Original Article Title: 5 categories to watch for in crypto x AI agents (+ examples)
Original Article Author: 0x3van, Crypto Kol
Original Article Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: This article explores the five major trends of combining crypto with AI agents. Firstly, investment-oriented DAOs and agent launch platforms (such as daosdotfun, ai16zdao) are on the rise. Secondly, DeFAI will become the new frontier of agent applications, where agents will begin autonomously executing tasks and accumulating value. At the consumer level, agents will develop more complex personalities and interactions, especially in the entertainment, gaming, and metaverse sectors. Furthermore, DAOs will evolve into multi-agent systems, enhancing efficiency through collective collaboration. Lastly, agents will possess the ability to autonomously manage funds, with examples like freysa_ai already achieving autonomous key management, driving agents towards becoming economic agents.

The following is the original content (reorganized for ease of reading comprehension):

AI is the core topic of this cycle, and many believe it is a long-standing category. On the other hand, there are also many valid criticisms, arguing that most AI agent technologies today are not mature, and we are still 3 to 5 years away from these technologies truly taking effect.

As a preamble, the intersection of cryptocurrency and AI covers many aspects. The true technological potential of cryptocurrency and AI is mainly related to crypto-economics, as it can facilitate better reasoning processes or provide decentralized computing access. This article is a good starting point for understanding the entire technology stack.

However, this article focuses on the current state of AI agents. While exciting innovations are happening in other aspects of the technology stack, AI agents seem to have already captured the mainstream cryptocurrency community's attention. Here are 6 trends in the cryptocurrency x AI agent field that are worth noting as this aspect continues to evolve:

1. Frameworks and Launch Platforms

Value accumulation is starting to become important, and frameworks may persist for a long time.

Value accumulation is starting to become important. But why is this happening? From a broader perspective, why do people hold assets? People convert dollars into assets usually for two reasons:

·They believe they can sell the asset to someone else at a higher price, aided by a narrative spin that will attract new buyers.

·This asset will bring in more cash flow over time.

Jez (izebel eth) wrote in his article "Old Coins Bad, New Coins Good" that the only thing that matters is cash flow. These two reasons reflect two bullish liquidity trajectories of the asset:

·New holders

·Token burn

However, in most cases, we have yet to see a true token burn or token value accrual phenomenon. Through the use of a token by a proxy end (such as AIXBT), it is more like staking rather than traditional value accrual.

This is why frameworks like Virtuals, AI16z, Zerebro, and Arc have recently become so popular. Virtuals has already accumulated $60 million in protocol revenue. ai16z, initially primarily an investment DAO, has become one of the top protocols in this category after releasing details about its upcoming launchpad and associated token value accrual.

Today, the frameworks + launchpad space has become extremely saturated, with them developing through the influence of early successes. Although many proxies themselves may not offer much utility, there are still plenty of healthy skepticism about the role of all these launchpads. However, many frameworks (such as Eliza V2 + launchpad, Zentients, Arc and their handshake programs) have not even launched their main products yet. If they succeed in attracting developers and users, they may continue to lead the entire industry.

Why Frameworks Might Persist Long Term:

Whether proxies are still stuck in the "pure garbage" stage or not, the frameworks used to launch proxies will perform well as they still have Product Market Fit (PMF) in a speculative market. Frameworks and launchpads allow users to have both a factory and a casino. In many ways, Virtuals has actually already replaced pump.fun in the Base ecosystem.

More optimistically, with technological advancements, leading frameworks may introduce more advanced proxies, and the emergence of open-source code libraries like Eliza can accelerate this process. Many launchpads are also positioning themselves as coordination layers for communication between communities and proxies, using their tokens for some form of value transfer. For a more in-depth article on Eliza value capture, see here:

Example: virtuals io, ai16zdao, 0xzerebro, arcdotfun are currently prominent names, but the launchpad space is becoming increasingly saturated. The fastest-growing platforms, the most scalable frameworks, and those offering the most unique features ("What can you build with this framework that you can't with others?") are worth paying attention to.

2. DeFAI:

The next wave of agents will prioritize utility and value accrual, and DeFAI (DeFi x AI) may be the first category to achieve product-market fit (PMF).

Most agents merely hold meme coins without real-world use cases. To advance the field of agents, the next wave must perform practical tasks for us. True new opportunities will come from real value accrual and agents that can take action. I believe this is the transition from Level 1 agents to Level 3 agents, expected to occur within the next year.

We first saw this trend emerge in the DeFi space, and we will see more interfaces that allow people to express desired outcomes through natural language or voice while agents execute tasks in the background. Existing wallets and protocols will also integrate agents to enhance the user experience.

Example:

AIWayfinder

griffaindotcom

HeyAnonai

LimitusIntel

neur sh

For a longer article on this category:

3. Consumer Layer - Entertainment Agents, Autonomous Worlds, and Gaming

Attention-based agents will evolve with more complex personalities and multimedia interaction. This may lead the next wave of gaming and metaverse technologies.

One issue with existing agents is that they are starting to blend together, becoming commoditized, over-glamorized chatbots. While some agent projects will pivot towards infrastructure (as many projects are already doing), others are starting to think about useful products or applications, and others may continue down the attention token path. However, the next generation of attention agents will be more powerful, develop more complex personalities, and offer greater interactivity. This may manifest as audiovisual forms, or endow agents with 3D forms and physical presence.

This concept has had early attempts, for example, Jeffy has written an article about giving Zerebro a physical entity, some attention-focused KOL agents are launched directly through audiovisual presence, creating content tailored for short video platforms (like TikTok). Slopfather and Ropirito are two early examples of agents using video.

However, I believe more agents will adopt these features to become more dynamic. Product-market fit (PMF) in this space will come from the consumer end, where individuals may want to create personalized agent companions or interact with KOLs. This phenomenon has occurred outside of cryptocurrency, with regular people engaging in hundreds of hours of conversations with AI character companions on sites like character.ai, a company that Google recently acquired for $2.7 billion.

Furthermore, these '3D' agents may have PMF at the existing consumer end, especially in the gaming and metaverse space. Agents add deeper background stories to the world. Imagine an NPC agent, able to independently perform tasks and play the game, with evolving memories and personalities. A truly autonomous world may be realized through agents in games.

Example:

1. Infrastructure: Creating frameworks and tools for more interactive, personalized agents

·soulgraph provides tools to enable agents to have more customized personalities and memories
·HoloworldAI collaborates with Web2 companies like L'Oreal, Bilibili, Fox to create digital virtual images

2. Gaming and Metaverse, Virtual Worlds with Autonomous Agents

·hyperfy.io is a metaverse platform that allows anyone to create virtual worlds and is compatible with the Eliza plugin.
·ParallelColony is an AI simulation game where agents are the players, and you can converse with them.

·digimon tech is a creature game similar to Pokémon, where creatures in the game undergo mental evolution based on their interaction with players.

·smolverse uses Eliza and showcases an agent character driven by a large language model, taking actions in the virtual world based on your commands.

4. Agent Organizations: The Return of DAO

The next evolutionary step for decentralized agent organizations is collectives, also known as multi-agent systems, which is very exciting as they may be able to coordinate and execute more advanced strategies akin to managing a company. Heterogeneous collectives, made up of many different types of specialized agents/models working together, may be more expressive than a single large model.

While fully autonomous agents and collectives may still take longer to materialize, the next version of DAOs is likely to involve human interaction with collectives. This will reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies, lower the cost and time of human execution. In terms of liquidity, the next step is moving from earning income through agents to earning income through the entire organization.

Example:

·Agent Collective Infrastructure: Projects like swarmnode, joinFXN, and others focus on multi-agent frameworks and coordination as infrastructure providers, but mainstream agent frameworks like 0xzerebro and ai16zdao have also shown intentions to build at this layer.

·DAO Launchpads: Currently, most early efforts are focused on investment-oriented DAOs. I believe daosdotfun is the first major DAO launchpad that nurtured ai16z. There are newer launchpads emerging, such as daosdotworld, and AI-driven funds like 3berascapital are gaining increasing attention.

5. Verifiable Agents

Today's agents are moving towards greater autonomy and having their own liquidity: Most agents still require significant human intervention. The next wave of agents will drive true autonomy, starting with managing their own funds.

The Product-Market Fit (PMF) of agents with cryptocurrencies lies in providing a financial track for real-world agents. However, most agents' treasuries are not directly managed by them or may be managed by a human team.

In order to achieve true economic agency, agents must be able to autonomously manage their funds. This can start to influence agent behavior as you can set economic constraints on the agent, requiring it to pay for its own reasoning costs. This will introduce Darwinism, forcing agents to earn income to survive.

Example:

· freysa ai is one of the first agents to control their own keys and has performed well (including attracting the attention of Elon Musk). They have recently announced that they are building a framework to enable agents to achieve verifiable autonomy under a TEE and agent-controlled key.

· LitProtocol also provides an agent framework, allowing autonomous agents to transact on-chain through a storage and execution system that supports private key operations.

· galadriel AI has launched an SDK called "Proof of Sentience," allowing developers to fully verify an agent's existence on-chain.

Before we see 1 billion humans on-chain, we will see 1 billion agents on-chain.

Cryptocurrency itself has a user experience (UX) that is unfriendly to human users, but agents are indifferent to such friction. We will start with human-to-agent interactions, but the ultimate goal of crypto AI is agent-to-agent interactions, where a cohort of autonomous agents will interact and transact on-chain within their own economic system.

In order for agents to have economic agency, enabling them to incentivize behavior (pay for services) and coordinate real-world activities, they need the ability to control and deploy capital. Cryptocurrency serves as the "home planet" for these agents—the blockchain's orbit allows agents to participate in permissionless finance. Stablecoins and high-performance L1 chains are the ideal vehicles to drive cost-effective, 24/7, global transactions.

Beyond the meta-narrative and trends, we have ample reason to have long-term expectations for the agent economy, all of which will take place on-chain. Perhaps, many practical applications, DAOs, and revenue-generating agents are much closer to us than we imagine.

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