Agentic Trading: Will AI Outperform Human Traders?

Transcript

Good morning. Welcome to beautiful Singapore. Hope you've had a great morning so far. Will AI outperform human traders? Maybe let's start with a show of hands. Who's on the side of the AI? AI, show of hands. All right, who's on the side of the humans? Okay, a couple of hands there as well. Very good. We shall find out in the next 15 minutes whether AI will outperform human traders.

I am here to tell you that I believe a golden era of agentic trading is about to start. And why do I believe that? Well, we now have this new resource, a new commodity almost, which is intelligence on tap. This is a crazy concept for a lot of us. You can actually take inference, intelligence, tokens, and channel them into workflows and activities that we do and normally have been doing with human

beings, knowledge workers, and so on. Let's look at a couple of examples. What you're seeing here are the most expensive models on OpenRouter for coding. Imagine you're doing something that involves software engineering. You need to code something. You're creating an application or you're making a change to an application or anything software related. The cost to do that is basically measured in cents now.

Maybe you'll pay a few dollars. But this is a completely different world than what we had even just five years ago when it comes to software engineering. Now, it does not mean that software engineers are out of a job. It means that they have evolved their roles. And of course, very few software engineers are now actually writing the lines of code themselves. Now, is this only relevant for coding? Let's look at some of this data from artificial analysis.

And here we're seeing the cost on the x-axis and the index of performing various tasks on the y-axis. And you can see how incredibly affordable a lot of these models are. Again, we're talking about cents to perform knowledge worker tasks, right? Coding, research, various things that you would do on a computer. But surely this is going to have no impact on trading and investing.

Cuz that's completely different, right? Well, what is trading? You sit on a computer. You research, you digest information. You click buttons. You execute trades, right? It sounds very simple. It's a little bit harder than the way I'm explaining it, but fundamentally, what you're doing is knowledge work on a computer. So, that means we can just tell an agent, right? We can just say, "Hey, make me money and make mistakes.

You can use Muse, you know, ChatGPT, Claude. Has anyone tried doing this, by the way? I've I've tried doing it. It didn't go very well. I do not recommend doing that. But, some people, you know, are are adventurous and might try it. I think there's a better way to do this. Well, maybe, first of all, Muse, ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, they don't have eyes on the markets and on chain. So, a good idea would maybe to give it a product that allows them to see what's happening on chain.

And with our API at Nansen, you can literally in seconds give eyes to your agent, eyes on chain. And actually, it's not just eyes on chain, it's also hands on chain. So, if you are of the adventurous sort, and you want to try agentic trading with existing AI products, it's not a bad idea to give your agent eyes on chain, and also hands on chain to execute your trades.

But, other people might not want to build their own agents, right? You might want to actually use a product that already has all of this stuff packaged up for you. And so, let me introduce you to our mobile app called Nansen AI. Agentic trading in your pocket, 24/7. Basically, it's a trading app that has an agent [snorts] built into it, which has been battle-tested, and we've run an insane amount of evaluations and quality assurance to make sure it's actually very good at helping you with on-chain trading.

It's powered by Nansen's 500 million plus labeled addresses, meaning you can see who is behind the different addresses. And it comes with trading built in. So, you don't need to connect separate wallets, send funds elsewhere. It's a fully integrated product. So, this could be a good idea to try out. Now, we put tons of research and development into this product. And you might think, well, is it just a chat GPT wrapper?

Well, it's a little bit harder than that. We've basically built a harness, and we've experimented with a range of different models. We run evals and quality assurance on all of the different models that come out, and we've actually evolved and changed them out, of course, as models get better, as the commodity of intelligence on tap gets better. And if you use the product now, you don't even have to think about which model to use. We just automatically route your prompt to the model we think that's best to respond to your prompt and to help you. So, there's a ton of research and development that's gone into this There are two characteristics of this

product. Number one, it is on chain. It's a self-custodial wallet that's built in. We are not an exchange. We are not a centralized exchange. We are a technology service provider. We give you this app and all of the magic that goes into the app. And the other part is that it's agentic, which means you don't have to click around too much on charts, on tables. You can just ask the agent about what's happening on chain. Which tokens are smart money buying?

What are the latest meme coins that launched in the last 15 minutes if that's what you're into. Or which perp's equities are smart money buying right now. You can even get financial performance on stocks through this app. So it has a lot of this stuff built in. Batteries included, you don't have to build it yourself. And it's very hard to build a simple product. This is a mobile app. It is very intuitive and easy to use, but there's so much stuff that goes into building this product.

And for me, what this really is is the beginning of walking up a trust ladder. Imagine that you are going into a self-driving car. If you'd never heard about the company and you've never heard about anyone else taking a ride with this self-driving car, I think you'd feel uncomfortable getting into it, especially getting into the backseat. You might want to sit where the wheel is, right? And similarly, our mobile app keeps you in the loop. You're sitting [clears throat] somewhat in the driver's seat. You are calling the shots on what trades get executed.

But I think the question is how do you ultimately get to the top of the trust ladder where you can actually delegate the trades to an agent that autonomously acts on your behalf. This is the concept of self-driving And what we are working on now is a product where humans are not picking the tokens, but agents will because that's what we believe 2028 and beyond will look like. I think there's going to be an inflection moment in 2027.

I think you'll have a cursor or a lovable moment for trading happen in 2027 and in 2028 the norm will be that we are trading with agents. Just like software engineers are coding with agents today. So, this product is called Nansen agents. You can sign up to the waitlist for it and I have a QR code for you here. This is self-driving traders. This is autonomous trading agents. We do not give you the strategies. You create the strategies yourself.

But, you can backtest them. You can run them in paper trading mode without putting any capital at risk. And once you are comfortable with the trading agents, perhaps after multiple iterations, you can fund the trading agent and it operates autonomously on your behalf. You can go in and see what it's doing. You can intervene. You can pause it. You can tweak it. But, it's all of the infrastructure that you probably do not want to build yourself. So, we take all of these amazing capabilities from Nansen that we've built out over the last 6 plus years.

All of our 500 million labeled addresses, all of the on-chain data, the trade execution, the agentic capabilities, all of that packaged up in one platform where you can create your own self-driving And the goal here is really to build a product where you can trade everything on-chain with agents. Because to go back to the very question that we started with, we believe that AI will outperform human traders that do not use agents. But, the key is

to acknowledge that the human gets a new role in this era. In the golden age of agentic trading, we believe that humans will be trading with agents. They're not trading against agents. It's not humans versus AI. It's actually humans who are acknowledging that we have a new role in how we trade and how we invest. And that is the future we want to build for. Let me touch on some of the challenges we need to solve to make this happen because this is a very hard problem, as you can imagine.

Let's break it down into a couple of sub problems that we have to focus on. Number one, we have to give you a platform where you have a better chance at growing your portfolio than if you're trading manually. We can never guarantee that people using our product are going to make money. If anyone is guaranteeing that, you should recognize that they don't know what they're talking about. That's not how markets work. However, the reality is that many trading products give users a really bad chance at doing well in markets.

I'm not going to mention any names. You can go on X and see people complaining about how much money they're losing on using various products. The goal here is to give people a better chance at outperforming. Number two, you have to build a reliable agentic system. Agents are non-deterministic. They are very powerful and flexible, but they can misbehave. And there are lots of subtle technical issues that we have to deal with in Even something as basic as backtesting is very hard with agents because the agent can find out that it's actually

being backtested and it's a simulation. So, you have to trick the agent so it believes it is actually operating in January 3rd, 2026, which sounds silly, but you have to keep it in the matrix, basically. Lots of small challenges like that. You have to have a reliable environment for the agents. Number three, you need to make it economical because intelligence on tap does actually cost money. Every time you prompt an AI system, it costs money to serve the tokens.

So, we don't have this infinite resource. We have to be thoughtful about how to actually give you access to this intelligence on tap without breaking the bank. And number four, which is maybe the most interesting part, you have to make it entertaining. I believe that people who trade actively, a big part of why they do it is not just financial reasons, it's also entertainment. We could put our money into the S&P 500 in an index fund, and frankly, most people should probably do that, but some of us who want to take the risk and have some fun, we like to actively trade.

So, by building trading agents, we don't want to take away the fun and the entertainment. You have to give people a new user experience that genuinely is entertaining and fun. You want to wake up in the morning and see how your trading engine is doing. So, you have to make it entertaining as well. Now, to wrap up, think deeply about the era we are in. We now have intelligence on tap. And to me, it is very obvious this is completely going to change trading and investing in the next couple of years, and I would encourage you to be on the right side of history.

Thank you.