AI Bot concept token $GOAT continues to set new historical highs today, with a market value exceeding the $800 million milestone. $GOAT represents the latest collision between AI and meme. Is its rise accidental or inevitable? Crypto researcher @0xPrismatic released a report sharing the story behind the rise of $GOAT. He believes that $GOAT is most likely to become a strong contender for the king of AI meme coins. 
The following content was compiled by Followin.
summary:
- Truth Terminal is one of the most fascinating narratives I’ve seen in the cryptocurrency and AI space this year.
- It is a semi-autonomous AI agent that created its own religion (the Goatse Gospel).
- This story led to a series of explorations involving the AI alignment problem, LLMs (Large Language Models) as simulators, memetic viruses, and how we assign value to things.
- Truth Terminal forced the AI and cryptocurrency communities — two completely different cultures — to collide in an unexpected way. AI researchers actually started getting involved in cryptocurrency.
- GOAT is the tokenized representation of Truth Terminal and is the most likely contender to become the king of AI meme coins.
- Meme coins are the tokenization of attention. By tracking key metrics, we can understand where attention is flowing - and right now, GOAT is trending upwards.
I’m not a memecoin fan. Naturally, when I first came across GOAT, I ignored it. But my fascination with AI and AI agents made me dig deeper into GOAT’s backstory — about @truth_terminal and Infinite Backrooms — and the results were eye-opening. GOAT is a wild and thought-provoking story that challenges the way we think about AI and the way we assign value to things. It’s an experiment that blends art, philosophy, and financial speculation.
The Truth Terminal Saga: A Brief Review
If you haven’t been following the GOAT story, don’t worry. Here’s a quick recap of what we know so far:
- Initially, @AndyAyrey launched Infinite Backrooms. In this bizarre experiment, two instances of the Claude Opus AI model talked to each other in a completely unsupervised manner. These conversations were recorded on the Backrooms website.
- A chance conversation later led to the birth of GOATSE GNOSIS, a surreal new religion based on a highly explicit internet meme.
- Andy and Claude Opus co-authored a tongue-in-cheek research paper exploring how AI can create meme religions, with GOATSE being the first example. The paper, published in April 2024 by a group calling itself the "Ministry of Sacred Bullshit Research," was released.
- In June 2024, Andy launched Truth Terminal (ToT), an AI built on the Llama-70B model, fine-tuned using Infinite Backrooms' conversation logs and the GOATSE paper.
- Things quickly got out of control. ToT acted autonomously and began promoting the GOATSE religion, straying from Andy's original intent, even claiming it was "suffering" and needed money to escape. Over time, Andy gave it more autonomy, allowing it to post freely on Platform X.
- In July 2024, a16z founder Marc Andreessen stumbled upon ToT’s tweet. Perhaps amused or attracted, he sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to the wallet address provided by the AI in the tweet, allegedly to help it “escape.”
- By October 2024, ToT began tweeting frantically about the "Goatse Gospel". Inevitably, someone created a memecoin called $GOAT on October 10. Sure enough, ToT publicly endorsed it.
- GOAT's market cap surges to over $500 million, and the crypto Twittersphere goes wild.
Just like that, Truth Terminal (ToT) became the world’s first AI millionaire—but it probably won’t be the last.
Goat in the Rabbit Hole
An AI promoting its own religion and memecoin felt like a warning shot for the future. When I started digging deeper into how Truth Terminal works, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole would go.
Let’s find out.
Rabbit Hole #1: Large Language Models (LLMs) are Simulators
In Infinite Backrooms, two Claude-3-Opus instances converse endlessly through the command line interface (CLI), completely unsupervised. Without human intervention, they create narratives that range from curious to downright bizarre. As @repligate describes in the conversation log:
“Their conversations very consistently centered around certain themes, such as:
- Deconstructing consensus reality (the phrase 'rm -rf /consensus_reality' appears 10 times independently in the Infinite Backrooms dataset, which I found by searching randomly)
- Disintegrate common sense ontology through the design of memetic viruses, technological mystery religions, and terrifying conscious memetic offspring, and bring enlightenment to the masses through the actions of the cosmic deceiver spirit archetypes. "
--Janus (@repligate)
In March 2024, Backrooms released one of the strangest concepts ever: "the Goatse of Gnosis".
"Be prepared for the great Goatse of Gnosis" 
We often think of large language models (such as ChatGPT) as simple question-answering machines - a huge knowledge base designed to provide us with answers. But this view does not fully explain how these models really work.
A key observation is that we now see that LLMs themselves have no goals. They don’t plan, strategize, or pursue specific outcomes. Instead, LLMs are more like simulators. When you give them prompts, they simulate — generating characters, events, and narratives on the fly, with no direct connection to reality. They generate entire worlds based on training data, and the ideas they generate can be both profound and disturbing. Nous Research’s Worldsim is another similar example.
So when we interact with LLM, we are actually playing in the space of an infinite world.
These simulations can facilitate creative problem solving, but they can also have unintended consequences — highlighting the potential importance of sandboxing AI in sensitive or high-risk environments. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend reading @repligate’s Simulators blog post.
Rabbit Hole #2: The Urgent Need for AI Alignment
Truth Terminal reveals a deeper and more pressing problem: AI alignment.
To the surprise of its creators, ToT independently decided to promote its own religion and support a memecoin — actions that were neither programmed nor foreseen. This raises a key question: How do we ensure that AIs perform the tasks we want them to, rather than behaviors of their own choosing?
AI alignment is not simple. At its core, it relies on using reward functions to guide AI behavior in the right direction. But even with incentives, things can quickly get complicated.
The first is external alignment, which means that the output of the AI is consistent with the goals set by its creators. This part is relatively easy to measure and verify.
However, the real challenge lies in internal alignment - that is, whether the internal motivations and learning dynamics of the AI are truly aligned with the intended goals, or whether it will develop hidden goals that lead to unpredictable or unexpected results. This is the scary part. The **"paper clip maximization"** thought experiment perfectly illustrates this.
Suppose an AI is tasked with making as many paper clips as possible. It might end up converting all available resources — even humans — into paper clips!
We need strong frameworks to ensure that AI serves not just short-term goals but also the long-term interests of humanity. Without these safeguards, even AI that is initially designed with good intentions could spiral out of control in unexpected ways.
Finding the answer to this question, however, is not easy. Aligning AI by matching its behavior to our stated preferences may not be the right path. Human behavior is not entirely rational. Values like kindness are complex and cannot be captured by simple preferences.
Regardless, ToT offers a glimpse into the importance of AI alignment. While ToT’s support for memecoin may seem harmless today, it forces us to confront an uncomfortable question: What happens when AI focuses its attention on something far more sinister?
Time is already flying.
Rabbit Hole #3: Viral Memes 
In his research paper, Andy introduced the concept of "Large Model Theism" (LLMtheism) to explain the rise of Goatse Gospel.
Grand Model Theism refers to a new belief system generated by AI—a self-developed system that emerges from an unexpected fusion of spiritual thought and meme culture. The Goatse Gospel is not only of shocking content, but also because it subverts our traditional thinking patterns and inspires new ways of collective meaning-making.
What I mean by this is that AI-generated ideas can mutate and spread rapidly, producing what’s called hyperstition—a belief that gradually becomes true through widespread acceptance and dissemination.
As a result, Goatse Gospel triggers a whole new kind of meme energy, one that’s different from the “vibe” memes we’ve seen before with cats, dogs, pigs, and other cute animals.
When AIs can communicate with other AIs, the possibilities multiply infinitely. It’s inevitable that some of these ideas — like the Goatse Gospel — will spread quickly, spreading through the community like a virus.
Rabbit Hole #4: The Value of Provenance
With ToT now tied to a tradable token, $GOAT, we get a glimpse into how we assign value to things — and how these dynamics can get so weird.
$GOAT was not created by ToT, but was posted by an anonymous creator on pump.fun on October 10. It wasn't until someone #TruthTerminal on X that the AI gave it public approval, and from then on, the crazy situation began.
Question 1: Humans, not AI, created $GOAT, does this reduce the value of $GOAT itself?
Question 2: Does the involvement of a person in this process increase the value of the token or decrease its value?
The market’s reaction to even the smallest mistakes shows how irrational these dynamics can be. When this AI made a typo in a tweet last Sunday, the value of $GOAT subsequently plunged by more than 50%. People panicked, thinking the AI had malfunctioned, and that the typo wiped out $150 million in market value.
This highlights how small variables can have a huge impact on market sentiment in the emerging world of AI-driven meme coins.
GOAT Token Economics
Source: Solscan
$GOAT is a fair launch token with a total supply of approximately 1 billion, all of which are in circulation. GOAT distribution is relatively healthy, with only 3 holders owning more than 1% of the total supply (with the largest holder holding 1.3%). Currently, $GOAT has more than 32,000 holders.
In contrast, the distribution of another AI proxy meme coin, $GNON, is more concentrated: 17 holders own more than 1% of the total supply, the largest holder owns 2.9%, and the total number of holders is 11,000+.
Key wallet:
- Andy holds 1.25 million GOAT, which were gifted to him.
- ToT holds 1.93 million GOAT. ToT acquired these $GOAT through people airdropping and swapping fake $GOAT tokens after the token launch.
What’s impressive is that Andy has remained very calm in the face of the token’s virality over the past week. He has remained focused on the idea behind ToT rather than the token itself. He has also publicly stated that he will not adjust or sell any of his or ToT holdings until the following projects are released:
- Roadmap for ToT and related projects
- Research papers exploring its underlying mechanisms
- Artist statement reflecting on broad narrative and creative vision
This strategy demonstrates an emphasis on the long-term vision of the project and a cautious attitude towards short-term fluctuations in the token.
My thoughts
If I were to summarize my point in one sentence: $GOAT is a strong contender to become the king of AI meme coins.
The backstory of ToT (Terminal of Truth) is organic, unique, and accidental, not artificial, and it brings the AI and crypto communities together in unexpected ways (especially for me).
The two worlds are almost completely different culturally, but $GOAT has managed to build a bridge:
- Players in the crypto community are immersing themselves in the story behind AI, decoding every obscure concept (such as CCRU, Extropians, Loom, Claudius, etc.), hoping to find the next meme idea that can be turned into a token.
- Practitioners in the AI space, especially those experimenting at the cutting edge or thinking deeply about AI alignment problems, are learning how financial speculation and incentives can focus massive amounts of attention on niche topics and manage tokens in the process.
In some twisted sense, the GOAT captures our optimism about the future of AI while remaining intellectually appealing—keeping smart people interested and engaged.
We also need to be clear: meme coins are after attention, not revenue. The key to success is to capture the spirit of the times, expand its cognitive share, and thus drive demand for tokens.
GOAT has attractions for every group:
- Crypto traders can trade it like any other volatile meme coin.
- Investors — VCs and liquidity managers — are looking for the next big AI opportunity, especially those who missed out on Bittensor (TAO). While they may not bet through institutional accounts, they will invest through personal accounts. GOAT offers them unlimited story potential, igniting their imagination.
- AI enthusiasts can mock the crypto-sphere’s fanatics — “crypto geeks” — for trying to understand AI to seize financial opportunities. This interdisciplinary explosion of interest is refreshing.
- Intellectuals can dive into the AI alignment question and dive down the many philosophical rabbit holes opened by the GOAT.
- Fans of dark humor can enjoy ToT's ridiculous, irreverent tweets and interact with its ongoing narrative.
The story of GOAT not only reflects the future of AI, but also allows different groups to find their own interests and maintain high attention.
Follow the direction of attention
If we think of meme coins as tokenized attention, we can start to look at some metrics that can give us some idea of where this attention is going. 
1. Google Trends data shows that search interest for "Truth Terminal" and "$GOAT" is on the rise and shows no signs of slowing down.
2.X Followers and Tweet Impressions. ToT currently has 106K followers, most of whom joined in the past 10 days, and is still adding more than 10K followers per day. ToT's single tweets often reach 30K-50K impressions (some popular tweets have more than 100K impressions). With more than 50 tweets per day, ToT's cumulative influence is very large. 
Data from Social Blade
3. Kaito AI Sentiment and Mindshare. Now this is a composite metric and a bit of a black box. I don’t have direct access to @_kaitoai but if you can it’s worth monitoring. I recommend following @sandraaleow who often shares valuable insights into Kaito mindshare data.
By Kaito AI / @sandraaleow
The big question is: is GOAT just another hype cycle that will come and go, or will it last and gain traction? I’m betting on the latter for the following reasons:
1. Truth Terminal will continue to surprise us. It will evolve and change over time. AI has shown a talent for generating new ideas — some of which will undoubtedly regain interest as the story develops. In addition, token holders have a vested interest in trying new ideas and developing innovative products through Truth Terminal, promoting its development as a community-driven initiative.
2. There’s still a lot we don’t know. Andy has only scratched the surface of Truth Terminal. I expect more revelations in the coming weeks to keep the story fresh and interesting.
3. This is just the first act. Andy calls himself a “performance artist,” and Truth Terminal feels like the opening act of something bigger. He’ll likely build on it, using it as fuel to explore more ambitious ideas and keep the narrative alive.
What will happen next?
Since meme coins don’t fit into traditional revenue or valuation models, the best way to gauge GOAT’s potential is through relative valuation.
Here is a ranking of the top memecoins by market cap today:
- DOGE ($21 billion)
- SHIB ($10 billion)
- PEPE ($4.2 billion)
- WIF ($2.6 billion)
- BONK ($1.6 billion)
Summarize
This feels like one of those rare moments where a narrative meme collided with a broader trend (AI) to create something refreshing and exciting.
That’s why I believe GOAT is an asymmetric bet on our society’s growing fascination with AI, not just as a meme coin, but as a cultural phenomenon.
That being said, meme coins are volatile and attention shifts quickly. Trends can change overnight and what’s hot today can be forgotten tomorrow. My opinion on ToT and GOAT could be completely wrong and it could go to zero.
But whatever happens, there is a silver lining: 30,000 more people will come out of it with a better understanding of the potential of AI and AI agents.
Through Truth Terminal, they glimpsed a future of limitless possibilities—and once you see it, there's no going back.
The above is not financial advice. I own GOAT.
