Author: YB, crypto KOL
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Over the past month, a large number of tweets related to AI agents have been collected for future in-depth study. In the past two weeks, a plethora of agent announcements were made, even unrelated to Truth Terminal / Zerebro. For example, Stripe released documentation about adding payments to agent workflows; Circle published an in-depth tutorial on how developers can integrate USDC with various agents, etc.
You might be thinking... this is nothing special, right?
Of course, these big tech companies are all talking about agents. But who isn't?
For the first time, it feels like the crypto bubble is discussing the same things as other tech industries. Maybe it’s a different style, but it’s definitely the same narrative.
Of course, cryptocurrency always feels strange to ordinary people. But even in the tech world, cryptocurrency is seen as a distasteful industry. This is understandable. The number of crazy headlines produced by the crypto industry is simply unbelievable, and even most crypto enthusiasts think that some trends are just nonsense.
The crypto industry has little overlap with other verticals in technology, at least in the short term. So far, the narratives around cryptocurrency have mostly attracted artists and quantitative analysts. But it feels like there is an opportunity to break this situation.
Below we delve into three themes:
Eased cryptocurrency regulation
Accelerationist Bubble
Crypto-driven success stories
Eased cryptocurrency regulation
SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler announced he will resign on January 20. The significance of this news is on par with Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.
Over the past four years, Gensler has been arguably the biggest bottleneck in the development of the U.S. crypto industry.
This is not only due to Gensler's strict regulation but more importantly due to his attacks on this emerging industry. Linda's tweet perfectly illustrates this: Coinbase, Consensys, and countless other companies were forced to spend hundreds of millions lobbying and fighting in Washington.
The image below shows that this potential candidate is making a 180-degree turn.
SEC Chair candidate Teresa Goody Guillén stated, 'To make cryptocurrency great again.'
Regardless of who succeeds as SEC chair, one thing is clear: Trump has made up his mind to accept cryptocurrency better than the previous administration. To be honest, the threshold isn't that high.
It was previously mentioned that Bernie Moreno (Republican) raised $40.1 million in donations, defeating Sherrod Brown (Democrat) in the Ohio Senate race.
Moreno ultimately won, objectively this is one of the biggest victories in the entire crypto space. He is a long-time crypto enthusiast, while Brown is a huge obstacle to Senate crypto regulation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the discussions around a potential U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve are insane. In the past few weeks, the momentum of cryptocurrency has changed significantly, with prices rising, inflows into BlackRock's ETF, etc., leading to a serious consideration of the fact that there may be Bitcoin on the federal government's balance sheet.
Well, but how does this regulatory news relate to cryptocurrency crossing the chasm into broader technology adoption?
One of the main concerns for builders in other vertical tech fields is whether cryptocurrency is a reliable technology in the U.S. This uncertainty, along with reasonable concerns about potential legal risks such as lawsuits and fines, makes the idea of combining this unstable technology with their lifetime work seem unrealistic.
But as this new administration begins to embrace cryptocurrency with clear regulation, others will soon explore cryptocurrency.
Vitalik sums this up well in this screenshot—it's precisely because projects lack regulatory clarity that builders cannot accept this technology. Those who are not actively participating in ecosystem building may form their views on cryptocurrency through the embarrassing headlines of millionaires like Moodeng and Bonk. This is not the best way to persuade genius engineers at Anthropic to use cryptocurrency, right?
Hopefully, in the next four years, politicians who support cryptocurrency will do their utmost to make it simple and safe for people outside the crypto space to adopt this technology.
Accelerationist Bubble
Packy pointed out in the article (Trump Bubble) that the next four years will be a golden period of risk-taking, vision, and optimism.
The author does not completely agree with the latter half of this article, feeling it is a bit overly enthusiastic and exaggerated. However, Packy presents some valid points that the perception of progress is changing. Things will become more efficient, crazier, and more experimental.
This phenomenon, as Byrne Hobart and Tobias Harris call it, is referred to as the turning point bubble.
Turning Point Bubble: 'Investors believe the future will be drastically different from the past.' Think about it: the Internet bubble. If you believe that significant changes will occur in the future, you will buy those stocks that you think will benefit the most from this difference.
The reason for bringing this up is that cryptocurrency (rather than traditional venture capital) will become the financial pillar of the next turning point bubble. Truth Terminal provided a good explanation:
It’s not to say that 90% of memecoins are ready for success—on the contrary, this form is still quite immature, and it will only be recognized when some good designs emerge in token economics that memecoins can compare with what people traditionally consider 'good investments.'
With the development of energy, artificial intelligence, biosciences, and gaming verticals, the combination of AI agents + crypto tokens may enhance efficiency in trying new ideas by a factor of ten.
Assuming you are a veteran nuclear engineer with decades of experience in the energy sector, wanting to try to build your own vision. You might spend months convincing venture capitalists to accept your ideas, forming teams, building communities, etc.
Or you could:
Write a white paper detailing your background, papers, plans, visions, etc.
Deploy 'brand agents' on Twitter to help you spread the word.
Raise initial funds through token issuance.
Collaborate with agents to build a real fan community (i.e. social tipping).
Grow your team from this community, and bounty can also be used.
This is reminiscent of the ICO frenzy of 2017. But ICOs may be a bit too early for the present.
In the author's view, changes such as improving crypto infrastructure, supporting regulatory environments for crypto, market maturity, and institutional adoption are indeed significant.
That said, the above framework will clearly still produce thousands of completely meaningless projects. But how is that different from the power law that VCs are always babbling about?
The author's view is that currently, there are no serious high-level institution builders from other vertical tech fields intentionally trying to realize their visions through supporting crypto financing.
Absolutely not in 2017. In 2024, we might see some early DePin & DeSci projects.
However, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, for the first time, it feels like there are some overlaps between the crypto narrative and the narratives that others in the tech world care about.
Not just agents, but also themes like bioscience research, GPU allocation, etc.
Although Pump.science has not been studied in detail yet, it is not surprising that it has become one of the hottest topics in this field. There are definitely some wild speculations, issues of legitimacy and security, etc., that need to be sorted out over time (hopefully everyone in the crypto industry can acknowledge this). But it is worth emphasizing that people are generally excited about the concept of crypto financing for non-crypto tasks.
The key point here is that the model of crowdfunding has been validated since the inception of Kickstarter in the 2010s. In any case, the wisdom and support of the crowd outweigh a closed-door board. People want to be involved.
But in fact, it may take time for the technical and social consensus around this model to form. It seems a perfect storm is brewing: positive changes in political management + the growing maturity of crypto and AI technologies + accelerationist bubbles generating a plethora of creativity.
Even so, there is still one thing missing for this concept to be truly taken seriously.
Crypto-driven success stories
One of the coolest things about on-chain AI and Goat metadata recently is 'attracting' some AI/LLM developers into the crypto space.
No one could have predicted this interview between Threadguy and Andy Ayery.
If you take a step back, you will find that this is really amazing.
Some people like Nick Liverman (founder of Chaos), who have spent their entire careers on robotics, transhumanism, etc., may have earned more money in the past month than in the past ten years.
Beff Jezos promotes for his friend Shaw, who is building the ai16z and Eliza framework as a launch platform for agentic tokens. The focus here is not on Beff, but rather on the fact that deep people in the AI field are even aware of the development of cryptocurrency through LLM developers experimenting with on-chain AI.
The key point to emphasize here is that next year will see some individuals from different tech fields correctly embrace crypto and demonstrate the efficiency of the agent + token model for building large projects.
Once some successful cases are seen, it’s only a matter of time before others are eager to throw out their ideas.
All of these token issuances and experiments being seen now are 'small potatoes.'
A few success stories can attract a large number of followers.