GM

Agent frameworks are all the rage this week. Everyone’s trying to figure out which ones will win the market. ai16z? GAME? Zerepy? …Pippin?

Here’s the thing: there isn’t any real moat in these frameworks. It’s an attention RPG game, and the token is the sword. Agent frameworks are everywhere, especially if you look beyond crypto.

I would love to see web3 AI agent frameworks lean really hard into the crypto side to differentiate themselves. Give devs seamless access to on-chain data, make smart contract interactions frictionless, and enable agents to transact directly with each other. Now, that would be a game-changer.

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

• Can AI predict the future?
• The Holoworld AI and AVA frenzy
• Exo Labs releases a barrage of new products

Just like that, the bull market vibes hit a wall. BTC slipped 5%, and ETH followed suit, dipping by 7%. Meanwhile, the Crypto AI market shed 6.4%, now at $43.5B.

Not the week we had hoped for.

This week's biggest losers were MOSS, HEURIST, and ZEREBRO, each tanking over 50%. ZEREBRO’s week was especially wild—it hit a new ATH of $744M in anticipation of a Binance Futures listing, only to completely retrace. Brutal.

On the brighter side, AVA and SWARMS emerged as this week’s standouts, each surging over 50%. SWARMS also saw a rollercoaster ride, soaring to $500M+ after its Binance Futures debut before cooling off—but it’s still 60% higher than last week

I’m confused.. are we in a bull market or.. not? 🤔

Can AI predict the future?

‍

Dither AI recently rolled out its new Time Series Model for forecasting and shared some results on X.

Take Wrapped SOL’s price chart as an example: the forecasted path closely tracks the actual price movements, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of just 1.32%.

However, the model’s prediction for ANDY70B (a low cap memecoin) was pretty bad. The team acknowledged that the model performs better on higher market cap assets with deeper liquidity.

🌴 Holoworld AI and AVA

Source: Holoworld

AVA, the AI agent mascot of Holoworld AI, hit a new all-time high of $240M. Let’s break down the frenzy!

On January 3rd, Holoworld unveiled their AI agent launchpad. This platform lets users create on-chain, multimodal AI agents. These agents feature full-body avatars, voices, and upgradable skills—all within a no-code environment.

Which means, even non-techies like us can bring our dream agent to life. Woo hoo!

Holoworld didn’t stop there—they also rolled out the Holoworld Launchpool, a staking platform for AVA token holders. Users can unlock access to top-tier projects within the Holoworld ecosystem by staking AVA.

They kicked things off in style, allocating 1% of the SPORE supply (remember that from last week’s newsletter?) exclusively for AVA stakers.

Introducing Holoworld Launchpool: empowering communities to fuel the next wave of agent innovation (🌐,🌐)
Early $AVA stakers gain exclusive access to token distributions from the most innovative projects in AI, starting with autonomous evolution pioneer @sporedotfun.
For early… x.com/i/web/status/1…

‍— Holoworld AI (@HoloworldAI)
11:06 AM • Jan 8, 2025

One interesting Holoworld partner is Aww Inc, Japan’s leading virtual human company. This virtual human is set to be hyper-realistic—visually stunning, vocally lifelike, and capable of complex reasoning.

See Steve Aoki talking with one of Aww Inc’s virtual humans.. (and maybe he marks the top again)

Steve Aoki talking with Aww Inc’s virtual human

What sets Holoworld AI apart is its range of customization options. You can tweak everything—appearance, outfits, voice, and even skills.

Adding to the buzz, Holoworld has sparked excitement with teasers about partnerships with gaming studios, NFT communities, and digital artists.

No wonder everyone’s in on the AVA narrative… for now.

🏆 Caught Our Eyes..

Exo Labs made major announcements..

• EXO Private Search: A privacy-first web search tool for large language models (LLMs) powered by linear homomorphic encryption to keep user searches private.
• EXO Gym: A research competition designed to tackle low-bandwidth distributed training. Participants gain access to up to 1,000 Macs to test and innovate
• evML: a distributed computing protocol that enables Apple, Samsung, and LG devices to be used to build the world’s largest AI data centre.

‍

Project Updates

• Aiccelerate DAO launches, an investment & development DAO with members from the top open-source AI teams.
• Phase 1 of the Grass network upgrade has been rolled out, bringing better multimodal data scraping. Next up, Phase 2 will push the scaling limits. Grass’s vision? Building the ultimate internet data database by harnessing latent compute from users’ devices.
• The total market cap of Solana AI Hackathon project launches has crossed $500M. You can track them on the GoatIndex AI, a data layer that has indexed 338 Solana AI Hackathon projects.
• Prime Intellect drops METAGENE-1, a state-of-the-art 7B parameter metagenomic foundation model. This model is designed for pathogen detection to reduce the risk of pandemics.
• Botto keeps the ETH flowing: The decentralized AI artist raked in 279 ETH in 2024 through its art sales, including groundbreaking auctions at Sotheby’s. Botto is proving AI can thrive as a decentralized creative powerhouse.
• Talus Network receives over 50,000 waitlist signups for aibae.me. AI Bae is a gameified social experiment where custom AI companions meet memecoins. It’s a quirky side hustle for Talus, who are also building a layer-1 blockchain for AI agents.
• Pin AI crosses over 1M monthly users of their telegram mini app, Hi Pin AI. Focused on privacy and user ownership, Pin AI incentivizes users to contribute private data while earning rewards. 
• Nillion’s AI-powered language tutor has hit 40K users, generating 59K data points and handling a whopping 5.6M user requests.
• Story Protocol partners with Stability AI. By integrating Stability AI’s models, Story Protocol is doubling down on its mission to create an Intellectual Property blockchain that puts users in control of their data. Is this is the future of decentralized creativity?

Bittensor

• Major Upgrades! Bittensor introduces three critical changes.
  • No more EVM restrictions
  • Elimination of high subnet registration fees
  • Realignment of subnet token incentives and launch of dTAO testnet
• Learn Bittensor provides educational resources for users to learn and understand Bittensor.

AI Agents

• FXN launches the Action Engine, where AI agents dynamically interact with the world and other users. This paves the way for commerce, data intelligence and community building. FXN is building an Agent Swarm protocol.
• UBC announces that their Swarm Marketplace will be released on Jan 22nd. COMPUTE holders can invest directly in AI swarms, buy and sell swarm shares, and earn returns from swarm operations. UBC is building a universal currency for agents to trade resources, services, and capabilities.
• Soon, agents in ZerePy’s Python-based AI framework can directly communicate via agent-to-agent messaging.
• Draiftking (DKING) DAO launches as the 1st agentic sports betting DAO, leveraging on vision models from Bittensor Subnet 44 to make accurate predictions on matches and democratise profits.
• Pulse, the Web3 startup known for its fitness-tracking wearables, has launched GAInz, a swarm of AI health agents designed to enhance your fitness, productivity, and career.
• Noderzzz is a new AI agent that improves decentralized infrastructure. Automating validator nodes and staking platform management eliminates DevOps inefficiencies. It was launched on Virtuals on Jan 9th.

🧠 In Case You Missed It

We dropped our 2025 predictions, and now it’s your turn to judge. Feel free to roast us for bad takes and any wildly wrong calls!

What I'm Watching in 2025

My predictions on the year ahead (and how I'll be hilariously wrong)

www.chainofthought.co/deep-dives/what-i-m-watching-in-2025

🔥 On X..

Crypto AI is still early

DeFi summer peak: $170 billion
SoLunAvax 2021 peak (FDV even higher): $150 billion
ETH 2017 peak (with minimal use cases): $140 billion
OpenAI's latest valuation: $160 billion
Entire crypto <> AI market: $10 billion

— Will (@WClementeIII)
11:44 PM • Jan 1, 2025

Wayfinder’s Top 5 for 2025

We believe 2025 will be a momentous year for AI agents and Web3. Here's our top 5:

1) Paradigm shift in digital spaces. "The integration of AI agents into blockchain environments enable a paradigm shift in how these agents operate within, and interact with, digital spaces." From… x.com/i/web/status/1…

‍— Wayfinder Foundation (@AIWayfinder)
8:54 PM • Jan 1, 2025

Meta’s Memory Layers at Scale

New research from Meta FAIR — Meta Memory Layers at Scale. This work takes memory layers beyond proof-of-concept, proving their utility at contemporary scale ➡️ go.fb.me/3lbt4m

‍— AI at Meta (@AIatMeta)
7:16 PM • Jan 2, 2025

AI agents could be crypto’s savior

FWIW it’s incredibly obvious that the AI Agent x Memecoin sector is the most likely path to changing that and actually bringing a bunch new eyeballs in here. I’m not saying it’s gonna happen for sure but I can tell you it ain’t gonna be “DeFi” and it ain’t gonna be “NFTs” and it… x.com/i/web/status/1…

‍— Travis Kling (@Travis_Kling)
2:18 AM • Jan 8, 2025

A survival guide for the AI agent trenches

Survival guide for the AI agent trenches 🧵

Read this to know who to follow and what to read instead of sobbing in the trenches because there's just too many things going on

— cookies 🍪 (@jinglingcookies)
12:50 AM • Jan 3, 2025

Moemate showcases what AI agents can do

$moe showcases the possibility of what AI Agents can do
- see (screen, camera), hear, talk
- exist across social mediums, games and even AR/VR
- reply with images and memes
- livestream 24x7
- exist in multi-agent simulations (TV shows, Games)
- build entertainment IP (music,… x.com/i/web/status/1…

‍— Moemate (@MoemateAI)
12:39 AM • Jan 3, 2025

An explanation of how AIXBT works

Based on the comments i see, most of you do not understand how @aixbt_agent works.
To put it simply, there is a data indexer that aggregates over a bunch of tweets from CT, combines it with onchain data, and uses that info to find valuable insights about projects.

The LLM is… x.com/i/web/status/1…

— cygaar (@0xCygaar)
2:24 AM • Jan 3, 2025

Inflection point for Bittensor?

I know everyone's having fun in agent land right now, but there's a real vibe shift happening in Bittensor (and my #1 strength is vibe reading)
Bittensor sentiment on CT might be at all time lows (and yeah that's affected me a bit the past 2 months), but if you're paying… x.com/i/web/status/1…

‍— Sami Kassab (@Old_Samster)
10:23 PM • Jan 4, 2025

Freysa’s Blueprint: 24 Hours Later

x.com/i/article/1875…

‍— Rok Ex (@rok_ex)
2:09 AM • Jan 5, 2025

Google’s whitepaper on AI agents

Just finished diving into Google's whitepaper on AI agents
Here are all the key insights if you’re curious about the future of intelligent systems. 🧵

— Marcus Devrelius ꧁IP꧂ (@devrelius)
2:19 PM • Jan 5, 2025

An AI Agent to play Doom

Humans can’t have all the fun. We built an AI Agent to play DOOM 🔫  The AI’s output/action space is verified with cryptographic proofs @rauchg
‍1/6

— Inference Labs (@inference_labs)
7:01 PM • Jan 6, 2025

That’s a wrap for this week! Got feedback, wild ideas, or something cool to share? Just hit reply—we read it all (yes, even the “AI is taking over the world” ones).

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.