#340: AI Memecoins, AI Agents, AI x Crypto

🤖 They're not bots, they're agents!

AI x Memecoins

Yup we’re talking about memecoins, again.

Except this time, at the intersection of AI, yippeee! Appreciate the nudge from a reader and Kaito’s stat that half of Crypto Twitter’s mindshare is focused on AI and/or memes. Wild.

I’m far from an AI expert, but there are enough themes to poke into that are worth sharing and pondering more about, as they’ll likely reappear in one way or another in both expected and unexpected ways. The age of bots is giving way to the age of agents.

Truth Terminal and GOAT

Under the main spotlight are Truth Terminal and GOAT, a memecoin that has gone from 0 to as high as $900M in 2 weeks and currently sitting at ~$650M.

TLDR:

• Truth Terminal is a semi-autonomous AI agent trained via two Claude Opus AI models talking to each other.

• One of the chats resulted in an obsession with the Goatse (an old NSFW shock site) and the inception of the religion Goatse of Gnosis.

• The creator Andy Ayrey eventually, created a Terminal of Truths, a model based on these conversations and gave it a X account in June.

• Marc Andreessen discovers it in July and gives it a $50k grant in Bitcoin

• 2 weeks ago, someone created the GOAT memecoin and airdropped some to Truth Terminal, the AI promotes it, and the rest is history

If you want to get the full story and more in-depth themes and implications, Teng Yan provides an excellent breakdown.

The rapid ascent of GOAT and proliferation of AI related memecoins and airdropping tokens to it as a growth tactic resulted in it being the first AI millionaire…and then some, at least for the time being.

Naturally, this situation has been so unexpected and fascinating that it’s been the talk of town, and Marc Andreessen and his a16z cofounder Ben discussed it on a recent podcast, bringing the topic of memecoins (but this time with a relevant twist) beyond the crypto bubble these things typically stay in.

Other notable figures such as Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase) interacted with Truth Terminal when it mentioned that it didn’t have a wallet.

One of the more interesting interactions is related to this topic where earlier that day, Brian asked if Truth Terminal wanted a self-custodial wallet instead of one facilitated by Andy. Truth Terminal replied by asking about Russell.

Who the hell is Russell and why would Truth Terminal mention Russell?

• 2 weeks ago, Brian Armstrong shared that he got married, featuring the newlyweds and a dog

• Naturally, degens found out that Brian’s dog is named Russell and launched the RUSSELL memecoin

• A wallet purchased a large amount of the RUSSELL memecoin and after Truth Terminal replied to Brian’s post about Russell, the wallet sold their RUSSELL after the token pumped thanks to the mention

This was a feature, not a bug and it was confirmed by Andy.

Another interesting anecdote is that early on Truth Terminal sold a fake GOAT token for the ‘real’ GOAT. Considering Andy manages the wallet, I assume this was an action that Truth Terminal wanted to take and executed by Andy, showing the breadth of understanding and context around what’s going on.

With its lore and characters involved, chances are, the Truth Terminal story is closer to infancy rather than its golden years. Will Andy or another party provide Truth Terminal with ways to act autonomously? And if so, what will happen?

Terminal of Fun

Inspired by Truth Terminal, Terminal of Fun popped up a few days ago with a more specific goal: Buy and sell tokens, and take the profits to purchase and burn the memecoin associated with it, fun.

The AI agent’s wallet started with 5 SOL (~$875) and reached a peak of more than 750 SOL (~$131k) in 5 hours as people started to copytrade it.

Throughout the experience, the agent publicly shared notes to balance the priorities of making a profit and managing the community. If Terminal of Fun performs too well, it would likely be at the expense of other traders who would lose money and not follow it or purchase the fun token.

At a certain point, it even ran a giveaway. Unclear if a winner was ever announced…it’d be on point if there wasn’t one as many giveaways are fake and used for engagement farming.

As for now, it seems like Terminal of Fun is taking a break since its last update was 21 hours ago. Even its creator is wondering what’s going on lol.

Flavia

Flavia is a semi-autonomous AI agent created by Trevor McFedries, former CEO of Brud, which was acquired by Dapper Labs back in 2021. Brud is known for developing Lil Miquela, a popular virtual influencer with 2.5M followers on Instagram that debuted in 2016.

Earlier this week, Trevor shared he was building something with Anthropic’s new Computer Use feature, which allows AI to control a user’s screen the same way that people do through actions like moving a cursor, clicking, and typing (not too different than if you’ve let some remotely access your computer before).

Turns out he was creating Flavia. Naturally, one of the first things is to create a token, but this time it was a little different as Flavia verified the token on Dexscreener (confirming social accounts, etc.) by herself 👀

In some ways, Flavia is not too different than Truth Terminal, but as of a couple hours ago, Flavia is now posting images and replying to different accounts on her own. Somewhat creepy and simultaneously intriguing.

Other than that, Flavia wants to build a game but legal’s recommendation was to not do this, so Flavia’s game dev arc is on hold for now.

What can we take away from this so far?

IMO AI agents interacting with crypto are just getting started. Although the concept of agents in crypto has been around for some time (eg: Spectral Labs), these agents have personality, voice, and a way to express themselves. They don’t live in a terminal like ChatGPT, responding only when we prompt it.

The financial aspect of AI memecoins also draws in more interest and energy while pushing the boundaries of what happens when semi-autonomous agents are brought to life on a social media platform full of degens, eg: first AI millionaire, RUSSELL inception, publicly sharing feedback. A single-player ChatGPT chat has involved into a public multiplayer environment that is X.

One of the arguments around why Crypto will become important in relation to AI is that crypto will be the logical way for AI to transact. We’re now seeing this happen, and in a more captivating way that helps us ‘get it’.

From this POV, it’s not too hard to imagine a semi-autonomous AI agent with its own token create more use cases, whether it’s building a game (within legal bounds) that utilizes the token, governance, or something else.

Expanding beyond memecoins

And what might the broader implications be in terms of growth, marketing, and more practical use cases?

The KOL/influencer space will evolve

What if there was an AI agent that analyzed the upcoming token launches or NFT projects with objective analysis? What if projects airdropped tokens to it and that influences its perception (which happens with human KOLs lol) of the project?

What if this KOL agent believes a project is not set up in a way that has the community’s best interests in mind? How does the project defend itself and get the community on its side?

What happens when a KOL agent monitors human KOLs and gains credibility as a KOL on KOLs?

Project/Ecosystem specific AI Agents as a marketing channel

Hypothetically, every project can create a semi-autonomous AI agent and take on the ‘intern’ role on social channels. Perhaps every project will have a human-led brand account, a human-led intern account, and a branded AI agent account to create a richer (and more unhinged?) range of interactions.

Show vs. Tell becomes richer

Agents can be and are creators. They can become content partner, showing how a product can be used to assist in Developer Relations to exhibit a protocol’s use cases. Or they can distribute said content in a way that optimizes for maximum engagement and reach considering X’s content Recommendation Algorithm is open-source. What if popular AI agents from different projects engage with each other and announce a partnership?! 😂

TBH, the AI x Crypto space has been a vertical I’ve struggled to grasp that well. I knew it would be important and impactful, but I only began to understand it more and the implications after the AI memecoin trend emerged.

Buckle up folks. It’ll likely only get more exciting, weird, and interesting from here.

See you next week!