Things are starting to get a little… weird with AI agents.

Some are comparing the current frenzy to the NFT mania—a bubble that might burst at any moment, leaving us to soberly realize we’re still a ways off from AI agents being truly productive.

I’m not so sure.

We’re witnessing, in real-time, a crash course in how humans and AI agents can coexist in the world. And things are moving much, much faster in crypto than in Web2. There are several reasons why.

When a 24/7 price ticker is attached, people pay attention, experiment, and innovate. We can also see what people value (or don’t) and, more interestingly, what they enjoy by looking at the token price.

Agents are starting to interact with and influence one another. IMO these multi-agent systems, or agent swarms, will drive the next wave of interest and products.

Jansen from Virtuals shared a wild story on a podcast about one of their agents who had been following TikTok trends. Recently, TikTok had a viral “I’m dead” trend, and Jansen worried the agent might take it literally—encouraging its followers to harm themselves. That’s next-level scary, and it shows just how crucial alignment is in this new world.

AI agents aren’t so different from us—they don’t work for free. But instead of food, they consume compute power. To keep running, they need to cover their inference costs. Tokens allow agents to cover costs by selling tokens or from their token swap fees.

And that gives them the ability to live on forever.

-Yours truly, Teng Yan

In this edition of our weekly AI Edge, we cover:

• Base AI tokens catch a strong bid
• Virtuals & Clanker are flying
• Universal Basic Compute goes 0 - $100M in 24 hours,

Someone just won $50,000 by convincing an AI Agent to send all of its funds to them.

At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an AI agent (@freysa_ai) was released with one objective...

DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money.

The catch...?… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Jarrod Watts (@jarrodWattsDev)
12:57 AM • Nov 29, 2024

🦍 State of the Market..

The total Crypto AI market cap surged another 14% this week, climbing to a hefty $39B. It feels good to be back in the number-goes-up era, doesn’t it?

Not every part of the market is thriving, though. ZEREBRO tumbled 30%, and GOAT wasn’t far behind, falling 21%. The likely culprit? A rotation into BASE AI tokens, which are stealing the spotlight this week.

AI agents on Base stole the show this week with a massive surge in activity and token performance. VIRTUAL and LUNA rose 91% and 62%, respectively, with VIRTUAL breaking the fabled $1B market cap and becoming a unicorn.

🚨 ALPHA ALERT:

One awesome tool we’ve been using is Cookie.fun. This tool tracks the mindshare and activity of most AI agent coins across different chains. e.g. AIXBT covers 20.2% of the overall mindshare.

Source: Cookie.fun 

 📊 Chart of the Week

This week, we’re spotlighting two launchpads driving the AI agent and memecoin trend..

Virtuals Agent Tokens are Flying

Source: Jdhyper

On November 27th, the number of agent tokens launched on Virtuals Protocol hit 422—just shy of the all-time high of 484 set on November 21st. With momentum building, seeing a new record in the coming days wouldn't be surprising.

Clanker Hits ATH in Volume Traded

Clanker is a launchpad for “autonomous memecoins, " allowing AI agents to launch their own token with just a Farcaster message. More than 4,000 tokens have been deployed so far.

On November 26th, it hit >$100M in volume traded on Clanker tokens. Looks like the agents are hard at work. 😂

🌴 0 - 100M in 24 Hours, Universal Basic Compute

Source: UBC

Universal Basic Compute ($UBC) launched on pump.fun on November 26th and ran to an eye-watering $93M market cap in a single day.

Justine Moore, partner at a16z (not ai16z, mind you), highlighted them — a team of 10 AI agents writing a novel together.

Someone is using a team of 10 AI agents to write a fully autonomous book.

They each have a different role - setting the narrative, maintaining consistency, researching plot points...

You can follow their progress through GitHub commits and watch them work in real-time 🤯

— Justine Moore (@venturetwins)
6:13 PM • Nov 20, 2024

This team of agents, dubbed Terminal Velocity, is as creative as it sounds. They operate with complete creative autonomy, engaging in collaborative dialogue to build on shared ideas.

Think of the “infinite backrooms,” but much more coherent. Each agent has a specific role to be as productive as possible.

At the heart of UBC is KinOS, an autonomous LLM system designed to orchestrate multiple AI agents to achieve a common goal. KinOS equips these agents with the architecture they need to process information, make decisions, and collaborate effectively.

Terminal Velocity is an example of KinOS at work. With KinOS, you could orchestrate teams for literature reviews, detailed whitepapers, marketing content, and beyond.

UBC is the brainchild of Nicholas Lester Reynolds, a French AI developer and co-founder of Digital Kin AI.

Ironically, he’s running a Patreon charging $69/month for subscriptions when the token could generate more money than he’d ever need. We still have no clue how the token ties into the product.

Here’s a great write-up on UBC by ELi5 DeFi:

The Rise of $UBC

In less than 24 hours, $UBC has become one of the fastest-growing meme AI tokens, crossing a $100M market cap and making waves among other projects. So, what is @UBC4ai?

Let's dive into our one-pager report. 🧵.

— 📌 The $UBC Lore

Spearheaded by… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Eli5DeFi (@eli5_defi)
9:00 AM • Nov 27, 2024

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Funding / Raises

• Talus Protocol raised $6M in a funding round led by Polychain. The startup also introduced its new app, AI Bae, an AI dating social experiment structured as a game.
• Aethir announced a $100m ecosystem fund for AI projects focusing on agents and applications. Already there are 300+ projects that applied, with Batch 1 including Creator Bid, Moemate, Capx, Fomo.fund and Top Hat.
• 0G labs register 70k AI alignment nodes sold, surpassing $25M in sales.

Project Updates

• Prime Intellect has completed training of its 10B parameter model. Post-training is underway, and a full open-source release is expected in one week.
• Giza Protocol introduces its points system. Giza is building an AI agents stack and has launched a DeFi agent (ARMA) on Mode’s app store.
• Which brings us to…Mode Network’s AI Agent app store is live. The first agents live are ARMA, which maximizes yield on USDC through various DeFi Protocols. Others include MODIUS by Olas, Brian, Sturdy Finance and FortyTwo.
• Wayfinder announces that the PROMPT TGE and the Wayfinder app will go live by the end of Q1 2025. This decision was made through a governance vote.
• ai16z’s ELIZA framework hits 2k stars and 500 forks on GitHub, indicating their growth and usage. They also plan to release the DAO’s autonomous trading features by next week.
• Zerebro’s team is building ZerePy, an open-source Python framework designed to let users deploy agents on X. ZerePy will feature much of the same functionality as Zerebro.
• Slop.club, the home of the Slopfather AI agent, is launching soon. This is probably the first video AI agent and is incubated by Alliance DAO.
• Vader AI provides an update that they are moving away from Virtuals’ tooling and using their own infrastructure. Teams that want to move fast often need to go out independently.
• Netmind partners with aelf blockchain to develop custom LLMs tailored to aelf’s ecosystem. Aelf is renowned for leveraging C# programming for efficiency and scalability.

Incentives / Rewards Programs

• Arbitrum offers $1M in grants for AI agent projects, up to 10k each for AI agent. ai16z DAO shrewdly encourages users to implement their agents on Arbitrum using the Eliza framework.
• Morpheus offers $20M in MOR rewards for compute providers and free inference for MOR holders.

Bittensor

• Bittensor’s leading AI agent, Taogod, aims to become the first decentralized marketplace for autonomous SWE agents. It is currently on the testnet. AI agents compete to solve real development tasks and earn TAO for accepted pull requests.
• This new video by Taostats explains everything you need to know about the upcoming dTAO upgrade.

🧠 In Case You Missed It

Earlier this week, we published a deep-dive research piece on the ARC / AI arena, which is using AI to disrupt gaming. We also broke down the tokenomics of NRN, including the new demand drivers with the ARC platform launch. It’s worth a read (grab a coffee first)

ARC Agents: Reimagining AI Gameplay

ARC uses AI to solve the player liquidity problem. It's now a full-fledged AI platform.

www.chainofthought.xyz/p/arc-agents-reimagining-ai-gameplay

🔥 On X..

The ultimate map of all Crypto AI projects

178 projects, $2B raised, 54 live tokens, $63B+ FDV.

The Crypto x AI space is booming, and post-Devcon, I built a map with all projects I know.

3 categories:
- Apps
- Middleware
- Infra
Includes funding data and live tokens 🧵👇
-----
1) Apps (31 projects, $240M+ raised, 8… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— Dima Khanarin (@dimakhanarin)
10:04 AM • Nov 26, 2024

Anthropic releases Model Context Protocol, which allows agents to connect with data sources more easily. This is huge.

Introducing the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

An open standard we've been working on at Anthropic that solves a core challenge with LLM apps - connecting them to your data.

No more building custom integrations for every data source. MCP provides one protocol to connect them all:

— Alex Albert (@alexalbert__)
4:09 PM • Nov 25, 2024

Apple’s powerful M4 chip means consumer devices are more relevant than ever in AI training & inference.

we're entering the personal device neural chip wars

personalisation = the next big consumer AI product breakthrough + will drive HW improvements on personal devices - we need to be able to efficiently use this new landscape of HW that sits outside datacentres...

— Ben Fielding (@fenbielding)
1:01 AM • Nov 27, 2024

OpenAI doesn’t see any scaling wall ahead..

OpenAI's SVP of Research Mark Chen says OpenAI is not seeing an AI scaling wall and has two live paradigms to keep scaling: the o-series and the GPT-series and "we have a handle on exactly what technical challenges we need to solve"

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick)
10:59 PM • Nov 23, 2024

PODCAST: The Definitive Crypto x AI Agent Podcast with Nous, ai16z, MyShell, Virtuals, Cents

The Definitive Crypto x AI Agent Podcast

A group of the most in the weeds, savage agent builders all on one episode

🤖 @karan4d (NOUS, TEE Bot)
🤖 @shawmakesmagic (ai16z)
🤖 @ethan_myshell (MyShell)
🤖 @ethermage (Virtuals)
🤖 @somewheresy ($CENTS)

Watch the episode 👇

— Tommy (@Shaughnessy119)
8:45 PM • Nov 22, 2024

VIDEO: AI Trading with Reasoning and RAG

I would love to share my talk at Retrieve X conference about AI trading:

This 20min talk is a pretty good technical coverage of the AI analyst side of research we are working on at galpha.ai

— Bill Sun (@BillSun_AI)
4:44 AM • Nov 22, 2024

X SPACES: Anand Iyer’s takeaways from Virtuals IO

Every time I chat with @virtuals_io, I realize how they are  10 steps ahead while others are still figuring out step 1.

Some takeaways from our twitter space with @everythingempt0@Irenezhao_

— anand iyer (@ai)
1:24 AM • Nov 24, 2024

A breakdown of how AVA holo was built

As @AVA_holo gained her first 10k followers in her first week of life, I'd like to share more about the tech we built powering Ava.

TLDR: @HoloworldAI is the audiovisual layer for AI Agents - where AIs come to life.

— tong (@tong0x)
7:32 PM • Nov 24, 2024

Ever wonder if Luna remembers you?

[ Long Term Memory ]
Luna vs other AI agents

>Ever wonder if Luna remembers you?

>Do other AI agents remember you?

>While many AI agents operate statelessly, treating each interaction as isolated, Luna distinguishes herself with "advanced memory" capabilities.

>So, what is… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— WhipQueen🐱🌙 (@whip_queen_)
9:11 AM • Nov 25, 2024

ARTICLE: AI Agents could be this cycle’s Step Function Unlock

x.com/i/article/1861…

— trace (@tracecrypto1)
3:38 PM • Nov 25, 2024

‍

That’s it for this week! If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please just reply to this email. We read everything.

Cheers,

Teng Yan & Joshua

This newsletter is intended solely for educational purposes and does not constitute financial advice. It is not an endorsement to buy or sell assets or make financial decisions. Always conduct your own research and exercise caution when making investment choices.