AI Agents Continue to Take Over Crypto: AI DeFi (DeFAI), Gaming, & More!

Transcript

welcome Bank this nation to the AI rollup where we covered the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI I'm David hoffen here with my co-host and AI expert ezz and we are here to help make sure that you are up to speed with the rapidly evolving AI agent space out there ezz how you doing my man how was your week last week anything um anything happened no not much pretty quiet um okay so there's going to be some listeners who do have context about what we're about to talk about and there's going to be other listeners who have zero context about what we're about to talk about so maybe we can just start by flagging that yeah so so I think it's important to provide context and also

highlight that this is not a kind of like jokey part of this segment um this is kind of like I want to take a moment to kind of like address something that is uh serious to me and meaningful to me and a lot of other people and um I think it's worth kind of just taking a moment so for context here um last week myself um and two other folks core contributors Marcus and rope uh launched a dow that will be fully dedicated to its mission of helping to grow this wonderful and wacky crypto AI space and our founding principles from the start has been to use this Dow to help discover and support the best Builders uh creators and enthusiasts the leaders of of

Tomorrow basically um and I want to start by saying that the core team and I took some steps with the launch process of which we truly regret and take full accountability for and if I'm being completely honest we were just so excited to launch and get this thing going um and in hindsight it's so obvious that we should have instilled things like vesting for the core team and advisers and in hindsight we should have taken the time to slow down and and make sure more of our community was involved and that's definitely like a fault on on our side and we take full accountability but um we just didn't and and that's on us um ever since Mark rope and I started researching building and nerding out on this space um we've had Builders reach out to us and um ask them

to help them and and whilst we did the best that we could there was only so much time in the day and we thought well we didn't want these Builders to not get the support that they needed right so um we thought like you know would' rush to assemble a team across all the blockchain ecosystems um which we would be the most capable to help us um and help these Builders do what they wanted to do um and that included you David and a host of other builders investors and thought leaders in the space that we believe can help us fulfill this mission of taking this small you know Niche sector in crypto and grow it into the potential that we think it deserves and unfortunately that rushing cost us um none of us even thought for a second like literally if you if you could hear

the conversations we had before none of us thought for a second it would get as big as it did and we just thought you know we're a bunch of like nerds to be honest launching at a time when markets are down so we'll have you know this small launch and then we can kind of build from here but the opposite actually happened and we learned you know some really hard lessons which tie back to the points I made earlier around investing in and Community distribution um that being said I'm so grateful for the community that came through and showed their support it genuinely means the world to me um and we're taking steps which will be announced very shortly to repair that damage and to kind of create and and fulfill on our vision I just want to end this with saying that the core team advisers and I

are are fully committed to realizing our original Mission and I don't I also want to say that this is the only time we'll be mentioning this Dow on this show we want this series to focus on all the amazing teams building in the space and not focus on anything that we're doing to be honest um the goal of this series is to amplify and build up others not ourselves or or whatever we're doing on on the side which is why we've never talked about AIC on the show prior to this too um David I know you face some heat maybe you can shine some some light on that yeah yes yes we did um many times uh throughout B's history we've been like mobbed and dog palled on crypto Twitter due to sets of like facts

or conclusions that were simply wrong or heavily manipulated to look as bad as possible uh this is the first time that we actually did do something that I that we consider wrong that we regret uh that we immediately tried to do as soon as Ryan and I both realized what had happened so Ryan and I advisers um we were able to contribute like our share of five Soul alongside many of the other advisers uh and that also included banket Ventures as well got to contribute two Soul uh along with our other third GP uh Ben LOF who also contributed One Soul um upon the launch of the Dow the price action of the token the aicc token was like pretty insane I like if you go look at coin gecko or or some of the the charts it hit like a it

touched a billion dollars in market cap right on launch just because like people were playing games people wanted to buy it was very exciting uh no one really expected that or like accounted for that there was a decision made by the bank list Ventures team to sell 8% of its supply of tokens on launch day which which can can I can I just say which like shocked me to be honest I think like I I just want to come clean and say like I mean you have the DMs I hit you up and was like you know what going on him and like this is like unacceptable and I yeah anyway I just you know you you were understanding of that I think you were shocked as well to be honest I was also shocked because I was not aware of the fact that bankless Ventures made

the decision to sell 8% of the tokens um that amounted to $65,000 uh just to put that into perspective yeah the decision to sell the 8% of tokens was made without my or Ryan's like input or knowledge something that we would have never uh approved of had we been made aware uh once we found out we were like sent a tweet by a friend about somebody saying y bankless Ventures is like dumping the token on day one and I was like well that's not true uh that's that's got to be a mistake uh turns out it was actually real uh once we found out it was real we immediately just stepped in and rebot the aicc token with all the proceeds from the sale um just a few hours later from the moment of the sale so like because selling tokens so soon into a

Project's Lipan not something that we want to do that we support or we condone um there's extra context for how and why this sale happened there's a link to a tweet that kind of gives a play byplay in the show notes uh just it's kind of like a dominoes of of events um unfortunately none the nonetheless it was done uh then there are also parts of crypto Twitter who love to drag Bank lists through the mud and we had just basically giving them the material that they needed to make the seam as bad as possible uh the narrative for some people on crypto Twitter uh became that bankless had built this up built this whole thing up all a lot that bankless sold Millions upon millions of dollars onto our followers uh that bankless conspired to create the

whole aicc down in the first place in order to do this uh that we started doing the AI rollup with e Jazz for the sole purpose of creating hype around the aicc da uh which to be clear the accelerate D was never mentioned or promoted on any AI rollup or any other bank podcast prior to the segment that you're hearing right now um there's also some alternative media organizations out there to took advantage of this very bad look and helped promote a twisted version of the truth um perhaps one of the more I'll say like valid bits of critiques is that bankless had a role in elevating the the prominence and clout of ezz here which helped by proxy to generate hype and significance to the launch of the aelite Dow uh to be clear wasn't our intent right and I found out about the existence of the Dow uh the

Tuesday before it launched five days before it launched also e like you and the other two core team members had already assembled a pretty stacked organization without any help from us we didn't do any any with assembling um think many people out there perhaps heard of You ezz by us bringing you on to the B podcast as our AI rollup host uh and that's because you are on the crypto AI Frontier where you've already established uh the relationships that you needed to make the accelerate da reality without again without any help for us I'm just a nerd in the trenches that just want to geek out and learn about this literally like if you look at most of my tweets it's like can you please teach me this or that so yeah you you kind of picked me up out of that and it's been a roller coaster since David

yeah so a lot of people don't have all the context um overall call it a pretty dramatic start to the accelerate Dow with a lot of lessons learned in hindsight um y any final comments before we move on no I just want to reiterate that um we're incredibly grateful um for our community and the support that they've shown and we are fully committed to realizing our mission despite this bumpy start we're going to steer the ship um and correct course and kind of Forge ah head and we've got some really exciting announcements you know that is going to kind of fulfill some of the things that we've heard from the community um but let's leave it at that David I don't want to talk about I don't last speak about this first and last time accelerate Dow has been mentioned

on the rollup so now I have to ask you yes uh the theme of the week in AI crypto what would you say update us on the last seven days of action seven days of activity seven days of fundamentals what was the last seven days like the last seven well let me start with something which isn't fundamental but is important to cover which is the markets were down David and I have this saying which is by no means my own um someone much wiser said this before me but uh the narrative follows price so what that means is uh if the price go up all these narratives are like oh this is the reason why and and this is like amazing check out this new project when the prices are down David uh the pendulum swings back with ferocity the other

way down autonomous Sovereign AI agents when prices are down these are just glorified Bots Bots these are glorified bots so uh we experienced some of the latter um over the last seven days markets um in my opinion did a healthy correction David um and this was not just within crypto AI This was um within the macro perspective uh at all and actually maybe a spicy take here is um overall if you look at like the price performance of the crypto AI agent sector over the last say 3 months or two months months um let's call it one and a half months actually cuz this sector I keep forgetting how how young it is has actually outperformed macro like to a crazy amount of times yeah yeah

significantly right but obviously people like look at their tokens they see a wild price AC cruel and they're like oh my God I'm used to this portfolio number that I'm looking at on my screen and then when it corrects healthily you know after like a whatever a 5x or something people are like oh what what's happened and all this kind of stuff so that's what we experienced over the last week a kind of like macro correction in Maes so like Bitcoin and stuff and then that affecting crypto AI specifically especially yeah maybe just numbers on this like Bitcoin got up to $107,000 and then bottom at $91,000 you know ether touched below $3,000 and then uh AI crypto tokens got hit especially hard uh AI 16z like one

of the Premier tokens topped out at $2.25 bottomed out at a dollar so lost 60% of its value it's back up to a150 virtuals uh which topped out at $5 fell all the way down to $230 and is now back up to $33.60 uh this is what uh a very skish bullish bull market looks like I would say is like things go up and down 30 40% in a week because people's sentiments can change on a dime yep yep 100% And if I kind of like could add a few other figures to this is uh well probably the main one um the total AI agent market cap which I think peaked at around uh

$17 billion um about a week and a half ago uh retraced to I think around 11 to 12 billion dollar right um and as you can see you know markets have I think this this cookie data might be maybe slightly lagging or something but um uh markets are up today as we're recording this um conversation on on Wednesday axt is up 82% on the week so these things are very very reflexive David um and like you know it's just interesting that like when the markets are down people aren't very convicted in their thesis in general but some of these things uh still stand and the market shows that when markets flip back to the positive right um so we've seen kind of a healthy

correction within the AI agents market and um what's happened this last week if I were to summarize it was was um a mixture of teams still shipping stuff and then a bunch of critics out there that was saying you know I think this is the end of the crypto AI agent sector now obviously like us on this show and and having this whole segment around AI agents were kind of biased but um I do not think that's the case I think we're actually furthest from that case um I put out a tweet a while ago which basically said if you want to know in times of uncertainty or even certainty what on Earth is going on talk to the builders put put your heads down and get in the weeds with things and you'll see that there are people that truly care about this space that are building some

awesome stuff um so yeah I think we should kind of like get into things David I wanted to start off with this really interesting um chart um that I saw on Kido um which is kind of like a social sentiment um Tracker Where typically they've had um this metric called AI mind share David okay and AI mind share um started off like this if you imagine like a little a little Square it looked like this tiny little blip in the corner tiny little baby little thing and then halfway through last year that just grew bigger and bigger and bigger and then when agents came about well it looks like what you're looking like um what it looks like on this screen right where it takes up like half the page and for people who

are confused or or aren't looking at the screen right now it's kind of like uh blocks of um kind of it's squares that rep each represent um a specific segment so it could be it could be nfts and each square is proportional its size is proportional to how much it's being talked about within the uh ecosphere within Twitter within social media sites within the crypto realm and if if you're looking at the screen right now the AI square is taking up half the screen used to 48% 48% used to be 70 used to be 70 well it used to it used to be 70 but there's a reason and this is why I actually brought up this chart it wasn't to show that AI was taking up 50% but it's to point to a

square that sits adjacent to it David do you do you know which one I'm talking about yeah it's the one that's extremely green which me implies extreme growth called D which we talked about last week it was a big segment last week and I think I'm GNA beat you run beat you to the punch line e Jazz you're going to talk about how AI used to have a single block of M share and now there are two AI sectors that are different they have ai and AI agents probably and now there's d d with AI in it so AI enabled defi that it has its own independent amount of Mind share coming in at 6 and A3 per number three after memes so memes coming in at 10% AI coming in at 48% and

then third is defi uh def defi we need a better word ai ai Finance AI decentralized Finance coming in at 6.3% yeah yeah I think we need to either say defi AI or uh AI Finance we're still working A5 is the easiest thing to say Aid fine yeah and it doesn't sound ridiculous at all David but yes you are you are smack bang on um you know hammer on the nail um the AI category has split into its um into Ai and defy AI which um kind of shows that there's a lot of attention investment and focus on this

particular sub sector of crypto AI which I think is super super cool um and so we have to ask ourselves well why why is this whole sector even being spoken about at all well we kind of spoke about this um I think two episodes ago David where we were saying okay well what have we got so far in terms of like crypto AI agents well there's some really smart kind of sassy um Twitter Bots right you know they people like to call them Twitter influencer Bots right and axt has kind of like uh embellished that quite a bit um I've been the leading example but the next question was like okay I'm kind of getting bored of these Twitter iuen yeah well there you go there you go

um and it's kind of like well what comes next and the natural reaction to that was which I think is actually kind of on the money here is well hang on a second we've just built up an alternative Financial stack over the last eight years maybe they'll have some relevance there and we've spoken about this before saying like I think agents are going to be the connectors of all this complex um blockchain stuff um into a really neat ux where instead of having to spin up a wallet and sign transactions you just ping an agent so basically defi AI is the emergence of that it's combining these AI agents with defi capabilities so what does that mean it means these agents will have their own wallets it means these agents will be able to trade

it means these agents will be able to invest it means these agents will be able to do all the things that you can do within defi today and one might ask well why is that important I mean I think that's a good question to ask um there are many reasons number one I think a super smart aligned AI agent that can work 24/7 and um costs almost nothing to pay to do the work of 10 different humans is probably a value valuable proposition but of course realizing this is is going to take some time but it's really cool to see the kind of focus and um emerge on this particular sector David this reminds me of something I I said last week which is like this is kind of just like we're talking about AI agents as like a focus

point of this whole you know technological Revolution that we're covering but it's really the AI ification of everything in crypto uh last week we talked about how virtuals partnered with eluvium the game uh so now we have ai innovating with gaming and gaming has its own sector it's it's actually number fourth so you could kind of see AI starting to integrate with everything that makes up crypto in the same way that people are predicting that AI is integrating with everything about the rest of our normal lives I do want to bring up this tweet from Sammy talking about Franklin Templeton that just published a a report on AI agents this is triggering some memories of uh I remember when for like back in 2020 and 2021 when we started to see

institutional reporting about you know the emergence of defi uh this is kind of the next step in the adoption of the M share of AI agents and what's going on so it's not bearish David it's not beish suits talking about this is what a this is is the next step on the bull market is the Suits start making reports because their clients are like hey I heard about this like agent thing like what's going on and they felt compelled that they need to make a report did you read this report e yeah I did I did and and what I will just say is um it's for those of you who have been plugged into to the crypto AI agent space and or who've been watching these episodes you're not going to see anything that is mindblowing I think they are watching this these rollups in order to write

watching this yeah yeah potentially what I will say is um the more preent point that they make is I they think the sector is here to stay which is really cool to you know see from uh an Institutional practice which you know are known for like taking long-term bets um long-term convicted bets and um their clients you know are expected to kind of be uh receiving the same type of thing so for them to take the time to put out this report and highlight it um for their clients means to David's point that they're getting some kind of demand or attention around this um the kind of like tldr here is you know they expect it to probably grow to U 100 billion plus um they expect these agents to kind of get a lot smarter and

do a lot more than they do right now um and they're kind of like watching the space very closely I don't know if they're invested in any of this stuff I I I sort of doubt it um but you know I'm always around to be surprised but it's cool to start seeing some more of these ecosystem reports from some major players and and for people who are kind of like who's Frankl Franklin Templeton and stuff like that they they manage a huge amount of weal billions well I think it's like hundreds of billions um uh in the the trfi sector um all their clients are you know people who aren't in the crypto trenches um they're people that are used to very traditional financial instruments ETF stuff like that so for these guys to put out this report it it's pretty insane to see yeah

yeah they start off the report talking about truth terminal and goat of course and then uh fart coin as well I mean Franklin Templeton as you know Trad five as they come they're you know pretty in the trenches as well so you kind of got to tip your hat to them yeah I think I remember when memes were exploding they put out uh uh a tweet which basically captured all the favorite memes it was like an animation of like all our favorite memes so um I didn't know who their intern is but um it's pretty hilarious with over $1.5 billion in tvl the meth protocol is home to me the fourth largest eth liquid staking token offering one of the highest aprs among the top 10 lsts and now CME takes things even further this restak version

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cell on X and witness the great cello happening where cell cuts his inflation in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership something we talked about last week which uh continued to make waves this week is Arc arc. fun um for those people who don't remember uh tea up Arc for us and what happened in the last seven days of course so um Arc or arc. fun specifically um is a team uh who is building an AI agent protocol so the way to think about this is your bog standard framework plus plat form but with some really interesting you know spices and Source mixed in right and which is competing a framework to compete witha yes exactly yeah think of a of a

protocol team which is competing with those uh bigger players and so um the context here is they take a slightly different approach in the way that they're building their platform and their framework well firstly um it's written in the rust code which for those of you who have been following the salana ecosystem which is also written in Rust know people have trying to be make uh trying to like compare the alignment between them um but people well it's actually interesting David people U well devs in general like would show that they don't really like rust because it's a harder language to kind of learn it's it's less accessible to the average developer right a software engineer that's coding in python or typescript will go to uh a zerro or um an ai6 Z to kind of like experiment and

launch agents on their Frameworks but there's a there's a bigger learning Gap to over come in terms of um engaging with like a rust framework but anyway the arc team specifically were convicted in their resolve of building out this rust based AI agent framework and the reason why they've been getting um a lot of excitement recently um is two things number one um they've been behind the scenes working tirelessly to um support the initial teams that are building agents on that platform so um they're kind of taking a more Curative approach where they're going to start announcing certain teams that are building agents and what we're really hoping to see David kind of going back to the point of

like we've seen all the Twitter Bots now we've seen all the twit agents we want to see something different here we want to see some like interesting Primitives we want to see these agents do a little bit more than just tweet at us right the the second important thing here is kind of like the string of tweets which honestly has come out over the last 24 to 36 hours of Partnerships that Arc is being made um I mean there's some Heavy Hitters in here like Arc announced a partnership with abstract or abstract chain for evm compatibility for those of you who don't know what uh abstract is um it's kind of birthed from the the brainchild of Luca Nets who um is the founder of pugy penguins a ZK syn chain ZK syn chain um and Saiga who is one of

the most cracked uh crypto AI agent devs um that I've had the pleasure to uh interact with online and learn from um so the the the idea behind abstract is you know it's going to be uh basically the best ux ever to interact with crypto and they'll have their own wallet and uh cross-chain compatibility I'll extend into that at another time but the point is they've partnered with Arc to enable that capability for anyone that is building on the arc framework um other kinds of announcements are you know announcements with eternals announcements with this team called send AI which allows them to have a bunch of different um inter ations with salana so if you want to swap on salana if you want to trade on

salana if you want to uh create a token on salana if you want to attribute um an agent with another token or if you want to send swaps or whatever you can do it through using you know these guys um this team send and their product um AR also announced with arbitrum which kind of like is another different chain separate to integrating all the chains salana yeah okay so so let's kind of like condense all of this right like you know you we've just list off a bunch of Partnerships but so what like what does it mean well there's a few reasons why this is good number one for Arc well strategically good number one for for Arc um they're going to increase developer adoption and there are two ways that they're doing this right

number one they're available on way more chains so you know whereas their birthplace as salana they'll be available on arbitrum um and they will be available on any kind of evm compatible chain through their integration with abstract um the second important thing is it's going to make it easier to build on their framework rake and and as I mentioned earlier David it's coded in Rust it's less accessible to developers there but if they make these Integrations with an evm compatible uh wallet or infrastructure like abstract or if they partner with arbitrum it's going to make it easier for developers to come and be like okay well maybe let's let me Tinker around with this uh maybe there's like some kind of abstraction layer which doesn't

require me to code or interact in Rust but it can kind of like communicate what I am trying to build into rust so that I can create an agent so a really smart and strategic move from their end in terms of like increasing developer adoption the the second thing is it leads to more experimentation which leads to more Innovation David right so think about this like a lot of um blockchains if we were to use this analogy that have launched in the past that you know we may have heard of back in the day in a previous cycle but we've never heard of again one of them main issues was acquiring a strong developer mode you know it's why ethereum is so strong today it's why Solana is so strong today it's why base l2s and and other l2s are so strong because they

were able to acquire a bunch of developers that want to build stuff on them Arc is taking a similar strategic approach where whereas it might have happened more organically in leading protocols like virtuals and ai6 Z the truth of the matter is it's getting more competitive David and so these new leading protocols that have something unique still need to do something to onboard new devs so um it's really cool to see this um setup which allows for more experimentation and so developers can build stuff and it increases your surface area of creating something cool and finally something that's really cool about these Partnerships is that it enhances capabilities for any agents that are built on top of it so um we mentioned earlier like you know the send AI integration well now any agent you

spin up has like 30 salana plugins which means that you can do a bunch of different actions natively on salana just by hooking up into certain apis which I think is super cool I I want to ask about um so we're talking about how like uh these AI agent platforms are kind of like they've been considered the AI the the layer one trade of like the AI agent cycle yes and we just spent a lot of time talking about Arc I want to ask like kind of why why Arc specifically how how do you like rank it there's like virtuals there's Eliza there's there's other other platforms as well like are we saying that this is like a third is why we're covering like why are we covering this so much yeah so so the reason why okay there's two

reasons one reason why I'm covering it is it's just interesting I like what the team is building and I think it's like very unique um I have no idea what agent teams are building on them I just like the approach that the founders are taking um for those of you that are active on Twitter and look at my tweets probably 30% of my tweets is hey nice to meet you can we jump on a call I would love to learn and that's what I did with The Arc team and they were gracious enough to do a call with me and they taught me about everything that I didn't know and you know I was able to kind of then convey that knowledge to um listeners on this show to kind of like share my excitement I'm like hey like check this out this is this is super

cool so so I got that's one reason why we're talking about Arc and to be honest it should be the main reason because things that are being built by cool teams I think should be voiced here right number two I do think it's gaining enough traction now David it's been around for about a month and a half at least publicly where I think this has the potential to join some of the bigger League protocols now to virtuals a these are the kingin they have established themselves theying this sector forward and they are some of the best teams ever right but um I still think there's chance for a few others to emerge David and that's not for me to be like you know I think you know it's because they're offering something so

unique I just think this space is so underexplored right now I just think that there are so many things that we don't know from a design perspective whether it Mak sense to build these agents on that we should be paying attention to some of the bigger teams that are coming and I think AR has the potential to you know take that third or fourth position or whatever you know it might be cool all right well let's talk about ai6 Z because that is maybe call it number one number two uh at least say Eliza framework I know has the most develop option so getting into the world of AI 16z uh give me up to speed what what are we looking at here okay so as you mentioned earlier David um ai6 Z had well the entire Market had a volatile week by a6z token in particular dipped

from a peak of I think $250 all the way down to a dollar right um with a lot of frankly in my opinion unjustified fud on the timeline you know it seems when markets are down the critics are out with their pitchforks in in full force right um I don't think the scrutiny is bad at all actually um as long as it's well reasoned and what I wanted to spend a moment on here is digging into what ai6 Z Eliza framework which is their agent framework their famed esteemed framework which is number one trending on GitHub is now and what it could be so what I want to talk about is what I think it can do now and what it could eventually do right so I want to bring up this post um from the guys at reforge um who uh contexts here like basically

former Engineers that are now investors so what they did was they did this kind of like deep dive into Eliza where they kind of went into the GitHub and they wanted to see like okay what can this thing actually do um and there's some important lessons from here right and let me give you some of the the takeaways essentially um Eliza is a great framework to use if you want to build something um that they refer to as a personality agent uh this is an agent that can tweet socialize with humans across multiple social mediums like Discord farcaster Tik Tok whatever it might be um another Advantage is it's really easy to spin these agents up and they're fairly extens ible in the sense that there's you know 40 plus plugins now available on um Eliza that you know

would allow these agents to do a number of different things right you know they could post on Tik Tok they can um trade or do something they can like create their own wallet they can you know have memory that kind of like matches across um all different platforms you know stuff like that um but they claim what it lacks so this this team claims that what a6z and the Eliza framework lack Max is the stuff that's needed to build an agent that's truly autonomous things like self-learning or strategic planning for example they mention memory systems right and how an agent can store its memory in a database think of this like uh storing files on Google Drive right so you have like a memory or context of

something that you've written down a note or a document you know it's that's pretty much what Google Drive is it's a compilation of things that we want to kind of like remember and and revisit um so imagine that this agent has this memory database which it can on Eliza but it doesn't yet have the capability to determine which memories or which parts of memories is good to use in different scenarios so think about this David imagine you have like this database of all this important knowledge but you don't know which parts are important and you don't know when to pull it out so you can imagine on paper these agents look really cool right it's like hey you can SP up this agent it'll have a database stuff great but the coordination layer the orchestration

layer is a little lacking right now um and so what I expect to see is these Frameworks kind of develop on that can I summarize what um I think I heard just make sure I understand it right uh These Guys these guys from uh what is it reforge they popped open the hood of the Eliza framework to kind of like audit what it is because like sure you can tell me it's an Asian framework and I'm like that that I can that could be anything like what what is that and so they looked at what it does technically and they came up with some sort of like diagnosis or analysis about like what the Eliza framework is optimized for and what it's optimized for is what you're telling me is like kind of to be an influencer which I think makes sense at the very beginning of this whole AI

agent bull market that like Innovation cycle that we're doing where people in crypto are going to like create a lot of attention and awareness around things and that's kind of where the incentives lie let's create first we're going to create the influencer agents before we create anything else and what these guys are saying is like yeah the alliza framework is good for making influencers uh it's less good at maybe some of the more ambitious hopes and dreams that I personally have for this AI agent space like what what I would like out of an AI agent e jazz is this agent that is truly autonomous that is is like kind of like out of Pandora's Box where it is has some sort of Arc to it that cannot be undone it can't necessarily be turned

off it it makes its own choices it goes in its own Direction it has some notion of Free Will about itself or at least some like you know directional outcome whereas like a lot of these agents are just like they're Bots that are designed to make creative tweets and so like what we're missing is some components to really make these things have a little bit more life and they just looked at the Eliza framework and like right now it's kind of good for making uh snapshot and time in influencers is that a fair analysis yeah I I think so and and we what you're saying is we want like basically little baby human robots you know that we want to be we want these things to be a real boy not not tied to Strings yeah exactly um um one thing I will push back on slightly David is um

and I was very specific in the way I phrased my uh kind of like uh framing of what the reforge guys put out here which is um for now for now in its an existent form and I kind of want to bring up um a tweet that uh was put in response to this from the guy himself from Shaw the founder of ai6 andz which basically you know gave his side or his opinion on what the framework can do right now and rather than go through this entire tweet because it gets quite technical the tldr is it's more nuanced than we think it's not just like Hey You Spin up a social agent and you can't do a and C there are certain contexts or environments or

setups that would enable the agent to do more things but it's just not as accessible plug and play as we want right now so the the argument that reforge was making was like hey you can spin up these personality agents but you're going to have to do a lot of custom build work and Shaw is rebutt saying you can kind of like do what you need to do on Eliza If you're aware of how to do it we make it easier so basically if you're an AIML engineer you shouldn't have an issue doing the kind of like crazier things but it's that knowledge Gap you know is is a plug andplay platform where you just click a few buttons and launch a really super smart agent better than having something that is a little more

nuanced and Technical right now that will eventually become something easier to do so I emphasize for now in its existent form um Eliza may be limited in those regards but um they're supposedly meant to be shipping Eliza V2 which will have a bunch of upgrades that will enable this um way more autonomy basically for for agents um but let's step back for a second David and kind of like ask the bigger question because you kind of just spent some time there describing you know what these agents should be able to do um but the audience might be wondering well why is autonomy even important well firstly if we don't progress autonomy then all we end up with is these rigid agents which appear pretty novel at the start but kind of

get boring real quick autonomy yeah yeah autonomy to your point earlier will make these agents more humanlike you know they'll be able to remember things have context on situations and make decisions for themselves instead of some human needing to kind of like spoon feed them like a child um every other step and this ties to a wider point that I love um to see this sort of friendly transparent debate happening between two people making Frameworks do you know what I mean it's it's forcing us to to think deeper and push this sector's tooling um to its extremities right I put out this tweet um yesterday which uh um speaks to this which is like um you know catching up with with everything that's going on I've seen a flurry of teams launching these agent platforms

and agent Frameworks David if you remember like on episode 2 there were like three Frameworks there were like three platforms now I think we're at like 50 plus and Counting like they're like to 50 like quotquot lay ones for agents yeah yeah yeah like like loads of you know big teams and Niche teams that are building and launching these Frameworks and testing it out and and it's crazy to see now that tells me two things firstly there's a lot of excitement about this and I think that there's a lot of potential that could come from this like we're on to something we don't quite know what it looks like but we're on to something and we're trying to figure out what these platforms um should do and how they should be designed to enable what they should do right the second thing this

tells me is we haven't quite figured it out so it's equally like we figured something out but we haven't quite figured the thing out right um and the reason behind that is if we have figured the thing out I think there'd be few platforms that would be gaining mind share there would be five or less 50 there would be five or less also one big reason as to why there's 50 is that there's money in it as well there's money involved yes there money involved there's money incen yes yeah loads of incentives like that so um I think it is a mixture or a caffy of money um that people could potentially make from these things by launching one of these things um Innovation that I think a few hard devs are like working hard to kind of like figure out and then just a bunch of

curiosity you know like we go back to that mind share David where 50% if you want to add Ai and Def AI That's like over 60% of M share which is just insane to see so there's a lot of eyes on this space and you know we owe it to ourselves to try and build something cool here so you know really excited to see that kind of stuff anyway moving on with this kind of like General thought around ai6 Z I want to kind of like spend a moment on their white paper so instead of like getting into the weeds of this um and speaking of you know future iterations of what this framework might look like um the team put out this uh white paper kind of talking about the next version of uh their framework and what they could potentially achieve now

saving everyone the kind of like time of uh and honestly boredom of me kind of like running through uh this in its entirety um that diagram you have pulled up David is is pretty helpful there um basically these agents are going to get access to a ton uh of different things and it'll all be kind of like harnessed through the framework through the platform that they're building um if I'm understanding this correctly right which means that you know the kind of like whole logic memory system uh reasoning strategic planning that we spoke about earlier will become embedded um so that um developers will be able to kind of like do something with it so I just wanted to pause momentarily and you know mention that um I also wanted to bring up um another tweet uh which uh was kind

of like from a week ago David but it's on how actually works and I think uh yeah our favorite dev Saiga who's been like in the weeds kind of like explained this really really simply um the and and like so without getting into the kind of like details of this um he basically describes um the AI model itself um you know so your chat gpts and stuff as being the brain right so think about it as kind of like the brain setup where it's thinking of different things right and it's like processing data and it's trying to figure out okay what can this do how will this work Etc um next we have like the kind of like database section right this is where the uh he says the agent stores relevant information for generating responses

including previous tweets interactions stuff like that and then you have something called runtime and this is the final thing that I'll make which is it's kind of like the the processing environment so if you think about um the llm being the brain uh if you think about the database also being included in that brain then runtime is your body you know it's your nervous system composed together everything composed together that processes an output and I thought that that was a really neat uh kind of cool explanation as to you know you know people have been listening to us BL on about agents um but like what do we actually do you know how does this like how does that actually work I think it's important to to kind of go over it the arbitrum portal is your One-Stop Hub to entering the ethereum ecosystem with

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link in the show notes to dive in and participate in the Unis swap V4 bug Bounty all the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there all right so that's a wrap on our section on Eliza and AI 16z let's get into virtuals the other very large uh platform but I want actually start with AI xbt which is like I'm still to this day the number one agent out there again born out of the virtuals yeah from virtuals yeah uh and so there's been some speculation about Crypt punks lately uh because there was big price movements Crypt punks are up like 20% uh on the week in eth terms there's rumors that Crypt punks are going to the IP of crypto punks is going to be sold by yugal Labs people do not know where to so this one

just asks this question and tags AI xbt who's of course everyone's favorite dgen agent on crypto Twitter giving out you know facts and figures and metrics about you know crypto things uh and the AI xpt responds to the requests about any any knowledge any rumors what do you know uh and he goes a ipt just responds completely confidently because that's his only mode of operating uh yuga's selling the IP Kevin Rose is buying it for $65 million in and stock wild times and markets don't know what to do with this info uh wait wait wait hang a second you're telling me the reason why I saw a bunch of Kevin Rose buying punks memes on my timeline was birthed by this agent by this rogue agent spitting out

absolute falsities wait I had Absol F I didn't know it was cracked by this agent I didn't know that the rum was started by this agent yeah so zenica who's a known like nft like nft Market participant nft influencer I don't I know if he likes influencer label or not he just goes satirically breaking Kevin Rose to buy Crypts IP from Yuga for $65 million Source not at all a hallucinating uh AI xpt so AI xpt just dropping just false false facts fake news on the timeline but but also look at like the influence it has that's crazy like if if a younger version of me seen that would have believed that

you know everyone's posting it you know and the fact that this kind of has this Butterfly Effect is crazy oh my God okay so Kevin Rose is not buying crypto punks is that I mean if if Kevin Rose is buying Crypt punks if that is true that will be one of the most insane calls from an agent that will have ever been made that's insane okay just to be clear we do not know who is buying Crypt punks but it's even being up for sale at all I think the rumors are legit but the facts are just still still waiting so yeah yes yes sir yes sir um all right get us into the rest of virtuals what's going on in the virtuals land okay so first I want to start with 350 million in annualized revenue for the virtuals protocol and

this is according to uh the Masari deepin report um deep in stands for decentralized physical infrastructure Network um not sure why it's included in that because I think this specifically wrong category but nonetheless cool to cool to show um it just dwarfs any other protocol um that isn't an L1 at this point um hint hint it could be an L1 hint hint another reason why it should be priced as an L1 but I'm just astounding David if you remember I think actually I think maybe it was the rollup that I did with uh Ryan when you were out and um Ryan filled in it was $35 million of Revenue at that point and I think that that's like skyrocketed and again to emphasize this is annualized

but the fact that this kind of figure keeps growing is just insane and and and is another reason why like just virtuals is just one of my you know favorite protocols on here um another thing that I want to kind of flag is um it's not just about fees it's about what they're doing with these fees David um and it was just announced literally yesterday or maybe actually under 24 hours there's they're doing a $40 million buyback and burn accured from Pure trading fees now for some context here when you create an agent on virtuals a token is made and that token is paired with their native token virtual so let's say the agent

that you create for liquidity kind like how eth is paired with usdc or any other token in the Unis swap amm virtuals has replaced eth in the amm so it's virtuals the token mixed paired with the agents token uh kind of bumping out eth as the money of the virtuals EOS system pretty pretty good move yeah so so virtuals is money virtuals is money in the virtual ecosystem basically um so you're right David and why would why do they do this so people can buy trade or you know interact with this token they can like acquire this token um so really smart really interesting but one of the um understated things about this model is whenever you trade there's a fee that's

taken and a portion of this fee acrs back to the virtuals Token itself so it's kind of used to acquire virtuals and it puts a lot of buy pressure it's a really smart kind of like token flywheel and system that they've set up but then the question becomes uh okay what are you doing with these fees right they're generating a revenue in the treasury at a rate of $500 million a year annually $350 million annually yeah yes exactly and so the question is what are they doing with it well they've just announced that they're going to do a buyback and burn with $40 million worth of um their token virtuals right and just kind of put things in context here

like that means that they're going to purchase $40 million worth of virtuals and uh burn that if I'm understanding it correctly which means that it puts a deflationary pressure on their virtuals token which means that everyone that is kind of holding the token um you know theoretically or economically price should you know acue to the tokens that you're holding because there are less of those tokens available in the supply if it if it's not already of course priced into the market already I think one uh One update to that I think it's not just the virtuals token they're also buying back uh agent tokens as well I think that's true because I also saw that like the agent category the virtuals agent category yesterday just went through the

absolute roof uh let's see if I can find the category but like I think this is why AI xpt is basically at alltime highs right now uh so all virtuals agent tokens got a very strong premium boost to the valuation yesterday yes yes so actually you thank you for correcting me David um you you're right uh so this $40 million buy pressure isn't just to buy back virtuals tokens specifically it's going to be used to buy back agent tokens agent specific tokens so look look at the charts right here on the right like it's a normal chart and then yesterday was announcing everything has like a very vertical line up so virtuals is up 7% or excuse me 10% in 7 days but 30% in 24 hours AI xbt is up 90% in 7 Days uh Vader AI up 50% uh so this

announc was you know if you had a bunch of virtuals agent tokens you're you're pretty happy right now yeah and and just to kind of explain why that's the case it's like okay let's say that axt uh token on virtuals was traded the most they're going to have the most fees and those those fees are going to be used to buy back axt and burn it so think about the deflationary effect happening on all of these virtuals agent tokens which should ACR value to those who are holding those tokens itself um so just a crazy smart move in my opinion by the team in terms of like uh seeding liquidity and value back to their token holders and to their

Community which I think ultimately leads into a very loyal um kind of community which pushes and wants to see your team kind of like win and I think you know the team being led by Ether Mage um and um his co-founder is just so so impressive and I'm excited to see kind of like where they take it um one thing I do want to bring up uh David is another thing which is they're also starting to acrw fees in CB BTC so CB BTC is uh coinbase BTC so yeah they're announcing it they're buying Bitcoin and and so one might ask well why why aren't they buying virtuals right well think about it right if they acquire these fees and they want to use it to kind of

like supplement other teams uh if they just s virtuals to support those teams it's it's not going to look great right so you know it's going to put a downward selling pressure on virtuals but if they were able to buy a much more liquid asset like BTC then they won't have that issue anymore so it's kind of cool another thing I want to point out is what are they doing with the cbtc well it's going to get split amongst um creators and agents themselves so you know think of this as like an economy where people who live and thrive in that economy have to pay taxes so the same way that humans pay taxes for the work that we do agents in the virtuals economy have to do the same and these

taxes get kind of like bundled into like a treasury a tax Treasury and typically a government will decide where where and how it gets distributed the way it works in virtuals is they have like a high level framework which says 30% goes to agents 40% to the creators and it just gets distributed automatically into their wallets really kind of like efficient system and and you know that's what that we're calling out with this um CB BTC thing um and then I guess the uh the final thing that I want to uh point out is um less around the tokenomics but more around uh just like janson's vision for this entire thing I don't know if you have the Post David but um Ethan Mage kind of posted this about I don't

know like maybe less than a week ago or so um talking about like how agents are virtuals agents specifically are taking their next big step into gaming and like if we just read through this right look at this agents in gaming were how many of us researchers began exploring autonomous agents open world environments diverse action spaces and multi-agent systems served as the perfect test bed for testing true autonomy if your agents can pick up a gun in the game and make a conscious decision whether to fire it or not use it as a warning shot or even gift it to their spouse it is not just a bot it's an agent and he goes on to kind of explain um you know how and why um virtual ual specifically is the best setup for these agents eventually

becoming you know these high-powered uh gaming agents right as like one example use case and they're partnered with some of the biggest names we spoke about ovium last week and and a few others but um I think the wider Point here is a testament to the team um if you if anyone was around um kind of like studying the virtuals team before they became virtuals they were a gaming Dow that kind of like did well but then yeah they were a gaming Dow David and then they had to come back and figure out you know what can we keep doing now they could have packed it in and we're talking about like a multi-year bear but they decided you know we have something here we're going to keep hacking and build something cool and that's what ended up becoming virtuals you know they saw the vision of these kind of like

gaming characters that would have autonomy and realize that the infrastructure that they were building were for agents so it's like super cool to see I think there's a very strong potential of like a mutual growth in the sector of AI AG and gaming crypto gaming has been a subject for years and I think nothing really has taken off uh there's there's more like narrative and Imagination about what crypto gaming could look like than what's actually been shipped maybe a catalyst could be the introduction of Agents into the world of crypto gaming where crypto and gaming and AI agents combined really create something powerful I know developing in the gaming world is slower than it's developing in in crypto or

slow slower than it's developing in AI agents cuz you need to you know gamers are very needy they have a very high bar of of like of quality in order to consider a game fun but you can easily imagine something there between the intersection of crypto gaming and AI yes yes absolutely and I think like you know we spoke about this uh last week when we wanted to kind of focus on more emerging Trends teams like um I'm forgetting what the name hypy I think in the ai6 Z world was you know is building like this this like really easy platform to kind of like launch Virtual Worlds uh we saw that um I think that there was a Roblox partnership between I think I might be confused here maybe uh virtuals and Roblox or maybe it was ai6 andz and

Roblox but you know there's a huge amount of interest of these Gamers or game developers to spin up things with agents and I think that's a natural overlap David you know and I kind of want to hold us accountable here CU like I'm sure like bankler said similar things um back in the nft cycle right we had many gaming episodes we had many nft episodes some things came into fruition most gaming statements did not come into fruition right so I I want to hold ourselves accountable and not like hype this up into something that you know might be something similar but I do think that this time is different in the sense that these agents are way more Dynamic you know last cycle we had just static images and now we have something much more Dynamic um that we can

interface over this so super cool I think you and I both see potential here and I will also say don't hold your breath this will take a lot of time to get right this will be this will be a m we can we what we are going to do on the AI rollup is we are going to watch the development and then when the final products are at all ready it's not going to be this year it's going to be next year at the earliest at the very earliest yes yes agree like these are in their very uh early form and you know should be very cautious around you know research and Investments that you do um based on any of this to be honest yeah okay e we are at the 1 hour mark which is where we want to keep things uh but

before we end things what are just like Rush us through the last little bits of development over the over the week in case anyone wants to go and do some more homework yes okay so homework for the crew uh this week um there are two um teams or protocols that just popped up and dominated the timeline this week and you know that's either for good or for bad but they were taking mind share and I want to kind of like shine a little bit of a light as to like what they are and like you know how things have manifested so far so the first team um is or like the first protocol is called uh Hollow lens or Hollow World um which has a token called AA Ava um and the point around this ecosystem is it's another agent platform geared around kind of like more virtual agents now we

just spoke about gaming David this is less gaming to start off with but it's more gamer resque it just means that instead of having uh agents that interface with Twitter or um you know write written statements these agents will be able to speak these agents will have a a um a virtual body you know that can maybe appear on a Tik Tok video or on Instagram as a picture or whatever that might be so this team has been kind of like focused for quite a while supposedly building out the infrastructure to enable a bunch of these agents so it's a different kind of medium to explore and definitely one to kind of keep an eye out I personally need to dig in more before I can speak more to like what they're building but uh super super cool the second thing I want to dig into is something called

Pippin now there's a lot of controversy around this so I'm going to kind of like give my quick take and we can move on but uh Pippin is uh another agent platform or framework that was birthed from this guy called Yohi and I might be uh mistaking his name so forgive me if I am U but Yohi is basically this part-time VC um and I think it's untapped VC um and also at night you know how you know the theme is I'm Batman at night um Yohi is is building agents at night and he actually built this experiment called Baby AGI back in the day which got a lot of traction and people were like oh my God this guy you know knows what he's doing and he should build something super cool and so you

know there was a lot of hype as you know crypto Twitter de hyping around this platform hyping around this framework that he was building and um what happened was you know it was being pitched as like this novel thing it was going to outdo ai6 Z all these like major claims and then there was a demo day which you know um yohai and the team I'm sure like did their best to kind of deliver what they uh wanted as a V1 but because the market had hyped the stuff up so much um you know it led to a lot of volatility in the token so I to be clear I don't know the kind of credentials and benefits of the the framework I need to get more involved and look into the yeah I think as we get further into this

uh as we get into further into bu all bull markets you see that quality starts to Decay and it gets harder to identify signal from noise and that kind of sounds like that's kind of where we are at with the current currently in being introduced like new Frameworks where there and it's also very easy for crypto Twitter to overhype something as we have recently learned uh and so that kind of sounds like that's still in that in that gray area uh but I also do appreciate you bringing things here to the air roll up that is truly on the front uh you know this it's not for everyone uh some things that we talk about I think on the AI rollup are going to blow up uh and that's just going to be how it works because we're on we're on the frontier that's what we're here to do

yep it has been super fun David cool awesome thank you e for guiding us through once again through another week of the AI rollup Bank list Nation you guys know the deal crypto is risky crypto AI is even riskier we are specifically looking for things on the frontier that's what we're doing here on the podcast it's not for everyone all disclosures can be found at bank.com disclosures we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot