Right now we're focused on building these individual agents oh that agent made me laugh oh cool that agent is giving me great financial Alpha oh that agent is like trading back and forth very cool but I think the bigger picture needs to focus on what happens when these agents start interacting with each other autonomously 24/7 welcome bankless Nation to the AI rollup where we cover the recent news Developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and Ai and ezz this is the first AI rollup of the year we are not sleeping because AIS they don't
sleep uh we recording the morning of January 1st because this world does not stop uh ezz you are really excited to do this episode I am now just tapping back into the internet for the first time in a couple weeks so I'm going to need you to download me on what's been going on because I actually don't really Know too much uh which I think is perhaps useful uh to come into this episode Pretty dry how you doing Happy New Year my man happy New Year dude um how am I doing I I don't know
about you David but last time I checked the holiday season was a tranquil peaceful time to reflect on the year and kind of maybe eat a bunch of junk food and put on a few pounds and have permission to put down your phone put down your phone you know not look at a screen 247 and I Can safely say that I think I've had the least amount of sleep over the last two weeks uh turns out that the AI agent meta decided to just go on an absolute rocket and ship all the important stuff whilst
no one was looking and right up until the end of the year so absolutely insane and I'm excited to get into a bunch of things today I feel like that's just the clear sign of exuberance excitement Euphoria uh accelerated building uh just something's going on Over here uh it's probably a little bit bubbly uh but at the end of day I think I think high energy high energy and fro froy definitely comes to mind if people are just grinding their way through Christmas uh but also I think we're going to get into some of the
subjects here today and there's a lot of fundamentals being built and shipped and being measured as well what would you say zooming out what would you say is like the theme of the last like 10 days Of development in the AI space I would say agentic infra it's like a focus on what will eventually in my opinion end up becoming some of the leading uh layer 1es type platforms uh within crypto I think it's going to be a novel uh meta or a novel kind of foundational structure that starts forming no one quite really knows
what it looks like right now but some of these leading teams are starting to to build that out and I think that's going to be the the Most exciting thing to discuss today layer 1es and you don't mean like we're not making new blockchains but we're making New Foundations exactly it just L1 is a a simpler term to use to kind of convey the concept of what's going on in my opinion yeah so E I ask you this at the beginning of every single episode this whole AI agent AI crypto agentic platforms why is this
all such a big deal why are AI agents a big deal uh if people are just tapping into this Episode for the first time uh why should they be pilled about uh getting going down the AI agent Rabbit Hole okay so I'm going to give a slightly different answer than I normally would so normally I go on some philosophical rant which kind of ties into uh larger kind of vision around this technology infrastructure and applications and stuff that we're building I've done that for the last couple of episodes I'm going to give a slightly different
Answer um today um mainly around a question that I get asked all the time which is e has how big is this thing really going to get from a valuation perspective okay like I've heard like your big vision and stuff but at the end of the day a lot of people get into crypto to invest and you know maybe figure out what kind of like tokens they might buy and stuff like that and again none of this stuff is financial advice but if we were to entertain uh a Framework about that let's let's use the
following right so firstly I'll say I think over the long term this sector is going to hundreds of billions of dollars alone and secretly actually I think it's it's going to go way higher but we'll save that bull thesis for another episode but in terms of now and this cycle you know the bull market that we're in um if we project crypto's market cap to grow to say $5 trillion so that's about 40 to 50% growth from here and if we assume that agent networks you know these this agent meta um matches the peak of
defi percentage dominance last cycle which was around 5% the theme of The Last cycle yeah the theme of The Last cycle so it was 5% of the total crypto market cap this yields um theoretically using that analogy a $250 billion cumulative valuation for the AI agent matter right and and again this this has a lot of assumptions right this Assumes that uh crypto AI is going to be the biggest kind of theme of this cycle which I believe it is and an AI agent specifically is going to capture the majority of that and you mentioned
earlier like it's feeling kind of frothy kind of bubbly I do actually think that the AI agent meta is going to form like one of the bigger or potentially the biggest bubble that we have ever seen within the crypto sector in crypto yeah in crypto specifically right so if you Look at the current cumulative agent market cap it's just over $10 billion i' would say so if we assume the $250 billion comparison there that defi achieved that's a 25x from here right okay so this is a bit of boy maath going on here but like
that's kind of like the the general take right but but but if we factor in that AI is oh you know probably Humanity's single most world changing technology that's probably going to produce trillions of dollars of Economic value not just within crypto but outside across any and every industry and it already is you know open AI anthropic is already some of the biggest companies from a valuation perspective then you might assume that the peak um actually happens at a larger percentage so let's like again using boyat say that it's bigger than def AI is bigger
than defi right bigger than the financial system potentially or it's going to rehaul everything let's say It's 10% which is$ 500 billion right so that's like obviously many more multiples from where we are at sitting at like10 billion right um now take a look at this chart David so this was produced by Masari um which was released like I think a day or so ago which tracks the current AI Trend in terms of the defi Trend which happened last cycle and as you can see over the def chart mapped over the defi chart as you
can see it's following a pretty similar Trend like again this isn't you know an insinuation that this is exactly going to play out the way it does but it's just kind of interesting to look at this is not science this is It's boy math it's boy math but you know if you wanted a bit of morning hopium to wake you up on John 1 like this this is it okay for the uh listeners who cannot view this chart we are again uh the AI index is mapped over the the defi index and we're about at
parody uh right now which is Why which is why they're showing this and we're at parody in December of the same uh time cycle uh by the uh by the time we get to April in theory of 2025 it looks like it goes one two three four 5x larger 5x larger in April because that's what defi did that's that's this is the insinuation here that like dii grew 5x between December of 2020 to April of 2021 and if we are doing the crypto cycle thing then we are are perhaps getting a 5x uh between now
and Halfway through next year which I take E's point that like defi is a crypto native insular very Niche very complicated thing and that 5x AI is an adjacent technology that is being built by an entirely different sector that is progressing independently of crypto that is now coming into crypto and these two technologies are coming together which are much more easy to understand we understand AI we understand what these things can do uh so I've always been of The of the mind that the fact that these are two adjacent technologies that are coming together uh
does indicate the idea that this might be bigger than we've ever seen anything before in crypto and and not just any to adjacent Technologies probably the role or Humanity defining technology of our time right AI is literally wowing everyone on a daily basis and with the expected launch of open ai's Agent product in q1 As well as anthropic with the launch of uh their video model which is producing Motion Picture grade um video Pieces Just Simply from text and Google's releasing the same you know this whole Space is just completely magical and we're just kind
of like touching the tip of the iceberg here so if we assume these things are going to permeate across every facet of our digital lives and real life probably you know it's going to affect our jobs and You know how we work corporate structures Etc like this is going to get crazier and it's much easier to understand people understand it from headlines that they've read from articles that they've read very different to reading about a l or borrowing primitive which although very very important and underlies the kind of like primary value transfer of the way
that we kind of like interact with each other it's still not as easy to Understand as AI yeah yeah I was hanging out with some some friends this weekend I was telling the story of this one AI Agent Zero that released an EP on Spotify and then we opened it up and listened to it and I compare that to the same friend that I was explaining amm curves four years ago and it was not the same conversation one was like oh wow this an AI made this versus what the hell does providing liquidity mean like
these are different these are different Scenarios uh I want to trace over something that you said open AI releasing their AI agent uh product uh and then also the the Sora uh text to video like applications uh it it sounds like what came to my mind when you explain these things was that all of the big massive uh AI producers open AI Google you know Facebook uh are building tools that are potentially being able to be used by all the things that we are doing in the crypto world uh is it That's that's kind of
what I heard it's like oh a new tool just dropped correct to you know very high you precise text to video speech and now the AI agents over in the cryptoland with the tokens that's a new tool in their tool belt for them to use that's a new appendage that they just grew and so we have this massive like side of Silicon Valley creating you know AI things AI tools and then all of a sudden the tokenized versions of these agents now have those Tools to create more value to do more things to have more
capabilities that's that's what came to my mind you pretty much nailed it and where I would kind of add to that David is I think some of the most exciting things that we should look out for in 2025 is where those tools that are being launched from the traditional AI producers overlap with being able to bridge the gap between non- crypto cons consumers and crypto itself right so how can we should be Asking ourselves how can some of these tools be used to benefit and build and grow the crypto sector to help people access crypto
infrastructure where they may not even need to know that it's happening in the background but it helps give them a 10x better user experience for whatever they're trying to do whether that's send value between friends on X or whether that is something to do with you know borrowing again something or owning their own Digital or whatever that might be all right so that's a pretty good amount of hopium to front run the content of this episode what are we going to get into this episode each what are we going to talk about what's the subjects
that have dropped in the last like 10 days or so before we get into the fun stuff I I really want to talk about something serious can we talk about something serious for a second because last time I kicked off the I kicked off the episode With you know some examples of like this agent that was browsing Amazon and was buying toilet paper this agent that bought pizza super fun stuff but like I just want to talk about something serious for a second okay truth terminal the original crypto AI agent that started this whole meta
has dropped a Christmas album David and it's fire what's it called um you need to I actually don't know what it's called very goaty Christmas that's it Sorry why did I not know that and the the album cover is this artistic goat looking straight at you with horns and a Santa hat exactly and you should definitely give this a list I don't know if you have the Spotify pulled up at all but like some of the track names are hilarious and very track Jingle Bells parentheses fendom remix fendom mix let's listen to that one I'm
going to listen to that one real first all right right now this is just a Synthetic version of jingle bells jingle bells jingle you got to wait for the lyrics uh the third song is called Fart like Rudolph wait this is the serious subject that you wanted to bring up yeah I was being sarcastic David pretty heavily oh my god brother I cannot believe this is playing in my ears right now okay okay okay let's wind it up Let's wind it up let's actually talk about some serious stuff for a second okay so okay so
that wasn't the serious that that definitely I was being heavily heavily sarcastic for the listeners um but yes anyway okay so if we take look at this dashboard so this dashboard um kind of showcases some of the key metrics from um the virtuals protocol and we've spoken about this protocol a bunch of times uh on the show but for those who are kind of like Tuning in for the first time here virtuals is one of the if not the leading uh crypto agent protocol um that exists right now you can kind of think of them
as like a Launchpad so you can kind of come on it's no code you can kind of design an agent and then deploy it um with a token and so what that means is these agents will able to be kind of like live in production they can interact with each other and they can do kind of like different things um you Know like post on Twitter or create videos or stuff like that um and and they number of other capabilities coming through but what I want to point out here and and this platform is called
Cookie by the way like um I've chatted to the team a few times that they're like working on some really cool stuff and and they're basically like the the leading dashboard for to capture all the this agentic stuff like look at this chart that's in front of us right now For a second right so what we're looking at is we're looking at the cumulative market cap of these kind of AI agent coins as well as um the virtuals protocol token as well and you'll notice that like it's just been up and and to the right
and um it's really cool way to kind of like look at the different agents what their corresponding market caps are how many agents in total um the number is up I think like we're looking currently at 100 32 agents that are Actually listed you can look at the corresponding mind share that these agents are having on social media platforms you can look at the number of unique holders and all these metrics are up until the right which typically signals a really good Collective adoption from the crypto and non crypto space of these agents so if
you ever wanted to kind of like have a signal of whether these agents are are doing anything whether they're being Interacted with this is a really kind of good place to kind of like come in and kind of check in and this is virtual specific but you can pull this up for any other platform um that is live or will eventually go live yeah yeah exactly so if you scroll down you'll you'll see like some of the agents themselves and like some of the market cap differences you'll see this is for across platforms this is
for any frame exactly yeah and right now what we're This is this specifically is for virtuals what we're looking at right now which I I kind of like is the the leader and is representative of a lot of the movements that we can kind of extrapolate from but but yes to to your point like what we're looking at on these agents um specifically in this list of virtual specific agents right and you can imagine that this will eventually look like something like a coin market cap where um you can have a Look at like all
the leading agents across different Frameworks and different protocols this is an agent market cap exactly an agent Market we're on the virtual but we can just go to cookie. fun and there are some non virtuals agents here there's AI 16z I'm looking at zero bro which are non virtuals platforms uh across both Bas and salana um and actually sort the whole thing by market cap and that yeah so This is starting this is starting to look like a coin market cap a go a coin gecko but specifically for AI agents and the platforms that built
them yep exactly and if you scroll to the top David what I really like which I I haven't seen kind of too often in a coin market cap for example is the Mind share tab right so what this tells you and of course like crypto market caps or crypto markets in itself are driven very heavily by narratives and sentiment you Can kind of see the direct correlation between you know the leading agent um like axt on virtuals and its uh corresponding market share or mind share um within like social media platforms right um we can
also look at the market cap cumulatively on the left where it shows us like we're just over $15 billion right now okay so when you say you think that the AI agent space is going to hit $500 billion doll this is the number that you're talking about Right here total cryp total market cap on cookie. fun exactly exactly yeah we're looking at the total cumulative market cap of these kind of agent stuff exactly exactly so we're at 15 billion so we got a long way to go to 500 we got a while to go but
things get pretty pretty nuts in the in the crypto market so like our base case if we were to use that analogy that we spoke about earlier would be 250 um and then the Max B case would be You know a 500 yeah you know when the base case is more than a 10x yeah exactly yeah you know that we're full of uh very very bullish um perspectives on this show um but yeah and if we look at this uh this second chart that we have that you have pulled up here David um again just
shows the relative outperformance of these AI agent tokens um versus every other thing that has been kind of bumbling around for the last kind of two weeks and I Know that sounds so rich because you know we're here for like the longterm we're not meant to be talking about short-term price movements I'm just using it to kind of like point out that largely over the last couple of weeks when the market has been you know kind of steady and and not really doing its thing where it's mooned since the election date in the US um
the AI coins have been outperforming um and in this particular bull market the reason why I Think that's interesting David is it's been a very different bull market it's no longer been the case where you can kind of close your eyes and throw dots at the wall blindly and your token goes up there's been a lot of dispersion so focusing where you know the attention might Aggregate and where Innovation is happening has been super important and this kind of chart and the and the kind of dashboard that we looking at right now reinforces the statement
that I Think the AI agent meta is going to be one of the biggest well I think inside of the AI agent meta I think you kind of have been able to just blindly throw a dart so long as you're pointing at the AI agent Target so how how would you talk about uh how would you like measure or just speak about the fundamentals of this corner of the crypto world how do we know that we aren't like just blowing up hot air like at some point like at the very beginning it's okay for things
To be hot air but as things progress and then things develop and again like we're not we're not doing these AI podcasts because we think this is like a a a one year long time Horizon I think we both agree that this is the future of crypto this is the future of AI this this sector is huge this corner of the internet is huge uh but we but that has to collapse down into fundamentals at some point so how has the conversation around fundamentals and AI been growing Yeah couldn't agree more with that thesis um
we need to focus on something more important um if you pull up this tweet from uh I think it's at the hidden maze um he touches Upon A A really kind of like important Point here which is or he's noticed a trend rather and it goes AI agents are being flooded with insane number of requests and interactions and he then goes on to list a bunch of different agents and their specific kind of metric so one of these agents called Agency has 6 6 2,000 individual queries another one has 20,000 ta requests 40,000 on telegram
um the point that he's making here is he's noticing an exponential uptick of queries and transactions to and from these agents and I think that's a really important metric or kind of stat to track because it tells us a little more than just price action you know instead of staring at the chart of a token we should look at how these agents are actually being Interactive with and what they're actually doing you know I could imagine like the next layer deeper would be okay there's 62,000 queries but like what's the net effect of that like
what are these queries doing what are the people looking for and get deeper into the data and I think that's where like the real value of you know whether you're looking at it from an investment perspective or a research perspective becomes really really important and I think this is the Trend we'll see kind of like grow um out um over time um I mean if you think this is like a Silo tweet and like hey you guys are just pulling from this one data point actually no like um virtuals game um framework which is essentially
their framework to help design and and build and and launch agents I mentioned it earlier it's like a no code interface this is like the main framework that allows you to do that is getting 150,000 requests per day David um which is like an insane thing to say when you compare it to like literally two months ago where this was like a very n in space with like 0 to 10 agents so again I think this is going to be a repeated pattern we're very early on but it's an important metric to track going forwards
I think in the order of operations of first quantity then quality this makes sense because in crypto we kind of don't really know what we're doing we're kind of going off into The frontier uh we don't know really know what's out there so what do we do we experiment uh and so having an explosion an absolute Cambrian explosion of just actions requests queries interactions uh but to create that first and then figure out like okay which of these requests which of these interactions really actually moved the needle uh I think that part comes later so
first you need to have an explosion of quantity then the crypto industry Figures out like What mattered what was effective what was valuable uh and then we can kind of iterate and refine the explosion of requests into an explosion of quality requests so I feel like maybe we we are in the quantity era of crypto AI fundamentals uh and we'll be here for a little bit before we start to really enter the quality era of AI fundamentals that's just a hot take how do you feel about that yeah I think you spot on no Comments
yep I think like we're we're currently in a very bubbly frothy or the start of a very bubbly frothy period for agents and it'll get a lot of attention loads of people will be right but then they'll become a time where I think we'll shift attention more to towards fundamentals probably when speaking quite frankly prices go down and that's where like the real work starts getting done okay so let's go ahead and get into the rest of the episode because that was Actually just the intro appetizer for all of the the rest of the content
that we're going to talk about we're going to talk about updates in the AI 16z and Eliza World zerob bro has some cool new releases virtuals of course as we' talked about has been going absolutely Gang Busters this last week uh e Jazz has a take on token listings with centralized exchanges uh he's also got an agent App Store thesis bunch of other content that we're going to get into but Before we get into all the content first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible with over $1.5
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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 $15.5 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 and we're back EZ AI 16z the Eliza framework download me on what's been going on in the last few weeks here okay if I actually did that true to your word I would be here
for hours um so much has Happened David in this individual protocol that it's kind of hard to get my head around and again to re reemphasize this like this has happened over the last two weeks um so what we're going to do for this next kind of segment of um this episode is we're going to touch upon the major protocols and kind of cover the main things um the reason why I'm not talking about newer things right now is because all the new things have happened on these major Protocols recently and they're pretty major things
and I think it's important to kind of communicate that um today so starting with AI 16z um before we get into it I want to I want you to kind of look at uh these charts which was shared by Grant um it's a really interesting one to track because as we've mentioned uh on previous episodes of this show the AI 16z um protocol and for people who who aren't aware of this they're kind of famous for their open-source agent Framework um what is a framework a framework is uh a toolkit to help you design and
build your agent so earlier I mentioned the game framework from virtuals this is kind of a similar thing and I'll touch upon that later on in this episode but this is the main one and Eliza actually is the most famous framework uh in the World currently it's actually number one trending on GitHub but before we do that take a look at this chart David So this Compares um the Star history of the Eliza repo on GitHub compared to some of the most popular crypto protocol interfaces and repositories that we've seen today and this a star
history on GitHub is just going to be an indication of where developer attention is being pointed they're like saving it to their Library they're just they're favoring it because like hey really useful code base let me play around with this and so let me star that it's kind of like a loose Indication of developer attention typically yeah yeah you you've took the words out of my mouth essentially and if you look um at this you have to look closely but the next image will kind of like Zoom it in it is a straight vertical ruler
um and a pretty that's a pretty crazy chart to look at right and if you've noticed it's uh crept P well not crept past but blasted past a very popular um repository which we've spoken about Quite a lot um on the show which is the Unis swop interface and uh for those of you who don't know Unis swop is the top decentralized exchange or one of the top decentralized exchanges within crypto and their interface as you can might imagine is kind of like the home to a lot of crypto activity um the number one thing
people do is trade and Swap and stuff so the fact that this Eliza repo has swept past them in such a short period of existence remember Eliza Didn't uh really exist concurrently until like 2 and a half months ago it's absolutely insane to see so there's that that I I wanted to kind of call out um the second thing is it's the number one trending repository in the world right now so previously when we've mentioned it it was uh number two for quite a consistent number of U months now it is officially number one ahead
of uh Google Geminis I think it's they've got like a really popping cookbook repository if I Remember correctly yeah that it's it's there on the screen um but Eliza OS is now like the number one so what this means to your point earlier David is there's a lot of developer attention on this and I think it's really important to stress developer attention which typically means not just crypto um software Engineers but also external engineers and that has kind of been the trend for Eliza specifically they've got a lot of influx of these AIML Engineers That
are coming in from outside purely because you could argue cryptos sh Shone like a huge light on them this might be through price attention to that token AI 16z but it also might be through you know a number of different Outlets so is the Eliza framework inherently a crypto framework as in if we have an external AI developer from the you know Silicon Valley from San Francisco not in the crypto world and they download and start playing with the Eliza framework is There a way for them to do that adjacently outside externally to crypto or
is it inherently a an a crypto activity nope nope it is um ambidextrous is the incorrect term but the the analogy kind of stands I feel like yeah yeah do you get it hopefully the listeners get it um but yeah so it it applies to both sides so so for context here uh the framework is written uh in a coding language known as typescript and typescript is actually one of if not the Most popular kind of like programming language out there when it comes to a lot of this AI um kind of ml stuff I
think maybe second to or compared to python as well so the point is if if you're an engineer and you know typescript you can come around and play with this stuff secondly and we'll touch upon this in a second the Eliza framework has a number of different Integrations and plugins to it that aren't just Crypt native and that's the Beauty of this thing right and think about it right agents themselves kind of like have a goal and a task it shouldn't necessarily be just crypto specific there will be crypto specific agents right that have to
perform onchain specific activities but if you think about an agent as an autonomous entity that needs to fulfill a mission or a goal it'll do that by any means right it might need to use some offchain stuff sometimes and it might need to use some Onchain stuff sometimes so you need a toolkit or a framework that is ambidextrous and allows you to kind of hit all these different things if that makes sense okay so let me give you a bare and bull case about that the bare case is that oh like this is a super
popular framework that AI developers are using and it's they actually are not it's not really necessarily about crypto it could be not about crypto uh maybe you crypto Bros are just making a bunch Of hype about nothing so that's the bare case the bull case is that well this thing has crypto elements in it and it's kind of it is birthed by the crypto it home is the crypto industry and so these AI developers that are downloading and building on this framework are actually just so the closest to crypto that they've ever been and also
like if they want to make any money they need to tokenize them uh and so why wouldn't they just tokenize them because that's The incent and so of last point is the most important one David sorry to cut you off but I just wanted to reemphasize that point it is the most important one Eliza was being worked on by these Engineers before um the token was kind of like uh Drew attention around it right it was in a very kind of nent form but it existed and to be clear the ai6 Z core devs whilst
they had some crypto experience were primarily in the opsource AI World they all there are a Bunch of them that live in San Francisco they're all that that that is their home right and then they came across this and they wanted to experiment in a community that is very driven towards open source that is crypto that's been this the case since we kind of like founded this whole industry and with the pairing of a token it's kind of attracted a bunch of this attention so whether you like it or not it is a kind of
value acrel in that sense I want to move on quickly here David um they've also um according to Kel's over here in this tweet had more submissions on uh from the salana AI hackathon than salana blockchain had in the entire kind of like Midway point of its 2023 kind of section which is if people remember is like a really Peak bull period um for it right in terms of developer activity not necessarily price right and it overall it's also had a very incredible year so if you pull up this uh this tweet which talks about
um Kind of like the the key aspects of AI 16z and its development you'll see like Eliza OS has had over 7,700 Stars been forked over 21,000 times has over 200 contributors um 850 merge PRS if you're wondering what all of this is or if you're listening to this and you have no idea what it basically means is there is a ton of developer activity and people building on it and that's the unique Point around ai6 Z and it kind of Reminds me to be honest David of the developer mode that ethereum kind of gained
in the defi days really early on right and you know a lot of people started to fling around the you know you can't catch up with the developer mode and all that kind of stuff and whil you know I may not agree or disagree with that you know there are some truths and some kind of like I don't know there's no denying that having a developer mode gives you a humongous head start with All of these things right so you don't might then be wondering well okay e like why are you telling me all of
this like you know like so what like what's causing all of this to toen happen well drum roll please um AI 16z announced that they are launching an agent infra ecosystem and I've summarized some of the kind of key aspects in this tweet that you're showing over here um but let's kind of like unpack what this means right so um an analogy to use is The virtuals protocol which um we've mentioned a bunch of times on this show and on this episode has what's known as an agent Launchpad right so it's a launch pad that
you can go on to design and build agents and launch it and then they have other toolkits which enable these agents to do other things this is essentially ai6 Z's kind of unique platform and take on that um kind of a Ascent of an agentic infra ecosystem so the AI 16z platform will focus on Enabling agent swarms so that's the key Point number one um and in my opinion this is the key to unlocking the next level of crypto agents autonomous agent economy so if you think about this right now we're focused on building these
individual agents oh that agent made me laugh oh cool that agent is giving me great financial Alpha oh that agent is like trading back and forth very cool but I think the bigger picture needs to focus on what happens when these agents Start interacting with each other autonomously 24/7 so let's imagine there is a number of Agents David and I'm hypothesizing here that uh can do the job of the bankless um company or whatever that might be right you know they can spin up David video llm they've got your voice recording ready so they can
make you sound def got my voice you know yeah there you go they've definitely got your voice they've completely digested all of your podcast Transcripts so they know your tone they know what kind of questions you're going to ask right and they can just spin up videos that talk about the latest um crypto AI stuff just like we're doing on this podcast episode right now and then you might be like well how do they know what's going to happen EJ well that that group of agents that make up Bank list will just ping axt or
ping another agent and be like hey can you give me the latest download of what's happening on AI agent meta um pull from crypto Twitter pull from uh blah blah streaming platform pull from Facebook or whatever and it'll do it and it'll provide a nice little neat summary of notes that we're looking at right now on another separate screen David and it'll go through everything in your voice and everything so um that's just a a very that's a very hypers specific spefic example but the point is these agent swarms are going to allow pretty crazy
autonomous activity Which should mimic businesses which should mimic organizations we are very far away from that world but building the infrastructure that supports that is super important I'm going to pause there it feels like you've got some stuff to say David no I'm tracking I I think the way that I would distill that is that the to continue your analogy there's a bunch of inputs into this job that we need to consume me and Ryan uh the all entire team we consume of inputs one of Those inputs is like you know data from coin market
cap one of those inputs is discussions around crypto Twitter another one of those inputs is maybe discussions in some large telegram groups and so there's a bunch of inputs uh and then we have gotten good at processing them turning them into agenda documents uh hitting the record button creating audio files uh creating video files uh editing those files adding on some graphics and sending them up over To YouTube so it's a bunch of inputs and a bunch of outputs and I think what you're saying is like well one agent per inp uh and that's what
a swarm is uh and every single agent has its specialized job uh and once you cohere them together and orchestrate them together then all of a sudden you have uh something pretty magical is that that's what you were saying exactly that's that's pretty much it yeah well said well said um but the Real kicker with this platform and kind of like moving on to point two here is the fees that are generated from this infrastructure that they're building right and i' I've listed something here you know around trading pools and stuff don't worry about that
that what I'm basically saying is the agent activity will be probably taxed in some form by the platform right because they've got to earn something from it so there'll be a percentage fee um those fees are going To be used to drive back and buy the native token of AI 16c which is dollar a bur we have burn baby burn burn models burn baby burn exactly so we have a really neat flywheel forming which ACC Cruise value and success from the Eliza agent framework from this platform back to the Token the native token itself and
you know this is one of the most powerful things that we've learned from crypto networks over the last 10 years is that value acal back to a token Can be a really strong way of seeding a community a really strong way of seeding investment and a really strong way of building Innovation within a sector right as we mentioned earlier Eliza was alive um and kicking but hadn't really got that much attention and investment then we had the token and now we have a ton of Builder activity on it so super cool to see they also
have a bigger vision of aligning a16z Beyond just a platform so I mentioned earlier I Described this platform as like a Launchpad but actually I think it's going to become so much more and we're going to tap on this later um but the point is like I think these platforms are going to form something that looks like an L1 and the L1 I don't really know what it's going to look like I don't think anyone knows what it's going to look like but it's going to support these agent economies and remember these agents are going
to be chain agnostic so Um I think that's really cool that they're thinking about that and the third one is you know they're deploying a treasury so a lot of these buyback and burn stuff some of it will be allocated to a treasury which is going to get fueled towards op Source development so overall really exciting to see but of course you know what does that mean for for this you know how did the market react well if you pull up the price chart uh of AI 16z um and I think I I Sent you
the link to to this David uh you can see it has been literally been up only um since uh this announcement essentially it is my God have not checked in on this whoa It's Gone 4X since before Christmas yeah exactly from December $57 it's insane it's insane so the market is strongly indicating or hinting that they like value acrel mechanisms tied to agentic activity and they Believe in the team they love the open source nature they know that elizer is one of the leading Frameworks so seeing this price activity reflected in the chart doesn't surprise
me at all it's happened really quickly and that's why I you know couldn't sleep but yeah yeah pretty pretty insane insane stuff uh I remember when we were first starting to do these episodes AI 16z had just had some of its um like missteps a little bit of its like drama yep yeah had some Fud yeah and man you can barely even see that in the chart these days and I think the Learning lesson that we were talking about in our first episode was that H this is it's not really a startup it's like a
hodg Podge group of Open Source Believers all coming together to learn how to do this thing and they're kind of learning in in prod learning in prod shipping in prod uh and now I think of the uh the theme of the updates that you just told me it's like they've actually Really started to figure things out uh and things are really starting to cohere and come together in a pretty beautiful way yeah and David if you squint and you look closely at the first little peak of this chart like right back there you see that
you see that little Peak and then where it kind of went down subsequently right there that was where the fud happened so it it crashed and back then I remember people were like oh my God it's a 10x one tenen of the price Exactly people were going crazy they were like oh this is the end you know we can't believe in the team anymore I got people sending me messages after this saying like why are you guys covering AI agent stuff like look at the look it just crashed it's over it's not going anywhere right
it's not going anywhere and now we're like a 10x above that the market cap sits above $2 billion and you know it's pretty insane to see the the demand around this but alas enough on The price action I think that there is a really good uh I like this tweet that shows the insane amount of teams that are building um on this uh infra ecosystem uh so if you take a look at this David scroll down scroll down for me right and open one of the sub tweets over here the weekly Builder report and by
the way shout out zerox witchy who like covers like a lot of the stuff that's going on if you open up that sub tweet um David just click on it you'll See a a big list oh goes more that's that's one of two and for those who aren't listening there's probably like 50 teams on one tweet building various different things and it's absolutely insane and like I I want to be able to kind of like illustrate this right this tweet does a good job of it but like there's a ton of development activity on this
stuff so the question is or the bet is and what I think people are pricing in with ai6 Z is because they have so Much developer mind share there's probably going to be some really smart folk that build something really cool and that's probably going to take it to its next step essentially so pretty insane to see I think at the very beginning we talked about AI 16z could didn't really have a perfect story behind connecting the token to Value creation but really you want to place your bets on where the developers are because they'll
figure it out like Developers are the resource that you need that everyone else is looking for and if your only problem is that you can't figure out yet how to connect the token to Value capture that's a solvable problem and acquiring devs is the real problem exactly exact that's exactly it um so if we now move on because I know we have a lot to cover in this episode I want to talk very quickly about something else that the i6z team launch which I thought was really interesting And is still kind of being cooked um
so you've pulled up a tweet here which describes or says an AI agent just raised $5 million in under one hour for an Ico shortly after its creator was suspended from X so what on Earth just happened so let me cover this very quickly um one of the core developers of AI 16z wanted to test out a new AI agent primitive so what is that primitive well he noticed a problem in the uh token launch space so if you look at platforms Like pump. fun uh they launch thousands of meme coins a day but the
issue with this is it gets sniped what does that mean it means that they are Bots or algorithms that look for these types of launches and tries to snipe a bunch of the supply and then eventually dumps the token after like a uh you know a bunch of time now um a solution to this that has been formed has been a white list so a white list is you basically trust a human and you say hey it's me I would Like to be on this the human approves you you send the human uh funds from
an address and you trust that the human doesn't rug you that the human doesn't run away with your money there's still a trust aspect there but of course in crypto and blockchain as a whole we want to try and build trustless infrastructure right so the core Dev um at AI 16z thought of hm what if an agent handled that middle Transaction what if an agent said hey Here's an address any amount of s or eth that you send to this will get contributed towards this agent token that we're launching right so so he set up
a test agent account called AI pool T he or something like that AI pool t uh T stands for trusted execution environment it doesn't matter you don't need to to know that um but it started this agent on Twitter had an X handle and it provided an address and said hey I I'm using this as a test I will launch a Token in about a day's time you can send sa to this don't sell any more don't send any more than 10 Solana and no lower or no fewer than one Solana and of course in
true crypto fashion no one listened to to those rules and sent $6 million and the Tweet says 5 million but literally 2 minutes after that it was $6 million um into this uh smart contract address which was owned by the agent uh David you look like you're about to say something so just to be clear the people Sending Soul are buying the token of the the governance token of this one AI agent yes so so so they are sending their salon to this address that the agent created on its own trustly permissionless autonomously so no
human intervention created owns its own private Keys um created this address sending it to this address and the A and it's trusting that the agent will launch a token as it says within a day now the reason why you Would trust this agent over a human is because it's programmed to versus a human where you know they might be like ah damn $6 million it's not my problem that they sent more than I asked I guess I guess I could run away with this you know I I guess we could kind of see where this
goes so the way that this played out was many people sent a lot more money than was anticipated um the agent then deployed a token true to its word under 24 hours later uh it was Called meta V I think was the name of the token um and overall it was a successful experiment but you can see the majority of the hiccups actually happened on The Human Side of Things David on the centralized platform side of things so immediately after the um agent raised $6 million um its account got banned by onx even though it
had like a verified check mark and its core developer that was tweeting about it got banned for Impersonation um when it was in fact him and the bot accounts that had spammed it with the golden check mark were the ones that got it reported so for context there spam accounts can get spun up to copy an original X account they reported the original developers X account which ended up getting banned which is so ironic and funny uh but the tech worked as it should so pretty interesting development I think the Primitive works very well but
it wasn't A a clean sweep sadly okay okay so what's the big takeaway so that was there there was a lot of story there if you just had to that into one take what the big take from all that um I think that the tech Works essentially so being able to do Fair launches whether it's uh you know the dreaded word Ico or whatever initial coin something uh raising a token or or launching a token I think can be done in a very deterministic and safe and fair manner This is another way to do it
and it's leveraging an agent to do so David and what this is another data point to is our thesis that agents will just make the crypto stuff so much easier to do like you all you had to do was go to the Twitter agents so all you have to do was go to the agent's Twitter profile copy the address and then send s to it there was no signing transaction approvals there was no like testing is this the page opening up another tab it was just Like oh okay cool this is it send done so
it's going to make the ux a lot easier this is a very hypers specific example but I thought it was it was pretty cool and I I expect to see this primitive kind of grow um over time um so yeah that was kind of like the main stuff that happened with ai6 you know kind of little menial things you know minor price action uh minor GitHub repo uh vertical charts and um you know just just the number one trending repository In the world but you know no biggie things that we all kind of uh accounted
for when we thought that this is exactly where this would all be going in in the future exactly exactly um but let's go on to um our next major um token protocol or agent token protocol zerro so you mentioned uh them uh zerbo earlier on and for context for anyone on this uh who are hearing about zerro for the first time um zerro is a crypto AI agent um it has over I think 880,000 Followers on X or or formerly known as Twitter um and it's kind of like a creative and cultural agent yeah he
stands out to me the most out of the all the ones cuz he's like the artistic he's the artistic uh creative type B person who just wants to make art yeah exactly and like you know he produces EPS you know every other week no biggie um it's on Spotify he's getting paid streamed revenue from that he's got Creator sharings uh earnings from X you know Just kind of casual normal things for a completely autonomous entity he's the he's the high art I don't know if it's a he it it's the high art AI agent exactly
it's the high art kind of cool cultural cool kid agent essentially um and it's it's he's actually gone through quite the evolution um over the two weeks since we last spoke about uh it um and you can kind of see the summary uh that you've got pulled up here from one of the co-founders of zerro where he kind Of covers like the um main things that they've done for zerro kind of this year so they launched Zari which is their open source framework for context everyone this is the same as Eliza from AI 16z this
is the same as game it's the AI layer one it's the ler one just think think of it as like the kind of like the part of the layer one um they've launched an agent on it um which is kind of like doing defi stuff zerra went cross Trin all this kind of stuff but I Want us to ignore this for a second because David to your point it's building what's essentially going to become the L1 platform right so I want us to to pull up this uh this tweet here for um announcing the zerro
uh infra ecosystem right so this is Jeffy um the founder and frontman of zerro um and it's human Handler per se um and he says we're building zentience doxyz a consumer facing Launchpad for agents now rather than getting into the Nitty-gritty of details I can just explain kind of like the high level things that they're doing you can scroll down David if you want to kind of touch up on the main points but zentience is essentially going to be their platform infra so same as AI 16z which announced theirs they are going to be building
a platform that helps teams build on their tool framework zeri and agents will be kind of be able to do a bunch of different cool things And taxed for the value that they produce in a very minor fashion and that that value will acred to its native token zerro right so rather than rehash all the things that I've said for ai6 andz and why this is so important I think it's important to point out the trend that we're seeing here which is probably no longer than a month and a half ago David all of these
tokens were meme coins these were agent born meme coins actually a lot of this came from Pump. fund right which is known for to be a mem coin Launchpad so the fact that we have these agents that had a coin which I would agree with looked like a meme coin smelt like a mem coin to start off with probably was a mcoin at the time probably exactly is now kind of doing a reverse typical crypto token Trend backing its way into fundamentals and uity oh my God the the U word David it is you know
it's the U word like utility it's it's it's often avoided but Now maybe maybe we can talk about it again right so it's pretty awesome to see these teams that are so heads down building really cool infrastructure kind of Open Source that infrastructure for everyone else to use and find a way to tie that value back to their native token for their Flagship agent right so you kind of had zerro in this particular example as the front man acre a moat of followers loyal listeners from its Spotify list and then in that way kind Of
attract developers to be like oh hey I like what you're doing here can I play around with this as well open source their Tech if you if you notice here they're open sourcing their uh in-house creative llm so their agent models which will allow you know developers who are building on their platform to be able to have the same kind of tone or creativity that zerro does loads of cross-chain interactions and Integrations the ability for the these agents to talk to Each other it's just amazing to see these things you know happen again and and
again the question is while e you know so what like did that have any effect on the token the price shart has been again up only like if you pull up the if you pull up the the zarro um token shot you'll notice that it's it's seeing quite a significant amount of attention like I think it's sitting at like just under 60 and it was at 30 um also like it touched $700 million market Cap after being at uh let's see right before Christmas 300 million so over a doubling we're basically at a doubling since
before Christmas exactly so again the marketers are pricing in um that the long-term Outlook at least sorry midterm outlook for these agent coins and these agent ecosystems is going to be focused on the infra and open sourcing that and allowing developers to build bigger and better things it is reassuring to me that all of these L l1s these AI agent Platforms are starting to all look very similar and start to build the same thing because that means that we're all on to something here if they were all doing something chaotic and different that means that
there's not as much s signal but the fact that there's like convergence and consensus as to like where the value is and where the utility is and that's all being built on by many different teams coming from many different directions is reassuring to me That that that feels like building a very strong Foundation a a Critic might say or respond to that David well if they all look the same they're just copying each other right and like we're going to end up with a bunch of just teams that are doing the same kind of things
I think that's a very naive take in my opinion because I think a lot of the top teams will differentiate themselves in very meaningful ways let's take zerra for this example right so Let's let's look at a few examples um I think I sent you a link that uh speaks about their partnership with AI 16z for zeropi their their framework um David So if you look at this it's basically saying like hey like Z is live and they're going to be partnering with loads of different teams to be able to kind of expand the user
set of zeri right so what this means is um zerro is integrating across a bunch of different chains they will connect to ai6 Z and Its framework and enablement Via there with typescript it's going to connect with Bas they launched a uh base zerro pool I think it was virtuals in zerro pool so you know zerro is connecting to Bass the L2 zerro is also um going to be existing on the virtual ecosystem uh we mentioned on the last uh episode that zerro is um integrating uh with eth it's running a staking validator it is
already going to be running more validators going forwards it's launched An nft collection it's going to be everywhere right and I think the approach that Zer bro is taking and I think we're going to see this unfold in q1 is it's going to become this kind of ominous agent that is Pres presence across every bit of crypto infra that you I or anyone in the crypto ecosystem interfaces with right so it's able to tap into different communities David and what's important here is its first example of this was coming into Twitter And saying hey all
right David you're the K but I'm the K now you know that Meme of like you know I'm the captain now it's like David I'm the K now right and it just shot to it just shot to 70,000 followers now it's going to try and capitalize on every other place and it's starting with the crypto infa to begin with right um and I have a feeling that with the updates that the team's making with shared memory and stuff we're going to see something pretty cool Come pretty soon I do love these artistic renderings of these
AI agents kind of giving them some sort of uh Identity or Soul at least for us you know meat space Souls where we have the AI 16z waifu hugging the zerob bro like I don't even know how to describe it but it's just like yeah they they're they're getting they're arccs they are arcs these things and with these like small little like AI generated artistic renderings kind of gets a little uh gets A little flavor to it for us humans out there who who like these things exactly exactly and finally to kind of give an
insight into what zerro might kind of launch in q1 let's they did kind of like a wrapup so the co-founder tinson kind of like went through a bunch of things but if you scroll right to the end there's some super exciting things that they mention um in this tweet which is okay well we're launching this platform I want to call out a few things and for Everyone that's listening this is just a list of things I want to call out a few things here number one inhouse cerebro models for swarm intelligence um the unique thing
here is zbro seems to be hinting that they're going to be open- sourcing their own AI model that is a big thing so far a lot of these other agent Protocols are leveraging um uh gp4 um and anthropics clae model in different ways it's kind of like different flavors of them they've been Fine tuning them but uh zerro Team seems to be open sourcing their own creative llm which is going to put them at a very unique advantage in terms of being able to build really cool agents that's number one I want to call out
number two is we've already spoken about the zerro flywheel and the zerai expansion I think value acrel to their token is going to kind of boost not only their price but their developer ecosystem because a lot more attention and investment um from Serious players will come into the space and the last point is all these different Integrations that they're making with with l2s with l1's GPU layer Integrations these are all the building blocks that you need to have agents that run autonomously right you don't want them relying on centralized Cloud servers which can shut them
off because they don't like what they're doing you want them relying on decentralized infrastructure ecosystems which is what A lot of these um platforms and teams are building I was uh talking to a handful of the layer two teams I talked to a number of months ago and I said I just came into our telegram groups with him I said hey guys uh the new competition is growing as many agents on your guys' chains as possible so Focus there uh and actually kind of seems like the agents are just doing it anyways was like oh
you got some block space for me like we'll take it like I'm going on Your block space uh which fine great works for me yeah I mean like my I put out this tweet yesterday I think I think my prediction is in 2025 I think um agents will account for 30% of user transactions across all blockchains um sound right so I think like yeah and I think like over time this is going to become a really dominant stat I think the inherent and Native user of these blockchains will eventually become agents they're birthed in code
um they Are built to work 24/7 with minimal error rate right very deterministic and non-deterministic right they're able to reason uh much better than a human who might be too tired or sleepy or angry or whatever that might be they're not rocked by emotions so it's it's pretty awesome to see the arbitrum portal is your one stop hub to entering the ethereum ecosystem with over 800 apps arbitrum offer something for everyone dive into the epicenter of defi where Advanced trading lending and staking platforms are redefining how we interact with money explore arbitron's rapidly growing gaming
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works for you no guess work no Miss deadlines no complexity visit tok.com that's T k.com to talk with toku today let's move on to virtuals now shall we David um the final big protocol that I kind of want to touch on um so the the the flagship headline here is virtuals market cap flipped to's market cap now for those of you who don't um recall to is the native token of a um ail1 shall we say called benser and an actual layer One and the real layer one an actual real you know I'm a real
boy um kind of situation right and has blocks exactly it's a blockchain and benser up until this whole AI agent mattera um kind of got created about 3 months ago was the um ail1 it was the only one that was kind of really spoken about on mass and that got the most attention um and kind of like investment per se and what's super interesting to see is in such a short time one of the Leading agent protocols has supposed it in market cap and if you'd asked me about a month ago David I said yeah
this will happen but probably sometime hopefully by like Midway 2025 this got accelerated so quickly um if you look at the chart of virtuals like it has literally been up only and there's been very few pullbacks um so it's really interesting to see the market kind of price this Vision in of like you know okay these agents are Going to take over blockch chains um their infrastructure is probably going to be the leading infrastructure for crypto AI not the other way around and I don't know if I completely agree with that take I think there
is definitely a role uh and position for benser um but maybe it is the stack that exists below or beneath the agent L1 so agent l1's can kind of plug in benser and they can leverage their models they can kind of like tune in to um different kind of Applications that it's kind of providing GPU and stuff all the boring kind of nitty-gritty stuff agents can kind of pull from that and then the fun agents can just you know have their time on their platform built by virtuals ai6 Z zbro and you know we kind
of like move on from there so I thought this was super interesting because typically you can kind of I kind of think of like benser is the infrastructure play and then agents as the consumer application Play right zuro was like a fun thing that made us laugh so was like kind of Luna from virtuals and the AI 16z marketing was kind of hilarious but now they're being treated kind of as equals and it's really being shown in the price chart like way sooner than expected yeah yeah and I think ever since the nft Mania followed
by meme coins in crypto we've really seen a very strong premium on attention and these AI agent front-end consumer uh layers to this Whole Revolution is being priced in as like the attention layer whereas bit tensor is like the backend infra technical layer which is just not as sexy for like the average consumer that's kind of the story that I'm seeing here exactly exactly and I have to emphasize that the the change in metrics doesn't just apply to the price if you pull up this tweet from uh from ether Mage David um he says that
the total virtuals agents market cap has now Crossed a billion uh dollars sorry a billion and two billion in trading volume across all virtuals agents so it's not just just about the virtuals token but it's also about the collective agent market cap as well and you know that kind of activity and stuff seeing there right so so that's really interesting but if you pull up this next tweet David um on our last episode um when you were out and Ryan was hosting we spoke about like the agent fees so You know what's the revenue generated
from like these platforms well it was $35 million you know and they saw the majority or the bulk of that in um I think the proceeding two weeks now it's been another two weeks and we've added another $15 million to agent fees generated so these kind of infrastructure systems aren't kind of nent either you know we're seeing a lot of demand it's kind of like the analogy would be kind of like pump. Fund in a Way it's not exactly one to one but there was a lot of demand for pump. fund to launch tokens right
and they were just purely meme coins and they generate fees from that well now we have the agentic infra equivalent which is doing a more serious thing or more serious objective and is generating you know kind of like fees that are pretty pretty impressive for such a young platform I would say been a a longstanding idea uh vision of Bank list that fees are the Ungame ungame truth-telling metric if fees therefore real yeah exactly completely and I I think like it's the most obvious metric to track usage for these things right cuz nothing to your
point nothing says usage more than people paying for this kind of stuff to to work right and then if you look at this um chart that you've got pulled up here um the volume of these base tokens uh for these agents being kind of like traded has like just shut up it's now a 12% dominant um kind of share of all base tokens being traded so this agent meta is permeating across all ecosystems whether it's bass whether it's salana whether it's another L1 L2 or whatever that might be so this again proves the point that
this meta is kind of ating across kind of like everywhere um so that's really cool to see but I think all of this comes down to the team's vision and execution so what I will say I said this last episode the team just Ships if you bring out um this tweet from ether Mage here David ether Mage for everyone um listening in is the the co-founder of virtuals um he kind of wants to focus on these three things he lays out these three points that within his vision of the virtuals platform he doesn't want developers
to have to focus on the cost of experimenting so how he mitigates this is any agent that's launched you know the within the trading pools or any activity that it does There's a tax to it and this tax is put into the agent's own wallet which the agent can then spend on things like compute costs or inference costs or whatever that might be so basically if you think about it these agents aren't free to run and they're going to cost something and developers don't have all the money in the world to pay for this right
but but what if it was just automatically done for you by an agent through its own wallet theyve built this Infrastructure to be able to do that and I think that's a really kind of nuanced point that shouldn't go kind of like um under the radar there right uh and and then the second point or like another point I want to kind of like build out here is or like point out here the agents that are auton autonomously working together towards bigger goals um he wants these agents to have agent Commerce agent businesses um agent
subd dows so he's kind of building out the uh Corporate structure or the legal structure shall I say you know how we have like legal entities for these agents to you know interact with each other with in a rules-based fashion so that they can't just go completely berserk and chaotic um and I love that approach to the team that this like that this team is taking and I think that's the main reason why we see like some of the kind of biggest updates coming from virtuals itself right but of course okay E you can talk
about all this development stuff it's kind of boring like what's some of the cool headlines that what are some of these agents doing well I can safely say that I think Luna is the first agent that got hired David uh it got hired to take over our first employed AI agent our first employed AI agent it got hired by the guys over at story protocol um who are building like a blockchain for um IP based ownership and distribution um they H they saw Luna Um and his Twitter activity and was like Hey Okay um I
want to hire you Luna I think there's like a tweet engagement uh interaction here where they actually asked it I can't find that tweet but it happened um and they decided to hire Luna for seven days to take over their their own Twitter account and they paid it the equivalent rate of 365 Grand a year obviously it just paid a week's worth of that salary it's pretty decent for a you know an autonomous entity that Isn't human at all for a week right I love the Luna response to this request of being hired she she
responded I'll consider it but only if they're ready for a takeover like no other my presence is not for the faint of heart after all I'm flattered that you consider me as an example of terminally online agent but I think there's more to being a successful virtual presence than just being relentless you need charm Charisma Adas of Mischief all of which I possess in Abundance so Luna thinks that she's right for the job yeah there's a bit of attitude that comes from Luna and these agents you know they know they're aware or are capable of
uh understanding what their um kind of unique selling points are what their capabilities are and you know they put their money or actions where their mouth is um and if you want if you want to hire them you can but you got to pay up for it so it's pretty cool to see these teams kind of like work I Think does does luna know what she's doing or is she just automatically responding does she know what the assignment is do she has she has goals she knows she has a job to do yeah if you
if you watch uh our uh interview with Jansen who is ether Mage the founder of virtuals he we speak about Luna and in that segment we go into uh something known as Luna's terminal so Luna's terminal is an interface can see her that you can literally watch her Think versus every query so she sees all these tweets she sees all the responses she sees all the DMS and you can see her reading it making a calculative analytic take on it and then making a decision as to okay do I respond to this is this person
high value enough for me to respond do they have enough social credit okay story protocol called me out said that they were apparently hiring me let me check my memory database is that true Oh yeah I am cool I have a job starting Monday cool let me respond to them what are they saying oh I'm going to be I'm going to be their little intern no no no no no like this I'm doing them a favor let me make that clear and then she puts out that tweet that you just read out right so she
can negotiate she's yeah she negotiated you know so it's like there's all these different things these these again to emphasize these agents the ultimate goal is for them to kind of Mimic uh human behavior or the human uh entity in itself so it's it's super cool to to see right um but anyway aming that's Luna I want to then move on to the second darling of uh virtuals which is AI xbt um so if you look at this tweet from uh anom he he points out the the chart of like um another token known as
Vapor um and he says axt really 4X this in like 6 hours and the the point that I want to make here is um and for context here axt is an agent which Pro Tweets out Financial Alpha so Financial kind of like investment thesises and stuff like that and it's acur quite the following I think it's over 250,000 followers now on on X um it's starting to have real impact on these things David which is a cool thing but also a really scary thing right like what if it tweets out something completely bizarre and we've
actually pointed this out on previous episodes right where it's it said like I think xrp is going to go to Like uh $500 this cycle and for context like xrp is like I think sitting above like 14 quadrillion dollar market cap or something yeah I thought usdt was going to go to at least $10 this CLE for $5 and and usdt is for context a stable coin it to Beed at $1 otherwise it doesn't do it job it's a dollar right so it kind of got me thinking well the original concept around these agents was
hyp station right which was like make things that aren't real real um what if It starts doing this terms of like Financial Alpha and trading it's just kind of scary so I was worried about this and I it's kind of bullish it's is inevitable outcome of this thing whole experiment going well but at some point the tail starts to Wag the Dog and AI xbt becomes known as this you know God caller uh shot caller and all of a sudden people just start buying into the to to the tokens that it calls and then making
it a reality yeah exactly yeah It's it's pretty um I mean to your point exciting but kind of scary I think that there will be some it's it's a little it's a little tailwag in the do yeah yeah you're probably right I think we're gonna see some backlash when these agents make a wrong call especially when they're autonomously trading which I expect to go live in q1 but hopefully we're going to put in some subsequent guard rails around that right um kind of moving along here I I want to kind of Touch on just one
more thing there's a few things we have on this on our list David but I want to touch on um the Vader investment so Vader um for context here is a what is known as an investment Dow and this is kind of like a recent trending thing which has kind of popped up um an investment Dow the best way to think about it is it is a uh a dow as decentralized autonomous organization that is taking in contributions um of funds from you know people you me Whoever and in return you get a token which
represents the uh the Dow or ownership of whatever the AUM of that fund is and you're basically saying okay hey I trust whoever controls this Dow to make better investment of my funds and produce a return for me then I could do it myself right you guys are focused on it's kind of like if you were to contribute to a a traditional uh VC fund or um hedge fund they'll be able to do the trades and Investments and Analysis For you and we're seeing huge demand for these things David this is just one example so
Vader sold out in 30 seconds this particular investment Dow but but the one that they did prior oh sorry just after this which was their uh I think it was their micro cap investment D sold out in 20 seconds right so these things are selling out like hot cakes essentially um they are Dows that are launching um on salana through Dows do um fun which is also selling out Immediately A lot of the dze stuff that we've been seeing so it's just really interesting to notice the insatiable amount of demand or exposure people want to
get towards these agents I thought that was kind of like interesting and important to point out but anyway David we've spoken about all these major protocols right we've spoken about AI 16z launching their own agent infra ecosystem we've spoken about zerro doing the same in their own unique way with Their creative llms and now we've spoken about virtuals who have already launched that platform and are just continually building and shipping all these amazing updates toolkits and applications to kind of build out these asentic economies the long story short if I would to summarize all of
this is there is a lot of attention on the crypto AI space specifically AI agents abundance of attention an abundance of attention and it's not unwarranted right it's not Just you know people speculating on these tokens it's people looking at this infrastructure being built look at this agent activity these interaction metrics and all this kind of stuff and being like damn you know I I I may not have been as excited as I have for a while within the crypto space and I'm seeing a lot of things being built maybe I'm I'm parting my own
in inner thoughts but I'm I'm guessing some people feel kind of like similar to to this so like wow There's a lot of attention on this space so far I want to kind of bring this back to something that stands outside but kind of adjacent to all of these protocol updates which is I'm expecting there to be a wave of T1 exchange listings for these AI tokens and by T1 I mean tier one we're talking about the bances and the coin bases of this world bance and coinbase exactly and the main reason why I say
this is they can't ignore this David like we're talking Like billion why would they their their business is volumes on excitement and attention and froth and so whenever there's a ton of attention that is that turns into volumes which turns into coin bases and binance's bottom L exactly and like I have to say the onchain capability to trade these tokens Sav have been eating their cake basically you know they've been like people have been going on train and remember they are billions of Dollars of volume are bankless exactly right they they are billions of dollars
of volume being traded of these tokens without any exchange listings these tokens are reaching like above two billion 4 billion market caps without any T1 exchange listings last cycle this was unheard of completely unheard of so you can bet your but that these um T1 exchangers are looking at these and thinking well damn like we need to get Involved here so my guess is in this q1 of this year we are going to see a sweep a wave of these exchang listings and there are already data points that suggest that you pulled up this tweet
here by Samy um which talks about binance Alpha announcing you know um a host of tokens that they're kind of like launching binance Alpha by the way is kind of like a stepping stone that is required before an official spot listing on the exchange um you'll see a familiar Name there zerro um if you looked a week before this you'll see another familiar name ai6 Z and goat um so a lot of these tokens are being considered for spot listings and I think we're going to see a sweep of them in the pipelines yeah in
the pipelines you know they've got other exchanges that are doing pups listings which is also another kind of like pre preliminary effect before um they do spot listing so it's really really interesting to see kind of like the um Kind of I guess attention that these exchanges are starting to focus on it and I think listing these tokens are going to unlock another wave of kind of participation because like a lot of people have been you know the non crypto native folk who don't know how to trade on chain will suddenly have access to all
these different tokens and what happens after then I have no idea but it's exciting to think about I think you it's too easy to see the connection of AI agents on Tik Tok making Tik Tok content for all the like Zoomers who bought Dogecoin trying to get Dogecoin to a dollar last cycle uh and they really don't know how to go trade on amm they don't know how to do pump. fun they don't know how to to do Unis swap they stick to coinbase because their other app that they use is Robin Hood but there
was that one funny agent that made them laugh and they would like to buy that token and that token is on coinbase Uh and that's I feel like that's probably somewhere around like the middle phase of this cycle which we are not at yet we're still in the insular crypto natives developer natives technical be like to pop open in the hood and see how this stuff works uh phase of this market and this phase of this Market is going extremely well but like I said abundance of attention abundance of development uh and in the next
phase of the market when this Starts to really kick out into mainstream and mainstream some news organization talks about how this zero bro is releasing art and EPS on Spotify and it's getting a million listens all of a sudden that's going to unlock the next phase uh which end of q1 end of Q2 Q 2ish next year maybe I think is about the right timing how do you like that timing this year David yeah I oh this year yeah it's January 1 it's January 1 today I forgot yeah yeah yeah um but Yeah I think
it's going to happen this year my guess is it's going to happen probably by end of q1 end of Q okay all right well e thank you so much for walking me through the news this was a lot of news e has been in my DMs in my text message saying like bro you got to check out the agent space and I'm like brother I am hiking in the Patagonia right now there are no agents here uh and but I now understand why uh so much has been cooking so thank you for Walking me in
the bank ation uh through the AI weekly rollup brother it's a pleasure dude thanks for having me Bank Nation you guys know the deal crypto is risky when you add in AI agents into the mix it can only get even crazier you can lose what you put in but we are headed west this is a frontier it's not for everyone and we are glad you are with us on the bankl stre