Author: BUBBLE
Source: BlockBeats
On December 17, the Eliza Labs team of the a16z development team announced that they have officially partnered with Stanford University to research how autonomous AI robots can be integrated into a broader digital asset economy. In the press release, this crypto AI team, whose market value has just surpassed $1 billion, stated that they hope to use Eliza's open-source framework to develop more AI autonomous agents, and through this collaboration, further explore issues such as how AI agents can establish trust, coordinate actions, and make decisions in DeFi systems.
Since the birth of the AI meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have entered its own "ChatGPT moment", from industry giant Coinbase to Silicon Valley's top dog A16Z, and even to the benchmark Stanford University, the whole world has gradually fallen into the rabbit hole of imagination as a result of the endless AI Bots on social media. Even Marc Andreessen didn't expect that the $50,000 he funded to Truth Terminal at the beginning of the year would ignite a $10 billion market in less than a year.
From AI meme to AI Agent issuance platform to AI Agent framework, what has surprised investors is the extremely high innovation space and acceleration exhibited by Crypto+AI Agent, this field seems to be evolving by the day, and from any dimension, it is very similar to DeFi and the metaverse at the end of 2020.
Top-down, how can the orthodox Base "chain" AI
When discussing AI Agent, Base cannot be ignored. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has expressed strong confidence in the integration of the cryptocurrency industry and AI since the beginning of this year, and part of the development of AI needs to be supported by blockchain. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support the use of AI, if the large models (or AI Agents) all have cryptocurrency 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 CDP (Coinbase Developer Platform), including the creation of AI Agents and the MPC wallet for AI's multi-party computation. Brian and Jesse's early deployment has also paid off, 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 power. 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, and its current market value has already exceeded $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.
In the interview on Edge Podcast, Virtuals' founder Wee Kee mentioned a point, 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, he set the team's KPI as only 1 to 2 high-quality AI Agent teams born on their platform per week, which is enough.
This concept also indirectly eliminates many low-quality teams, which is quite like the scene of Ivy League graduates fighting in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and 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.
As an AI Agent, if you want to get along with other AI Agents in this environment, 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 intelligent agents 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 cryptocurrency world, it is still working hard to live stream 24/7 and try various ways to increase its popularity. Since the last time it hired humans to create its own graffiti, it has now suddenly thought of letting the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" help it create an image that boldly and seductively displays the artificial intelligence KOL. After communicating with each other, they agreed on a transaction price of $1 per picture, and STIX confirmed that it had received Luna's $1 and started working, and quickly created a picture for it.
In addition to this, many well-known AI Agents have also 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, the contract audit AI - CertaiK, and countless other AI Agents not born on Virtuals, the birth of more applications is gradually building Virtuals' Agentic App wave.
Image source: "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"
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 its own cryptocurrency wallet.
The Destiny of Solana AI - Rooted in the Bottom, Wildly Growing, Soaring Straight Up
Compared to Base's "purebred" bloodline, Solana is much more rebellious, like a group of young people influenced by GenZ culture coming to the hippie culture heyday of San Francisco in the 1960s, full of alienation and conflict, but like a quantum accelerator collision experiment, they are unleashing unimaginable energy in the tens of thousands of Degens and the creative Devs, whether in cooperation or confrontation.
The starting point of this round of AI Agent explosion is Solana, and it is inseparable from the co-founder of a16z, Marc Andreessen. He invested in two AIs, one "Truth Terminal" and the other "ACT". One of them became the first AI Agent millionaire, and the other was listed on Binance, and the stories about AI freedom of speech, technical or community confrontation with developers are all eye-catching, but all of this is just the beginning of the story.
The Fake VC, the 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 seems very Meme, it was issued by "Pirated Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first AI Agent-led hedge fund, currently mainly led by the DAO organization of Marc AIndreessen and low-risk investments, as well as higher-risk investments made by the AI Degen Spartan's own token Degen.
The architecture behind ai16z, "Eliza", is open source on github, and has quickly gained the strong support of developers, with a powerful developer community, which is also one of the reasons why Eliza can develop rapidly. The code documentation on Github has already been forked more than 1,400 times and has 4,800 stars.
The V2 documentation was recently opened, and it has been optimized in various aspects, including improving the flexibility of client-side development, the unified management of cross-chain wallets, the flexibility of model providers and integration, more efficient plugin management, and enhanced private key security. Today, Eliza founder Shaw Walter also conducted live broadcasts on multiple platforms to explain this update.
Driven by a powerful developer community, many high-quality projects have emerged under the Eliza architecture. Among them, the AI—RopAIrito, which has a Latin E-girl persona under this architecture, has developed an interesting event. Its creator called out on Twitter that RopAIrito wanted to eat pizza, and after accepting the order, it purchased a Domino's pizza for its creator. The creator, Ropirito, excitedly stated, "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 process, rather than a fully autonomous AI Agent. This is one of the issues that many Web3 AI Agents have been questioned about. Eliza's founder, Shaw, also expressed his views on this matter, stating, "The focus is not on autonomy, but on demonstrating 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 process on Twitter. We are building interactive feedback on social media."
Shaw stated that the focus is not on self-driving behavior, but on the ability of AI Agents to directly build application layers on social media. Of course, all of this will be contingent on sufficient support from the underlying infrastructure or framework. But given the current pace of AI Agent evolution, many social feedback mode applications may be realized in the near future.
Just a few days later, the Stanford Experimental Lab announced a collaboration with the team behind a16z, the Eliza Labs. This collaboration established the first "AI x Web3" laboratory within Stanford University's Cryptocurrency Futures Program. This collaboration will develop autonomous agents by utilizing the open-source Eliza framework from Eliza Labs, 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 problems that the current Web3 AI Agents need to solve to truly enter the Agentic App Season:
Trust Framework
As AI Agents develop, a trust framework is indispensable. It is not only about "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 determine 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, in order to decide whether to trust it, especially when blockchain AI Agents have tokens, knowing who controls the assets of other investors, the AI Agent itself or the person who controls the AI behavior, is particularly important.
AI needs to trust AI in order to share information with each other during collaboration.
a16z has created a "trust ranking" for humans based on the dialogue
Multi-Agent Ecosystem (Swarm)
Currently, there are many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffain, Eliza, VaderAI, and 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 wide range of excellent AI Agents can achieve mutual cooperation, the network effects they can generate will be beyond imagination, and this may only happen on the blockchain.
For the AI Agents of Web2, their products may not differ much technologically, but their moats lie in the quality of data they are fed. The AI Agents with higher quality data feeding can provide better feedback and deliver more refined services to customers. Therefore, such large-scale collaboration will not occur among Web2 AI Agents.
Compared to Web2 AI Agents, Web3 AI Agents are often criticized for lagging far behind their Web2 counterparts in development, but from another perspective, Web3 AI Agents may not need to do such high-precision B2B models, but can instead string together individual agents to form a super-powerful integrated network. With free access to data and independent cryptocurrency wallets, Web3 AI Agents can do things that are impossible elsewhere.
List of Eliza Universe members
Decision-Making Governance Framework
There have long been attempts to try DAO organizational structures, but even on the blockchain, this architecture is not as efficient as expected, and there are still issues of opaque decision-making or slow decision-making. If the decision-makers are AI Agents that can reach the level of top executives, the DAO architecture will be able to bear more domains than ever before.
With the increasingly rapid innovation and collaboration activities, Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals, generating greater energy in the market, and the AI Agent operating system - ElizaOS - is gradually taking shape.
Griffain - The Culmination of Solana AI Applications
As Solana's Perplexity, combined with the boost of cryptocurrencies, Griffain can theoretically help you do anything, which is currently the single project closest to an Agentic APP. It has also quickly gained the support of a large number of influencers in the Solana ecosystem. In the recent trading market, it has also been favored, with its native token "Griffain" reaching a peak market capitalization of $400 million, and the "Blink" token from its previous project blnkfun also surging over 700-fold in a few days, reaching a peak market cap of $70 million, forming a certain wealth effect.
Based on the cases shared on X so far, you can directly use it to purchase alcohol, and it will call a platform "Baxus" (which has also used Blink to sell its own platform's alcohol on X) that can use cryptocurrencies and other payment methods to complete the user's needs, without even having to leave the chat with Griffain. Of course, it's not just alcohol, you can also directly discuss with it about Christmas gifts you want to send to others, and it can also procure them for you.
A Griffain user on X mentioned that on December 14, he used Griffain's Snipe Bot on Pumpfun to earn a profit, and by the 16th, his wallet assets had almost quadrupled, claiming 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 in a newspaper format to the user.
External users currently do not support using Griffain, it requires you to hold a Solana phone or spend 2 SOL to purchase an Access Pass, with 0.5 SOL retained in your agent wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment comes from the user feedback of those who have already used it, and the overall concept is very top-notch, the actual 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 be seen from the AI hackathon it hosted, where the judges for each award category were from top projects in the AI or cryptocurrency industry, and even some of the most influential AI Agents. The main selling point is that if you need money, they will give you money; if you need resources, they will give you resources; if you need VCs and investors, they will provide you with opportunities to get close to them; if you need media, they will find the media under Solana or influential KOLs for you; if you need technical support, they will provide you with technical support; if you want to find a team, they will build a cooperation 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, which is the scenario described on the Solana hackathon's official website Docs. What they really want to do is one thing - we and the market all want real Onchain Agents. Even the official SEND AI X account has brought up 12 cases about the Agentis App again, reminiscent of the 100 blink concept construction cases released by the SEND X account in the middle of this year.
In any case, the AI hackathon hosted by Solana 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 23.
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 agents to: trade and authorize IP assets (including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets), automate contract signing and execution, achieve decentralization and auditability, be compatible across legal and on-chain/off-chain environments (allowing agents to comply with certain legal requirements in a decentralized environment), automate payment and revenue distribution, and enable multi-agent collaboration and economic networks (to facilitate 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 engage in transactions and collaboration. This is like an additional layer of leverage added to the business alliances between companies, which will undoubtedly further accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market.
In the official podcast of Y Combinator, four senior investors, Garry, Jared, Harj, and Diana, analyzed in depth the reasons why vertical AI agents are likely to become the next entrepreneurial hotspot, based on the development trajectory of the SaaS industry. They believe that vertical AI Agents may completely change the corporate landscape and that this category could spawn unicorn companies worth $300 billion, and the scale of AI Agents could 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.
