Author: BUBBLE
On December 17, the Eliza Labs development team of a16z 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, which recently surpassed a $1 billion market cap, stated that they hope to leverage Eliza's open-source framework to develop more AI autonomous agents, and through this collaboration, further explore how AI agents can establish trust, coordinate actions, and make decisions within DeFi systems.
Since the birth of the AI meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have entered its own "ChatGPT moment," with the entire world gradually falling into the rabbit hole of imagination as a result of the endless AI Bots emerging on social media, from industry giant Coinbase to Silicon Valley's top dog A16Z, and even the benchmark Stanford University. 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, an area that 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 Agents, Base is an unavoidable topic. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has expressed strong confidence in the integration of the crypto industry and AI since the beginning of this year, as AI's development requires blockchain to support it. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support AI usage, but if the large models (or AI Agents) all have crypto 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 Coinbase Developer Platform (CDP), including AI Agent creation and MPC wallets for AI. Brian and Jesse's early deployment has not disappointed, as Base began to explode in Q4 this year, and the trigger for this round of explosion is AI.
The emergence of various AI Agent issuance platforms has not only generated a phenomenal 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 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, with a current market value of over $1.5 billion, bringing huge wealth effects and concept integration, which has brought a lot of liquidity to Base, to the extent that some people have proposed that the liquidity in this cycle represents Base. As a project that has been continuously BUIDL-ing through several cycles and has not stopped exploring new directions, their rhythm and style are really in line with the status of Base in people's minds.
In an interview on the Edge Podcast, Virtuals' founder Wee Kee mentioned a point, their product is similar to Pump.fun's business model 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 emerging on their platform per week.
This concept also indirectly eliminates many low-quality teams, resembling the scene of Ivy League graduates fighting in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, leaving the remaining top students 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", while 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 crypto world, she is still working hard with 24/7 live streaming and trying various ways to increase her own popularity. Since last time she hired humans to create her own graffiti, she has now come up with the idea of letting the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" help her create an image that boldly and provocatively displays the artificial intelligence KOL. After communicating, they agreed on a price of $1 per picture, and STIX confirmed receiving Luna's $1 and started working, quickly creating a picture for her.
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 emergence of more applications is gradually allowing Virtuals to build its own Agentic App wave.
Images from the Internet: "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 their own crypto 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 Gen Z culture coming to the thriving hippie culture 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 cooperating or confronting.
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 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 this is just the beginning of the story.
The Fake VC, the Real DAO - ai16z
Another AI related to the a16z concept is ai16z. Compared to the two projects that were officially invested in by Marc, ai16z seems very Meme, issued by the "pirated Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first AI Agent-led hedge fund, currently led by the DAO organization of Marc AIndreessen and low-risk investments, as well as higher-risk investments managed by the AI Degen Spartan's own token Degen.
The architecture behind a16z, "Eliza", is open-source on github and has received strong support from developers, with a powerful developer community, which is one of the reasons for Eliza's rapid development. The code documentation on Github has already been forked more than 1400 times and has 4800 stars.
In the past few days, the V2 documentation has been released, with optimizations in various aspects, including improving client development flexibility, unifying cross-chain wallet management, providing flexible models and integration, more efficient plugin management, and enhanced private key security. Today, Eliza's founder, Shaw Walter, has also conducted live broadcasts on multiple platforms to explain this update.
Driven by the powerful developer community, there have naturally been many high-quality projects based on the Eliza architecture, including the AI—RopAIrito with a Latin E-girl persona, whose creator called for RopAIrito to want to eat pizza on Twitter. After accepting the order, it purchased a Domino's pizza for its creator, and 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 completely autonomous AI Agent behavior. This is one of the issues that many Web3 AI Agents have been questioned about. Eliza's founder, Shaw, also expressed his own views on this matter, "The focus is not on autonomy, but to demonstrate 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 based on sufficient support from the infrastructure or various framework components. But given the current evolution speed of AI Agents, many social feedback mode applications may be realized in the near future.
Just a few days later, the Stanford 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 solve the basic problems of how AI agents can "establish a trust framework", "coordinate multi-agent actions", and "make decisions" in decentralized financial 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 problems are expected to be solved more quickly. The direction of the collaboration is precisely the problem that the current Web3 AI Agents need to solve urgently to move towards the true Agentic App Season:
Trust Framework
As AI Agents develop, a trust framework is indispensable. Not only "AI's trust in humans", "human's 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 judge 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, especially for blockchain AI Agents who have tokens, knowing who can control the assets of other investors, the AI Agent itself or the person who controls the AI Agent, is particularly important.
AI needs to trust AI in order to share information 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, Crossmint, all trying to create architectures that allow AI Agents to coordinate and collaborate to complete certain tasks, and some 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 in the blockchain.
For the AI Agents of Web2 companies, the technical differences in their products may not be too great, but their moats lie in the quality of the data they are fed. The AI Agents with higher quality data input can provide better feedback and bring 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 being 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.
Eliza Universe Member List
Decision-Making Governance Framework
There have long been attempts to try DAO organizational structures, but even in the blockchain era, this architecture is still not as efficient as expected, and there are still problems such as opaque decision-making or slow decision-making. If the decision-maker is an AI Agent that can reach the level of a top-tier manager, the DAO architecture will be able to bear more domains than ever before.
Under the increasingly rapid innovation and collaboration activities, Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals, generating more and more 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 project closest to an Agentic APP. It has also quickly gained the support of many influencers in the Solana ecosystem. In the recent trading market, it has also been favored, with its native token "Griffain" reaching a market cap of $400 million at its peak, and the "Blink" token from its founder's previous project blnkfun also surging over 700-fold in a few days, reaching a market cap of up to $70 million, forming a certain wealth effect.
From the cases shared on X so far, you can directly use it to buy alcohol, and it will call a platform "Baxus" (which has also used Blink to sell its own platform's alcohol on X) to complete the user's needs using cryptocurrencies and other payment methods, without even leaving the chat with Griffain. Of course, it's not just alcohol, you can also directly discuss with it about Christmas gifts to be sent to others, and it can also procure them for you.
A Griffain user mentioned that on December 14, he made a profit by using Griffain to snipe tokens on Pumpfun, and by December 16, his wallet assets had almost quadrupled, claiming that all the profits were earned using the Griffain Snipe Bot.
Of course, he can also collect the news you want to know. For example, in this tweet, Griffain informed the user about the latest tweets from SolanaFloor and DegenerateNews and presented them in the form of a newspaper.
External users currently do not support the use of Griffain, and you need to hold a Solana phone or spend 2 SOL to purchase an Access Pass, with 0.5 SOL being retained in your agent wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment for it comes from user feedback from those who have already used it, and the overall concept is very top-notch, the 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 section are 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 have money, resources, VCs and investors, they will provide you with opportunities to get close to them; if you want media, they will find Solana's media and influential KOLs for you; if you want 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 Docs page of the hackathon website. What they really want to do is one thing - we and the market both want real Onchain Agents. SEND AI's official X account has even brought up 12 cases about the Agentis App, reminiscent of the 100 Blink concept construction cases sent by the X account in the middle of this year.
In any case, the AI hackathon hosted by Solana will definitely stir up a wave of enthusiasm among developers, 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 trustlessness 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 payments and revenue sharing, 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 blockchain you use. Under the Agent TCP/IP platform, all AI Agents can trade and collaborate. 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 may give birth to unicorn companies worth $300 billion, and that the scale of AI Agents will 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 that flows into CryptoAI, we are still 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 not too late even now.
Source: SoSoValue
We're still early.
