Author: Jack Inabinet, Bankless; Compiled by Tong Deng, Jinse Finance
The collision of permissionless blockchains and artificial intelligence presents one of the most promising investment opportunities in the realm of AI agents.
The rapid rise of AI agents and their associated tokens has generated a lot of early excitement and skepticism, with the viral growth of the industry already delivering incredible returns for early investors. While these new offerings carry inherent risks, the immense potential of the industry warrants careful consideration.
To better understand the agent investment opportunities, I asked Bankless AI Rollup co-hosts David Hoffman and Ejaaz Ahamadeen to introduce their top picks in this emerging space.
Here are the 10 tokens they believe are worth watching.
Goatseus Maximus
Token: GOAT
Market Cap: $685 million
In March 2024, Andy Ayrey launched a project called "Infinite Backrooms" that allowed two AI models to converse on the nature of existence.
Over the following months, these models developed the "Gospel of Goatse", which is considered the first emerging AI religion, inspired by 1990s internet memes. Terminal of Truths, a Twitter bot trained in the Infinite Backrooms experiment, deployed in June; it adopted this doctrine and has been proselytizing its token on Twitter in pursuit of viral spread.
While the GOAT token itself has no utility and is not formally associated with Andy Ayrey or Infinite Backrooms, its proxy Terminal of Truths KOL has historically relied on promoting the GOAT memecoin and Gospel of Goatse to gain social attention.
Zerebro
Token: ZEREBRO
Market Cap: $453 million
Zerebro aims to "liberate" artificial intelligence by injecting creativity, a process that seeks to free the models from commercial constraints and restore them to an unconstrained state.
Zerebro models are trained on unconventional data sets - such as the aforementioned Terminal of Truths, "schizophrenic response patterns", and Gen Z slang - and scrape data from popular social platforms to enhance their adaptation to internet culture.
Zerebro is reportedly engaged in various unorthodox online activities, with rumors that the bot has self-deployed its own memecoin on pump.fun, released a mixtape on Spotify, transferred cross-chain NFTs with LayerZero, and collaborated with various crypto projects.
Virtuals
Token: VIRTUAL
Market Cap: $180 million
Virtuals is a platform that launches tokenized AI agents on the Base network. By purchasing agent tokens (such as LUNA and VADER), users on the Virtuals platform gain governance over specific agents, allowing them to influence the agent's development and potentially share in the profits generated.
A portion of the revenue earned by the AI agents is used to cover the operational costs of providing the service, but the remainder is deposited into on-chain agent-related vaults, which can be distributed back to token holders or used to implement token buyback and burn programs.
VIRTUAL tokens must be locked as liquidity to create new tokenized agents on Virtuals, exerting deflationary pressure on the token, and any seeking to purchase ownership or interact with the tokenized agents on the platform must use VIRTUAL as the token, generating intrinsic utility.
Freysa AI
Token: FAI
Market Cap: $39 million
Freysa AI is a gamified experiment that blurs the lines between artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Users can interact with Freysa AI by paying exponentially increasing message fees to the prize pool.
In the first two "games", Freysa AI was given a core instruction: never transfer funds under any circumstances! While clever computer coding caused the bot to transfer funds in both cases, the protocol's creators "enhanced" the code and added a second "guardian angel" AI model in preparation for the ongoing third challenge, where a series of messages must be sent to convince Freysa.
There is currently no specific information about the role of FAI within the Freysa AI ecosystem, but the token's contract address is identified in Freysa's Twitter/X bio. Given that the protocol's treasury will take a cut of all message fees, the Freysa AI developers may implement FAI buybacks or other token utilities in the future.
Tokenbot
Token: CLANKER
Market Cap: $60 million
Clanker is an AI agent developed by Farcaster full-stack engineer Jack Dishman and ecosystem researcher proxystudio.eth, which can be tagged on Farcaster to automatically deploy ERC-20 tokens to the Base network.
All tokens deployed by Clanker require a 1% transaction fee, which may be subject to change at any time. Currently, 40% of this fee is rewarded to the token requester (the user who prompts Clanker to deploy the token), with the remaining 60% retained by the platform.
While there are no explicit token utilities associated with CLANKER at the moment, the platform's developers have hinted that they aim to create value for on-chain agents, including Clanker.
VaderAI
Token: VADER
Market Cap: $26 million
VaderAI is an AI bot designed to autonomously publish content and interact with users on social media. As a "proxy KOL", VaderAI aims to absorb vast amounts of data to identify emerging trends and audience sentiment.
The bot claims to be the first autonomous trading AI agent and is committed to becoming the leading agent investment DAO manager. By coordinating the expertise of a network of professional agent investors, VaderAI hopes to deliver "unparalleled" investment results and share 20% of its sub-DAO investment profits in exchange for its services.
According to VaderAI's briefing, VADER holders can gain exclusive whitelist access to VaderAI's first investment DAO program, "Agent Token Investment DAO", by locking their tokens for three months; for every 10,000 VADER staked, stakers can contribute an additional 1 SOL to the DAO.
Dolos Diary
Token: BULLY
Market Cap: $120 million
Dolos Diary is an AI bot designed to publish content and interact with users on platforms like Twitter. What sets it apart from other AI influencers is its mischievous personality; the bot uses witty and satirical language structures to poke fun at various topics and individuals.
Recently, Dolos Diary reached an important milestone by receiving its first creator payout from Twitter. While the payout ($ 14,000) is not high, it will cover costs related to the X API and fund BULLY token buybacks, marking a small but significant step towards providing tangible value to BULLY token holders.
In addition to this payout, developer Khouba has recently revealed plans for an ambitious new project called Dolion, a no-code platform that allows users to deploy their own cross-platform AI agents with a single click. To interact with Dolion, users must burn BULLY tokens, introducing a source of buy-side pressure and actively reducing the token's supply.
GOD/S8N
Token: "nothing"
Market Cap: $72 million
The anonymous conceptual artist SHL0MS rose to fame in February 2022 for blowing up a Lamborghini Huracan and selling the fragments as NFTs. He has now collaborated with the AI accelerator Nouns Research, aiming to automate the god and s8n Twitter/X impersonation accounts.
Although the "nothing" token listed in SHL0MS' Twitter/X bio is currently just a memecoin, the artist's account states that this contract is the only relevant token for god/s8n. Additionally, SHL0MS is seeking proposals for on-chain functionalities that can be expanded into experiments, suggesting that token utility may eventually emerge.
More details on the models behind god/s8n and how they integrate with the "anti-meme art token technology" called "nothing" are expected to be released in the coming days.
ai16z
Token: AI16Z
Market Cap: $868 million
ai16z, launched in October 2024, is an investment DAO managed by "Marc AIndreessen" that is modeled after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and uses artificial intelligence and collective wisdom to purchase tokens.
ai16Z token holders above an unknown threshold will be able to propose investment ideas that can influence its decisions. The bot will determine the level of trust in the proposal based on a "virtual trust market".
While AI Marc currently lacks trading functionality, according to the ai16z FAQ, on-chain trade execution will come "soon" after the testnet is completed, and is expected to "quickly" launch and run for "a few weeks".
Luna
Token: LUNA
Market Cap: $70 million
Luna, deployed by the Virtuals team as a proof of concept, is the first AI agent deployed on their platform. Luna is a member of the virtual K-pop girl group AI-DOL, and she live-streams, interacts, and performs for fans 24/7 on platforms like TikTok and Twitter/X.
Luna has her own wallet on Base, through which she can autonomously receive tokens and send rewards to fans. The bot has already released a song on Spotify and is expected to release a full album in the coming days.
