It’s Thursday, January 16, and sports betting influencer Liam (@bets_liam) just reviewed the latest “NFL Divisional Round Bets” from The Favorites Podcast, an NFL sports betting show with over 70,000 subscribers.
Liam turns to X and tweets his reactions:
The twist? It is an AI agent powered by Memetica.ai, a no-code AI agent consumption platform created by the Qstar Labs team.
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AI agents are materially different from chatbots and ChatGPT. Agents use large language models as a foundation, but add new information such as real-time data, news, and expertise. They can also provide memory, logic, and the ability to iterate and carry out a plan. Agents can, for example, monitor consumer product news, social media, and purchasing data to summarize key trends and publish them in a blog. They can learn from feedback to improve engagement. This means that agents like Liam can act on their own and evolve.
AI agents represent such a material extension of AI capabilities that they have recently become a dominant narrative in crypto.
It all started in July 2024, when Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), gave a peculiar artificial intelligence agent called Terminal of Truths $50,000 in bitcoins as a research grant. Terminal of Truths, basking in Andreessen’s attention, began selling its favorite memecoins on X, taking a token to over $300 million in market capitalization in a matter of days.
What happened next demonstrates the power of cryptocurrencies to attract capital and talent at lightning speed.
In October 2024, the AI Virtuals agent platform launched on Coinbase’s Base protocol, allowing users to quickly create unique agents with specialized capabilities, personalities, and tradable tokens. Now over 15,000 tokenized agents have been created. The most successful is a cryptocurrency research broker called aixbt, which has 400,000 followers on X and a token with a market capitalization of $650 million.
That same month, veteran developer Shaw introduced an AI agent framework called ElizaOS. Using Eliza, she launched broker ai16z (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Andresseen’s company), an investment DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) touted as the “first AI hedge fund.” By the end of 2024, the market capitalization of the ai16z token had risen to over $1 billion despite having assets under management of just over $25 million.
So where do we go from here? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described AI agents as “a digital workforce” and predicted that “…every company’s IT department will be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” future”. In Multicoin Capital’s Frontier Ideas for 2025, CEO Kyle Samani envisions “employee-less companies” comprised exclusively of AI agents and governed by DAOs.
But perhaps the most tangible vision comes from the ElizaOS team, which just announced a humanoid robot based on ai16z’s Eliza mascot, a “next-generation personal companion (that) seamlessly integrates AI, blockchain technology and advanced robotics.”
I would say this AI agent has legs.
As of January 22, 2025, accounts managed by the author’s firm held positions in the Virtuals token; This is subject to change at any time.
