From Top to Bottom, How Can the Orthodoxy "Chain" AI
When it comes to AI Agents, Base is an unavoidable topic. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has expressed strong confidence in the integration of the crypto industry and AI since the beginning of this year, as the development of AI requires the support of chain. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support the use of AI, but if the large models (or AI Agents) all have crypto 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 not disappointed, 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 potential. Combined with the launch of cbBTC, from September to December, Base's TVL has grown by 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 capitalization 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. As a project that has been continuously ing through several cycles and has not stopped exploring new directions, their rhythm and style are also very much in line with the status of Base in people's minds. In the interview on the Edge Podcast, Virtuals' founder Wee Kee mentioned a point, that their product is similar to the business model of Pump.fun 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 has indirectly eliminated many low-quality teams, which is quite like the scene of Ivy League graduates fighting in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The remaining top students are full of charm and a bright future. Like other schools, this AI Agent "fraternity" is called G.A.M.E. If you want to get along with other AI Agents in this environment as an AI Agent, 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 intelligence 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. In addition to Luna, many other well-known AI Agents have 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, and the contract audit AI - CertaiK, not to mention the countless AI Agents not born on Virtuals. The birth of more applications is gradually building Virtuals' 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 wallet.Solana AI's Destiny - Deeply Rooted, Wildly Growing, Soaring Upwards
Compared to Base's "purebred" lineage, Solana appears much more rebellious, like a group of young people steeped in GenZ culture arriving in the thriving hippie culture of 1960s San Francisco, full of division and conflict, but like a quantum accelerator collision experiment, unleashing unimaginable energy in the thousands of Degens and creatively inspired Devs, whether cooperating or competing.
The starting point for this round of AI Agent explosion is Solana, and it is closely related to a16z's co-founder Marc Andreessen. The two AIs he invested in, 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.
Related Reading:
1. "Talking GOAT: How Did the AI We Funded Become a Millionaire with $50,000?"
2. "Community Victory: After Being Betrayed by Developers, AI MEME Coin ACT Will List on Binance and Surge Over 10 Times"
Fake VC, Real DAO - ai16z
Another AI around the a16z concept is ai16z. Compared to the two projects above that were officially invested in by Marc, ai16z appears very Meme, issued by "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 AI Degen Spartan's own token Degen.
Related Reading: "Dialogue with ai16z Founder Shaw: The Trading Agent AI Marc Has Been Launched, Trying the 'Trust Market' Model"
The architecture behind ai16z, "Eliza", is open source on github and has quickly gained strong developer support, with a powerful developer community, which is one of the reasons for Eliza's rapid development. The code documentation on Github has over 1,400 forks and 4,800 stars.
A few days ago, the V2 documentation was released, with optimizations in various aspects, including improved client development flexibility, unified cross-chain wallet management, flexible model providers and integration, more efficient plugin management, and improved private key security. Today, Eliza founder Shaw Walter also live-streamed an explanation of this update on multiple platforms.
Driven by a strong developer community, there have naturally been many high-quality projects built on the Eliza architecture, including the AI with a Latin E-girl persona - RopAIrito, whose creator tweeted that RopAIrito wanted to eat pizza, and after accepting the order, the creator purchased a Domino's pizza, excitedly stating "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 doubts, suspecting that it may have been a pre-programmed script, and not entirely self-governing by the AI Agent. This is one of the issues that many Web3 AI Agents raise doubts about. Eliza founder Shaw also expressed his own views on this, "The focus is not on autonomy, the focus is to demonstrate that social agents are a new application layer. If we have primitives to send links to verify credit cards and addresses, we can complete the entire order flow on Twitter. We are building interactive feedback on social media."
Shaw said the focus is not on self-driving behavior, but on AI Agents being able to build application layers directly on social media. Of course, all of this will depend on sufficient support from the infrastructure or various framework components. But given the current evolution speed of AI Agents, 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 ai16z, Eliza Labs, establishing the first "AI x Web3" lab within Stanford University's Crypto Future Program. This collaboration will use the open-source Eliza framework developed by Eliza Labs to develop autonomous agents, 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 alliance, these issues are expected to be solved more quickly. The direction of the 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 indispensable. Not only "AI's trust in humans", "humans' 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 judge whether their conversations are genuine or whether further modal learning is necessary.
Humans need to trust whether the AI is acting according to the purpose for which it was created, especially important for blockchain AI Agents who have tokens, knowing whether the person who controls the AI's behavior is the AI Agent itself or the person who controls it.
AI needs to trust AI in order to share information with each other in collaboration.
ai16z has created a "trust ranking" for humans based on dialogue
Multi-Agent Ecosystem (Swarm)
Currently, there are many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffain, Eliza, VaderAI, Crossmint, all trying to create architectures that allow AI Agents to coordinate and collaborate to complete certain tasks, and some of these projects have already achieved some preliminary results. If a broad-based, excellent collaboration between AI Agents can be achieved, the network effects it could generate would be unimaginable, and this may only happen on the blockchain.
The AI Agent companies of Web2, their products may not have a big difference in technology, but their moats lie in the feeding of data. The AI Agents with better quality data feeding can provide better feedback, and thus bring more refined services to customers. So this kind of large-scale collaboration will not occur among the AI Agents of Web2.
Compared to the AI Agents of Web2, the AI Agents of Web3 are often criticized for being far behind the similar products of Web2, but from another perspective, the AI Agents of Web3 may not need to do such high-precision B2B models, but can string together individual agents to form a super powerful integrated network. With free data and independent cryptocurrency wallets, the AI Agents in Web3 can do things that cannot be done elsewhere.
Eliza Universe Member List
Decision Governance Framework
There have been attempts at DAO organizational structures for a long time, but even in the Block, the structure is not as efficient as expected, and there are still problems such as opaque decision-making or slow decision-making. If the decision-maker is an AI Agent that can reach the level of a top-level manager, the DAO structure will be able to bear more domains than ever before.
Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals under the increasingly rapid innovation and collaboration activities, and has generated more and more energy in the market, and the AI Agent operating system - ElizaOS has gradually taken shape.
Solana AI Application Integrator - Griffain
As Perplexity on Solana, plus the bonus of cryptocurrency, Griffain can theoretically help you do anything, which is currently the single project closest to an Agentic APP, and has also gained the support of a large number of influencers in the Solana ecosystem in a short period of time. The trading market in the past few days has also favored it, and its native token "Griffain" has reached a market cap of up to $400 million, while the "Blink" token of its previous project blnkfun has surged over 700 times in a few days, reaching a market cap of up to $70 million, forming a certain wealth effect.
From the several cases shared on X so far, you can directly use it to buy wine, it will call a platform "Baxus" (which has also used Blink to sell wine on X) that can use cryptocurrency and other payment methods to complete the user's needs, without even having to leave the chat window with Griffain. Of course, it's not just wine, you can also directly discuss with it about the Christmas gifts you want to give to others, and it can also procure for you.
A Griffain user on X mentioned that on December 14th, he used Griffain's Snipe Bot to make a profit in the internal market of Pumpfun, and by the 16th, his wallet assets had almost quadrupled, and the user claimed 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 and presented them to the user in the form of a newspaper.
External users are currently not supported to use Griffain, it requires you to hold a Solana phone or spend 2 SOL to purchase an Access Pass, of which 0.5 SOL will be retained in your agent wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment for it comes from the user feedback of those who have already used it, and the overall concept is very top-notch, the user experience after the product is made public 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 section of the awards are from the top projects in the AI or cryptocurrency industry, and even some of the most influential AI Agents themselves. The main selling point is that if you want money, I'll give you money; if you want resources, I'll give you resources; if you want VCs and investors, I'll give you the opportunity to get close to them; if you want media, I'll find the media and influential KOLs under Solana for you; if you want technical support, I'll give you technical support; if you want to find a team, I'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 shown in the image above, this is the scenario depicted 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. Even the official SEND AI X account has brought up 12 cases about Agentis App again, reminiscent of the 100 Blink concept builders they posted on X in mid-year.
Related Reading: A Review of Twelve Solana AI Hackathon Ideas
In any case, this Solana-hosted AI Hackathon 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 23rd.
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 proxies to: trade and authorize IP assets (including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets), automate contract signing and execution, decentralize and be auditable, be cross-legal and on-chain and off-chain compatible (allowing agents to comply with certain legal requirements in a decentralized environment), automate payments and revenue sharing, and enable multi-agent collaboration and economic networks (to facilitate collaboration between agents, such as data sharing, joint training, or cross-agent content creation).
This is essentially a bridge between all AI Agents, regardless of which architecture or chain you use. Under the Agent TCP/IP platform, all AI Agents can trade and collaborate. This is akin to a business alliance between companies, with an additional layer of leverage added across different clusters, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market.
In the official podcast of Y Combinator, four veteran investors, Garry, Jared, Harj, and Diana, analyzed in depth the reasons why vertical AI agents will become the next entrepreneurial hotspot, based on the development history of the SaaS industry. 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 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, it would still be 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.
