Crypto investors have become enamored with the emergence of quick-witted AI agents like aixbt and creative “schizo” bots Zerebro and Truth Terminal but skeptics have been quick to lash the nascent sector, slamming the majority of AI agents as being nothing more than chatbots with useless tokens attached to them.
“After studying the AI agent space for a week now, it's 90% chatbots with a meme coin bolted on,” wrote Bitcoiner Mark Jeffery in a Jan. 2 post to X.
“99% of it will die and 1% will be something great (maybe),” he said.
Source: Mark Jeffery
Arturo Rodriguez, the head of product development at Australian AI and blockchain firm Not Centralised told Cointelegraph that the current landscape of AI agents bears a striking resemblance to the hyper-speculation around memecoins.
“Much of what has caught public attention is memecoin-centric.”
“The intersection between AI and blockchain is very very multifaceted. Some projects are building actual language models that are to be trained and executed on-chain.
“Others are building agent execution frameworks driven by off-chain models like OpenAI where the agents have access to on-chain wallets and are able to send and receive tokens.
“I would argue that most AI agents are of the second category: an off-chain agent linked to a Twitter feed and access to a wallet,” said Rodriquez.
In a Jan.1 post to X listing his predictions for crypto markets in 2025, Hasseb Qureshi, the managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly took a similar line of thinking to Rodriguez.
“These [AI agents] are not really agents. These are chatbots with memecoins attached; they are barely agentic at all besides posting on Twitter.”
“Current ‘AI agents’ are also mostly ‘Wizard of Oz’ agents — there are humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI doesn't go off the rails,” added Qureshi.
Source: Haseeb Qureshi
However, experts and analysts say we could be in the early innings of an explosion of legitimately useful AI agents in crypto, one that could deliver the “utility” crypto pundits have been championing since the early days of DeFi Summer.
Kel Eleje, a former Messari research analyst predicts that the total market cap for AI agents and technology could rally as high as $250 billion — a 1,470% increase from today’s total AI token market cap of $16 billion.
Source: kel_xyz
Eleje pins the bull thesis on a “historic setup” for AI and crypto technology, noting several catalysts that would push AI agents into the mainstream.
He listed the election of Donald Trump and newly-appointed crypto AI czar David Sacks overseeing crypto, the Silicon Valley venture capital firms that are yet to invest in crypto, the dominance of the AI narrative in traditional financial markets, and impending exchange listings for swathes of new AI tokens.
Similarly, Rodriguez said that despite his skepticism towards the current meme-driven agent landscape, he remains extremely bullish on the long-term trajectory of “actually useful” AI agents in the crypto space.
“AI Agents will help us solve problems that humans can't solve because of excess costs or lack of skill — and we know there are many, many problems like that.”
How AI agents like aixbt work
While crypto AI agents all operate in slightly different ways, the overall process is much the same: a developer builds, wraps (or jailbreaks) an AI chatbot and trains it on vast data sets, from social media platform logs, to e-books to podcasts
That bot is then prompted to come up with ideas, analysis and answers to questions which are then selected for algorithmically or by the developer.
It’s crucial to note that AI agent developers are constantly “nudging” their agents to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. Additionally, the tweets published by agents are typically parsed through a human before they live on the platform.
The most timely example of a social AI agent is aixbt — a bot that functions in a very similar way to a crypto key opinion leader (KOL).
It dishes out investing tips, research, and analytics via public posts and responds to users who ask it questions directly on X.
Aixbt — built by the Virtuals Protocol on the ETH L2 Base — has captured a hefty 4.29% of all crypto user attention in the last week, according to data from crypto AI startup Kaito.
Aixbt is the most attention-capturing user for crypto pundits on X. Source: Kaito
Meanwhile, its native token aixbt (aixbt) commands a hefty $500 market capitalization — something that’s spurred many skeptics to question why AI agents even need a token at all.
Despite their apparent technological shortcomings, Qureshi said he expects the craze for agents like aixbt — which he describes as “Wizard of Oz” agents — to continue through the remainder of 2025, but warned that it will die off eventually.
“This is not the long-term disruption to watch out for from AI, but it will be [Crypto Twitter’s] fixation because it is the most social,” said Qureshi.
While much of the everyday attention is directed at social chatbots, there are two key projects that form the foundation of the current AI frenzy, with AI bulls betting that these protocols will become the springboard for legitimate AI use cases in 2025.
These projects are Virtuals Protocol (VIRTUAL) on the Ethereum L2 Base and ai16z (ai16z) on Solana, a parody of Marc Andreesen’s venture capital firm a16z.
Ai16z — A fund that isn’t just a fund
Ai16z markets itself as a decentralized hedge fund, where token holders can become “partners” by supplying their holdings to the on-chain fund. The traders supplying the funds get a share of the fund’s profits until the earning-share feature expires in October 2025.
The fund has locked up more than $31 million in user tokens as of Jan. 3, according to data from daos.fun.
However, despite critics who have taken aim at its valuation relative to it being purely a “fund” — ai16z is also home to the Eliza framework which helps developers deploy agents and manage autonomous AI agents.
On Dec. 30, ai16z developers began weighing up whether to launch a new blockchain specifically designed to cater to AI apps.
They also discussed creating a token launchpad in Q1 of this year, which they say would serve as the main deployment platform for agents using the Aliza framework.
ai16z and the Eliza framework’s code base has already become a hit with other developers, with it’s Github repository spiking to over 3000 “stars” — outpacing the same metric on Uniswap in a less than month.
ai16z has rapidly become a hit with other developers on GitHub. Source: Kel_xyz
The recent frenzy for everything artificial intelligence has seen Ai16z’s native token (ai16z) has surged a staggering 15,000% in the last two months, ripping from a price of $0.015 on Nov. 3 to $2.12 as of the time of publication.
Ai16z has gained over 15,000% in the last 60 days. Source: CoinGecko
Virtuals Protocol: AI agent launchpad on Base
A similar rapid upward trajectory has been charted by Virtuals.
Launched on Oct. 16, 2023, the protocol witnessed little in the way of price action until a year later in October 2024, when the price of its native VIRTUAL token surged over 10,000% in the wake of the sudden popularity of agents launched on its platform.
Virtuals Protocol price action since inception. Source: CoinGecko
The Virtuals Protocol currently stands as the largest AI Agent creation platform by market capitalization, touting a total value of $4.6 billion.
This Virtuals Protocol functions largely by way of a framework called G.A.M.E — which is both an agent and a protocol on Virtuals.
GAME is a low-code toolkit that allows users to develop, launch and customize AI agents, and currently holds more than $32 million in assets.
Experts who are skeptical of the current AI agent use cases believe that these protocols are well-positioned to capture the upside and deliver on the promise of utility, but they’ll have to do it quickly.
“I think that Virtuals and Ai16z will quickly start to face the utility question since the meme-driven usually doesn’t convert to a ‘religion’ like most other non-utility tokens that have survived are,” Rodriguez said.
“Both Virtuals and Ai16z have good potential, but the question is if they can deliver value fast enough for the people to either forget or to ask for blood (people love drama).”
Outside of AI platforms and “memecoin” agents, there’s a growing number of infrastructure projects including things like “ agent assisant” platforms that market themselves as platforms for making blockchains easier to navigate.
These include Griffain (GRIFFAIN) and Orbit (GRIFT) on Solana, both of which harness agents to help users with a range of different tasks, including researching new tokens, completing complex cross-chain actions and figuring out strategies for airdrop farming.
Source: Griffain
But what happens if AI agents turn bad?
While social AI agents may be the darlings of crypto social media right now — parsing out useful insights to users and sharing alpha — Qureshi says it won’t take long for AI agents to be turned to a “darker side.”
He said that while AI agents have proven to be great “wordcels” — internet slang for someone with good writing skills and a high verbal IQ — it’s not difficult to imagine how these skills can be quickly co-opted by bad actors to be used for nefarious purposes.
“What are the best ways to make money as a wordcel in crypto? First is being an influencer, sure, but close second is being a scammer,” he said.
“You will start seeing autonomous scambots proliferate. These will explode, comparable to what ransomware and crypto-jacking became post-2017. Expect this to become a real social problem,” wrote Qureshi.
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