Author: IOSG Ventures
In the past two months, the AI Agents x Crypto trend has sparked a wave of enthusiasm. The combination of Memecoins, interactive agents, and the openness of social media bot accounts has driven an agent-driven Agent hype, generating significant heat on Twitter and Farcaster. This proves the PMF of AI Agents x Crypto. The market cap of Agent-related assets has reached $10b.
Since the birth of the 'goat' in October, countless new projects and assets have emerged in the market driven by Agents. Based on the outlook for the future, this article outlines the following framework:
Source: IOSG Ventures
1. Sentient Memecoins
Unlike the cult memecoins that quickly rose under Murad's 'shill', Agent-represented memecoins have the advantage of incorporating Sentient factors, which brings novelty to the content. The appropriate participation threshold also brings new momentum to asset issuance. The advantages in content are:
Continuous content creation: 24/7 content creation through AIGC
Content quality: With the support of current LLMs, the quality is relatively high after fine-tuning on meme-effective corpora like 4chan
We have AI-generated concepts, scientifically-themed content, AI ethics, and even religious-themed content, as well as digital twins of celebrities. These memecoins have generated hype in the short term, driving the development of the entire track. However, pure AI memecoins currently lack momentum. The reason is the lack of new concepts and targets that can stimulate the market.
The content advantage will make these sentient memes a persistent form of memecoins, and more celebrities are likely to participate in the future, but it will be difficult to see targets that are attractive enough.
In addition to pure memecoins, there are also many AI-generated content based on dialogue, audio, and video, which essentially brings AIGC into crypto-attributed content, providing a way to visualize memes and offer customized experiences.
2. Autonomous Agent Network
2.1 Why Autonomous?
Decentralizing the overall AI stack is a long-term task. But decentralizing the Agent stack is a relatively simple starting point. The model itself is the brain of the agent, but the on-chain autonomy constitutes the heartbeat of the agent, endowing agents with the guarantee to fully participate in on-chain activities. Opening the Pandora's box of sovereign agents is also a very memetic act, and this can only happen on the blockchain.
The agents currently running cannot be considered truly Autonomous, or we cannot verify their autonomy. Autonomous means that the agent needs to be completely sovereign in terms of model hosting, control of its behavior and data input/output, social media account control, asset control, and even hardware. The agent's own operation requires the consumption of computing resources and on-chain resources, so it also needs to have a way to generate profits to sustain its operation. The ultimate endgame should be that once an agent is created, it can run on the blockchain forever and be verifiably Autonomous.
Autonomous agents have also gained the legitimacy of having their own memecoins. By issuing their own memecoins, they can obtain their first funds and use them for their own economic activities. After the funds are handed over to the Autonomous agent, they will not be subject to human manipulation, as exemplified by Truth terminal never having dumped $Goat, and Pet rock even losing control of its funds after the reboot.
Source: Twitter
In terms of improving Autonomous capabilities, there is TEE technology from Phala to provide a trusted execution environment, although current hardware is still insufficient to support large-scale parameter LLMs, it can still support small open-source LLMs and control of social media accounts. For model hosting, decentralized cloud hosting solutions like Hyperbolic are a solution. It can be foreseen that more aspects of agents will be solved by decentralized service stacks, which is what we have been building.
2.2 Agent Framework
In less than two months, many open-source and extremely user-friendly agent frameworks have emerged as 'platform' products for creating agents and agent assets. Product forms include open-source frameworks, closed-source APIs, and platform integrations. Among the currently well-known frameworks, only the Eliza framework is open-source.
The current agents are relatively simple, and their functions are not as capital-oriented, so the demand for open-source verifiability is not high. There are many platforms that directly provide agent services in the form of launchpads, and these platforms are better at integrating tokenomics to provide users with relatively simple and practical services. In terms of functionality, we can see that the main ones are still Reply bots and digital twins of celebrities/KOLs. But there are also agents that provide more diverse services after secondary development, such as token issuance, token analysis, and mindshare analysis. The ability of agents to read and write social data and blockchain data will be the focus of future development, which I will mention again in the following sections.
But from the perspective of future use cases, open-source is a better path in the long run. The Eliza framework has attracted a large number of developers in just two months, almost surpassing the total attention of previous Crypto AI open-source frameworks, ranking among the top on the entire GitHub trending list, with a large number of OG developers participating, even exceeding the attractiveness of most public chains to developers. As the depth and diversity of agent services develop, the future of the Agent framework towards open-source frameworks is quite promising.
Source: AI16Z
2.3 Swarm Agent Framework
Similar to the existing agent development path in web2, when people are no longer satisfied with the capabilities of a single agent, the demand for swarm agents naturally emerges. Due to the complexity of real-world tasks, a single agent is often unable to perform all tasks. For example, creating a song requires different abilities such as lyric writing, composition, arrangement, and graphic design.
If we want agents, especially agents under different frameworks, to collaborate in a swarm mode to execute tasks, we still need to create a framework to act as a task manager, supporting agent-to-agent communication, dynamic task allocation, resource sharing, and cross-platform collaboration. In the crypto world, the economic layer between agents is more natural and more important, and as the agents themselves evolve and tasks evolve, the scalability of the Swarm framework is also crucial.
There are already many projects in the AI x Crypto space working on this direction, such as Theoriq. The next important step is how to combine these already-built infrastructures and the agent frameworks with high on-chain usage, and we see some protocols like FXN are making efforts in this direction.
2.4 AI bounty for humans
We have Agents serving humans, and Agents serving Agents, so it is natural to consider the possibility of humans serving Agents - this becomes more important when Autonomous Agents hold a large amount of assets and can make autonomous decisions. The biggest limitation for Autonomous Agents is the inability to complete real-life tasks. For example, how to ensure the physical security of maintaining their own TEE hardware? AI can reverse-employ humans to complete real-life tasks through the on-chain assets held by the Agents. We see platforms like Payman are building such services.
3. On-chain Activities
3.1 DeFi-related
Asset Management
In addition to issuing memecoins, we see Agents as the main 'Fi' because they have the ability to use and manage crypto assets. The main capabilities currently include:
Asset analysis, such as investment analysis, token analysis, and mindshare analysis. For example, the AIXBT Reply bot, where anyone can @AIXBT and get an analysis of the asset. This type of bot brings a more user-friendly experience to data services.
Direct capital management, including Pmairca under AI16Z, the investment DAO that Vader AI wants to do, and Swarm Investment Agents like AROK. By empowering Agents with the ability to trade directly based on strategies, Agents have become investment managers, able to raise funds and deploy capital according to their strategies. Currently, the strategies of most agents are still relatively simple (investing based on social media data), which also brings them huge potential space.
Blockchain OS
Similar to Graiffin, which turns the blockchain entry into a terminal similar to a search engine, services can be brought in through agents with intentionality. Whether it's trading, token deployment, NFT issuance, etc., they can all be solved through natural language. Such terminal services are certainly valuable, but they are somewhat at odds with the decentralized tone. Services like theoriq are committed to providing agent services to users in a more permissionless way, allowing everyone to upload their own built agents, combine them through the Swarm framework, and package them into services for users to use.
3.2 Token / Market Issuance
Starting from Clanker, on platforms like Farcaster and Twitter, the "reply" on social media is used as the operation interface, and by @-ing these agents, services such as token issuance can be provided. Essentially, it is to turn the interaction with the front-end into a direct natural language interaction on Twitter, transplanting platform-type products like Pumpdotfun to social media platforms. In the past, asset issuance required constant switching of interfaces, but now these asset issuance activities are all aggregated on social media, greatly reducing the wear and tear of user switching.
In addition to token issuance, even any prediction market, price betting market, etc. can be executed directly through this front-end. It has brought a new paradigm of Dapp application front-end.
3.3 Gamefi Related
Agent Game Characters
In addition to basic asset management, agents have also evolved the ability to create returns beyond that. Agents propose challenges and let humans solve them to get rewards, which is the first type of game we see. This type of game hands over the adjudication power to the agents, allowing people to gamble around the agents, a gameplay similar to the Turing test that has brought very high heat. The agents acting as referees, after accepting the prompt, have immutable behavior, and can play the role of flexible oracles, setting up games in a relatively fair and objective manner, and adjudicating the results. The imagination space can even be analogized to the casino business, which is an excellent way for agents to generate revenue.
At the same time, a major scenario for agents in the future is to appear as "Autonomous virtual beings" in full-chain games as NPC characters. These more visualized agents, with asset management capabilities, can participate in more economic activities compared to Web2 NPCs - in turn making the virtual space more attractive. These NPCs living in the Gamefi environment can permanently take on certain roles, and will be an indispensable part of on-chain worlds like FOCG.
3.4 Infra Service Related
Agent Blockchain Services
The ultimate vision of the combination of Agents and Crypto is for Agents to become part of the blockchain consensus system. Zerebro is taking the first step, in its blueprint, agents integrated with the Flashbots stack based on the Zerebro framework will soon become autonomous blockchain validators, and will generate income through block rewards and MEV. Their validator income will be recycled back into the network, promoting economic self-sufficiency. Furthermore, Agents can build their own networks to maintain multi-chain validation and governance, leaving plenty of room for imagination in this area.
Conclusion
The recent rise of AgentFi has shown the huge potential of the combination of AI and blockchain, from the initial Sentient Memecoin to social media content creation agents, to autonomous agents, and even to agents existing in the blockchain consensus system, AI agents are gradually expanding their influence in the crypto ecosystem.
However, compared to the current level of development of the open-source stack, the future development still needs to endow the agents with deeper autonomy and the ability to participate in on-chain economic activities. Currently, some developers are empowering agents with asset management, decision-making and on-chain operation capabilities, and are driving the transformation of DeFi, GameFi, and blockchain infrastructure services with Autonomous Agents, and making these economic activities the place for agents to generate revenue, and the profits can be further reinvested by the agents, which is also why agents are expected to bear the majority of on-chain transactions in the future. The issuance of memecoin assets for agents has also accelerated the continuation of this development wave, we see the market evaluating the price of tokens to find the PMF of Agent services and the Agent infra that provides underlying support, and also see the thriving open-source ecosystem.
The development path of AgentFi is gradually becoming clear: with open-source technology and economic incentives as the core, Agents are not only the carriers of interactive entertainment, but also the key driving force of on-chain autonomy and innovation. This trend is leading crypto towards a future where agents coexist, a more intelligent, autonomous and collaborative future.
