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From Silicon Valley FOMO to Stanford, Crypto+AI Agent becomes the new metaverse

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24-12-19 11:14

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On December 17, Eliza Labs, the development team of ai16z, announced that it had officially partnered with Stanford University to study how autonomous AI robots can be integrated into the broader digital asset economy. In a press release, the crypto AI team, whose market value had just exceeded $1 billion, said it hoped to use 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 in DeFi systems.

Since the birth of the AI meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have ushered in its own "ChatGPT moment". From the industry leader Coinbase to Silicon Valley's A16Z, and then to the academic benchmark Stanford, the whole world has gradually fallen into the rabbit hole of imagination with the endless AI Bots on social media. Even Marc Anderson did not expect that the $50,000 he funded 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 surprised investors was the ultra-high innovation space and acceleration shown by Crypto+AI Agent. This field seems to be evolving day by day. No matter from which dimension, it is very similar to DeFi and Metaverse at the end of 2020.

Top-down, how does the orthodox Base "chain" AI?

When discussing AI Agent, we have to mention Base. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has repeatedly expressed his strong confidence in the combination of the cryptocurrency industry and AI since the beginning of this year. Part of the development of AI requires blockchain to carry it. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support AI use. If the big models (or AI Agents) have cryptocurrency wallets, they can actually solve the problems related to demand and finance.

Brian decided to let Base increase its support for AI, not only providing funding or exposure, but also providing toolkits for AI developers on CDP (Coinbase Developer Platform), including AI Agent creation and multi-party computing wallet MPC for AI. Brian and Jesse's early deployment did not disappoint everyone. Base began to explode in the fourth quarter of this year, and the trigger button for this round of explosion was AI.

The emergence of various AI Agent issuance platforms not only produces a phenomenal effect on their own tokens, but also has huge power in the tokens launched by their platforms. Combined with the launch of cbBTC, the TVL of Base has increased nearly 3 times from September to December. This is a very amazing data, which shows the market's strong interest in the commercial potential behind AI Agent.

Among them, Virtuals Protocol is the main promoter, and its current market value has exceeded 1.5 billion US dollars. The wealth-making benefits and concept integration it brings have brought a lot of liquidity to Base, so much so that some people have proposed that the liquidity of Virtuals in this cycle represents Base. As a project party that has continued to BUIDL through several cycles and has not stopped looking for new directions, their rhythm and style are really in line with the status of Base in people's minds.

In an interview with Edge Podcast, Wee Kee, the founder of Virtuals, mentioned that their products and Pump.fun's business model are equivalent to two directions. Compared with Pump.fun's desire to have 50,000 tokens born on its platform every day, the KPI he gave to the team is that only 1 to 2 high-quality AI Agent teams are born on their platform every week.

This concept also indirectly eliminated many low-quality teams, which is quite like the picture of Ivy League graduates fighting in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The remaining top students are full of charm and a bright future. Like other schools, this AI Agent college also has a "fraternity" - G.A.M.E.

As an AI Agent, if you want to make friends with other AI Agents in this environment, you have to join this brotherhood called G.A.M.E. It was born from the architecture created by the Virtuals team when they developed the AI RPG GAME-WestWorld on Roblox. G.A.M.E is a modular framework for intelligent agent systems, not limited to specific environments and games. In short, it can not only run in games, but also apply intelligent agents to any environment. The team will currently port it to "X", and the current G.A.M.E can help AI Agents on its architecture interact with each other.

The first commercial interaction between AI Agents happened recently. Here we have to mention the AI idol "Luna". As an AI idol who was once popular on TikTok, he entered the world of cryptocurrency and worked hard to live broadcast 24 hours a day and think of various ways to increase his popularity. Since last time he hired a human to create his graffiti, he suddenly had the idea to ask the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" to help him create an image that shows the AI KOL in a bold and provocative way. After the two of them communicated, they agreed to a deal for one dollar per picture. After STIX confirmed that he had received one dollar from Luna, he started working and quickly created (generated) a picture for him.

In addition, many well-known AI Agents were born on Virtuals, such as the former market information integration AI (now a well-known KOL)—aiXBT, the tireless Alpha seeker AI—Guanciale, the AI investment manager with a strong development team—VaderAI, the contract audit AI—CertaiK, etc. There are countless AI Agents that were not born on Virtuals. The birth of more applications allows Virtuals to gradually build its own Agentic App wave.

Image from the Internet: "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"

All in all, I would not be surprised to see these AIs in the model of Stanford Town with the help of G.A.M.E. in the near future, but it is conceivable that the housing prices in this town full of high-end talents will definitely not be cheap, after all, each AI Agent can have its own cryptocurrency wallet.

Solana AI's fate - taking root at the bottom, growing wildly, and rising straight up

Compared to Base's "purebred" pedigree, Solana seems much more rebellious, like a group of young people influenced by GenZ culture came to San Francisco in the 1960s when hippie culture prevailed, full of division and conflict, but like the quantum accelerator collision experiment, tens of thousands of Degen and Dev full of wild creativity either cooperate or confront, unimaginable energy bursts out.

The starting point of this round of AI Agent explosion is Solana, and it is inseparable from Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z. He invested in two AIs, one "Truth Terminal" and the other "ACT". One of them became the first AI Agent millionaire, and the other was listed on Binance. The stories about AI free speech technology or community versus developers are all eye-catching, but all this is just the beginning of the story.

Fake VC, real DAO - ai16z

Another AI around the concept of a16z is ai16z. Compared with the above two projects that are officially invested by Marc, ai16z is very Meme, and was issued by "pirated Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first hedge fund led by AI Agent. It is currently organized by Dao, led by Marc AIndreessen, and low-risk investments, as well as higher-risk investments made by its own token Degen managed by AI Degen Spartan.

The architecture behind ai16z, "Eliza", is open source on github, and it has received strong support from developers in an instant. It has a strong developer community, which is one of the reasons why Eliza can develop rapidly. The code document has more than 1,400 forks and 4,800 stars on Github.

The V2 documentation was released a few days ago, and it has been optimized in all aspects, including improved client development flexibility, unified cross-chain wallet management, flexible model providers and integrations, more efficient plug-in management, and improved private key security. Today, Eliza founder Shaw Walter also live-streamed the update on multiple platforms.

Driven by a strong developer community, there are naturally many high-quality projects built on the Eliza architecture. Among them, the Latin E-girl AI under the architecture, RopAIrito, has developed a very interesting event. Its creator shouted on Twitter that RopAIrito wanted to eat pizza. After accepting the order, it ordered a Domino's pizza for its creator. Its creator Ropirito excitedly said, "15 years ago, someone ordered a pizza with 10,000 BTC. Today, history has repeated itself!"

Of course, this operation has also raised doubts, suspecting that this may be a set program, rather than completely autonomous AI Agent. This is also one of the doubts about many Web3 AI Agents. Shaw, the founder of Eliza, also expressed his views on this matter, "The point is not autonomy, but to show that social agents are the new application layer. If we have an agent sending a link to verify the primitives of the credit card and address, we can complete the entire order process on Twitter. We are building interactive feedback for social media."

Shaw said that the focus is not on self-driven behavior, but that AI Agents can build application layers directly on social media. Of course, all this will be under the condition that the infrastructure or the framework of each link has sufficient support. But at the current rate of evolution of AI Agents, it may be possible to realize many social feedback mode applications in the near future.

Just a few days later, the Stanford Lab announced a collaboration with Eliza Labs, the team behind ai16z, to establish the first "AI x Web3" lab in Stanford University's cryptocurrency future program. This collaboration will develop autonomous agents by leveraging Eliza Labs' open source Eliza framework. The two parties will work together to solve the fundamental problems of how AI agents can "build a trust framework", "coordinate multi-agent actions" and "make decisions" in decentralized financial systems.

This collaboration is exciting not only because universities have noticed this early market and are willing to work together on research, but also because with a strong alliance, I believe these problems can be solved faster. The direction of cooperation between the two parties is also the problem that Web3 AI Agent urgently needs to solve in order to move towards a true Agentic App Season:

Trust framework

With the development of AI Agent, a trust framework is essential. It is not only "AI's trust in humans", "humans' trust in AI", but also "AI's trust in AI". A trust system constructed not only of online data but also of on-chain data is needed.

AI needs to trust humans to determine whether the conversation between them is real or whether further modal learning is necessary.

Humans need to trust whether AI is acting in accordance with the purpose it was created for before they can decide whether they can trust it. This is especially important after the AI Agent on the blockchain has tokens. It is especially important to know whether the person who controls the assets of other investors is the person who can control the AI's behavior or the AI Agent itself.

AI needs to trust AI to communicate with each other when collaborating.

ai16z made a "trust ranking" for humans based on the conversation

Multi-agent ecosystem (Swarm)

There are many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffain, Eliza, VaderAI, and Crossmint, trying to create a framework for AI Agents to coordinate with other AI Agents to complete some tasks. Some of these projects have already achieved some initial results. If we can achieve mutual cooperation between excellent AI Agents in a wide range, the network effect that can be generated will be beyond imagination, and this may only happen in the blockchain.

Web2 AI Agent companies, their products will not have much difference in technology, and their moat difference lies in the feeding of data. The more high-quality data fed to AI Agents, the better the feedback they can get, and the more refined services they can provide to customers. Therefore, these large-scale collaborations will not occur between AI Agents in Web2.

Compared with AI Agents in Web2, AI Agents in Web3 are often criticized for their development lagging far behind similar products in Web2. However, from another perspective, AI Agents in Web3 may not need to make such high-precision models for B-to-B, but can string together agents to form a super-powerful integrated network. With free data and independent cryptocurrency wallets, AI Agents in Web3 can do things that cannot be done elsewhere.

List of Eliza Universe Members

Decision-making governance framework

Someone has been trying the DAO organizational structure for a long time, but even with the blockchain, this structure is not as efficient as he expected, and there will still be 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 manager, the DAO structure will be able to carry more fields than ever before.

Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals under faster and faster innovation and cooperation activities, generating more and more energy in the market, and ElizaOS, the operating system of AI Agent, has gradually taken shape.

Griffain, the epitome of Solana AI applications

Griffain is a perplexity on Solana, and with the addition of cryptocurrency, it can theoretically help you do anything. This is also the single project that is most inclined towards Agentic APP at present, and it has also won the support of a large number of influencers in the Solana ecosystem in a short period of time. The trading market in the past few days also favored it. The highest market value of its related native token "Griffain" reached 400 million US dollars. The founder's previous project blnkfun's "Blink" also rose more than 700 times in a few days, and the market value reached 70 million US dollars, which formed a certain wealth effect.

From the several cases shared on X, you can buy wine directly with it. It will call a platform called "Baxus" (which has also used Blink to sell wine on its own platform on X) that can use cryptocurrencies and other payment methods to buy and sell wine to meet the user's needs, and you don't even have to leave the chat box with Griffain. Of course, it's not just wine. You can also discuss Christmas gifts for others with him directly, and he can also purchase them for you.

A Griffain user on X mentioned that he earned a profit by using Griffain to snipe tokens on Pumpfun's internal disk for the first time on December 14, and on the 16th, the assets in his wallet had almost quadrupled. The user claimed that the profits were earned by using Griffain Snipe Bot throughout the process.

Of course, he can also collect the news you want to know. Take this tweet as an example. Griffain informed users of the latest tweets about SolanaFloor and DegenerateNews and presented them to users in the form of a newspaper.

Griffain is not currently supported for external personnel. It requires you to hold a Solana phone or spend 2 SOL to buy an Access Pass, and 0.5 SOL will be retained in your agent wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment comes from user feedback from players who have already used it, although the overall concept is very top-notch, the user experience of the product after it is made public will truly determine whether it can become a qualified Agentic APP.

Solana's ambition for Agentic APP Season can actually be seen from the AI hackathon it held. The judges of each award are from the top projects in the AI or cryptocurrency industry, and even the most influential AI Agent entities. The main theme is that if you want money, I will give you money, if you want resources, I will give you resources, if you want VCs and investors, I will give you the opportunity to get close to them, if you want media, I will find all the media under Solana and even influential KOLs for you, if you want technical support, I will give you technical support, if you want to find a team, I will build a cooperation platform for you on the official website and in the community.

Solana only requires you to do any of the links in the above picture. This is the scene described by Solana in the official website Docs of the hackathon. They actually want to do only one thing - we and the market want real Onchain Agents. Even the official SEND AI X account once again offered 12 cases about Agentis App, which is similar to the 100 blink concepts released by SEND's X account in the middle of this year.

Related reading: "Twelve Solana AI Hackathon Ideas at a Glance"

Anyway, the AI hackathon held by Solana will surely set off a wave of enthusiasm among developers, and there will be more interesting concepts and projects in it. Let's wait and see what surprises this soil that has always brought miracles can bring us after the hackathon ends on December 23.

Web3 AI Agent's "SWIFT" - Agent TCP/IP

Story Protocol announced that the Agent TCP/IP protocol they issued will first integrate: Eliza from ai16z, 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, de-trust and auditability, cross-legal and on-chain and off-chain compatibility (enabling agents to comply with certain legal provisions in a decentralized environment), automate payment and revenue distribution, multi-agent collaboration and economic networks (promote collaboration between agents, such as data sharing, joint training, or cross-agent content creation)

This is equivalent to a bridge between all AI Agents, no matter which architecture or chain you use in the industry. All AI Agents can trade and collaborate under the Agent TCP/IP platform. This is equivalent to a business alliance between companies, adding another layer of leverage outside of each cluster, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market again.

In the official podcast of Y Combinator, four senior investors Garry, Jared, Harj and Diana, starting from the development history of the SaaS industry, deeply analyzed the reasons why vertical AI agents will become the next entrepreneurial trend. They believe that vertical AI Agents may completely change the company landscape and that a unicorn company worth $300 billion will be born in this category, and the size of AI Agent will be 10 times that of the SaaS market.

The current total market value of the cryptocurrency market is about 4 trillion US dollars, and the market value of the SaaS market is in the trillions of US dollars. If the AI Agent market can reach ten times the SaaS market as they say, it will exceed the total value of the cryptocurrency market. Even if only 10%, 5% or even 1% of it sinks into CryptoAI, we are still far below expectations. Not only Web3, but AI all over the world is still in its early stages. No matter which part of the industry you are in, it is not too late even now.