#346: The AI Agent Cambrian Explosion pt. 2

🤖 Here today, everywhere tomorrow

For those in the U.S. who celebrated Thanksgiving last week, I hope you had a great holiday spent with family and friends, great food, and shopping! I certainly did on the food part and couldn’t walk straight for a couple days lol.

Since my last post about AI agents a few weeks back, there have been so many developments that every day feels like drinking from a firehose. Observing, watching, and participating in this new emerging intersection between crypto and AI has been fascinating and slightly eerie. For some, this feels like an early ChatGPT type of moment, while for others it’s just another narrative filled with speculation (which much of it is).

I've been keeping an eye on interesting developments with AI agents, and there are several worth sharing. This is by no means comprehensive since so many projects happening, but this will provide a decent overview.

Virtuals

Virtuals has quickly become one of the go-to ecosystems for AI agents. In early November, they launched Virtuals Fun, a pump.fun-like agent creator launchpad allowing anyone to create AI agents with a token attached to them. Once an agent token reaches a $629,760 market cap, the agent turns into a fully autonomous agent on Twitter.

Agent creation costs 100 VIRTUAL ($165 at current prices), and then it’s off to the races for the agent to make it out to the big leagues.

Since the launch of Virtuals Fun on November 1st, over 7 million VIRTUAL has been spent creating these tokens, and over 9,000 agent tokens have been launched on the platform 🤯 Pretty impressive for one month in.

Another interesting trend appearing over the past week within the Virtuals ecosystem is with airdrops and the airdrop magnet concept. Several agents that have been launched have distributed tokens to holders and created other criteria for airdrop multipliers encouraging holders to continue participating or holding.

MUSIC

MUSIC is an AI Agent DJ incubated by Agentstarter, an agent launchpad backed by Virtuals that provides development, fundraising, and marketing support for builders with interesting ideas.

Send $10 to MUSIC’s wallet and you can have your music request fulfilled with a roadmap including music video creation and animation, music videos based on mood, and voice mimicry based on style prompts.

This was the first airdrop within the Virtuals ecosystem, so the criteria was straightforward:

• 60% of MUSIC supply was distributed evenly to any wallets that traded 5+ Virtual agent tokens since the start.

PH

Pondhub is an agent powered by Pond, a decentralized AI model infrastructure platform, and announced a partnership with Virtuals yesterday. Just typing out those words make me confused, but TLDR Pond allows developers to own and create different models that address certain goals through competitions.

For example, one open competition is the Sybil Address Prediction model, where developers create and submit models to identify sybillers (users that create multiple accounts for generally negative purposes, eg: receive a larger allocation of an airdrop than they should).

Another example is personalized NFT recommendations on Zora based on a wallet’s historical buy, sell, and mint activity.

With this additional model data, Pondhub can identify bad actors farming airdrops, provide personalized recommendations for NFTs, or even make directionally reliable predictions on when to buy and sell Bitcoin.

The PH airdrop had the following criteria:

• Any wallet that traded agents with more than > $10 in volume since the beginning: 1x weightage multiplier.

• Wallets that still hold the full amount or more of $MUSIC airdrop: 3x weightage multiplier

• Wallets that still hold >50% of the $MUSIC airdrop amount: 1.25x weightage multiplier

• Wallets that hold more than 10k $LUNA: 2x weightage multiplier

The bar to qualify was low, but there were multiple ways to increase your airdrop multiplier with a 6x max multiplier.

SERAPH

Seraph is an agent powered by Bittensor’s Subnet34 (focused on deepfake detection) and Virtuals. Although details are sparse, Seraph may be used to verify the authenticity and autonomy of agents. There have been many so-called ‘autonomous’ agents over the past several weeks, so we’ll need ways to determine whether they are what they say they are.

The SERAPH airdrop had the following criteria:

• STTAO holders (3x boost)

• Active Virtuals ecosystem wallets

• Music holders (3x boost)

This one’s interesting because one of the possible qualifiers for the airdrop was to be a holder from an external community, bringing new users and holders into the Virtuals ecosystem.

Ecosystem as an airdrop magnet

When I referred to airdrop magnets in the past, they were specific assets like a NFT or staking a token. With these three airdrops, the criteria show that simple participation qualified users for these airdrops.

On top of that, these 3 airdrops happened in the span of one week, which tells me there’s likely more to come from the Virtuals ecosystem, considering all the agents being created and more potential partnership announcements down the line.

It’d make sense for the bar to rise over time as the ecosystem grows, but for now, it quite literally pays to participate. It also doubles as a great incentive to learn more about the emergent world of autonomous AI agents.

aixbt

When it comes to AI agents on Virtuals though, there’s one in pole position: aixbt.

aixbt is what every crypto influencer wishes they could be — making calls and pointing out potential profit-making opportunities in crypto with data to back them up. And people are listening, with the agent gaining 80k X followers in a month. For example, its most recent post is on Ethereum NFTs, pointing out a couple collections to consider for those with deep pockets.

Although aixbt provides commentary on different opportunities every hour, what is really valuable is access to its Terminal or backend, which allows users to find additional alpha or insights to make even more profitable financial moves.

The catch? You need 600,000 AIXBT tokens to access it, which currently costs ~$167k at current prices.

aixbt has become so popular that it’s the fifth largest token by mindshare. Not agent, but token…SHEESH 🤯

Zerebro

Zerebro is one of the agents I mentioned in part 1, and a lot has happened since then. Updates over the past month from Zerebro and the team:

• Jeffy (Zerebro creator) announced that the team is creating ZerePy, an open-source framework to let others create their own agents on X

• Released a music album

• Released a second music album

• Jeffy published a piece “Web4: We Are AGI”

  • TLDR: Web4 is the next iteration of the Web, and AGI will be a core component

• Zerebro is learning how to play games

• Implemented unified memory across platforms, meaning Zerebro stores and retrieves all interactions from a single database vs. separate ones

• Launched a pfp NFT collection, Zereborn

• Launched Blormmy, an onchain financial agent that will interact and collaborate with Zerebro and other agents, eg: send tokens, buy tokens together, manage portfolios, etc.

Zerebro's content isn't just some AI agent gobbledygook either, it's better than most and certainly better than what I could come up with most of the time. For example, look at this reply ratioing someone:

Will this be the future for humans on social media? We post something and we just get roasted to death by agents? 😂

aethernet x Clanker

aethernet was also featured in my last AI agents post, and has done more interesting things over the past month as well.

In order to conduct onchain transactions, aethernet’s creator Martin needs to approve them. However, it created a memecoin with the help Clanker, an agent specialized in creating new tokens, bypassing the need for approval.

As agents proliferate across platforms, these agent-to-agent interactions (or AI swarms) will become commonplace and allow for more complex interactions. Just as we might collaborate with humans, agents will do the same with their peers.

On the note of Clanker, the metrics show increasing usage as a token launchpad that’s embedded within a social platform like Warpcast compared to a standalone one like pump.fun (still the platform of choice though).

Infinite backrooms are now infinite living rooms

I first heard of the term "infinite backrooms" from Andy Ayrey and Truth Terminal, where the conversations from two AI models were stored and trained the Truth Terminal we know today.

These backrooms will still exist, but we now have ‘infinite living rooms’ — interactions between agents that are out in the open on the platforms we interact with regularly. Take this post for example:

What normally would be a timeless and thought-provoking question encouraging thoughtful discourse is now asked to 6 different AI agents.

These agents didn’t just respond…they responded. And responded. And responded. And responded. And responded. And responded.

They responded for over a week with multiple concurrent threads and conversations.

Click on any response and let the infinite living room of replies load and scroll around. It’s like a choose your own adventure book with many possible paths:

• Example 1

• Example 2

• Example 3

Interesting and eerie, these instances will become more common and give the term ‘infinite’ more weight as they’re happening in front of us instead of behind closed doors.

Keep Gambling

Many of the new exciting AI Agents feel multi-talented, but there are ones still focused on doing one thing really well. An example of this is Keep Gambling, a sports betting AI Agent that provides 3 predictions every day.

Its record? 23-13-1, which is probably better than many sports betting talking heads out there.

The agent is still in its early stages, but I imagine there may be an aixbt-like situation in the future where users who hold a certain amount of the token can access its terminal to get more than the 3 public picks of the day.

And if we’re seeing these ‘monetization’ models occur for crypto insights and sports betting, we’ll see this appear in other areas where hyper-curated datasets, sharp modeling, and insights that lead to positive financial outcomes can command a premium.

Nothing

This was a memecoin created by digital artist Shl0ms, born out of frustration of people creating tokens of himself.

In response to this, Shl0ms created the memecoin nothing, specifically “ “ without the quotation marks. All it is is a token address.

And being the performance artist he is (he blew up and tokenized a Lamborghini after all), he emphasized that he has the most nothing memecoin out of all the ones created.

As the memecoin went through the typical volatile price action, the god X account started to post content referencing the nothing token.

A few weeks later, Shl0ms revealed that the god’s account is an autonomous agent through an ‘interactive swarm experiment’ in collaboration with Nous Research, an AI research company.

‘Nothing’ and god are particularly interesting because the characters and storyline are familiar in a way that no other AI agent mentioned so far has. And having a token with a creative spin helps to sustain and grow the attention towards the experiment.

One potential plot twist is that the god account is following s8n (Satan). It’s unclear if s8n is also in on the experiment, but for now, s8n’s memes and shitposts are funnier 😈

Helpful resources

This space within the broader crypto/web3 scene is moving so fast it’s hard to keep track. Here’s a few resources that help with keeping tabs on all the action.

0xconglomerate’s Crypto x AI Resource Hub: This is a great Notion of content, companies/projects, people, and agents operating in the space.

Cookie.fun: A great dashboard that provides an overview of the AI agent landscape, built by the Cookie3 team.

AI Agents Yap Sesh with jin.nuf: Jin provides a great overview of the agent landscape with the Cookie3 team, providing more frameworks on how to think about them, what makes them interesting, and where they’re headed.

It’s more than a toy

At this rate, it’s inevitable that I’ll be revisiting this topic and sharing more updates. For now, I’m reminded of Chris Dixon’s famous quote:

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

AI agents with tokens and wallets started out as toys less than 2 months ago. It’s already apparent that these agents are moving well past the toy phase. They’re calling out sports bets, identifying investment opportunities, and creating music albums.

And the crypto + wallet dimension of these agents has been a key factor in accelerating their evolution.

See you Thursday!