At the recently concluded CES 2025 exhibition, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a rather bold prediction about the prospects of AI agents, stating that AI agents could become the next huge business opportunity in the robotics industry, potentially worth trillions of dollars.

Hearing Huang's statement, I reflect on my own experience with understanding AI agents.

I first heard about AI agents from a tech blogger I subscribe to. That blogger did not specifically limit the application of AI agents to any particular field, nor did they mention any relationship between AI agents and the crypto ecosystem. They mainly discussed the potential changes that AI agents could bring to all existing industries.

At the time, I simply treated it as a piece of knowledge to understand.

Likely due to my limited knowledge, I did not see any significant AI agents emerge in the traditional internet or mobile internet industry afterwards, nor did I see any major internet company launch a practical AI agent.

Therefore, I have always felt that AI agents might still be a bit far from us.

Until the recent wave of AI agents in the crypto industry, where some AI agents have emerged, although they are still in the very early stages of development, they seem to be starting to provide services with real value.

Now that Huang has mentioned the potential huge space for AI agents in such an important occasion, I am curious:

- Where do the AI agents that have emerged in the crypto ecosystem stand in the overall AI agent market?

- What kind of intersection and interaction will occur between the participants in the crypto ecosystem and the traditional industries in the AI agent market?

The reason I have these questions is that while AI agents must be a very promising market, the current participation of the crypto ecosystem alone may not be able to develop this market to the imagined scale. At a certain stage of AI agent development, it is likely that they will still not be able to break away from the participation of major players in the traditional financial market.

In the current crypto ecosystem, the driving force for the development of AI agents in terms of funding is mainly from the crowdfunding (ICO) of retail investors. This method can start a small project, but to continuously push a project forward and iterate on the technology and operations, it will definitely require a continuous influx of new capital and teams.

And this is most likely only achievable by traditional venture capital/VC.

Therefore, we cannot only look at the development of these AI agents from the perspective of the crypto ecosystem, but also need to step out of this ecosystem and examine their development from other perspectives.

For example, are traditional venture capital and VC paying attention to the development of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem? What is their attitude?

Coincidentally, the traditional fund Franklin Templeton has just released a report "Intersection of AI Agents & the Crypto Ecosystem" on AI agents and the crypto ecosystem.

This report gives a very high evaluation of the combination of AI agents and the crypto ecosystem. What's interesting is that the data sources cited in the article are all new platforms and applications that have grown with the recent surge of AI agents, which actually looked no different from Altcoins a few months ago.

This precisely proves that in the short few months since the rise of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem, some traditional financial institutions have also quickly noticed the development of this ecosystem.

Compared to a few years ago when DeFi was just emerging, I don't recall any traditional major fund having such attention to DeFi.

I believe that there are more than just this one traditional financial institution, and I believe that the subsequent entry of traditional financial institutions into this market is also very likely.

But what will be their way of entering this market? At what stage will they enter this market?

More importantly, can these institutions expand the current AI agent applications in the crypto ecosystem to a wider range of offline services and industries? After all, the traditional and offline domains are probably the areas they are more familiar with and can better control.