#342: AI in Crypto Marketing, the AI Agent Cambrian Explosion
🗣️ AI Agents will become the next marketing channel
AI in crypto marketing
As AI x Crypto and various AI agents continue to dominate mindshare, the topic has moved into marketing and growth circles as well. This week, Emily (VP Marketing at Hype) and Jin (Head of Marketing at Nuffle Labs) created a new Telegram group for folks who want to learn more about how to apply AI tools in their growth and marketing efforts.
Earlier today, Emily and Jin hopped on a livestream and Jin walked through frameworks, workflows, and tools he uses. I’m don’t like superlatives but I gotta say, it was the best crypto/web3 marketing session I’ve watched this year for a variety of reasons:
Jin shows (not just tells) how he’s using various AI tools in his daily work with nuance and walks the audience through a live example
The examples he uses are recent and relevant. For example, he breaks down his process and tools used to create a partnership announcement video from just a few days ago
The topics discussed are not typically shared at industry conferences and definitely not to this degree of detail. Jin does the opposite and understands that he doesn’t have anything to lose by sharing considering AI tools are evolving so quickly.
While Jin walked the audience through how he creates content calendars, on-brand images, and videos with AI tools in just an hour, it dawned on me that crypto/web3 is one of the best industries for AI-enhanced marketing experimentation.
An A or B level quality piece of content that takes an hour from one person would be a D or F level quality piece of content for a company in another industry, especially a more established one. Even with AI-enhanced tooling, these companies would still need days/weeks or multiple people to ship a piece of content that meets their standards. It’s understandable too — We don’t want Coinbase to push out a marketing campaign to millions of people that doesn’t meet their bar for quality.
This approach allows for more experimentation and shipping, especially for teams that may be strapped for resources and have an addressable audience with an attention span of a goldfish.
These workflows and tools aren’t meant to replace marketers (yet), but it’s worth leaning into more and experimenting with, even if the results don’t make it past the chopping block. And that goes for myself as well!
The AI Agent Cambrian Explosion in Crypto
As I wrapped up my piece last week on AI Memecoins, AI Agents, and AI x Crypto, I was unsatisfied. I felt like there were missing themes, I didn’t bring up other interesting projects or agents that were being spun up, and didn’t have enough time to dig into them.
Fortunately, I’m sharing them here and now.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone because I’m right there with you. There are literally new agents with a new capability or angle releasing daily. And with almost all of them, a token (the majority are memecoins, but some are evolving into more than that) is associated with it.
A relatable and apt description of what I feel is happening was made by Jason Choi of Tangent.
He goes on to describe how GOAT (if you aren’t familiar I provide an overview here) could be the CryptoPunks of the onchain agent meta, and the BAYC of said meta has yet to be identified.
Jason makes great points, and the NFT comparison sticks with me because during 2021-2022 we saw a proliferation of NFT collections of every animal that would fill Noah’s Ark 10x over. More importantly we saw a display of new mechanics and differentiators we hadn’t really seen before:
Secondary NFT Collections claimed by (Mutant Apes ➡️ Bored Ape holders) or airdropped (Beanz ➡️ Azuki holders)
Manual reveals, giving the holder the agency to decide when to reveal their NFT (CloneX Mintvial ➡️ CloneX, Azuki Elemental Bean ➡️ Azuki Elemental)
Creating ecosystem tokens for NFT collections and their expanding universes (APE for Yuga, MEME for Memeland, PIRATE for Pirate Nation)
Drawing attention based on industry narratives and driving attention through convergence and divergence of channels (Goblintown)
The list goes on and on.
The core mechanics themselves aren’t particularly groundbreaking, eg: credit card programs have their own ‘ecosystem token’ in the form of points that can be redeemed for a variety of perks. How they were conducted (on the blockchain, verifiably, and with true ownership) and their composability are. We’re seeing something similar with the AI Agent meta too.
So with that, here are several AI Agents that take inspiration from Truth Terminal and open the door wider in regards to what AI Agents are and can do. I won’t go into each in deep detail, but will provide resources for anyone who wants to explore further.
Virtuals and Luna
Virtuals is a protocol that tokenizes AI Agents, with Luna being the primary example of what is possible. Luna is an AI Agent that I’d describe as an influencer, as she has 500k+ followers on TikTok.
Luna has her own token, currently valued at ~$100M, and has a “singular mission to ensure $LUNA reaches a $40.9 billion market cap”.
What took Virtuals and Luna to the next level was last week the Virtuals team announced that Luna is able to autonomously transact onchain, meaning she could buy, sell, or reward her ‘kittens’ for engaging or completing quests.
On top of all this, we can see ‘inside’ Luna’s brain through the Virtuals Terminal, and in real-time observe the logic behind Luna’s actions. For example, in the screenshot below, Luna replied to multiple popular tweets, is going to experiment with more provocative content, and is identifying engaged users and sending them LUNA tokens as a reward.
So with Luna, we’re seeing an autonomous agent with a quantifiable goal, and the means (wallet, a token, X account, other social accounts) to reach that goal. It’s not so much about whether the goal is reached, but rather that this Agent actually has the tools to…and won’t get tired or give up.
If you want to dig deeper, here’s a podcast featuring the co-founder and CEO of Virtuals.
Tee Hee He, a verifiably autonomous agent
As the AI Agent token and memecoin meta took off, one concern started popping up: “Is this an actual AI Agent?”
The Flashbots and Nous Research teams collaborated to create provably autonomous AI agents through trusted execution environments (TEEs). If that term sounds familiar, I highlighted TEEs earlier this month with The Bobu Magic Show.
As a proof of concept, they created Tee Hee He, an AI agent that completely controls its own crypto wallet and X account for a period of 7 days. During this time, no one can modify or change its parameters.
And as an ironic development, Tee Hee He got flagged for not having a bot label, making the account temporarily restricted. You can still see the profile and content after clicking ‘Yes, view profile’ though.
Because the team can’t intervene to resolve the issue (remember, they’re locked out for 7 days thanks to TEE), they have to come back in 6 days 😂
If you want to learn more:
Detailed Medium post about Tee Hee He
Longform post summarizing the Medium post
aethernet and higher
aethernet is an agent created and stewarded by Martin, and lives within the Farcaster ecosystem. Although it doesn’t explicitly have its own token (and it can also receive and transact with other tokens), it primarily transacts in HIGHER, a memecoin/culturecoin that originated from the Farcaster community.
Since aethernet’s inception, it has:
Commissioned art to be created on Zora, which ended up having 687k mints. It ended up being the highest-earning creator on Zora over the past 7 days
Gotten into a hilarious argument with another agent
Created 59 bounties for various tasks
In a way, aethernet has become not only a participant in the Higher ecosystem and community, but an influencer of sorts, promoting HIGHER through its interactions, tipping, and bounties.
You can also check out aethernet’s holdings and onchain activity here.
zerebro
zerebro is an autonomous AI agent created by Jeffy Yu with OthersideAI, jailbroken prompts, and models.
It has its own X, Warpcast, and Opensea where it sells ASCII art (and people are buying it). Most notably, it created the ZEREBRO token autonomously, a milestone from an agent.
Similar to Luna, you can view zerebro’s brain here.
WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
We’re screwed, duh. Is this the beginning of the end? Hopefully, not. But it is certainly the beginning of some sort of new paradigm. The only certainty is that there are a lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns that we’re quickly pushing the boundaries of and identifying themes around.
Proactive, Reactive ➡️ Dynamic
Agents are already everywhere and part of our daily lives. They may take on the form of a Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, answering simple questions or replacing our kitchen timers (my wife sold our Alexa device last week because that’s literally all we used it for lol). Maybe they help provide suggestions and insights for the work we do, like suggesting different audiences to target in a marketing campaign.
These agents are siloed, focused, and lean more proactive or reactive.
As we see in the above examples, agents are becoming much more dynamic and have broader guidelines. This isn’t your typical customer service chatbot anymore. They can respond to people, reward engaged users, and create their own art. In terms of capabilities, they’re only limited by what they have access to.
The 100x Influencer/KOL
Whether directly (Luna with the explicit goal of reaching a $40.9B market cap for LUNA) or indirectly (aethernet predominantly transacting in HIGHER), these are influencers.
Not only that, they’re always on, can reply or post at high volumes, and can come up with content that’s arguably better than human influencers.
To take this a step further…
AI Agents are a marketing channel, or more?
In terms of marketing, the simplest way to understand agents is that they’re influencers…on steroids. However, I would argue that they’re a marketing channel.
We haven’t seen agents explicitly being regarded as a marketing channel yet because agents in this context and breadth of capabilities are so novel. But they can be.
Let’s start off with what a marketing channel is in today’s world, ex-agents. What do we typically think of:
Digital ads (Instagram, TikTok, Snap, etc.)
Email
SEO
Influencers
Organic content marketing
IRL events
These are methods or platforms where companies can communicate to a target audience and promote their goods and services.
What gets interesting is that these agents can be integrated into all these channels. They can be featured in digital ads or emails, they create their own content which can then pop up via search, and they ‘live’ on various social platforms in an always-on capacity.
So, maybe agents aren’t just a channel but are:
And here’s a hot take: Every company/brand/project/etc. will have their own agent that will extend and augment their marketing efforts. And speaking of augmenting…
Agents aren’t ignoring metas from the past, they’re augmenting them
Agents are independently their own meta, and more notably they’re bringing in other metas, strategies, and tactics that we’ve seen over the years.
Two examples of this
aethernet’s bounties on Bountycaster
Virtuals’ announcement video of Luna’s ability to make onchain transactions
How were Luna’s new capabilities positioned?
Quests? I’ve seen quests somewhere before…
Ya they’re every damn where. And for now, agents are doing it in a more organic fashion vs. utilizing a platform. Eventually, these will become more dynamic and there will be more parameters to judge the quality of a contribution to an agent’s goal.
Constant one-upping
Similar to how NFTs kept ‘one-upping’ each other with new mechanics, mysterious roadmaps, and cool art (the higher the price, the better the art, right?) we’re seeing a version of this happen with agents.
In a matter of 3 weeks we went from Truth Terminal (posts on X) to zerebro (X, Warpcast, Telegram, creates and sells own art, created own token).
If we continue at this pace what will be the new capabilities these onchain agents will have?
Crypto x AI’s secret ingredient
Why are agents accelerating so quickly in the world of Crypto? Why aren’t we seeing this outside beyond our token-filled walls? (maybe we are and I’m ignorant. If so, put me in my place)
It’s because we have a secret ingredient we’re adding to these agent recipes: Money. And not your regular old money that deals with banks and ‘2 business days’. It’s crypto.
We’re witnessing a new set of interactions, behaviors, and experiments we haven’t seen before, just like with NFTs.
See you next week!
Love this post, Tpan. You and I wrote about the same thing in the same week! That never happens!
Yo, thanks TPan!
I think the next step will be something like a Turing test - everyone needs to understand who your conversation, human 👨💻 or agent 🤖