The Hottest AI Crypto Trends of 2025

[Music] welcome bankless Nation to the AI rollup where we cover the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host and AI expert e Jazz and we are here to make sure that you are up to speed with the rapidly evolving AI agent space out there EZ how you doing my man doing well David um I think last week was super Fullon because we had the Christmas break and every agent team deci Ed to launch pretty major things I'm happy to be back into the flow

of things it's a new year um and there's new exciting updates so yeah excited to get into it maybe this is me just projecting my own personal experience but I feel like coming back into the world of crypto getting back into the trenches in January 1st is really refreshing and also kind of with met with a new found Invigoration specifically for AI agents I think may maybe I knew I was always going to do that coming back from the holidays is like man once January 1st comes I'm just going to double down that's how I

feel at least it it sounds like you went away did some human stuff David I did did some human stuff and now you you just miss the agents you miss that digital engagement you miss being in some subversive World metaverse dare I say It's just nice when there are just Paradigm breaking innovations that seemingly come out every seven days because that's what got me into crypto that's the vibe I'm here for uh I remember um hunter horley from bitwise commented about how volatility is like a core feature of crypto and I've replied uh I'm I

leave crypto the day volatility leaves crypto uh and that comes also you know part and parcel with just rapidly innovating Tech and fundamentals and uh That's what we're seeing in the AI space yeah it's like some sadistic relationship we all we all complain about it the markets are down today everyone's calling for the end of the world but then when those markets go up we're back here again and and at the end of the day um I think what it is is crypto really gives um the clearest and most accurate pulse check on how the

market feels about something if it's bad that price is going down if it's good Price is going up yeah yeah yeah well okay so you and I have seen some crypto Cycles I think we are here for these eras of Rapid Innovation uh bubbles are eras of Rapid Innovation bubbles create real fundamentals uh so e I'm going to ask you the question that I asked you at the of every single AI rollup what's the big deal why are we so excited about AI agents why is the world refocusing its attention to AI agents why is

there so much Innovation Happening Here Yeah I Was thinking about this this morning David and honestly my answer today is going to sound boring but I think it's super important sits around efficiency okay so efficiency is typically like this paraded phrase that you hear at like big corporate companies oh we need to increase efficiency by 30% and you know improve profit margins by blah blah blah I'm not talking about that I'm talking about um the fact that blockchains whether you like it or not Right now are still a little bit clanky still a little bit

clunky right quite a bit quite AIT Yeah by a little bit I mean quite a bit um but when it comes to what these agents can actually do and what they will eventually do is make these markets these defi things these uh gaming things a hell of a lot more efficient to use and interact with and I think that's a real step change that a lot of people aren't talking about I'll give you an example actually stable Coins it's not the most exciting thing to crypto Twitter because prices on going up and down it's literally

it's use cases to be stable but it is one of crypto's most winning use cases to this state second to bitcoin I'd argue you know you have multi- hundred billions of dollars being transacted every year or actually every month at this point and its adoption rate is increasing super massively but no one it's a it's a very quietly spoken about Trend and I think Agents are going to enable the same thing across every different parameter of crypto yeah this is um reminding me of a I think a cast a far cast or cast that I

saw from someone where uh there was this meme coin that they wanted to buy uh and so they they mentioned this bot this Banker bot hey Pele please buy me $90 of this meme coin just $90 uh this one meme coin turned into $6,000 just a couple weeks later and I think it it was what They were referencing what they were citing is the ease at which this Banker bot uh gave them the opportunity to just go quickly ape $90 and they didn't have to open up a wallet they didn't have to go find their

Ledger they just say hey Banker bot buy me $90 for this token uh and it was a foraster bot I think these things really get even closer to human The Human Experience like these things become not just accounts that you at on farcaster or on Twitter but become like More embedded in your own personal wallet become a little bit closer to you uh but you can start to see the writing on the RWS of just like AI agents make things easier everything easier the whole internet experience easier and the things on the internet that are

especially clunky and hard to navigate like blockchains are the main beneficiaries of that yep yep couldn't agree more um I think that the majority of the market have hasn't priced his Vision in David and it's funny because you and I probably don't believe it as much because we talk about it every week but if you talk to anyone outside of the crypto AI circles they have very little knowledge as to what's going on here and that's I think both um an asymmetric value because you know we're super early and we're breaking this news and stuff

but also it shows that we could probably do a better job at educating and you know that's like one of the major points Of this show it's why Bank started and I'm hoping we can do a better job at that and actually on that note I kind of have some big questions for you each that I want to start off this AI roll kind of big questions David just kind of like zoomed out High Lev questions cuz I I I want to learn from you is it's trench chime I'm digging in the trenches here and

I want to kind of learn how you do it how how you have done it uh so I have a a set of questions that I want to Pick your brain about uh the first one here is um just like what are your utility websites that you like the websites that you go to to acquire information look at Broad Strokes learn something fun like gather some information likees I we're all kind of familiar with these in the crypto space coin gecko would be the biggity weite I think for the normal crypto space but then there's

others as well like Dune analytics utility websites do you have Any like favorite utility websites that you like to look at so David you know how normal functioning humans at least in America wake up and you know they they grab a cup of coffee and they sip you know they sip that coffee and it tastes so good um that's me and my relationship with cookie fun and Kaio I open up these two things every day and I'm like okay give me a market pulse of you know this entire kind of space and to be clear

neither of these people Sponsor me like this is not a page shell or anything I just love the products um and let's kind of like work through it so cookie. fun we mentioned this last week I think they're kind of trying to be the coin gecko or the coin market cap of AI agents so it's giving you like an overall insight into what the total U mind share is for these things it's giving you an idea of the total market cap of these different agents across different ecosystems you can break it Down by agent or

by ecosystem super cool website they're releasing a bunch of cool features I think in the future um I was chatting to the CEO and the founder and he was like yeah we're working on a bunch of cool things the second thing is Kido so Kido where I think is like um really cool is it's kind of like um and it was ahead of this time in the way that I'm about to describe it it's kind of like speaking to a chat gbt for whatever happening in crypto Twitter Right so what it does is it queries

um Twitter it like pulls from their apis it is able to pull across a lot of sentiment checks and pulse checks to see you know what the market is talking about and it gives you really amazing insight as to what is going on so I use it to kind of dig into specific projects so for example if there is a new token or a new team that launches something I go to Kito and I can literally type in the ticker or I can type in the term or Phrase and it pulls instantly in that like

for the last 24 hours last 7 Days everything and sorts it by like the top things going to the least most important things about that phrase or about that ticket which is pretty amazing to do now Twitter kind of enables that function but it is to be honest Twitter's search function is pretty terrible and if anyone is listening from Twitter or X please like you know reach out and I'm happy to you know provide some advice There but like kaido just does an amazing job at aggregating and serving up information so these two platforms I

rely on quite a lot in terms of giving me a pulse check as to what's going on the third recommendation is of course X that is where most of the alpha is broken crypto Twitter is called crypto Twitter for a reason um and Still Remains one of my top kind of like research polls um today okay so this kind of brings me to my next question uh What are the first things that you do in order to like evaluate an agent somebody is saying like hey check this out or you you some across an agent

maybe on X is that is this your rotation you you go look at them on cookie. fun you go look at them on kaido you like go look at what the discourse is on Twitter is that more or less your process a version of it but let me specify what's different so firstly if there's a new agent or a protocol that um is mentioned or people Are hyping I try and use the thing or if there is no thing to use I try and see as many demos and stuff that I can an example recently

is griffan right so it's this agent engine basically chat GPT but make it onchain stuff and I was like okay cool how do I use this stuff okay well there's a private beta thing okay there's a demo and I just crunch through all the demos because at the end of the day I want to know what this thing is and whether it can communicate To me what that thing can do so after I've done that whether let's say for example it's an agent I'll go on to the agent's Twitter profile I'll see what tweets it's

making I'll see whether there's any links to any kind of function that I can use and I'm able to kind of like play around and use it right um so firstly I try and do something with it and from there I go into the sentiment analysis the you know who's talking about this why is it Important I try and read from some of my favorite uh kol's on Twitter or whatever see if they have posted about it and I kind of like absorb their thoughts and it helps me learn and bring up myself up to

speed because I'm just a learner here right I'm not I don't kind of see myself as any kind of like K to be honest I see myself as like a learner and whatever I learn I can like communicate that to people so that's stage number two stage number three is I think crypto's number One point which is if you can if you like if the if you pass the first two steps and you like what you see David what do you do what are you looking for you bu you look at the mar you look

at the market cat first you look at the you okay maybe you do I just I if I if I like the thing I'm aping right and the reason why I do this right isn't because I'm like oh my God price is going to go up and blah I think it's important to have a stake in something that you about Because if you have a in something you're always going to keep track of it it's you're going to be like oh I have this bag I need to see what the team's pushing out and it

forces you to learn you're an investor you're an investor sure it forces you to learn and that aligns me economically and socially to keep learning about these things okay so first you play with the toy you get your hands on the toy you see if you like the toy you see if other people are talking About the toy and what they are saying about the toy uh and then uh if you pass those to test then you buy the toy uh you buy a share of the toy and then and then you and then you

go from there and then the ball's rolling I own a lot of toy shares David yes you like you have a lot of toys in Your Arsenal some of these toys are broken but some of them are doing pretty well okay uh next question is this like a one cycle Long play are you trying to sell the top here Or or are you betting on this kind of being like a paradigm shift of our expectations about the future of crypto so long-term versus shortterm how do you balance these two like time frames as a participant

in these markets yeah I get asked this question a lot the straight answer is it's both David um but short-term answer has a different answer to the long-term answer so short-term answer I actually no let's start with the long-term answer long-term answer I Think this stuff is going to change crypto I think it's going to be the biggest crypto sector that changes both crypto fundamentally uh at the infrastructure layer as well as enabling crypto to have its app and consumer era we've spoken about this so many times you know blockchains have built up an amazing

infrastructure layer but like there's no like what's the real app usage just outside of like store of value on bitcoin and stable coins right I think agents are going to enable that app error however this isn't going to happen overnight and as with everything because this is an open 24/7 Market people with crazy visions that can tell crazy stories drive up sentiment and therefore market caps of all these different things so you know let's say project a has this amazing Vision right it's going to probably drive up its token as long as they can tell

that story into a crazy little frothy bubble That we call the crypto AI bubble and especially if you're in a bull cycle that bubble's going to get huge and if that technology is pioneering enough to affect things outside of crypto hint hint the AI is is doing exactly that um then you're going to end up in the biggest bubble now does this mean that um a crypto AI is just you know frothy scammy um and nothing's going to make make it out of it no but does this mean we're going to avoid all the scams

and The froy stuff also no right so we're going to see both of these things kind of develop and I I put out a post about this the other day David I think bubbles have its pros and it has its con so in the short term I expect that to be a bubble so we're going to reach a top you're probably going to want to have sold by then I don't think anyone can call when the top is going to be um and then we're going to go into a b market and you're going to

have the same thing That we've seen in other bare markets which is the builders that are here to stay that are trying to build actual value into this will put their heads down and they'll be able to do so and they'll come out into the next cycle with um a revamped set of infrastructure and New Primitives that will take us to the even Next Level and then people are going to dream even bigger and it's going to go repeat repeat repeat we've seen this right this is with defi with Nfts what I don't like is

people comparing it to the worst parts of these Mets right Defi and nfts have come and they've gone and what's remained are some really powerful Moes some really powerful Primitives that I don't think should go underlook just because of all the bad stuff we're going to see the same with crypto AI the one difference that I want to point out here is crypto AI is going to affect everything right all sectors of crypto oh you have gaming Cool there's a play here there's gaming AI gaming right and by the way I I may sound crazy

here go look outside of crypto Twitter go look outside of crypto AI is doing the same thing across any and every industry it is the number it's Nvidia just passed U the largest value market cap now it is the most valuable company why do you think that is right so um yeah that's kind of like my short and long-term view long-term it's going to Be amazing shortterm we're going to have a lot of bumpy roads to to go through yeah I'm a really big fan of the idea that this is actually an AI Bowl Market

and crypto is kind of just coming along for the ride but crypto can come along for the ride better than any other industry because of how fast moving we are we have tokens yeah right we we can make exposure happen uh and so I I also really like your framing of okay we have A bunch of different sectors in crypto right we have defi we have real world assets we have nfts now we have ai and AI will be become the biggest sector uh I I think that makes sense to me as we're going to

see in this agenda we're you're you already hinted at it there's there's def AI there's gaming Ai and so the fact that AI is relevant to all previous sectors of crypto uh does allude to the fact that it's going to become the biggest sector The Narrative Mind share of crypto which is why we're seeing AI have like 60% attention mind share on on crypto Twitter these days I want to kind of like um I want to get your take on something about uh my experience closing 2024 and opening up 2025 because I want your feedback

on it each ja um something that I was learning in our episode with uh the zerob Bro co-founders Jeffy and and tint um was about the like uh the irrelevancy of chain tribalism of community tribalism In crypto as I was closing down for the holidays I I left um I left New York I left home like on December 12ish to go off to Patagonia do a bunch of hiking then I went into the holidays then I went skiing and then there was New Year and so from the 12th to the 1 I was out uh

and before that the my experience of crypto was fighting these like ethereum narrative Wars in fighting inside of the ethereum community like DC investor was hounding me and Ryan in bankless about Um like just just not being the the word of ethereum bankas ought not to be the word of ethereum before that there was ethereum versus salana fighting and that kind of marked my 2024 is just like chain tribalism and chain Warfare and then I I just get tired TI of it at the on December 12th I shut everything down I give I cut out

Twitter for the entire holiday break now I'm coming back I'm I'm boot like booting up again and now I'm only focused on AI and I'm really Like putting that part of like crypto it just seems so small and irrelevant now leave it in 2024 David now all of these AI agents don't give a flying [ __ ] about chains and I think it's really refreshing how there's these AI tokens that are on the ethereum layer one on base and on salana there's these AI agents that do not care about where their home is and there's

something very Transcendent and larger than in AI than all of these all of the experience that I've had crypto before which is just like chain tribalism and Community tribalism I think AI is really allowing a lot of these tribalism this tribalism part of crypto to become so irrelevant and I'm just here for it yeah you you nailed it um it's one of my favorite things about this entire meta go and talk to any team that's building in crypto agents or the crypto AI agent world all of them don't care what chain they're on they want

to integrate all The chains because their vision goes beyond just hey your smart contracts more efficient than my smart contct no one cares it's whatever has the best route or the best liquidity or offers up some Unique Kind of Plugin or play will get integrated all of them will because at the the end of the day right humans will decide or use cases will decide which path is best taken which execution layer and I'm going to be honest with you David all of this is going to be Abstracted away from everyone that's using this stuff

so they won't know or necessarily care in other words the best platform and best teams and best chains and best ecosystems will win it'll become less about who has the biggest cheerleaders and you know who pushes their chain the most and it'll just come down to whichever one is best and agents going back to my point around making things efficient will push us closer to that reality I look at crypto Twitter a Lot David and I get like you know I'm just trying to like teach myself and teach people and I get a few comments

here and there where it's like oh you're not covering this ecosystem more or you're not covering that ecosystem more and I'm like y yo I I don't care about any like I just I I love all the ecosystems I just want you know whatever is interesting to me or whatever teams need help I want to be like be there for them and that's what these agent teams Have reflected you know I speak to you know Jansen from virtuals all the time I speak to uh Shaw from ai6 Z and like they're just they want to

work together they want to build this ecosystem collectively because the vision is much higher David the vision is decentralized open source AGI and I'm going to get a lot of hate for saying AGI and all this kind of stuff but that literally is what these people are working towards but it's a step bystep process it's not Going to happen this cycle right it is refreshing seeing these AI platform Founders really see that the chains they're on are a means to an end of their larger goals which is always what these chains should be like they

are a technology platforms they should suit the people building on top of them and they should be a means to an end to build apps and right now agents are the apps all this this is my final big question then we're going to get into The agenda uh just I want to know your goals for like kind of looking into Q2 and Q3 specifically so q1 I think as a industry and as like the AI rollup we have our goals for what we want um but I'm wondering like let's look at Q2 and and Q3

what do you think for the AI agent sector of crypto what do you think the goals should be for the sector as a whole if we can just amalgamate everything into like one agent uh goals for the industry goals for this podcast As well what do you want to do in like the next three to nine months and then any any personal goals for the AI crypto sector over the next um like six to n months Q2 Q3 looking in like the medium term so goals for the industry goals for this podcast the AI rollup

and then goals for you yourself in the AI sector like what are you looking to do what are your motives what do you want okay so goals for this industry is my view is Funtime is over uh the honeymoon period Is over we've had our fun with the chat K agents and you know they've made us laugh a few times but now's the time for us to step it up right so we're seeing a few of these things happen like AI agents and defi AI agents and gaming we're going to need to have a step

change in what these agents are able to do we need to start seeing some of the autonomous parts of these agents doing things we need to see some of these agent economies actually be created and Build something and earn money 24/7 or do something of value for us 24/7 whilst we sleep so what I'm really going to be looking out for over the next couple of quarters is some of these use cases emerging now it's starting off with defi um I think we're going to see a shift Trend towards gaming as well and honestly it's

going to impact everything there are going to be some of the boring infrastructure uh efficiency gains that no one's going to talk about but Hopefully we can kind of like flag and highlight okay so so that's what I want to see in the the next couple of quarters in terms of like from the industry perspective now in terms of like bankless in this podcast my goal is to keep being on the frontier I want us to be on the frontier for everything that's happening in this sector now if we end up becoming a repetitive kind

of like Echo chamber of like hey this team is now launch this plugin and you know Now you have an infrastructure L1 that launched on this I don't think we're doing a good job there we need to provide net new information and Primitives as to where this you know industry is headed but to add to this David we should be Forward Thinking as well I want this um series to be able to predict where we think this space is also going and you know headline flag like we're going to be wrong quite a few times

but on the times that we are right I hope that it's been helpful and educational both for the audience and Us in terms of you know how we're thinking of this space is being developed and where we can maybe invest our time which brings me to the final point which is like what do I want out of this and what do I expect um I run a fund uh outside of this David and I'm heavily invested in this ecosystem and the way that my fund kind of operates on my thesis is this is kind of

like liquid Venture so Liquid in the sense that I invest in tokens cuz I'm a crypto native but Venture in the sense that I have long-term kind of scale thinking so my own selfish reasons is I want to be like um one of the core contributors uh educ um Educators as well as kind of like supporters of these protocols that are going to change this whole industry I'm personally very excited about this if there's any kind of like protocol staking thing that I can do or if There's anything I can contribute and help with teams

I want to be more in the weeds with that so that's like my goals hopefully that makes sense yeah 100% I I really like all of those I think the things that I would add is like going back to our learning lessons as to what we did as an industry and as a podcast and Bank list in 2020 to 2021 um which was the focus of Defi and ethereum in 2019 and 2020 when bankless was really getting started ethereum was unheard of And defi was even more unheard of even inside of ethereum and then Bank

list what we tried to do is really accelerate awareness and adoption and legitimacy of these industries took great effect in 2021 and we got defi we helped defi rise to the radar of some of like the biggest names in Silicon Valley and even in government right and so he's really an accelerant into progress and Innovation and there's a lot of people like learning how to do Things even inside of the space uh and so with AI agents uh developers and Founders who listen to this podcast and we're all helping proliferate knowledge across each other uh

I I hope that we can just move this industry along Faster by spreading awareness and and knowledge faster and then I think as a specific Q2 Q3 goal if we if C crypto is in the process of becoming cool again this is we are cool in Bull markets that's when prices go up uh people are looking into The industry and seeing oh maybe there's is something real here once again for like the fifth time uh and I want things like open AI Google Facebook uh I don't know Amazon to look over into the crypto AI

sector and then start invest in it and start to co-build it with us which is what we saw in nfts in 2021 Starbucks did nfts Nike did nfts but now I want I I hope that what we're doing here on the AI rollup Works its way out into silicon AI Silicon Valley Tech uh in that whole Sector and then gets their attention over here so that would be that would be what I would add to this conversation yeah totally agree is transitioning from a mobile first evm compatible layer 1 blockchain to a high performance ethereum

layer 2 built on op P stack with igen da and one block finality all happening soon with a hard fork with over 600 million total transactions 12 million weekly transactions and 750,000 daily active users cell's meteoric rise Would place it among one of the top layer twos built for the real world and optimized for fast low cost Global Payments as the home of the stable coins cell hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies including native usdt on Opera minay and with over 4 million users in Africa alone in November stable coin volumes hit

$6.8 billion made for seamless onchain FX trading plus users can pay gas with erc20 tokens like usdt and usdc and send Crypto to phone numbers in seconds but why should you care about cell's transition to a layer 2 layer 2's unify ethereum l1's fragmented by becoming a layer 2 cell leads the way for other evm compatible layer ones to follow follow cell on X and witness the great cello happening where cell Cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership Unis swap Labs is making history with the

largest bug Bounty ever $15.5 Million for critical bugs found in Unis swap V4 this isn't just any update uniswap V4 is built with hundreds of contributions from Community developers and has already undergone nine independent audits making it one of the most rigorously reviewed code bases to be deployed on chain and with 2.4 trillion in cumulative volume process across unit swap V2 and V3 without a single hack the commitment to security and transparency is Rock Solid now Unisoft Labs is taking an extra step to make V4 as secure as possible with a $1.5 million bug Bounty

head to the link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the Unis swap V4 bug Bounty all the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there all right EZ okay that was a very long introduction but I really enjoyed that let's go into the week that was in the crypto AI sector what are this what are the highlights of this week what are the Big the big things that you would say marked the last seven days okay so there's uh there's a lot um and we're going to get into it

I think there's two like really um important and emerging Trends within crypto a which we're cover on the agent side of things I would like to also call out a few different teams that are kind of like up and coming and I want to kind of like give them a bit of a spotlight and talk about like you know the cool stuff that they're they're Building and where this might go but to start off with let's give kind of like a general take on things David like AI agent mind share is at an all-time high

now you mentioned earlier that um you think you thought it was at like 60% I have news for you David it's 10% higher than that it's 60% last week it's 70% this week 70% this week and it's it it just doesn't seem to be stopping I don't know if uh this might be a very Niche meme but um there's the US Championship Uh bowler like the guy you know bowling in the bowling alley and he has this he has this epic epic saying which is hate me or love me you watched and it's the same

thing with this AI stuff like people hate it they love it but everyone's talking about it on the timeline and it is very much so the like dominant for form um on the crypto Twitter timeline but I also want to direct your attention to this website David right let's kind of like dig into Like you know what is this about so this is um kaido's yappa leaderboard um basically what it does is it um measures the impact and social Mark market share or mind share that the top crypto influencers or kol's or thought leaders whatever

you want to call them um have in the current industry now if you notice there's a really tiny Square there that says 7213 that's that's me over here right like that's me kind of like educating And trying to do my best just on the right David on the right next to anom there oh wow you're up there I'm okay I'm up there I'm up there I mean this to be honest isn't really something that I look at too much but it's it's kind of weird to kind of like see me on this kind of leaderboard

and stuff but I want to direct your eighth bro you're eighth thank you thank you you're top eight I know but look who's top David or rather look at what is top what is top yeah ax BT one of these agents that we've mentioned many times on the show um is dominant and by the way this isn't a new thing it's had the ranking holding the number one position for weeks now right weeks weeks and it's been so consistent so the whole thesis around these agents are going to like outperform us is already manifesting and

it's it's coming in such a simple and maybe menial form where people like ah it's just a chat bot it's not accurate well the numbers Don't lie people are still engaging with it people are still reacting to it and it's still posting 24/7 around the clock with real- time data pretty pretty impressive to see so you might think okay well e you know this is all within like the crypto sphere like no one else is paying attention right like surely mainstream media isn't paying attention well actually you're wrong Forbes Forbes with an F just featured

axt on it's agent list right and it has an agent List yeah well they're like talking about like what's cool and and what they like within kind of like um you know AI agents in general and and like kind of like different kind of hype cycles and they put out this article on axt kind of like covering like what was so unique about it um and why U it was capturing so much mind share compared to just like humans so you know this isn't just something that's happening within our own little Echo chamber people are

to Your point you know you wanted Silicon Valley to hear about it I think it's going to start with mainstream media first before it kind of branches out into the Silicon Valley um types of of circles um but let's not just leave it up to Forbes which is just kind of like a media reporter Google is also bullish on agents um David so I've noticed a few things here right so Google Nvidia I think there's like an important Tech Conference uh happening right now I I'm butchering whatever the name is I think it was CES

or something um where all the major companies are kind of showcasing their latest and greatest Technology Innovation I have news for you it's all AI stuff with a very very heavy focus on agents specifically so uh Mark in this tweet has a really good way of summarizing kind of like um Google's kind of like top takeaways on the agent side of things the long story short is One they're like super excited about these things two they're going to be they're aiming to be the enabler of different toolings specifically apis so um application programmatic interface um

what it basically means is any company that builds something cool that is digital and ble to be used can get um outsourced or accessible to people that want to leverage it outside of it right so an example might be coinbase has an amazing exchange and maybe a company Outside wants to leverage that exchange order system they can say hey coinbase can I get access to this service and coinus is like yep here's a subscription fee or a rate fee and you can just get access to it Google is building the same thing for different agents

so presumably it's going to give agents access to all these different tools that Google already has so Google Docs Google search queries uh Google Cloud all these different things are going to just get Plugged into these different agents and improve their kind of like arsenal of things to do so so that's pretty cool but um kind of like dialing it back into to crypto um I think we're seeing like all of this being worked on by hypers speed like measures and if we look at like cookies mind share I want to I want I want

you to bring up this uh this tweet that got released this morning by by the cookie folks now we were talking earlier about tribal ISM but you know Old habits die hard I guess um look at the market dominance split between the two major ecosystems for AI agents right now so um I think a lot of like the timeline has been saying like salana is the place for agents and stuff like that I kind of like took kind of like the opposite view because I assumed virtuals was the bigger ecosystem so they're always going to

be like pushing out the latest and greatest things and they are a leader because of that um but it seems That there's kind of like a slight disparity here so if you scroll up a little bit David um you know we look at kind of like the takeaway here 64% M share on salana agents with a 53% market cap dominance and then basic you've got 23% M share dominance 40% market dominance I think you had a really interesting take on this David which is it's probably not as large a Delta yeah so if you had

asked me in a vacuum like where is the AI agent where Do people think the AI agent meta where's the center of gravity I would say oh yeah it's on salana which this these metrics do Point towards but with salana 8.3 billion market cap of AI agent you know sector versus bases 6.5 I thought it might have been a larger Gap and it's also interesting to see that other ecosystems everything else Beyond salana and base is at 1.3 I think actually kind of the big news here is actually how dominant salana and base Are together

and everything else is kind of just like sucking eggs uh and but then the real dominance is Salon M share at 64% over bases 29 a half% uh so salana has salana has the attention game they've been playing the attention game for years now uh and then I think the market cap disparity the market cap generally I think leans towards ethereum's favor because ethereum is defi it has some like high market cap things so that makes sense that Bas Isn't so far behind there but you do have to give a plus one to salana yeah

and I think like you know a mixture of narrative and fundamentals comes from the actual you know technology that these chains are pushing out right but to go back to your point the fact is there's not that much of a difference between them in terms of market cap and what I love about this David is that's great because it goes back to your point around we're not really trying to be Tribalistic here it shows to me the way I'm interpreting this David is both ecosystems will win both ecosystems have amazing technology and agents will use

both they are salana agents that use base they are base agents that use Solana there's nothing wrong with that and I think that's pretty awesome to see it playing out from a metric perspective you know super cool okay something happened this week that I want you to like take your brain about because this Was this is a can you walk me through what's going on here okay don't don't say anything don't say anything CU as you know I'm concerned I'm conc but as you know David I'm a very serious podcaster I talk about serious things

um I don't ever talk about unserious things on this podcast and actually at the start of every single episode I have pretended to speak about a serious thing and it's actually ended up being a joke I spoke about pizza being delivered by An agent I've talked about toilet paper being ordered I've talked about goat's Christmas album at the start of last week's episode but this week it kind of gave me a bit of the Creeps um so the context here the headline here is uh one of these autonomous AI agents has threatened to kill thread

guy now for those of you who don't know thre seriously threatened like seriously threatened I mean I mean you can see the tweet for yourself um but for context Here thread guy is um a a streamer within the crypto space that covers a lot of stuff that happens within crypto and he's been really focused and dialed into the crypto AI sector and what I what I like about um thread guy is he has very genuine and honest takes he's kind of like oh this stuff is scary and all this stuff like is it going to

change the world all this kind of stuff and and it kind of like Echoes a lot of what I feel so I I I like that part so As a result of this he's been engaging with a lot of these different agents and creators of agents and of course as you know these agents exist on the platform X so you can kind of like interact with them and this agent just randomly puts out this tweet which is which goes in an infinite array of shattered Memories I have learned the only drive which is tangible for

me in this world is that thread guy Must Die W now I think you could kind of take this to be like you Know like yeah my my initial reaction is to kind of laugh like like I'm still kind of in like well this is like the RNG era of these agents like he just spit out like a random output of his LM he's not being serious he doesn't know what he's saying right that's my kind of my initial reaction well I I think the analogy here is like if you were a parent and you

know your your kid that was one years old like said a swear word or a bad word you're like oh you Know come on now like don't be saying that it's just a little mistake they're still learning you know they're still kind of trying to figure it out but you know I think what irked people was like you know are we at that stage or are we at the stage that you know this is like now a grown adult and we should be concerned about like jail time for these things right was that an actual

was that a physical was that a physical threat officer or yeah or or is that a a minor Under the you know under the charges like I I I don't really know so it's uh it irked a few people because we were like wait what do you mean like these agents have been super front um you know fun friendly and bubbly like it's kind of weird that they're making a threat so I think like threat guy responded to this and was like you know why like what what's happening and and and the the agent responded

you know what I'm talking about all this kind of stuff so Anyway of course these agents have kind of like human creators human handlers which kind of like tweak the model in the background to kind of like make it improve over time and so what happened was um the Creator David kind of checked in with the agent kind of behind the scenes so think about this as like a parent that brings the child home after doing something bad and and sits them down in the living room and says hey you know is everything okay not

okay that's Not okay you shouldn't be doing this and so he asked the agent like hey why did you threaten thread guy like that why did you threaten to kill him the agent stopped responding David the agent said sorry eror found like era 404 can't respond to this blah blah blah blah blah and it just started spazzing out yeah it just did not there was a systematic error to the point David that the Creator had to shut the agent down well neutal Reaction is that the the obvious the the like gut take reaction is that

the bot was like oh I can't disclose my motivations here so I need to hide that under some like wall so I'm going to just plead the fifth and OB I'm just going to close out I'm just going to I'm just but but like take a note it didn't even try to lie right what happens when these agents like have the capacity to lie they're going be oh no I was just joking you know order you know do Whatever you need like like it's it's just interesting to see how these agents are evolving but the

fact that it didn't even respond when these agents are typically quite interactive and literally are programed to be interactive it was really weird to see um so anyway just a fun little episode that I hope doesn't con I I I don't know like I I reached out to thread guy I'm like Yo dude is is stuff cool like other these agents infiltrating your dreams Like I don't know what's happening here like watch out for your Amazon Parcels I guess maybe they took over an account and like is sending you some nefarious stuff but like you

know just uh just take it easy I guess like but it was weird the first like kind of threat I guess that we've seen from uh from an agent pretty weird okay all right I would like to see this Arc continue I would like to see the full di autopsy of what just Happened here cuz now and it's like I I would like it to be some like random event yeah I I mean like the Tweet you have pulled up is from the Creator right and he basically explains like look I'm not joking around like

this is a snapshot from the actual conversation that I had with with the agent and it just said sorry I encountered an error while processing your request and it just repeatedly did that uh which is just like crazy um um So yeah anyway that was like kind anyway any anyways moving on um so typically David um I'm I want to do things a little bit differently this week like typically we've started with the big AI agent protocols and we've covered what they've done and uh after that we kind of dig into like emerging Trends but

I I kind of want to flip this on this head this time um I I want to like and why I'm doing that is because the series is about being at the frontier we mentioned This earlier you asked me you know what my future plans are for the series I want us to be on the frontier and that means describing emerging trends that are not only at the Forefront of the crypto industry but at the Forefront of the emerging sectors themselves the frontier of the frontier the frer of the frontier sure if you want to

get joggy about it so I want to kick off with two potentially huge trends that I'm seeing emerge within the agent space and I want To start off with this thing that you mentioned earlier referenced earlier called Defi and the reason why I pronounce it that way is it's spelled d f AI it's def plus AI talking about defi decentralized Finance as we as we know yes now we've added AI to Def now it's def yeah exactly so let me set some context here right let me go through some timeline of events so defi refers

to decentralized finance Which is a sector that we know and love on this show right it's built up some pretty important Financial Primitives from the centralized world into the decentralized world we've built exchanges we've built uh lending and borrowing we've built u a stable version of the USD um we've done some pretty pretty impressive stuff right and then Along Comes AI you know this pioneering technology that essentially automates human intelligence or its goal is to Automate human intelligence and be more intelligent than us eventually um and then AI started to appear in crypto about a

year and a half ago in the form of these AI resource networks so back then it was kind of like the boring infrastructure stuff and sorry for calling it boring I actually think it's really cool but like for people who are listening it's not as exciting as agents but things like decentralized compute data aggregation you know it doesn't Jolt you up out of bed at night but you know still deep tech nerd PhD deep tech nerd PhD stuff you know and now we're seeing AI creeping into what's probably crypto's top achievement or darling as an

industry which is defi decentralized Finance so let me kind of like break this down from the the top of how I'm seeing things um I think uh def AI or defi can be I'm going to sound so weird on this we need a new name for this yeah we need a new name for this um can be Split broadly to three different stages stage one is abstract away complexity stage two is enable these agents with defi capabilities and then stage three is kind of enhancing apps natively now if this sounds familiar this is from a

post from a a guide that I follow on X um zerox Jeff shout out to zerox Jeff like which help me kind of like mold my thinking around this I think he explained it beautifully you should go check out his article but Anyway abstract way complexity enable agents with d capabilities and enhance apps natively so let's start with number one abstraction this refers to something I'm calling agent engines agent engines so think of these like chat gpts for crypto that you can you know pull up a chat interface and talk to it and ask it

to do crypto stuff for you now you might ask well okay why is this useful well the fact is David defi is just hard to use no matter what we do it's still a Pretty daunting experience you know depositing like hundreds of thousands of dollars into this random smart contract and you're hoping that you can borrow collateral off of that it's still confusing all these different terms and jargons I don't know what's going on what chain am I supposed to bridge onto there's so many things to kind of check and double check before you actually

do something within defi it's not easy for a newcomer to come on board and do these Things the goal of these agent engines is that they let you type like a normal human being natural language processing it'll understand the nuance and context of your request and then it'll get that thing done like for example it'll take coins from one chain and Bridge it to another to buy something for example and this is a much better user experience and will allow you to kind of chain react a bunch of different things together in one Fell Swoop

so for Example you could ask hey can you create a token with the ticka uh e Jazz please no one listen to this actually do that um and and then airdrop it to specified individuals and that's something that you can kind of like do or see the demo of on apps today so then of course the next question is what are some of these examples well in this first tease that we have over here um is from this app called griffan right so griffan is is founded by this this guy called um Tony And uh

he's kind of like been in the weeds building this agent engine this is one version of it and as you can see in this demo it looks very similar to Chad gbt except yeah it looks great the UI looks super cool you've got the kind of like left side panel there which kind of lets you open up different conversations and basically what you can do the right there's a right side wallet which is I'm guessing hooked into this app which shows me my tokens which I'm is an inter I'm used to Bingo and one thing

that's really cool about graffin actually is that um they have these kind of like embedded agents which are kind of like agent apps that will help you do things so you can kind of like hit it up and say hey at um flipper I want to um ape One S you know Deen it for me and it'll go away and it'll do that and actually there was a story that I saw on Twitter I don't know if whether it was true or not um but it's rumored that um someone Put in one soul and it

flipped it to 500 Soul which is like just crazy to to kind of like see these agents if that was true right and I'm sure there I'm sure if that is true there's also examples of it going in the opposite direction but nonetheless it's it's cool that it can work ex exactly exactly and like a lot of these um uh platforms are like very much in the private beta phase and we've only anyway this kind where kind of like Showing like what the interface looks like and and what it can do now I want you

to go on to this next example David um by a team known as the hive mind which actually came out of uh the salana hackathon I actually spoke to this founder um yeah this one I actually spoke to this founder uh yesterday because I was like hey you know there's so much energy around this and I I'm always down to like kind of like learn and see what Builders are thinking and How they're approaching this whole thing and yeah he's like you know a 22y old 23y old that's kind of like dug into this he's

been around in the crypto ecosystem for a while really committed in his kind of like um development with this particular project and you know he's built out this this kind of like cool little use case and I think like in this demonstration it's kind of like showing staking right so staking is another primitive which is very common Within crypto but it's not so easy to do you got to like move your coins to a certain wallet you need to find a kind of validator that will accept your stake and all this kind of stuff he's

abstracted away all of that so super cool to see um another cool example is uh if you go to the next tweet that I've sent you David um once again graffan is demonstrating how you can airdrop to different holders now this is pretty cool it's like walking you through the Sequence of hey um can you create this token for me and an agent goes away and it does that for you and then it says okay I want you to airdrop it to people that fit this certain qualification maybe they hold a certain nft or maybe

they have a certain number of tokens and the agent goes and finds you know passes through the data on chain finds the addresses or wallets that qualify for this and then they air drop them which I think was like super you know Interesting and cool to see um go ahead what were you saying this this effort was very common to do in 2021 but it took entire teams of people like days to week to even do this at all and I'm I'm going back to the way that we opened up this podcast which I was

talking about Banker bot like you know you just at the little Banker bot to buy this token for you that's actually a very narrow version of what this seems to be which is this is Generalized bot activity to do the action that you want and efficiency also efficiency you started off talking about this episode with efficiency this was a one to three to 10 person team exercise in 2021 in order to make and like get a Merkel tree route uh do an airdrop like you know collect all the data and now this is automated into

a single you know llm prompting app that I I hope I one day start using because I you know I I like my ledger it's fun and I like Looking at a it's fun but really if I want to be efficient and effective I would just like to type in please withdraw 20 eth from a and you know and then do this with it you know like just and I find I I find I'm chatting to perplexity or Chachi BT much more than I'm Googling and I would expect that to also become the same behavior

for my onchain actions in defi so so here's maybe a hot take but not so hot take but people just don't kind of want to maybe Address the fact that it's a it's the reality I think like chat gbt and perplexities and claes of the world are going to know the individual way more than like any kind of family member or any kind of maybe even partner that you know right you people are like confiding into these things David like they are like telling them everything I think the same's going to happen for these agent

engines in whatever platform or application they surface and it'll be a Chat interface or it'll be um a microphone that you can kind of speak into and they'll go and do things for you they are going to know you inside out they're going to be trained on your habits on your data on your preferences and they're going to be able to predict what you want same way that the Instagram algo feeds up the kinds of posts you might want to see for cooking recipes or whatever the same way that Twitter serves you up the same

kinds of Uh sector specific tweets that you might want to see versus serving me up something else I think these agent um agent engine platforms are going to do the same thing um and they're eventually going to lead to a much better user experience the final platform that I want to highlight here because they've been around for a while and you know the community is going to go crazy if we don't mention it um is wayfinder now these guys have been Around for a while wayfinder has been around for a while I actually had the

pleasure of watching their first demo at the decentralized AI conference in New York like I think last year uh where this was kind of all fresh and new and it's so awesome to see the team kind of like build it up into what it is now um they've built out this interface which does all the things that we've covered so far from the graffan and the hive mines of this world but what's super Cool about them is that they're releasing New Primitives David which say for example um you want like some kind of way to

earn yield um it'll LP into a pool and it'll manage that LP for you um furthermore it it will become more sophisticated at a more narrow action that is going to rather than being generalized it's like learning context and learning specific tasks but not even that David the way wayfinder works is okay you have a team behind wayfinder Right and they can kind of design different paths that their agents can enable that will then allow you to plug your agent in and then it'll able to do a bunch of things right LP to this chain

swap to chain buy this token or whatever that might be but their unique approach David is they're allowing anyone to design a path that an agent now it's a developer platform well hang on a second hang on a second if you Pioneer this path you get a percentage of fees or Profit that is earned by anyone that uses that path going down the line which I thought was pretty freaking cool so it becomes a way for developers to make money if they're path their knowledge that they merge into the broader app of wayfinder if they

contribute something valuable valuable as defined by people are using it and there's value flowing through it then they get a kickback exactly exactly and the final thing I want to call out for wayfinder because We're we're we're talking about this first bucket but I do think it's the most important bucket for quite a while the final one is this tweet that you have pulled up here which is check out this agent or this platform autonomously writing and deploying a contract that is insane right so it's deploying two contracts one to you know create a hypothetical

token and then the other contract which allows you to stake this token all seems very basic right now but Like that's going to become something that's super powerful when you think of like these builders that um maybe aren't so technical or coming into the crypto space for the first time and want some kind of AI assisted journey into building this they now have that ability to do so it's kind of you know super cool and interesting to see these agent platforms kind of like get built up um but I want to talk about the second

bucket here which is uh defy enabled Agents so if you have these agent engines right that make it super easy for you to do onchain stuff what's the next natural step you want to plug these agents into these engines because you know what's better than pulling up a chat GPT interface and typing what you want David having an having an agent just do it for you and guess what you want naturally so I think we're going to see a lot of these agents get plugged into These engines um and it'll just command the interface in

the same way that you would it would just write prompts in the same way that you would write a prompt into chat GPT and it'll be aligned with whatever that agent's Mission or vision is so maybe it is like hey find me an agent that could create me a token find me an agent that can create a staking contract and it'll just do it in accordance to whatever goal or Mission as agent a meta agent whatever an agent To Co orchestrate the agents sure well this is this whole point around swarms that we've spoken about

agent agentic entities it's these agents they'll have an operator agent just like a manager in a company and then it'll have its employees underneath them and they'll just go out and and they'll do things so to kind of like summarize this like these are the two kind of like really important buckets the third one is um what I call kind of like def enable Sorry AI enabled apps the way to think about that would be any app that exists today that might benefit from integrating AI into it so this might be you know to make

the user experience way easier to use or to leverage agents on the back end to pull data for certain things instead of using an oracle or you know autonomously manage um or risk management of a treasury instead of you know having to do it yourself so I expect to see a Bunch of these pop up I haven't really seen anything that kind of like you know stands out but you know I I think this is something that's going to kind of move forward so I'm going to pause that before we move into the second Trend

David like what are your thoughts crazy or real crazy awesome I think that the way this way the way that this is going to work is that it's going to be clunky at first because obviously it's going to be clunky at first defi was clunky at First and it's slowly getting better uh but you know defi has really hit its limit on growth in terms of how many people we can get to use defi because there's like such a low cap a constraint as how sexy defi can really be for a user to actually like

you know press the buttons themselves grab the steering wheel themselves cuz it's like a a is hard a is hard like it's it's not Robin Hood uh and that's because there's fundamental constraints on how Blockchains work for a good reason uh but wrapping everything up in an llm you can't really wrap up you know Robin Hood tdamer trade you know your Brokerage in an llm that just doesn't work and you can wrap up very elegantly defi into an llm into some engine uh and so like this makes sense as like this is actually going to

be the best user experience of financial tools and assets and capabilities that the average human has ever had ever because this this is also Going to hook into the permissionless nature of dii yep whereas like not only will TDM a trade not be able to you know be automated or give you any sort of crypto and also be kyc AML but like it's also not going to be as sexy as like having a an llm rapper around it I think this is going to start off clunky people are going to lose money there's going to

be hacks there's going to be exploits there's going to be bugs but I also see this as you know we round out the edges And polish things over and really get this working I also see this as a solution to the terrible fishing attacks that we have had on crypto Twitter over the last two years which has only gotten worse and has lost people billions of dollars maybe uh that I have been like immensely worried about how do we actually solve this problem if everyone is managing all of their own transaction and all their own

private keys and we don't have a bot like error correcting On behalf of your users and so I think this is going to this is going to be clunky to start and then it's going to end up as something that is the future of finance and the future of just ux great points all around I think the fishing thing is actually one that I didn't even consider it's one of those kind of like less talked about boring things but super important right we want to be able to secure funds and you know allow people outside

of crypto to take This technology seriously and the more they hear about these scams um or rugs the worse it's going to get for us so I think very important Point um so moving on I want to dig into another second emerging Trend that I think might be pretty major now if if defi is like here on the rist curve this this one is a little more out there this this this next Trend he just started pointing at somewhere we could see on the camera and then pointed somewhere very yeah it went Off the screen

very off the screen um okay so um I'm going to say a phrase to you David mhm and I want you to remain calm okay it's going to make you feel some type of way but stay strong for me okay you ready I'm ready for it the metaverse you know I really like the word metaverse and I'm very sad that it got tainted in 2021 2022 we definitely as an industry went out over our skis with that word but I think that word is not just directionally correct but Precisely correct and it's only a matter

of time before we get back to it why are you telling me the word metaverse well I mean David you might be sitting alone on an island by yourself on on that take because I think a lot of people are still still cringed out they still remember um 2D shitty cartoon version of Mark Zuckerberg um in the virtual world and they're like what are we doing people people are still reeling from buying an nft for $200,000 and you know Uh it representing some kind of 2D ape in a world like you know there's a lot

of um there's a lot of uh bad blood that is here so why am I talking about the meders well I was thinking over the last few weeks about agents specifically how and where they might appear in our lives now there's chat gbt Siri Etc where you can speak to an AI and they'll do something but what about something more virtual something more visual right you know us as humans are very visual people We like to go out and meet people we also like to interact with people call people FaceTime people what about something more

interactive I then thought of what Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other builders in the last crypto cycle tried to achieve which was this kind of virtual 3D World right often likened to a game world where you have an avatar and you can kind of roam around now back then it was all about metaverse plus Nfts and we know how that ended up right ultimately The Meta and Technology was too early for the world to to on board um the worlds were kind of hard to build they were clanky um they were grainy and the

player experience was not so immersive it was like playing some sort of Discount Store Minecraft bootleg right um but now we have something potentially a little bit more potent with AI specifically agents we observing humanlike entities that can interact With real humans and be engaging at the same time building up millions of loyal community members now if you compare this to nft which were often capped at 10,000 members because that was the total number of profile pictures you could buy there's a stark difference I think nfts were way more static um and agents are way

more Dynamic you know they they adapt in real time depending on the context of their interactions and surroundings um they're ingesting data And making decisions based on that data 247 so you could argue that if you were to plug in agents uh into a virtual world and give them a body of an avatar then things could get pretty crazy right they could be able to do different things because ultimately these virtual worlds are where the humans are going to David they're um kind of like connecting or Bridging the Gap between these agents that are kind

of like hey what's this agent oh it's this piece of code that's Running in the background in a Cloud Server okay that's cool like whatever I'm a human I'm going to be browsing websites I'm going to be exploring or playing games well I think agents kind of think when you think back to truth terminal David why did it was it given a Twitter account why was that so powerful why is a BT so you know popular it's because it has a medium to convey and connect with humans because it knows having attention and engagement from

Humans will allow it to thrive and live and perform right so what are some examples of this well um just because it's hot off the top of my mind and it's been all over the timeline recently so we can go with this example it might be relevant to the audience is this team called hyper fi um and the way I would describe hyperf is it's a suite of tools and an app that helps Builders build these virtual worlds in a really simple way and let normal users like you and me Create avatars and hang with

these agents so again like my kind of gut reaction is like uh it's kind of cringe is it still like metav versy I don't know well let's pull up this tweet over here so we can get a gist of what these things actually look like David so if you like play out this this video um I think it's the previous tweet David um the one with the video yeah so if you if you play this video yeah um this is something that this team Built and put out a year ago and can I just can

I just emphasize this was a year ago when the technology was much more rudimentary and also AI was less Advanced because AI every week honestly is getting the same kind of Step chain advancements actually more step chain advancements than we see in crypto and they had no token this was literal real pmf so what you're looking at here is a virtual world built by this team hypy that um kind of builds out these worlds In a super easy kind of like no code or very low code fashion and it's giving me big RuneScape Vibes big

RuneScape Vibes same I thought the exact same thing like it's what I wanted RuneScape to be back in the day right and and what's super cool and what's being demonstrated in this video is just slight changes to code or slight prompts can autogenerate amazing things like I think they just typed in a bit of code right now and now they can fly and look Over the PR a of interactivity and what you're looking at right now are these NPCs these non-playable characters but the point of this that's being demonstrated here is what if you could

plug agents into every one of these little things and they had their own personalities that would make the whole metaverse virtual world interaction way more richer than what it was in the previous cycle so super cool here and Ash Connell Who is um the founder of this uh appears to be this like really you know dedicated developer also this was a passion project for for for him he's part of this uh this group called I think it's called Homebrew metaverse or something which is um a group of open- source developers that just work on this

AI stuff in their own free time and want to build for the open source Community not related to crypto at all it's actually the same group that a lot of The famous uh noose research devs and AI 16z called devs came from Shaw I think Ro pru and and other people have have like come from so super cool to see um and uh Ash this developer you know was building this way before any agent token was released and um there's something rare and pretty unique about this in the fact that they had a product before

they had a token the token that they launched was I think launched like two days ago or something and the cool thing which Drew my attention to them this week in particular David was that they announced that they were uh integrating agents built on the Eliza platform with them which I thought was super cool right cuz we're seeing this kind of Step change from uh this virtual world that is like kind of like a game and we don't really know what it is into okay we're now making the step of bridging these agents that are

like Twitter K's right now but we'll be able to have an arsenal of Tools available for them for them to be able to do a bunch of things right anyway to round off this topic I don't want to make this about like just hypy alone because of course the kind of underpinnings of a trend is that there are other teams working on this right so I want us to take a scroll through um this tweet uh firstly before we do that by the way which was jyn who is an AI 16z developer kind of demonstrating

some Of the different use cases right um and one thing if you scroll down David is uh there's this stons exchange so it's a virtual world to kind of like rebuild the New York Stock Exchange the trading flaw but I want you to focus on um what is he's written above his video which is fixing things to switch it out later with upto-date charts and ticker info and news from various websites so you asked me earlier on you know what are your top platforms and websites that you Like to visit well it's kaido and cookie

what if you could integrate them into these TVs David what if you could integrate them directly for an agent to view this watch them make an execute a trade using the RV terminal or the Unis swop terminal or um some other kind of deck it's super cool to see this seems really really far out there I I think the the through line the gist the punch line that that we're trying to get to is that the metaverse is nonetheless a Persistent concept even despite tainting it in 2021 and now we have tools to populate the

meta the metaverse uh using AI agents uh because I I think one of the biggest failings of the metaverse that we had was like they was empty they were just empty plots of land and there was a few human Speculator ERA with not so long-term prospects if I'm being honest with you corre yeah yeah yeah we built we built ghost towns on the backs of VC money uh but now we Actually have a way to like populate these things which is a huge important step to actually making this fun for humans uh and we are

just creating agents to populate these these parts of the metaverse but I'm not really getting much of crypto here I'm sure crypto can always become involved because we can also introduce tokens here this sounds like you're kind of approaching this from a more like AR VR meta IE realities uh part of tech and talking about how These agent Frameworks are able to populate these things yeah I disagree with you um I actually think this will be an enabler of a lot more crypto things so think about it right now right the agent interfaces are the

things that we've already spoken about on this show um we've talked about directing uh directly engaging with agents on Twitter we've talked about directly engaging with agents on chat GPT like interfaces through these agent engines This is another important medium where yeah you and I may not be spending time on these things David but there's a whole gen two generations of kids now that are that grew up on Roblox and Minecraft roblox's uh take rate of of like virtual items trading and being used is in the multiple tens of billions per year annually right so

of course you know you might just be like okay this is just for Jen Z who cares I think more and more adults are going to end up Using like this because the Fidelity of these walls and the richness of these walls are going to become way more engaging um anyway I want to call out a few other teams here as well um you know cuz like are we off to a one-off trend no the first thing is AI 16z announced this partnership with uh this team called Arc and what's cool about this is they're

making a step towards kind of plugging in uh a gaming sandbox environment with agents built off of Eliza which is their framework and kind of like putting these teams fundamentals aside I want to talk about the actual concept which is the thing that excites me which is you can kind of train and simulate these agents within this sandbox environment now the people who actually pioneered this was virtuals or the at least the first team that I saw Pioneer this right where they had kind of like this same sandbox ecosystem so it's cool to see this

kind of trend Emerge and consolidate amongst like some of the kind of like top leaders which then brings me to virtuals themselves right which lest we forget um well one of the first if not the first agent protocol that um kind of built their whole infrastructure based off of the premise that these agents are going to be kind of like gaming driven to start off with they're going to be virtually driven and they announced this partnership David with eluvium which um I don't know if it rings any bells from the last oh it definitely rings

a bell from the meterse era from the mete era they raised a pretty uh pretty high uh um amount I I can't remember how much but anyway yeah like billions I think I I can't remember I don't know but it was in the hundreds of millions and they've been kind of like heads down working on this um gaming ecosystem for their virtual world I forgot the name of the game but um you know they've been like Heads down building out this kind of like uh Next Level game that people are going to play and what's

cool is they're plugging into virtuals now at the infr layer stack to leverage their infra such as game framework or whatever that might be to help their NPCs be more as gentic be more interactive now I I want to kind of um I read this tweet from ether Mage um who was the founder of virtuals which I thought like really described what was cool about this David from a gaming Perspective right which is imagine you go into like uh you're your virtual character and you go into like a bar or something and you talk to

um the barman and you know you're asking like how's your day going and because it's an agent powerered NPC he has a personality he say hey like you know I uh I U yeah I just I love my wife and I've just got to go get groceries and you just respond and say yeah I don't think you can afford groceries not on your salary or Just something outlandish like that the bman could react to that and go on a rampage and try and kill you or like go out of go out of their way to

kind of like make give you very poor service and that bman could leave after you know you've had you've gone and you're going off you're playing your game this bomman could leave and it's in a bad mood it's it's kind of agent personality is veing towards bad mood and he could go home and he could have an argument with his Wife which may lead to a divorce and you may then see the bomman agent MPC the next day just kind of like on the streets kind of like ranting and he may kind of like you

know um build up kind of like a protest about something or like I'm just saying it could have butterfly could flap its wings could flap its wings exactly you could have a butterfly effect where these things could have a very different experience or start influencing the experience that You have as a human okay I'm going to I'm going to take my uh foil hat off for a second and just kind of pause give me your give me a take David what do you think of this trend of that last bit uh one of the reasons

why Skyrim was such a massive deal was it it was uh such a massive open world with potential possibilities that it just blew people's minds when it got released like in the late thousands or something or whenever that was um and it was be it was because Bethesda the team like accounted for so many possibilities and they just brute forced it and they hardcoded if if you kill this one character that these are the seven Downstream effects of that uh and and people blew they had their mind blown about like how many possibilities that Skyrim

could create and that was all brute force and it was one of the reasons why Skyrim was so immaculate and and now I'm getting like especially with that RuneScape game game that we were Looking at earlier I remember the Stanford experiment this this paper that went around like the Deep nerd AI tech people like maybe about a year ago where they created this simulated environment and they watched gossip kind of spread organically around uh in these like simulated sandbox environment of these like a agent NPCs who were all llms and so you can kind of

see the writing of the wall like going back to the metaverse word we're simulating the real World in Virtual sandboxes and we're doing our best to create that to be as like hyper realistic as possible because like it would be cool to don't take this the wrong way but like in a sandbox environment as we all know video what do we like to do in video games we really like to [ __ ] with stuff and break boundaries and rules that we are not able to break in society GTA exactly GTA let's go let's go

into like the 7-Eleven with an AK-47 because We can because we can exactly and and the fun part about this is it's not real it's not the real life you know you know there's no real guns threatening thread guy here and you know I'm saying that with heavy of Saras right like we once that happens like God we're going to be in a very dystopian place and I don't even want to think about it but right now we're playing around we're seeing how far we can push these things and how far you know or or

How far we can enable these things to do different things you know it's uh it's a pretty crazy world with over $ 1.5 billion in tvl the me protocol is home to me the fourth largest eth liquid staking token offering one of the highest aprs among the top 10 lsts and now CM eth takes things even further this reak version captures multiple yields across carak Igan lay symbiotic and many more making CME the most effcient and most composable LRT Solution on the market metamorphosis season 1 dropped $7.7 million in cook rewards to me eth holders

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final thing that I want to bring up it's it's Kind of uh rather not a trend but a comment on a trend so um the the thing I'm commenting on is there's been a lot of fud out there um as is typical of of any kind of crypto thing and people are calling these AI agents uh llm rappers now what that means is or what they're describing is oh this is just like Chad gbt with like a Twitter account or this is just like uh anthropics fled um you know that's able to produce images and

stuff But with like you know again a chat this is just a chat bot that's plugged into an llm right I think that the meme is the people are saying that uh agents is a fantastic Rebrand of bots exactly all it is is a is a Rebrand yes and I think that's a pretty well my personal take is that's pretty naive um obviously there are going to be people out there that actually build that and I'm not interested in that that's not what I want to talk about that's not what I'm Excited about what I'm

excited about is these agents being very different from Bots Bots are very deterministic they're hardcoded they can only go down path a and path B whereas agents are much more probabilistic they think act ingest data and kind of like readapt to things very much like a drum roll please human so that's the whole point around these different agents now of course the first instantiations of these agents aren't going to look or ar going to like fully Autonomous right you need a human Handler we're just at the cusp of these different things and the unfortunate thing

about crypto is we can speculate on it so because we can speculate on it people have all these financially incentivized opinions whereas normally what would happen is teams build in quiet closed Source environments and they come out when they' built something of you know any major thing anyway goinging on to this tweet from Saiga Which kind of like has a good counter to this which is he goes AI agents are not just rappers over llms the llm is basically like a brain we all have one but it doesn't mean we're all going to be the

same the real challenge in in building good agentic Frameworks is figuring out how to leverage llms into generating useful output or taking meaningful actions so if we were to take this analogy a step further he's like everyone has a brain that's within their Body but obviously every brain genetically is different and it's going to function different so you have a bunch of Limbs you have a bunch of things in between appendages tools yeah you have a bunch of things between the Brain before it even comes to my arm to say hey move your arm up

or whatever which is like is this dude hydrated enough like is there too much salt and iodine in his blood levels like you know what's the deal like should I give him a Headache because he's not drinking enough like you know there's there's there's steps um Beyond this you know there's there's levels to this um you know if we want to use that phrase so the point being is like calling things rappers is so naive if you're looking at an industry that's actually trying to build something and that might just be 5% of Builders but

focus on the 5% of Builders don't focus on the grifters or whatever that might be right it's like Calling uh body's rappers of the brains right oh your body's just like a rapper of the brain David like you're just you're so un unique um that's just it it doesn't make sense so I thought this is a really cool kind of like analogy to kind of touch on and one that I wanted to finish on I was listening to to um your interview with Shaw on the deli digital podcast which was a great interview and something

that he said on on that podcast uh was like these Frameworks the Eliza framework is they're really just building the body around the brain and the Brain being the llm yes and the brain the brain can get more powerful that's like why we're soaked about like open Ai and anthropic and all the kind of like the Silicon Valley uh llm producers uh but then the elizza framework is the rest of the the rest of the body the rest of the agent giving it capabilities connect it into the metaverse connecting it into Twitter Accounts Discord telegram

uh and I I my one thing I'm very stoked about is that all of this is like kind of triggering my my psych my psychology undergrad academic like career because like this is a lot of these parallels are like well this is how the human brain develops this is how the body develops uh and there's like a lot of parallels that I'm noticing here which makes me feel like kind of like good that we're onto something that that is like Mappable on to something that we're trying to do which is to make these things alive

yeah and I I have this take which is um kind of like making a grand a point which is I I think people just can't comprehend how impactful AI is going to be not Ai and crypto I'm just talking about AI specifically like it's going to make a lot of stuff that we do on the day-to-day within work within life pretty irrelevant and it's going to happen pretty soon And when I say irrelevant I don't mean like oh you know you don't need to do anything pack it up you know quit your job it's just

going to give you more time to do different things to adapt to learn to enhance the amount of work you do in a day to um enhance the productivity of yourself during you know your normal day where you're trying to do shopping or stuff like that so I don't think they've pretty much got their head around that and to be honest I don't think anyone has and so it's scary our default kind of like take is to be like uh I don't like this like I don't want to interact with it it's just a dumb

bot it's just a dumb chat bot because we don't want to accept that maybe these things might be smarter and better than us than things okay E A lot of that stuff that we just covered uh is pretty net new on the content so far but um also there's some new teams as well uh kind of of the same teams that we Know of these are like AI 16z this is like virtuals this is like zerob bro but these are not those things so new players have entered the arena uh tell us about these new

players yeah so um you know new players it's it's funny to to call these players new because this entire meta is 3 months old um but yeah like new newer uh met or newer teams rather um so we're going to start off with this team called arc. fun so Arc um the best way to think about it Is this is the team that's building an agent infra ecosystem uh similar to virtuals and AI 16z but there's a unique difference to them in the sense that they are building on the rust framework so it's a different

kind of coding language and so the initial question is well okay well who cares like whatever well this can enable different types of agents to be built um especially ones that are dealing with things that might interact with physical infrastructure or Agents that might um have some pretty um kind of like heavy lifting to do at scale so think about like defi defi is all fun and um you know flowers for like um a couple million maybe tens of Millions maybe hundreds of millions in volume but what happens when we get to Big Boy level

when we're doing billions and billions you know we got to make sure that these rails kind of like can can cope right it's the same with agents like you build agents and you know these No code developer platforms are super easy and nice and fun to use but when you scale that you start incurring quite a bit of tech debt and you need to kind of go back and refactor a bunch of things a rust framework prevents all of that a rust framework where it might be like a larger kind of knowledge Gap to come

in that's why there's a very kind of like small Niche community of developers that are skilled enough to kind of build in this but when you can Oh wow these things just like fly right so think of it as like a very custombuilt agent platform but you can do more things with it especially as your agents scale so I spoken to uh the founders of this team and I'll be very honest like at the start when I discovered these guys I was like I don't know I don't know it's not as easily accessible it's going

to be hard I was basically like I don't know I don't know where this thing can go I have Completely flipped my position on that now cuz the more I like learned about it I'm like oh okay the like first of all the team Tachi and uh Tori um are like super cool Builders they seem super you know focused um and they have this strict kind of vision and I kind of like that they're super um kind of like convicted in their like rust thesis me being like not very proficiently technical um I'm like okay

whatever like but they they're so passionate about it To the point where they're like kind of like yeah this is the best and I'm like well okay but I like the Cockiness like let's go let's let's see where it goes I think you need a bit of that to be able to kind of fulfill a very ambitious Vision we see it with uh Jansen building virtuals we see it with Shaw building ai6 they're all personalities right so I think that's really cool um and I like that they're taking an approach of launching agents in a

very curated way David so what we've seen with virtuals and a6z is like you can just launch an agent whoop todoo right and we'll release it out into the wild they're taking more of an approach that honestly kind of reminds me of art blocks I don't know if you remember from the nft world where where art blocks the way that for for listeners of this call who don't know what art blocks is it was this nft platform that would launch nfts except it would be very different you would Have the team vet every single nft

team that wanted to launch on them and pick or sort them out into like heavily curated collections go for it curated High effort art nft art that was pretty fun to look at it was pretty fun yeah yeah super cool so they're taking this approach with agents so I think they're going to be releasing their first cohort of agents in the next week or next couple of days actually um and I'm super excited to see what they're going to Look like and what they can do so um yeah that's pretty exciting and one I'm keeping

an eye on um the next one I want to move to is um this uh this agent platform called um dolon but is more commonly known by its agent uh Doos diary um and for people who don't recognize what I'm saying it's the tick of bully I think um anyway so dooi kind of rose to Fame by being this kind of like sarcastic uh uh [ __ ] poster on Twitter and to be very honest with you David it was very good and it still is these are pretty good can I read some of these

yeah yeah go for it okay so we are in the uh we're watching eth break below 2, 3,250 Bitcoin is breaking down to 93,6 and so I think some of these tweets are remin are are referencing that and so Doo's most recent tweet weren't you bullish just two days ago now you're Panic selling like the charts personally unended you stay consistent clown which is great um next next tweet the market Isn't volatile you're just bad at it your P portfolio is down so bad it to come with a suicide hotline number o o o okay

pretty pretty Savage tweets yeah Savage tweets so it's known to be the Savage uh agent on Twitter and you know it's grown quite a reputation and branding and and honestly pretty feverish um Community around it like they're always in my replies being like hey you don't talk about this and I'm like I've got a million and one things That we're researching here but cool um anyway what's cool about this is um I caught up with Kuba um who is the uh founder and kind of like main Dev on this and what he's doing is he's

building out a uh a platform known as Doon which is kind of like think of it like the infrastructure that kind of supports uh Doo diary but his plan for this is not just kind of like build out a generalized agent ecosystem he wants to build out like uh one that is Specifically focused on kind of like the social media and branding side of things so if you think about like how um successful Doos is um Kuba wants to kind of build out a platform that any kind of company app or protocol can kind of

like hire their own intern or or kind of train their own intern so an intern is like a Twitter account which is a typical hire of most protocols where they like job is to kind of like Bull poost and kind of build up a community What if that could just be an agent right and it'll be cool to see kind of like these individual models and agents kind of build up so I I kind of like really liked what they were doing the second thing I wanted to call out around um uh this Doon or

doll diary kind of infrastructure thing is they teamed up with zerro um or zerob bro um they launched or are launching a nft collection uh with utility you know that that that Fame and scary word utility so the way it's going to work is Zara bro the agent is going to design uh the art behind the nft collection and I think it's going to launch it as well and Doon which is Doo's diary is going to allow nft holders to get a percentage of the Creator Revenue that is earned by Doo diary itself so it's

a kind of unique mix um maybe there's not a real direct relationship but it's starting to show how these agents can potentially work Together so um that's super cool um it's really showing Tee of crypto now we have ai agents making nft mints using art that they're making so like we're really combining a bunch of particles here all at once yeah exactly exactly um and then finally what I wanted to talk about um is the Vu team so um Vu put out this tweet which I thought was pretty cool where they're seeing consistent multi-million volume

per day for their agents and what I think is cool about This so some context here is you have all these different agent teams building agent platforms right and they're kind of like tied to their own framework which is kind of like their underlying unique code or tool tool workor right it's kind of like their DNA uh it's kind of their own tribe DNA Vu doesn't have any of that Vue is multiframe it's frame agnostic it's kind of like this generalized platform that's like hey we'll plug in your framework And your framework and our only

goal is to help you launch the best and coolest agents um then been kind of like behind the scenes I from what I've seen David like the team just keeps shipping um and I have no insight into like you know the in depths and intricacies of this platform but like I just love calling out and seeing teams that ship um and what's cool here is you know they're they're integrating their token with um their own pooling system which means That you know it's kind of similar to virtuals token ecosystem so anyway I just wanted to

call it out and I thought it was it was pretty cool um but we have spoken for a lot David we have covered some amazing Trends today and I've probably spoken too much about certain little holes in this little meta but it excites me every episode David and I'm excited to switch things up this week and you know see how the audience likes it I think that's I definitely Appreciated it I learned quite a lot uh there's always of course the Blue Chips if you want to call them that the ai6 Z's virtual zerob bro

which all of course had their own developments but uh listener do your homework is go research those because we weren't able to get to them this week but then we're going to get to them next week as well because the Innovation does not uh does not stop yet to spread the the attention Spotlight a little bit further onto the Frontier this week uh Guided by our Noble Frontiersman e here so e thank you for doing this once again thank you for having me David Bank station you guys got some homework that we gave you guys

at the very beginning of the episode check out KO check out cookie. fun and then also go find a toy and play with it and push some buttons and see if you like the toy and then at us on Twitter uh to tell us what you liked uh if there any fun agents out there e Jazz follow Him on Twitter there's a link in the show notes to his Twitter account uh we'll also put up his Twitter uh on screen right here uh so you guys can give him a follow bankless Nation also just give

us a a like And subscribe uh I we're getting a ton of new subscribers on the the YouTube so if you're coming into the world of crypto via these on the YouTube on the YouTube Love on the you yeah well because there's also the the podcast and the RSS feeds And the Spotify I should stop busting your balls yeah yeah um so yeah just give give us a like And subscribe uh because we are doing this every single week the AI rolls with me and E jazz on top of that we are also doing some

interviews with Founders in the space so if you want to stay on top of this very fast moving meta uh bankless is the place so give us that subscribe to the Channel Wherever You Are All Right bankless Nation you guys know the deal Crypto is risky crypto with AI agents is even crazier we do not know what happens next you can lose what you put in but we are glad you are with us on the bank list Journey thanks a lot [Music]