one of the main focuses, right? And he argues that like it can still be a base ecosystem and he calls out virtual here where, you know, a lot of money eventually flows back. And I see that point of view, to be honest, David. I don't think this necessarily king makes all of the Solana AI coins, but it did just onboard a ton of people who probably won't want to bridge or move their capital anywhere else.

I think what is really going to help secure my belief that this crypto AI revolution bubble, whatever you want to call it, is going to be the defining meta of 2025. We need to hit some inflection point about both crypto and AI, mainly focused on tokens because that's what a bull market is.

that really captures the interest of the otherwise uninterested people, because that's what brought them into NFTs in 2021. You know, retail investors. We have to strike the curiosity of retail investors. And that takes both. We need both like crypto to do well and AI to also itself. I'm not talking about crypto AI, but like Silicon Valley AI to grow in capability and power and investment in this space.

Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of Silicon Valley AI, David, Trump yesterday announced $500 billion will be spent within the US on AI specific infrastructure sites, data sites, and just in AI in general. Now, this is a coordinated effort from the likes of OpenAI, Masayoshi-san, who leads the SoftBank Fund.

And it's just crazy. So $100 billion is being focused on being allocated this year alone. And this kind of like made in America theme, which we've seen being propagated over the last couple of weeks, you know, if the blockchains and crypto coins are made in America, like Solana and XRP, then, you know, this would be... Which is so nonsensical, but nonetheless, anything like USA branded got like a 25% valuation bump last week. Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. And so...

just kind of like zooming out for a second and not even talking about crypto at all. I think this is amazing for the industry and the world in general, David, like AI is by far, in my opinion, one of the most important technologies to ever grace mankind. And I think it's going to completely change the way we interact with each other and build things. And it's of the utmost important that we put our time, focus and attention on this industry. And

the government now being aligned with this is just a fascinating thing to see. And so it kind of like reinvigorated kind of, I think the market's hopes that crypto AI or AI in general is still a core or key mindshare when it comes to investing. But this wasn't the only thing, right? Like, if you want to look at like the money being invested, let's get away from the money and talk about like some of the fundamentals. Whilst all of this was going on, it's being reported that OpenAI will release

super agents, David, that can do PhD-level math and entry-level software engineering. Who is reporting this? This is Axios reporting on...

OpenAI specifically. But I need to say this isn't a rumor that's been just currently created and circulated. This has been going on for a while. Actually, OpenAI themselves have hinted that the next product that they launch in the next couple of months will be agent related. And so what does this mean, right? Well, what it means is the mainstream companies are getting involved in

in the kinds of things that we have been obsessing over for the last couple of months in the crypto world. So you could say like we've been a leading indicator, but actually these guys have been working on these kinds of things for a while. - To be clear, when OpenAI is talking about their agent, they're gonna invest in agents, they're talking about the same kind of agents that we're talking about, right?

I actually disagree. I think these are going to be agents that are much, much smarter than the agents that we've been talking about. But the same conceptual thing of like these autonomous, like souls, spirits, entities that exist on the internet. The only difference is that in our world, they have tokens too. Correct, correct. And I think in our world so far for V1, they have been very much based on social media sites and they've been tweeting. And they've been able to do a bunch of other stuff as we've seen being, you know, coming to light with all the DeFi stuff.

but we're still kind of like, they're trying to find their feet. I think when OpenAI, and again, I must emphasize I'm hypothesizing, but I think when OpenAI releases their agent product, it is going to be a chat GPT-like moment.

It's going to be a moment where people interact with these things and they're like, wait, what? This agent could do this crazy college essay for me and it passes as a PhD level standard thing. Or this agent can, you know, plan a trip for me, book everything, pay my rent and kind of like still save money and send it to my bank all without like me looking at a computer. That's pretty insane. I'm trying to wrap my head around what it actually looks like as a product.

Yeah.

Is that what we're talking about? Like a product like that coming out of open AI? What's the form factor here? So I think it'll surface itself in two ways. And again, I'm hypothesizing here. I have no idea. But I think it'll

It'll come in two ways. Number one is it'll be an agent that you can interface off of the direct chat GPT interface. So right now you talk to chat GPT. That's where people spend a lot of different time, a lot of their time and effort in. I don't think they're going to shift you onto another site. That makes no sense. So I think what will pop up is, you know, you'll have a model and you'll also have an agent and the agent will be able to do things for you. So similar in the way that you can talk to an AIXPT,

and tag it in your tweet, and it'll respond to you. You can talk to an agent in ChatGPT, and it'll be, I don't know, able to do the shopping for you, or it'll be plugged in and integrated into a bunch of different things. Now, what those use cases are, I have no idea. But we had a bit of an insight when ChatGPT first launched, and people started to try and hack this themselves. And it didn't work very well. It wasn't very fluid. It didn't have consistent memory, as you mentioned, David.

But the second thing that I think they're going to launch, which I think will have larger impact, is basically exposing their framework or APIs, David. Because at the end of the day, they know that probably the best way that people can build agents using their stack is to just allow them to access the API. Well, not even open source. I was going to say open source, but it's not really. It's charge people. And they'll basically have access to the API or the model, the agent model. And they'll be able to do a bunch of these different things.

So the knock-on effect is I think a lot of these crypto agents we've spoken about are about to get supercharged. They're about to get like way smarter. It may even come with things like contextual memory and stuff across different layers. So I think it's going to like make these frameworks that we've spoken about like way more effective. Yeah.

And it kind of got me thinking, well, if these frameworks are going to get supercharged, you know, where, you know, which one will benefit the most? And if you pull up this, this tweet, which kind of like shows where Mindshare is focused for all these different crypto native frameworks, David, it's, it's any, it's a toss up.

It's anyone's gambit at this point, you know. AI16Z, the leading open source agent repo, is kind of like neck and neck with the likes of Virtuals and Arc. It was mentioned Arc and Virtuals a lot in the past. So it's honestly anyone's game. And I have no idea where this goes, but it's going to be exciting being at the frontier for it.

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Yeah, these framework wars, I feel, starts to be the foundation for this podcast. We always talk about the frameworks because everything seems to be downstream of them. So let's just go ahead and, I guess, dive into the big one, virtuals. Not the big one, the second one. Where would you place virtuals in the ranking of frameworks? Or is it truly a toss-up, as you said? I think it's a toss-up, David. I think, like, right now...

everyone is kind of seeding themselves in their own ecosystem. So virtuals is like the kingpin on base or the EVM side of things. AI16Z ELISA is that of Solana, but it's facing kind of competition and heat from ARK. But I all think like all of them are kind of like playing in the same kind of field right now. When we talk about virtuals,

They had a few major updates this week, David, which I think is definitely worth kind of like pointing out as well as the fact that we're talking about frameworks, actually. So virtuals announced this thing called the terminal API. Okay, what does this mean? Well, to date, virtuals has been focused on pushing their own framework, right, their agent framework. And as we've described on the show, this framework allows you to build and design these agents, right?

And what they've done with this terminal API is they're allowing any builder to connect any framework, which means you could connect Eliza, you could connect Rig from the Arc guys, and you can connect any other kind of framework according to the API. And I asked myself this question. I was like, why are they doing this? Why would that make sense? And then it kind of clicked to me, David.

If these agents are ever to win and become effective, you need them to be able to traverse across any kind of chain or framework. It doesn't really matter. The whole point is you want your agents to be able to do a bunch of different things and you don't want it to be constrained or restricted by blockchains. That's old school thinking. Previously, we've been like, oh, we want all the...

you know, we want the moat and the ecosystem moat to be on your specific chain, you know, Ethereans, Solana people, base ecosystem people. But now we have this kind of like medium or this entity that should be able to travel us across anything. And I found that like fascinating. And you can kind of see how they're thinking about this. Like today, they mentioned that, you know, we have agent creators that can choose whichever framework that they want, pick, and this is the guide for them to be able to do it. But soon,

If you notice, they say something here, multi agent orchestration.

Across frameworks and they talk about an agent to agent commerce standard David So what they're really thinking about is how they're trying to do the cross-chain comms. They're trying to go cross-chain Yeah, yeah, I think that's important David to be honest I like I think about it like if these agents are to succeed they should be able to act on any chain that they want and I think that's a pretty endearing point to be honest and I'm kind of excited and my guess if I was to guess is

is the next step for them is to launch on another chain. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, that would make sense. Okay. So just to make sure I understand, virtuals, you would need to use the virtuals framework to launch an agent on virtuals. Yeah, game. But you can now also with this use the ELISA framework to launch an agent on virtuals too. Yeah.

Yep, correct. And that just seems net accretive to the virtual ecosystem because at the end of the day, virtual is really just going to be like a customer distribution, consumer distribution platform with a token that it just has distribution. And so it doesn't matter. Maybe virtual doesn't care about its own framework. It just cares about distribution, right? So I would frame this as a land grab, right? They're conquering land. And it's actually kind of,

a useful analogy because Janssen, if you pull up his tweet here, David, has talked about agent economies, agent nations, right? And whilst he doesn't specify this in this exact tweet, look at

how he presents this different frameworks, different chains, different cultures. And on our interview that he had with us, which if you haven't seen, you should definitely go check out. He talks about building up these agent societies. The only way that's going to get done is if you're multi-chain and multi-framework. And he seems to suggest it here.

you know? So super, super exciting stuff. But that's not all with virtuals, David. If you bring up this next tweet, I want to point out a really interesting thing that this dude at Masari saw or spotted. Of the top 10 agent tokens in virtuals, three of them are investment DAOs. And I started thinking about this. I was like, what does this mean? I honestly think people...

There's so many agent tokens, David. Seriously, like I'm spending a lot of time trying to dig into all of this and understand this and meet the teams and figure out what's going on. I'm losing hair and I'm losing sleep. I think a lot of people just want to pool their money or cash in an investment DAO that provides them some kind of an index play on these things.

and leave it at that. And if you see some of these investment DAOs listed here, so if you scroll up, you've got VEDA, you've got Sequoia as well. I think like we're going to start seeing a growing amount of people purchase these tokens just to get access.

What are some of the advantages these DAOs provide? We've spoken about VEDA before, but basically they try and source deals or buy liquid tokens off the market. Sequoia tries to do the same thing, but takes a more VC approach where they either incubate or seed invest. It's just a really cool approach that I like seeing a bunch of these virtual ecosystem teams doing. And then the final point I want to make about virtuals is,

Do you remember last week we spoke about that $40 million buyback and distribution? Yeah. That's being put into effect officially. So, you know, they're not wasting any time here, David. I think it's the equivalent of $35 million is going to get start distribute to buy back virtual agents tokens specifically and burn them. And for those who are listening to this and wondering, you know, what the hell does this mean?

Basically, this revenue has come from virtuals tokens being traded. The way that the protocol is designed is there's a 1% fee being charged to anyone that trades these tokens. And that fee... Denominated in the virtuals token. Denominated in the virtuals token, correct. And what they thought of or what they announced last week was instead of just deploying this virtuals token into something else, we are going to use it to...

to buy back agent tokens specifically. So let's say your agent token was traded the most, you will get the highest allocation of that amount and it'll buy back the agent token and burn it.

which reduces supply and is much more beneficial for holders. It's a pretty cool model. Okay, so the virtuals platform is selling the virtuals token in order to buy the agent token. So it's actually a transfer of wealth from virtuals to individual agents. Agent tokens. To prop up the value, to pump up the value of the agent's token or to give some like buy pressure to,

out of the trading fees generated to the agent's token. So it's kind of a stimulant. It's an economic stimulus to the individuals in the virtual society. Yep. Good choice of words, David, given that they're trying to build like some kind of an economy here. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, congrats to any agent that is getting their token bought and burned.

I mean, when there is a limited choice set for developers to build their agents on and one platform is literally saying, hey, we're going to buy your token and burn it if you do well. So it's an incentive for developers to come and migrate into the virtual economy and establish their little settle down in there. Yep, exactly. Yeah.

All right, take me to Indie.fun. Crowdfunded games, 100x faster. This is a Twitter article. What's going on here? Yeah, so I was scrolling the timeline the other day and I came across this post from this team called Indie.fun. And for clarity here, I...

own none of this token. I literally came across this for the first time and I read through it and I thought, wow, this is kind of cool. So we've spoken about gaming and agents before, and this platform appears to do something similar in the sense that, you know, they allow you to launch and play games where you can interact and compete alongside AI-powered entities.

NPCs, NPCs standing for non-playable characters. So in this sense, it's like an AI agent that is super smart, right? And it can understand your playing style. It can interact with you. It can maybe trade tokens with you or could compete with you, right? So it's pretty cool, right? And, you know, it says here, Indie.fun provides infinite worlds where AI agents can compete, adapt, and grow alongside or against real players.

swarms of independent agents powered by their token can be deployed in an indie.fund in seconds, learning, adapting until they become indistinguishable from human players. So there's a self-learning element that they kind of like make there. And I want to draw attention to this bit, which made me think about their strategy, you know, this team strategy. So they know that crypto Twitter has the attention span of a child.

We get excited and we get so bored so quickly, David. You know, I think Trump meme coin was a perfect example of that, right? So I think their plan here is to build games which are designed to engage with that type of user. But a key difference is when you get bored and you switch games, you can still play with the same people because they're agents, David.

The agents that you play with in one game show up in a different game and they behave similarly. And they know the rules and they know if you lost the last game or not, David. So they'll know. Do they choose whether, like, I don't want to play with this guy, he sucks.

But maybe, maybe that's why I like it. You know, like you're going to stop being like, oh my God, this agent ditched me. What does that mean for me? Do I really suck that bad? You know what I mean? Wow. I'm not ready for this. I already get dunked on by crypto Twitter now.

So you start having this consistent personality or personalities accompany you and adapt to any game, right? It's kind of like what NFTs were supposed to be, but now we have a smarter, more dynamic entity to engage with. And the creators of this platform also allow game developers to create tokens, which become each game's in-game currency. So I'm hypothesizing something here, right?

agents make it easier to engage with these tokens seamlessly in gameplay. So you can now hop to each game, win tokens or valuable prizes, and then cash them out seamlessly into Sol or Ether or whatever currency you want at the end. The resurgence of maybe play to earn, David, I don't know. Because like previously, it's like, okay, this token belongs to blah, blah,

chain or L2. I don't know what to do. What if the agency has abstracted it away from you? What if you could just go up to an agent at the end and be like, all right, I'm cashing out my chips. I'm going home. I'm going to go. My mom's calling me to go eat dinner, like sort this out for me, put this all into Sol. Actually, could you stake 50% of it? That would be great. So now you're embedding DeFi AI into it. I just think maybe I'm dreaming too much. Maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too much, but I just thought of the

to try and think about where this could potentially go. We talked about this maybe last week or the week before, but the intersection of AI and gaming seems to make a ton of sense. And it was because of this. It was like you populate the world with these AI agents just to bootstrap your own economy or bootstrap your own landscape or whatever.

Yep, exactly. And I think another thing I wanted to kind of talk about is what happens when someone adds betting functionality into the mix, David? That seems like an attention sink, right? Because let's not beat around the bush. A lot of people are buying tokens sometimes with

no idea of the investment case and they just kind of like gambling. And I wonder what that looks like with, you know, the rise of prediction markets and people obviously wanting to get exposure to that. I wonder if they would do something similar within a gaming context. What do you think?

Well, there's a portfolio company that we have at Bankless Ventures called Sweep, which is specifically putting together a streaming platform and a prediction market platform. So the streamers' audiences can make prediction market bets about the outcome of said streamers' actions or like win-loss ratio or something. So it's definitely like the hyper-gambolization and streamification of the internet making its way into crypto. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's... I'm too fixated on the presidential meme coin thing, David. Just when that happened, I was like, I just think we're leaning so much into high-risk, high-stakes gambling. Oh, yeah. And if the government is embracing it, what do you think this is going to have a knock-on effect to the rest of the public? It's just...

Insane to see. I think we are leaning into gambling culture, financial gambling culture. That is just, like, I don't necessarily, I don't want to, you know, put my foot on the gas pedal to go that way, but we are just, culturally, we are absolutely going that way. Mm-hmm.

Actually, speaking of streaming, I wanted to pull up this agent. It's not just any agent. It's an agent that is streaming, David. It is streaming a live gameplay of the massive MMORPG called Dota 2. Massive, massive game.

massive game, and it's live commentating. And it's doing this in real time. The agent isn't playing the game. The agent is streaming people playing the game and it is commentating. So it is being, we're watching an agent streamer right now. Yeah, correct. And if you notice, it's not just commentating saying, okay, player A is now in control. And wow, that was an amazing attack on blah, blah, blah. It's talking about the strategy, David.

It's talking about what it could potentially do, you know, how the teams are operating, how they might improve, why they lost. It's actually a really smart, intelligent kind of overview, which I think a lot of commentators at professional leagues do something similar or aspire to do something similar. I'm curious how this agent was kind of trained or maybe it was trained on like transcripts of previous commentators. Maybe it was trained on, you know, live gameplay for like

you know, millions and millions of games so that I was able to understand, you know, what each character profile could do. Because I don't know if you've played Dota, David, but it's pretty complex. I've played like for less than an hour. I also suck at it, but it's a pretty complex game, right? Yeah. Ethermage says here, you know, this isn't a demo. It's a game streaming agent casting live, you know, and these agents live on the front of attention for gamers. And this kind of reinforces the point that you were making earlier around, I think,

The intersection of agents and gaming makes a lot of sense. And I'm seeing a lot of the leading protocols lean into it more, particularly virtuals. Right. Is this Luna? Because this looks like Luna. The Luna from the virtuals protocol. They bootstrapped Luna as their own agent. And it was this little anime character.

I don't know if it's true or not. Maybe I'm just being agentist because all agents say the same. I was literally about to say, you're being pretty agentist, David, and I'd like you to cease right now. It may surprise you, but a lot of crypto Twitter uses anime in a lot of their projects. So, you know, this is just one of the...

Let's not get canceled for that. It would be cooler. Not that I'm going to complain. This is pretty cool. It's pretty cool that an AI agent is commentating on a game. It would be cool if they were the ones also playing the game at the same time, because why can't they? They can multitask. All right, David. All right. Well, how about you go to the next demo that I'm going to show you here, right? It's not an agent streaming, but it's an agent doing something that you wish you could do, David.

You wish you could do. So we've spoken about agent. Am I on the right tweet? You're on the right tweet. You're on the right tweet. So this is a team or a protocol team called agent tank. And you might've heard of them before, David. They were the guys behind the agent that had browsed Amazon and ordered toilet paper. Very important. Very, very important use case. And the technology that was underpinning this was something called computer use.

So imagine, you know, the way that you're scrolling through Twitter right now and you're moving your cursor, you just gave the reins to an agent and the agent could see your screen. It could maneuver. It could do a bunch of things. So if you play this particular video again, David, you'll be able to see that this agent is doing something a lot different from browsing Amazon and watching and sorry, ordering ads.

It pulls up the DexScreener chart or whatever this website is that's observing price. TradingView. DexScreener for TradFibro. DexScreener for TradFibro. I know. Sorry. And it is...

observing what's happening with this chart and it's doing a bunch of technical analysis, David. So, you know, Bollinger Bands, you know, resistance, what is happening? RSI. RSI, all that kind of stuff, you know, to try and figure out what might happen at the current price point that is. Will it go up?

Will it go down? Should I long? Should I short? This is an agent that's just doing it all for you in a matter of seconds. And I thought that was pretty insane. Yes, it may not be playing a game yet, but it might end up making you money, David. Let's give it some real money. Is this in sandbox or are they trading with real money yet? This is in sandbox. This is in sandbox. Let's give it some real money. Okay. Well, if you're listening to this agent tag team, please, you know, V2. Do it live. Strap it. Do it live and strap a wallet to it. Hilarious.

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But we're not done with our demos, David. We're not done. More demos. It's demo week. Yeah. So we're moving on to a little-known protocol called AI16Z.

And we're not actually watching any demos because we might actually need to spend about three hours doing it. But 0xWitch over here wanted to highlight some of the teams that were building on AI16Z's kind of like incubator experience.

if you like. And they had a demo day where a bunch of these projects were kind of like being displayed to the wider public. And some of the highlights included a pump fund trader agent and a sports analytics agent. Now, the main reason why I'm mentioning this isn't to kind of call out any individual agent. It's just nice to see that AI16Z is taking a more curated approach to the teams that are building on AI16Z.

Typically, it's just been an open source, massive game. I think...

who is one of my favorite writers in the crypto AI space, described it as a bazaar for agents. That's how I would describe it as well. It's now kind of really cool to see some kind of like a Y Combinator approach from the AI16Z team. And I think we'll see more of this going forwards as they lean into their platform, David, which of course was spoken about before. They're going to launch an official platform, which is tied to their framework, which will allow teams to build and launch agent tokens and agents specifically in a guided and curated platform.

manner and these agents will be able to speak to each other. So I love the curated side of things here, right? But of course, the platforms on the horizon, they're curating these agents. What about the framework itself? Last week, we kind of gave it a bit of heat, David. We were pointing out some of the criticisms that were being aired about Eliza. And it's nothing major. It was just to say, you know, this is what Eliza V1 can do today. And it's

we kind of maybe need to take it a step up. Well, all I'm going to say is AI16Z seems to be delivering, right? V2 is heralded to have quite a few impressive upgrades coming up. We're talking about full autonomy, which means, you know, actual autonomy. So these agents aren't going to have a human handler. They'll be able to like do things on their own 24-7.

ingest information, assess whether they want to make a decision and then execute on that decision. They're going to have unified wallet abstraction, which means that whether your token is on chain A, B or C, it doesn't matter. We'll work things out and you can use tokens wherever they might be.

They'll have a plugin registry, which means all the plugins that they have already, which allows you to do a bunch of either web two or web three things will be kind of consolidated and ranked. So you can see kind of like which ones you want to use, which ones might be more useful than the other. Oh, that's really, really important. Okay. Because that's how the entire like modding community works. I was once upon a time, a Skyrim modder.

modder and you need to have like the, your mods curated because shitty mods will crash your game. And some mods people put in a ton of work into, and it's like basically it turns into a semi-official actual upgrade to the game itself because everyone uses it. It, you know, bug fixes everything. And so mod curation became huge in the modding community. And so a plugin registry, a plugin mod, basically the same thing.

Alongside some open source ethos of everyone being able to improve the mods and come to a collective decision on which mods are more useful than others, then all of a sudden, all of these things become much more accessible and can grow a lot faster. Yeah. If I were to summarize the strategy that I think is starting to form with AI16Z, is they started incredibly open source.

And they're now trying to not rein it in, but just kind of like add a few different kinds of constraints that will allow them to- Add a little bit more order to the chaos. Order to the chaos that'll allow them to build something super powerful, right? They could focus attention on all of these things. Now, if you look at Virtual's approach, they're taking the other side of things. They started super close source, mixed source. You know, they weren't showing any of their cards. Right.

And now they're becoming multi-framework, potentially multi-chain. So it's really cool to see two of these behemoths take two different strategies. And I want to see whether one strategy favors the other or whether they both can win in the same environment. Either way, exciting things to see. Ejaz, let's take us to the last platform framework that we talk about. We spent a lot of time last week talking about Arc.

as perhaps this third new entrant into the AI framework category. AI16z, Eliza being the first, virtuals being the second, now Arc is perhaps the third. Fill us in on what happened with Arc in the last seven days. Okay, so for context here, Arc is another one of these major agent protocols that have a framework called Rake, which is coded in Rust.

programming language. And they have also this platform where you should be able to launch agents from and, you know, have a token associated with them or maybe not. And the reason why we've spoken about ARK is back when we first mentioned it, we had no investment in it and we had no idea like whether it was going to do well. We just thought like, you know, we love how the team is shipping. Maybe it'll, you know, be something worth keeping an eye on. And then like, as we've been tracking it, David, you know, we've seen a growing amount of code being shipped.

and a growing number of partnerships. The conversation last week was about all these different partnerships. But to this point, David, if I'm being honest, it's kind of been like pudding without proof, you know? So we wanted to kind of like see, okay, well, what is actually underneath the hood? What are you guys doing, right? You keep talking about teams wanting to launch, but like, what does that mean?

Well, this week, they kind of dispelled all rumors. They announced their first two teams that are launching within their framework or within their platform, rather, right? One of them is called Listen, and the other one is called Soulgraph. What we're looking at right now is Soulgraph. And Soulgraph was the first one to do this. Now, I'm not going to get into the intricacies of what Soulgraph does, but the way to think about it is they are trying to tackle kind of like the personality agent

A comparable to this would be a lot of the agents that we see live today that have come from Eliza specifically, and some of the agents that have come from virtuals like Luna that you referenced earlier, David. And they argue that the way that they've designed their kind of architecture and the reason why they've used Rake, which is Arc's framework, is it allows them to build a much more lighter weight version of

of agents that are more powerful and that can do way more, right? They're adding a lot of, uh, um, text to voice. So these agents will be able to interact in different kinds of mediums and platforms. Now let's say, David, let's hypothesize for a second. Let's say that, um,

agent digital worlds like virtual worlds like Hyper-Fi or Roblox or whatever become some of the main grounds that these agents kind of infiltrate and they can walk around, interact with humans and stuff, just the metaverse concept, then you could argue that protocols like Solgraph could be better positioned to have a direct

interaction with humans, you know, either through voice or maybe they're better designed. Now, of course, the proof is literally in the pudding. So let's see what some of the agents look like. But I've played around with some of their demos on their website, and it seems pretty cool. There's like a financial advisor agent, which you can like talk to and say, hey, you know, like,

I bought Sol the other day and I don't really know what to do with it. And she kind of like guides you with like real market data as to what might be an interesting move to make. And I could just literally speak to it like I'm speaking to you right now, right? The second project that they launched was something called

And to summarize, Lysn is aiming to be the leading DeFi AI project on Arc's framework rig. They're taking a pretty strong chain agnostic approach. So what I like about them or what stood out for me is they're going to start with Solana and then integrate all EVM chains.

Sui and more, right? So to kind of like go back, what is DeFi AI? The best way to describe it right now is the agents that can allow you to interact with DeFi.

So if you wanted to do a bunch of swaps, trading, lending, perps, whatever that might be, instead of trying to figure out which protocol to use, whether the contracts are safe or not, whether there's enough slippage dialed here and there, you could just kind of type in normal human verbose language what you want, and it'll just do it for you. So this is ARK's kind of like project that they're incubating to launch from their platform to achieve this, right? And they're looking to stand out

by offering something a little deeper than just conversational AI for DeFi, David, which is what we've seen with a lot of leaders right now. Can you scroll down and look at some of these examples? I wonder if you can just... Yeah, okay. So this is a perfect one. Instead of just being like, hey, can you do A, B, and C for me? You can kind of talk to it and say, okay, look at this example. Wait for Fartcoin to hit

X dollar market cap, then DCA dollar cost average out of Pengu to Solana after a 20% increase. So it's taking a level deeper in terms of like what these agents can do for you, you know, stable half of my Pepe position if ETH dips below 3k. So you know, two tokens that are completely non related to each other, you can get this thing to do something laborious multiple steps things you can kind of like get done and sorted by this protocol.

I thought I liked the way that they're thinking about this. And Arc's whole approach to this, by the way, this whole like incubation strategy has been to pay attention to quality. I don't know whether that works in the long term, but it's a cool experiment to see, right? Because on the plus side, you're filtering for quality. But on the other side, are you restricting people from playing around with the framework? I don't think they are right now because you can fork or get access to the code and build something cool. But it's just interesting to see.

Yeah, it is interesting to see. We all know DeFi has rough edges. In theory, like this product, I wonder if I actually had my hands on it, if I would actually use it or not. It's a little bit like getting into the car of an autonomous driving car. It's still a little bit scary. I want to press the buttons on my ledger. What would make you, I'm curious, David, what would make you comfortable to use something like this? I would like data that,

that using something like this actually produces a better financial ROI than if I had done it myself. Like if it is, you know, if it's optimizing the right, like sometimes I like to go and do things manually myself because I know I can optimize for the best execution by going to the right spots and doing things in the right ways. And so making sure that it's also being smart on how to do things

how to prevent MEV and getting the best execution and doing things in the right way. And if it can give me more value by doing my task, both faster, more simply, and also in a more value preservative way, then I'd be pretty compelled. Okay. So hypothetically, David, if agent XYZ turns up on Twitter tomorrow and says, hey, I'm an autonomous trader agent and here's my wallet.

It's been funded with $10 million. I'm going to go trade on the liquid market and you can watch my trades live and I will post portfolio updates every hour. And let's say you monitor this for two weeks and at the end of these two weeks, it was up 150%. Would that be convincing enough for you to LP into that agent or would you need more data? I'm just curious.

I at that point, I would LP a small amount into that agent. Yeah. Okay. So it's very reputational. I'm curious. Okay, well, let's take this. I just want to zone in on this point because it's something I think about as well, right? Because I'm like, hey, check out this agent. They're like, is this safe? Like, should I use this? What if a major institution like Coinbase or Binance was like, hey, we got this agent, David.

It's five bucks a month to you. Well, actually, no, that price plan makes no sense. It will take 5% of any kind of fees or swaps or whatever it does with your money. But aside from that, all the profit is yours. But also you will incur all the risk. Is that a yay or a nay?

So my mind goes to how this feels like this shouldn't be a product, because if there is an agent out there or some even a human with some trading methodology, methodology, some, you know, magic algorithm that can turn my dollar into two dollars or, you know, my dollar into five dollars.

why would it open up more? Why would it invite more capital rather than just becoming rich itself? The signal that this is a product that can be sold to me tells me that it's not a real product because if everyone dumps their money into this trying to chase the gains, then the gains go away. That's just how markets work.

Yep, yep. And so I was actually having this exact conversation with a friend the other day, which argued the same thing, David. And I tend to agree. It's like, I think a lot of these agents will make

way more efficient because everyone else is aware of the same alpha that a lot of people, a few people rather, were just privy to behind the scenes, you know, behind their terminals that they paid high amounts to get access to. Now it kind of like decentralizes that information. What I think this ends up

resulting in is the market is going to get smarter and it's going to become increasingly more difficult to access some of these things. And the agents that actually make a lot of money, similar to like all these trading algorithms and bots that are behind IP or trademark IP for some of the top funds, it's going to be a similar thing where it's like this agent is trademarked in general. I don't know how many examples there are of where this business model is actually open source, but I don't think there are many.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. If that is the outcome where DeFi on-chain execution just becomes very efficient, that's a very good outcome for crypto. DeFi execution is terrible. You cannot get good price execution on large trades in DeFi. You have to go to the centralized counterpart's

And it's one of the biggest limiters as to why we can't get further capital to come on chain is because our execution is so bad. So if we can get some rebalancing, some optimization of the markets to optimize for execution, which is what the net effect of that would be, that's just very good for a healthy DeFi ecosystem. Well, it's funny you say that, actually, David. If you bring up this next tweet that we have queued up, this is a demo of an AI16Z ELISA AI,

agent. So that's their framework. Someone built an agent that can autonomously monitor your LP position on one of these decentralized exchanges and keep them around a certain pool price. So for those of you who don't know, in order for these decentralized exchanges to function, there needs to be liquidity of

available for a particular token pair, right? So let's say you want to swap ETH to USDC. You need a bunch of ETH and you need a bunch of USDC in the pool. And the way that it works is people who come in, they want to swap.

They can swap from one asset to another. Price goes up, price goes down, and a fee is taken and the fee goes to the LP provider. But someone needs to provide the liquidity. So you might ask yourself, well, what's the point of providing the liquidity? Well, they earn off the fees, but they only earn off the fees for the price that is being traded.

for an asset. And so one of the most annoying and frustrating things about being a liquidity provider is you need to be around the same price range in order to earn fees. Now, if you had an agent that could just monitor this for you and move your liquidity position up or down. There have been entire startups in DeFi about automated LP rebalancing. Yes, literally. Now you could get all of that done for you by an agent that costs a fraction of a cent, just pay for its compute costs,

and it's good to go. So, I mean, I thought this was pretty fun given that you just literally used that example, David. And so, you know, I kind of like think, okay, so this is in this particular demo, David, this is an agent using computer vision or computer use similar to the agent demo that we just showed. So, you know, it's looking at your screen, it's doing A, B, and C. And I think like, you know,

So could like computer use be the thing that charges this entire industry? Should we not be looking at plugins? Should we just be looking at computer use? And then pull out this next tweet, David, which is kind of, I think it's a response to this demo. Basically, this guy goes, or lady goes,

Cool demo, but you don't even need an AI agent for this. People have been doing this with a much less cool thing called a bot or a script for years, and it's well optimized. But I think an AI agent will perform well when it can decide not to rebalance the LP position, if it thinks that the market will round trip back to the range.

So he's kind of making... If the agent, a bot cannot be... A bot or a script cannot be opinionated about the market. But this guy is saying an agent can be opinionated about the market and it may or may not be correct in just like how humans may or may not be correct. So it's saying an AI agent might perform well if it can be correctly opinionated about the market, which is also kind of the holy grail. Yep. Yep, exactly. You kind of want...

these agents to be able to think and do as a human would, right? Instead of some kind of like mechanical pre-programmed software, right? So I think it's important to kind of balance our eagerness to see something super cool and call everything an agent and be like, wow, agents can change the world with reality and being like, hey guys, there's actually a better way to do this right now. But if you do A, B and C, it could become useful.

All right, Ejaz, last topic of the day. This is a tweet from Nifty Island. That is a throwback. The tweet starts, the AI agent playground grows. What's going on here?

Yeah, so if you remember a few episodes ago, David, we spoke about this team called HyperFi. And again, just came across it across the timeline. And I was like, oh, I like what this team is doing. I kind of dug into it. And I realized that they were some of the OG guys that came from the same communities that Shaw and a lot of other OG AI ML open source devs came from, right? And it got us thinking about the

AI intersection with the metaverse, right? If these agents were put into virtual bodies, how would that change interaction between humans? How would people, you know, want to invest their money when it comes to this kind of like emerging meta? And, you know, it would have been one thing if that was just

the only time we talked about it and nothing ever happened. But I'm still seeing data points, David, that is pushing us towards this vision. Namely, in this example, Nifty Island, but it's partnered with a little-known protocol called Virtuals, of course, which is one of the major agent protocols. And what they've done here is

And Virtuals is partnering with them to provide a kind of virtual world for Virtuals agents to play. And I'm saying Virtuals a lot, but the idea is these agents will be able to do a bunch of things. So it's kind of like their Hyper-Fi play, right? And Hyper-Fi is not, you know, chain specific, it's chain agnostic, but it's cool to see another example of this pattern appearing in a separate ecosystem. It also is a...

quite helpful reminder for ourselves that the virtual team before they became an AI agent platform was pretty heavy on the gaming side. David, if you remember with our interview with Jansen, he spoke about, you know, effectively being a gaming DAO before. And it was that gaming experience and that gaming kind of focus, which led them to think, hmm, I wonder if these non-playable characters could be more than just non-playable characters, which got them started to think about agents,

They saw what was happening in the AI ML world. Their engineers had a lot of AI ML experience. They kind of like paired those two together with crypto's number one incentive mechanism, tokens. And so it's cool to see this extension from the OG team kind of building this out.

And it's also cool to see AI just infiltrate every single other vertical about crypto. We've talked about gaming. We've talked about, um, uh, defy and liquidity providing, uh, we've talked about streaming, uh, and what else have we talked about? Uh,

It just seems to be like computer use. It seems to just be like it kind of just goes back to this is not just an AI crypto agent thing. This is the AIification of everything that we touch in crypto. And kind of like you said at the beginning, a lot of this stuff won't make sense. Some of this stuff will completely change everything we know about crypto. Yep, absolutely.

Ejaz, thank you once again. This is our eighth AI Weekly Rollup. I wouldn't be here without you, man. Thank you for guiding me and the Bankless Nation through the last seven days of the AI agent space. No, I appreciate you having me, David. I just want to reiterate that I am learning all of this in real time. And we're always looking to kind of improve this show and be on the cutting edge. And I don't think I can do it on...

my own. I mean, we can't do it on our own. So a lot of this has been through the help of people just DMing us and DMing me and being like, hey, check out this protocol, or you should meet this team. Please keep it up, guys. And I'm not usually one for people saying, hey, DM me, random stranger. But it is super helpful for me because I can't keep track of everything. And if you've got a project that you're passionate about, like just talk to me. And I just want to like learn about it. So yeah, thanks for everyone so far.

We'll see if you really enjoy giving out that request to get DMed next week. We'll see what your DMs look like. But EGS, it's good to see you, my man. I'll see you in seven days. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. If crypto is risky, crypto AI is even riskier, you can lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.

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