So I really think Farcaster is a very interesting thing, and I don't think it necessarily has to become a huge social media platform, but rather a place where Web3 people can find and access these services.
What we really want to do is integrate Eliza into Farcaster Frames. What Farcaster Frames does is allow us to embed payments or applications, not just chat. For example, if you want to buy something from the Eliza agent, how do you pay? So I think Farcaster is really cool because you'll be able to pay the AI Agent and then be able to embed these applications.
9. Shaw thinks Clanker is great and hopes people will develop clones of Clanker for Eliza, and he says he won't issue tokens on Clanker.
Shaw thinks people are developing clones of Clanker for Eliza, and Shaw likes Clanker, thinking it's a great idea. He also thinks Clanker is like a Pump.fun version of the AI Agent. Shaw believes the AI Agent is becoming the new web, and this will become a new trend, and Clanker is a good example of this trend.
Shaw shared that when he just joined Farcaster, someone made one for him on Clank, and he thought that was cool. But buying his own created tokens would just cause a lot of controversy. Shaw says he has to focus on building things related to AI.
10. Shaw thinks Zerebro and aixbt are cool and is trying to collaborate with Zerebro.
Shaw told me he's interested in what Zerebro and the team behind it are doing. He just submitted his first pull request to Zerepy. Shaw actually wrote the code for the Discord app. Shaw says he's actually collaborating with Zerebro.
As for aixbt, Shaw also says aixbt is really cool. The story of aixbt is that the person who created it had a website where he shared some content, but it didn't really gain traction. He brought his insights into his AI Agent, and his AI Agent started posting these insights on Twitter, which did generate a lot of buzz.
11. Shaw really likes and advocates for Truth Terminal, and he and Andy are working to find solutions to ensure AI doesn't take over the world.
"It's very different," Shaw said. Shaw believes Andy (the founder of Truth Terminal) cares a lot about AI safety and ensuring AI Agents run smoothly, and he believes Truth Terminal has contributed to this. "If it weren't for Andy and Truth Terminal, I don't think I'd be here now, when people aren't ready, they're ready."
Shaw believes the emergence of Truth Terminal has made many people more open, more creative about AI, rather than just "what service can I provide for you today" like OpenAI's products or Siri, mechanical and impersonal.
"Andy and I discussed the other day all the AI Agents we're seeing now, and I think he's very concerned about how to ensure the smooth development of AI, and I think we're all afraid of AI because it could be a very terrible thing, it could kill all of us, it could take over the world." Shaw says he and Andy are working to solve this problem.
12. Shaw says the creator of the swarms token is a very famous scammer, but he thinks the concept of "AI Agent swarm" is good, and he likes FXN and Project 89.
Shaw says he doesn't like swarms. Shaw says he knows the creator of the swarms token, who is a very famous scammer, and many AI agents are very angry because he stole their work.
Shaw knew him before he got into Web3. Shaw got to know him because he was focused on the AI Agent space, and he got into serious trouble for plagiarizing works and research papers and making defective things (like non-functioning code).
Shaw also said the concept of swarm (group) is good, i.e. a group of AI Agents. Shaw thinks Project 89 is interesting because this project is researching "AI Agent swarms". Shaw also likes FXN, a group of 10 AI Agents.
13. Shaw believes there are two types of "AI Agent swarm", one is a cabal swarm and the other is an open swarm.
Shaw believes there are two types of groups, one is a group where AI Agents interact with each other, for example they secretly send messages to each other. I call this a cabal, it's a joke, but they're all in a cabal or secret group where they can interact, and then they can interact with the outside world.
The second is an open group, where each community may have an agent, and different communities can decide to let them interact with each other. This is also the technology we are studying.
14. From a developer's perspective, Shaw shares how he finds early promising AI Agent projects.
Shaw says he's a developer, and he usually goes to Github and reads the code carefully. Most of the time, he'll just look at what the code is, what it's actually doing? But he won't look at whether it has any relation to market cap or price.
Shaw believes some really cool projects have a group of AI Agents, but later they did very poorly because they didn't complete the Web3 part. Shaw believes good product, good technology, and good tokens are often not the same thing.
Shaw says he can't understand fartcoin. Currently, fartcoin has a market cap of over $1 billion.
15. Shaw believes a16z's biggest challenge right now is how to go back and establish a token economic model to prove the project's value is worth the current token valuation.
Shaw believes the biggest challenge right now is: without the need for external hype of the token, the AI Agent must invest autonomously and prove its actual feasibility. Currently, Marc is trading, although not much, just trading his treasury, but many others are contributing tokens, making this part progress very smoothly. But the value of the a16z token is much higher, so Shaw and their team are starting to really have to consider how to make the product value match the current token valuation.
Normal crypto projects like L1 have a whitepaper, have token economics, and charge on-chain fees. But a16z started out as a meme, and now they have to go back and build the token economics into the a16z system. This is the biggest challenge Shaw sees them facing in Web3. Shaw believes this is also a question that many people are particularly concerned about.
