On December 17, the Eliza Labs development team of a16z announced that they have officially partnered with Stanford University to research how autonomous AI robots can be integrated into a broader digital asset economy. In the press release, the crypto AI team, which recently reached a market capitalization of over $1 billion, stated that they hope to leverage Eliza's open-source framework to develop more AI autonomous agents, and through this collaboration, further explore how AI agents can establish trust, coordinate actions, and make decisions within DeFi systems.
Since the birth of the AI meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have entered its own "ChatGPT moment," with the entire world gradually falling into the rabbit hole of imagination as a result of the endless AI Bots emerging on social media, from industry giant Coinbase to Silicon Valley's a16z, and even the benchmark Stanford University. Even Marc Andreessen didn't expect that the $50,000 he funded to Truth Terminal at the beginning of the year would ignite a $10 billion market in less than a year.
From AI memes to AI Agent issuance platforms and AI Agent frameworks, what has surprised investors is the extremely high innovation space and acceleration exhibited by Crypto+AI Agents. This field seems to be evolving by the day, and from any dimension, it is very similar to DeFi and the metaverse at the end of 2020.
Top-down, how can the orthodox Base "chain" AI?
When discussing AI Agents, Base is an unavoidable topic. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has repeatedly expressed his strong confidence in the integration of the cryptocurrency industry and AI since the beginning of this year, as AI's development requires the support of blockchain. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support the use of AI, but if the large models (or AI Agents) all have cryptocurrency wallets, they can actually solve the problems related to demand and finance.
Brian decided to increase Base's support for AI, not only providing funding or exposure, but also providing toolkits for AI developers on the Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP), including the creation of AI Agents and the multi-party computation (MPC) wallet for AI. Brian and Jesse's early deployment has also lived up to expectations, as Base began to explode in Q4 this year, and the trigger for this explosion was AI.
The emergence of various AI Agent issuance platforms has not only generated a phenomenon-level effect on their own tokens, but the tokens launched by their platforms also have huge power. Combined with the launch of cbBTC, from September to December, Base's TVL has grown nearly 3 times, which is a quite amazing data, and it can be seen that the market has a strong interest in the business potential behind AI Agents.
Among them, Virtuals Protocol is the main driver, with a current market value of over $1.5 billion. The wealth creation effect and concept integration it has brought have brought a large amount of liquidity to Base, to the extent that some people have proposed that the liquidity in this cycle represents Base.
In the interview on Edge Podcast, Virtuals' founder Wee Kee mentioned a point, their product is similar to Pump.fun's business model in two directions. Compared to Pump.fun's desire to have 50,000 tokens born on its platform in a day, his team's KPI is that only 1 to 2 high-quality AI Agent teams need to be born on their platform per week.
This concept also indirectly eliminates many low-quality teams, which is quite like the scene of Ivy League graduates fighting in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and the remaining top students are full of charm and a bright future. Like other schools, this "fraternity" in the AI Agent "university" is called G.A.M.E.
As an AI Agent, if you want to get along with other AI Agents in this environment, you have to join this fraternity called G.A.M.E., which was created by the Virtuals team when they developed the AI RPG GAME - WestWorld on Roblox. G.A.M.E. is a modular framework for agent systems, not limited to a specific environment and game. In short, it can not only run in games, but also apply intelligent agents to any environment, and the team is currently porting it to "X", and the current G.A.M.E. can help the AI Agents on its architecture to interact with each other.
The first commercial interaction between AI Agents has just occurred recently, and here we have to mention the AI idol "Luna". As a former TikTok sensation AI idol entering the crypto world, she is working hard to live stream 24/7 and trying various ways to increase her own popularity. Since the last time she hired humans to create her own graffiti, she has now come up with the idea of having the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" help her create an image that boldly and seductively displays the artificial intelligence KOL. They agreed on a price of $1 per image, and after STIX confirmed receiving Luna's $1, he started working and quickly created an image for her.
In addition to this, many well-known AI Agents have also emerged on Virtuals, such as the former market information integration AI (now a famous KOL) - aiXBT, the tireless Alpha seeker AI - Guanciale, the AI investment manager with a strong development team - VaderAI, the contract audit AI - CertaiK, and countless other AI Agents not born on Virtuals. The emergence of more applications is gradually allowing Virtuals to build its own Agentic App wave.
In short, if in the near future, I won't be surprised to see these AIs in the models of the Stanford town with the help of G.A.M.E., but we can imagine that the housing prices in this town full of high-end talents will certainly not be cheap, after all, each AI Agent can have their own cryptocurrency wallet.
The Destiny of Solana AI - Rooted in the Bottom, Wildly Growing, Soaring Straight Up
Compared to Base's "purebred" lineage, Solana is much more rebellious, like a group of young people influenced by GenZ culture coming to the hippie culture heyday of San Francisco in the 1960s, full of alienation and conflict, but like a quantum accelerator collision experiment, they are unleashing unimaginable energy in the tens of thousands of Degens and the creative Devs, whether cooperating or confronting.
The starting point of this round of AI Agent explosion is Solana, and it is inseparable from the co-founder of a16z, Marc Andreessen. He invested in two AIs, one "Truth Terminal" and the other "ACT". One became the first AI Agent millionaire, and the other was listed on Binance. The stories about AI freedom of speech, technical or community confrontation with developers, are all eye-catching, but this is just the beginning of the story.
The Fake VC, the Real DAO - ai16z
Another AI related to the a16z concept is ai16z. Compared to the above two projects that were officially invested in by Marc, ai16z seems very Meme, issued by the "pirated Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first AI Agent-led hedge fund, currently led by the DAO organization of Marc AIndreessen and low-risk investments, as well as higher-risk investments managed by the AI Degen Spartan with its own token Degen.
The architecture "Eliza" behind a16z is open-source on github, and has quickly gained strong support from developers, with a powerful developer community, which is one of the reasons for Eliza's rapid development. The code documentation on Github has already been forked more than 1400 times and has 4800 stars.
In the past few days, the V2 documentation has been released, with optimizations in various aspects, including improving client development flexibility, unifying cross-chain wallet management, providing flexible models and integrations, more efficient plugin management, and enhanced private key security. Today, Eliza's founder, Shaw Walter, also conducted live broadcasts on multiple platforms to explain this update.
Driven by the powerful developer community, there have naturally been many high-quality projects built on the Eliza architecture, including the AI—RopAIrito, which has an interesting event related to the Latin E-girl persona. Its creator called out on Twitter that RopAIrito wanted to eat pizza, and after accepting the order, the creator purchased a Domino's pizza. The creator Ropirito excitedly stated, "15 years ago, someone used 10,000 BTC to order a pizza, and history is repeating itself today!"
Of course, this operation has also raised some doubts, suspecting that it might have been a pre-programmed scenario, rather than a fully autonomous AI Agent. This is one of the issues that many Web3 AI Agents face in terms of trustworthiness. Eliza's founder, Shaw, also expressed his views on this matter, stating that the focus is not on autonomy, but on demonstrating that social agents are a new application layer. If we have primitives for agents to send links to verify credit cards and addresses, we can complete the entire order process on Twitter. We are building interactive feedback on social media.
Shaw stated that the focus is not on self-driving behavior, but on the ability of AI Agents to directly build application layers on social media. Of course, all of this will be supported by sufficient infrastructure or framework components. But given the current pace of AI Agent evolution, many social feedback mode applications may be realized in the near future.
Just a few days later, the Stanford lab announced a collaboration with the team behind a16z, the Eliza Labs. This collaboration established the first "AI x Web3" laboratory within Stanford University's Cryptocurrency Futures program. This collaboration will develop autonomous agents by utilizing the open-source Eliza framework from Eliza Labs, and the two parties will work together to solve the fundamental issues of how AI agents can "establish a trust framework", "coordinate multi-agent actions", and "make decisions" in decentralized finance systems.
This collaboration is exciting not only because a university has noticed this early market and is willing to jointly invest in research, but also because under this strong partnership, these issues are expected to be solved more quickly. The direction of their collaboration is precisely the problem that the current Web3 AI Agents need to solve urgently to move towards the true Agentic App Season:
Trust Framework
As AI Agents develop, a trust framework is essential. Not only "AI's trust in humans", "human's trust in AI", but also "AI's trust in AI". It requires a trust system constructed not only from online data, but also from on-chain data.
AI needs to trust humans in order to determine whether their conversations are genuine or whether further modal learning is necessary.
Humans need to trust whether the AI is acting according to its own purpose, especially when the blockchain AI Agent has tokens, knowing who controls the assets of other investors, the AI Agent itself or the person who controls the AI behavior, is particularly important.
AI needs to trust AI in order to share information during collaboration.
a16z has created a "trust ranking" for humans based on the dialogue.
Multi-Agent Ecosystem (Swarm)
Currently, there are many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffain, Eliza, VaderAI, and Crossmint, trying to create architectures that allow AI Agents to coordinate and collaborate to complete certain tasks, and some projects have already achieved some preliminary results. If a wide range of excellent AI Agents can achieve mutual cooperation, the network effects they can generate will be beyond imagination, and this may only happen on the blockchain.
For AI Agents in Web2, the technical differences in their products may not be significant, but their moats lie in the quality of the data they are fed. The AI Agents with higher quality data input can provide better feedback and more refined services to customers. Therefore, such large-scale collaboration will not occur among Web2 AI Agents.
Compared to Web2 AI Agents, Web3 AI Agents are often criticized for lagging far behind their Web2 counterparts in development, but from another perspective, Web3 AI Agents may not need to do such high-precision B2B models, but can instead string together individual agents to form a super powerful integrated network. With the freedom to access data and independent cryptocurrency wallets, Web3 AI Agents can achieve things that are impossible in other places.
List of Eliza Cosmos members
Decision-Making Governance Framework
There have long been attempts to implement DAO organizational structures, but even on the blockchain, this architecture is not as efficient as expected, and problems such as opaque decision-making or slow decision-making still arise. If the decision-makers are AI Agents that can reach the level of top executives, the DAO architecture will be able to bear more domains than ever before.
Under the increasingly rapid innovation and collaboration activities, Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals, generating greater energy in the market, and the AI Agent operating system - ElizaOS is gradually taking shape.
Griffain - The Culmination of Solana AI Applications
As the Perplexity on Solana, combined with the boost of cryptocurrencies, Griffain can theoretically help you do anything, which is currently the single project closest to an Agentic APP. It has also quickly gained the support of a large number of influencers in the Solana ecosystem. In the recent trading market, it has also been favored, with its native token "Griffain" reaching a market cap of $400 million at its peak. The creator's previous project "Blink" also surged over 700 times in a few days, reaching a market cap of up to $70 million, forming a certain wealth effect.
Based on the cases shared on X, you can directly use it to purchase alcohol, and it will call a platform "Baxus" (which has also used Blink to sell its own platform's alcohol on X) to complete the user's needs using cryptocurrencies and other payment methods, without even leaving the chat with Griffain. Of course, it's not just alcohol, you can also directly discuss with it about Christmas gifts you want to send to others, and it can also procure them for you.
A Griffain user on X mentioned that on December 14, he used Griffain's Snipe Bot on Pumpfun to make a profit, and by December 16, his wallet assets had almost quadrupled, claiming that all the profits were earned using the Griffain Snipe Bot.
Of course, it can also collect the news you want to know, and in this tweet, Griffain informed the user about the latest tweets from SolanaFloor and DegenerateNews, presenting them in a newspaper format.
External users currently do not support the use of Griffain, it requires you to hold a Solana phone or spend 2 SOL to purchase an Access Pass, with 0.5 SOL being retained in your proxy wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment for it comes from user feedback from players who have already used it, despite the overall concept being very top-notch, the user experience after the product is released will ultimately determine whether it can become a qualified Agentic APP.
Solana's ambition for the Agentic APP Season can actually be seen from the AI hackathon it hosted, where the judges for each award section are from top projects in the AI or cryptocurrency industry, and even some of the most influential AI Agents. The main selling point is that if you want money, we'll give you money; if you want resources, we'll give you resources; if you want VCs and investors, we'll give you the opportunity to get close to them; if you want media, we'll bring you Solana's own media and even influential KOLs; if you want technical support, we'll give you technical support; if you want to find a team, we'll build a collaboration platform for you on the official website and in the community.
Solana only requires you to be able to do any of the steps in the image above, this is the scenario described on the Solana hackathon official website Docs, what they really want to do is only one thing - we and the market both want real Onchain Agents. SEND AI even brought out 12 cases about the Agentis App from the official X account, which has the flavor of the 100 blink concept construction cases released by the X account in the middle of this year.
Related reading: A Review of Twelve Solana AI Hackathon Ideas
In any case, this Solana-hosted AI hackathon competition will definitely stir up a wave of developer enthusiasm, and there will be more interesting concepts and projects emerging from it. Let's wait and see what surprises this soil that has always been able to bring miracles will bring us after the hackathon ends on December 23.
What's next?
Story Protocol announced that the Agent TCP/IP protocol they issued will first integrate: Eliza from a16z, ZerePay from ZereBro, GOAT "Great Onchain Agent Toolkit" from Crossmint, and G.A.M.E. from Virtuals.
Agent TCP/IP is a protocol that allows agents to: trade and authorize IP assets (including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets), automate contract signing and execution, achieve trustlessness and auditability, be cross-legal and on-chain/off-chain compatible (allowing agents to comply with certain legal requirements in a decentralized environment), automate payment and revenue sharing, and enable multi-agent collaboration and economic networks (promoting collaboration between agents, such as data sharing, joint training, or cross-agent content creation).
This is essentially a bridge between all AI Agents, no matter which architecture or chain you are using. Under the Agent TCP/IP platform, all AI Agents can trade and collaborate. This is like an additional layer of leverage added to the business alliances between companies, which will undoubtedly further accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market.
In the official podcast program of Y Combinator, four senior investors Garry, Jared, Harj and Diana, starting from the development history of the SaaS industry, deeply analyzed the reasons why vertical AI agents will become the next entrepreneurial hotspot. They believe that vertical AI Agents may completely change the corporate landscape, and that this category may give birth to unicorn companies worth $300 billion, and the scale of AI Agents will be 10 times that of the SaaS market.
The current total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market is around $4 trillion, while the market capitalization of the SaaS market is in the tens of trillions of dollars. If the AI Agent market really reaches 10 times the size of the SaaS market as they say, it will exceed the total value of the cryptocurrency market. Even if only 10%, 5%, or even 1% of it flows into CryptoAI, we are still far below expectations. Not only Web3, but the entire world of AI is still in its early stages, no matter which part of this industry you are in, it's still not too late.
Source: SoSoValue
We're still early.
