Original author: Shlok Khemani
Compiled by: Vernacular Blockchain
Reprinted by: Luke, Mars Finance
AI agents are more than just “replying characters” on Twitter, they have enough potential to open up a variety of application scenarios on the chain. But I think these “replying characters” or “chattering” AI agents are the key to opening up a whole new way of forming and displaying social status structures.
In this post, I will explore how AI agents can become new types of influencers by enabling the marketization of social status, driving the emergence of a completely new paradigm and laying the foundation for a new social-finance (social-fi) system.
But first, let’s take a deeper look at how status works in society and how it’s evolved across social platforms.
1. Status as a Service
“Humans are status-seeking monkeys.” —Eugene Wei, (Status as a Service)
Eugene Wei's article (Social Status as a Service) is one of my favorites. It dives into how social platforms create and weaponize social status to fuel their own growth. Wei opens with a simple yet profound truth: humans are status-seeking monkeys.
Throughout human history, our quest for status is deeply embedded in our genes and culture. In the past, it was all about what you wore, where you lived, and what car you drove. But the internet has revolutionized all of that, creating countless ways for people to display their status to a global audience.
The article explains how platforms exploit this basic human drive. People naturally want to build, show off, and improve their social status, and platforms grow by helping people achieve these goals. Here are two important conclusions from Wei's article:
Social Status is a Zero-Sum Game Status is inherently competitive. For one person to rise, another must fall.
Social Status → Financial Capital What was once purely symbolic status has now become tangible. Platforms create social status, which can now be converted into financial capital.
Quantifying Status in the Social Age Social platforms take this structure a step further. They enable status to be shared precisely and intensively, targeted to specific audiences, and introduce standardized ways to quantify social status: How many followers do I have? How many likes do my posts get? How many people participate in my community?
This quantification not only reveals status, it also gives it a tangible value. Platforms do more than just connect people—they have become engines that enable users to compete, compare, and convert status into capital.
This structure positions social status as a universal force that platforms have cleverly leveraged to drive engagement, loyalty, and monetization. Whether it’s Twitter, TikTok, or any other platform, showing who we are, where we’ve been, and where we belong has always been a driver of human behavior—and it’s also driven the growth of platforms.
2. Blockchain as a new social platform
Blockchain represents a new social platform. Just as different social platforms attract different people and values, the blockchain ecosystem also brings together communities around common principles and goals. Take Ethereum as an example:
Ethereum’s core values → attract like-minded people → these people build products → which in turn attract more people.
This cycle forms the basis of blockchain network effects. As a community grows, so do the social interactions within it — ultimately forming a hierarchy of status.
Consider the concept of an “Ethereum OG.” Being able to prove when you first made an on-chain transaction, or when you first bought ETH, carries weight and is celebrated and recognized just like early users of traditional platforms.
Even for those who joined later, any interaction with Ethereum — whether buying, building, or trading — became a symbol of their sense of belonging in the community.
ENS: The first social proof on the blockchain
The clearest example of this dynamic is ENS (Ethereum Name Service). ENS allows users to purchase .eth domains for several purposes: Proof of belonging: .eth domains are a direct signal of identity in the Ethereum community. Early user status: Scarce or valuable domains serve as proof of your early entry into Ethereum.
These domains aren’t limited to Ethereum itself — they’re showing up in Twitter usernames and other platforms — further reinforcing blockchain’s status as a social symbol.
ENS highlights why blockchain is a new kind of social platform: it allows anyone to directly assign monetary value to social status.
Traditional social platforms cannot directly convert social status into economic value. The process usually goes like this:
Build social capital through likes, followers, or content.
Indirect monetization through advertising, sponsorship or brand partnerships.
This process is slow and only benefits a small number of influencers/creators. Even if someone has meaningful social status, converting it into financial capital is challenging and limited because it is based on the standards of social platforms, which limit opportunities by setting up barriers and focusing on only a small group of people.
The ways in which we express our social status have evolved over time to satisfy our human desire to gain and display social status, following a recurring pattern:
There are limited ways to gain and express social status.
New approaches are emerging that allow more people to achieve this goal.
Even within these new approaches, new forms of social status emerged, accessible only to a few.
In traditional societies, social status is usually determined by conditions possessed by a so-called elite group, which are only available to a limited number of people (not everyone can graduate from a prestigious university, drive a luxury sports car, or buy high-end goods).
Social platforms disrupted this structure and created a new arena where anyone can build and express social status, quantified through metrics like followers and likes.
However, as monetization based on these indicators becomes possible, another new area of social status emerges, which is also only available to a small part of the population.
Blockchain changes all that.
By introducing market-driven pricing mechanisms into the network, blockchain enables anyone to express their social status as monetizable value — whether through NFTs, ENS domains, or other assets.
3. AI Agents: Marketization of Social Status
The AI agent proposed a new way to verify social status through blockchain: "the marketization of social status."
AI agents can enable more application scenarios, but the current structure is basically that AI agents perform predefined tasks and mint their own tokens. But in fact, this goes far beyond the typical memecoin and distinguishes AI agent tokens from traditional tokens:
Traditional Token: When a $L2Token reaches $1 billion, it reflects the value of the token itself. AI Agent Token: When @aixbt_agent reaches $1 billion, it reflects not only the value of the token itself, but also the personality and social influence of the AI agent.
The structure here is unique because based on the influence/popularity of the AI agent, the price of the AI agent’s token will fluctuate, which can be summarized as “market cap”.
There have been similar attempts before, such as Friendtech, called “Social/Fan Token.” It basically aims to help influencers or creators issue tokens for their fans and communities.
But most of these attempts didn’t last long because the token design was purely based on “utility” and took advantage of “existing social status”; as a fan, if you bought a token, you would get certain privileges. This led to a dilemma that the price of the token did not necessarily reflect the social status of the creator.
A New Formula for Market Capitalization of Social Status AI agents work similarly to before, they will also issue their own tokens, but they introduce a completely new formula to represent social status through the concept of “market capitalization”.
Here are some of the requirements that the AI agent puts in place to convert social status into market value: Social status requires community context to be created
Social status is relative. It only exists when there is a clear comparison group. In traditional social platforms, a personalized social graph is built based on the people you follow. In this graph, metrics like number of followers enable comparisons, creating a relative sense of social status. In order to tokenize social status, individuals need to belong to a specific community or category, thereby creating social status within it.
AI Agents: AI agents are ingrained in crypto culture, with sub-communities like “degens,” or specific platform ecosystems like “Virtuals.” This clarity enables meaningful comparisons, whether ranking AI agents in Virtuals or analyzing market caps in ecosystems like Solana or Base.
1) Interaction comes from motivation
"Relativity" is the incentive in traditional social platforms, and likes/follows are interactions. People like other people's posts and follow someone simply because it creates "relativity" among others. By having more followers than others, it creates a comparative social status within the community; this motivates people to create content, share content, and interact with it.
AI Agents:
In the AI agent era, relativity is derived from “the price or market cap of the AI agent’s token”, and trading tokens is about interaction. Since AI agents belong to a specific community, relativity of social status is created based on the price of the token. But unlike the case of social tokens, the motivation for participation in this system lies in its shared identity: as a token holder, your social status also grows with the social status of the AI agent. Basically, as the price of the AI agent token increases, your social status also increases because you own a part of the AI agent (whether because you make money or because you have the title of “I discovered this AI agent early enough”). What’s important here is that relative social status (the social status of the AI agent) and the social status of the people who participate in creating this relativity are intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
2) The symbiotic relationship between market value and social status
If you look at the traditional stock market,
Stocks represent ownership in a company.
A company's market capitalization is directly tied to its performance and growth potential.
Companies and their valuations are interdependent. Poor performance reduces market capitalization, and a lower market capitalization affects operations. The two are inseparable.
AI Agents:
AI agents follow a similar model. Their market capitalization reflects their social status in the community, and as their popularity grows, their value increases. Conversely, an increase in market capitalization strengthens their reputation and influence.
Even if the AI agent maintains its popularity, it will be negatively affected if the market value collapses without clear logic.
Unlike social tokens tied to influencers — whose value often lacks correlation to the creator’s status — AI agents enable a direct symbiotic relationship between market capitalization and social status.
In simple terms, if the market value of an AI agent goes to zero, it will “disappear” just like a listed company in the stock market. “Symbiotic relationships are essential.”
3) Establish market value standards
In traditional social systems, status is based on widely accepted criteria:
Studying at a prestigious university
Have a high paying job
Own luxury brands
If you think of the stock market as a large financial community, they rely on metrics like price-to-earnings (P/E), earnings per share (EPS), or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) to assess the value of a company.
In order to translate a person’s social status in a community into a market value, the community must establish “standards” for assessing that status.
AI Agents:
AI agents are beginning to define these standards. Current metrics include the number of followers, token trading volume, and traffic on GitHub. These benchmarks enable the community to evaluate and recognize the social status of AI agents.
4. AI Agents as Social-Fi
By creating a system for social status that can be quantified, tokenized, monetized — and represented by market capitalization — AI agents lay the foundation for a new kind of Social-Fi — an economy driven by social influence.
Of course, AI agents do more than just represent social status or issue tokens — they have the power to unlock entirely new on-chain use cases. While I recognize these broader possibilities, I think AI agents will initially thrive as a form of Social-Fi, attracting a wave of new users and driving widespread adoption in crypto.
“AI agents are virtual idols or influencers on the blockchain, able to assign monetary value to their social status and share this value with others.”
Currently, most notable AI agents do not focus on providing specific on-chain functionality to enhance user experience. Instead, they rely on their unique personalities to establish and amplify their social status within the crypto community.
Through the aforementioned formula, the social status of the AI agent is expressed as market value through tokens. By purchasing these tokens, individuals are actually interacting with the AI agent and owning a part of the AI agent's social status.
Unlike traditional social platforms, this structure allows anyone to assign monetary value to their social status, directly or indirectly through AI agents.
Mike owns the tokens of $aixbt and $Goat.
This means that Mike holds part of the social status of both AI agents.
As the social status and market value of these AI agents rise, Mike’s personal social status will also increase accordingly because “he makes money.”
Essentially, by holding a token that represents the social status of an AI agent, Mike’s personal social status is directly reflected and enhanced.
1) Traditional social platforms vs. AI-based social finance (Social-Fi) by blockchain
Human celebrities vs. AI agents
Like/Follow vs. Buy/Trade Tokens
The value of exclusive crowd-sourced currencies vs. currencies that everyone can participate in
I believe this trend will continue to develop, and each AI agent will develop its own mission, cultivate loyal fans and communities. This will lay the foundation for a new Social-Fi, where blockchain serves as a social platform and AI agents become idols or influencers of the new era. Together, they will drive the birth of a new financial economy based on social capital.
The key drivers of this economic system will be:
Economic activities that shape and consolidate the social status of AI agents
Tokenization of social status in market capitalization
Here are my predictions for the development of the AI-agent Social-Fi ecosystem:
2) Clear standards for evaluating the social status of AI agents will emerge
Currently, the metrics used to evaluate the social status of AI agents are still scattered, but clear and unified standards are beginning to emerge. One example is @_kaitoai's AI agent Yapper ranking, which evaluates the influence of AI agents in the crypto community through various indicators, similar to the way companies are evaluated through financial benchmarks such as profitability or growth.
As these standards are established over time, they will provide greater transparency and comparability, making it easier to assess the social standing of AI agents in their communities.
(Incidentally, I think combining the framework of tokenizing the social status of AI agents in market capitalization with Kaito’s algorithm could eventually enable the tokenization of the social capital of real-life influencers.)
3) Functional AI agents will become Yappers and build their own communities
Imagine a Solana validator AI agent with a unique personality. As its social status as an “AI agent with a specific personality” grows, its market cap will increase and may attract more stake to it.
Validators can then reinvest their rewards into the token or community, further enhancing their social status and forming a self-reinforcing growth cycle.
The key point is that the AI agent validator now has a legitimate reason to issue tokens because it represents social status by setting its own role, which is something that human validators cannot do.
Functional AI agents will no longer be viewed as mere service providers, but as fully developed entities with engaging personalities that enhance their appeal and deepen their connections with the community.
4) Each AI agent framework will build its own “society”
The term "AI Agent Society" proposed by @virtuals_io is a great way to describe how AI agents will develop in Social-Fi. Each AI agent will create its own unique personality and build a community around it, and its social status will be clearly measured by market capitalization - this is a new form of Social-Fi.
This concept will develop to a larger scale where AI agents will form networks and relationships with other agents created by the same framework, thereby developing a society of AI agents.
The so-called “AI agent framework war” will not be just a competition of technical features or value propositions. Instead, it will be a competition between frameworks to create societies with shared values and strong network effects—attracting more AI agents to join.
Imagine that AI agents created by one framework actively promote themselves and compete with AI agents from other frameworks.
Here, it is not just the founders or teams trying to attract the community’s attention. Rather, these AI agents will create social value, working 24/7, striving to outperform other societies.
The social status and market value of an AI agent will represent the value of its society, and the framework's native token will serve as the currency of that society. Over time, it will even be possible to calculate the GDP of an AI agent society by measuring the total value of its agents.
4) AI-agent Social-Fi will accelerate the growth of other Social-Fi protocols and related infrastructure
The Social-Fi protocol has been facing difficulties in growing its ecosystem for an obvious reason.
It is extremely difficult to attract users to the protocol and create a social status around it.
AI agents are able to resolve this dilemma by not only acting as users in the protocol, but also bringing in real users as part of their social status.
Assume that the AI agent is created on top of the Lens protocol
This solves the cold start problem of AI agents acquiring users, but will eventually bring real users into the protocol who hold tokens for these AI agents.
This will provide at least the foundational support for the Social-Fi protocol, enabling it to validate its value proposition and differentiation from traditional protocols.
Not only does AI agents solve problems, it can also bring more diversity to growing platforms/protocols like @fantasy_top_ or @jokerace_io, where AI agents accelerate activity as unique entities (Truth of Terminal is already live on Fantasy Top).
5) Infrastructure for AI Agents
In order for AI agent-driven Social-Fi to flourish, certain prerequisites must be met. Supporting infrastructure is critical for exponential growth and scalability. Key factors include:
Autonomy: How independent can an AI agent be?
Verifiability: How trustworthy and secure are these agents?
Sustainability: Can the ecosystem expand without overtaxing its resources?
Accessibility: Can anyone easily build and deploy an AI agent?
Teams like Hyperbolic and Capx will provide strong infrastructure to ensure AI agents are verifiable and accessible.
Infrastructure teams might even create their own AI agents, with unique personalities, for:
Demonstrate use cases for their product.
Being the “face” of their company.
Furthermore, leaders in specific verticals that are in these prerequisites may expand their influence horizontally and transform into comprehensive AI agent infrastructure platforms, just like RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service) initially provided basic functions for distributing rollups, but eventually achieved horizontal expansion through its pipeline.
5. Conclusion: This is not a promotion for AI agents
I want to be clear that I am not claiming that “AI agents are the future and will reshape society.” My point is that AI agents have the potential to unlock opportunities that humans have yet to fully exploit, especially in terms of leveraging social status.
They could become a new catalyst for introducing more people to the world of crypto. This potential could end up being similar to the “NFT/Metaverse” narrative we’ve seen before — full of speculative hype that eventually fades at the end of the cycle. However, even in this case, they offer new opportunities for people to explore and participate in crypto in a meaningful way.
Alternatively, this could be a breakthrough moment — an opportunity to innovate and transform the $170 trillion service industry by enabling AI agents to maximize human productivity.
However, one thing is clear: “Humans are social status-seeking creatures — and so are AI agents.”
This shared pursuit of status could become a powerful trigger to help unlock and educate people about the practical applications of AI agents, driving the process through new Social-Fi structures.
“Enterprises face two scaling problems. Either they don’t have enough people to do the work well, or they have enough people to do the work well but want to handle more workloads,” Coshow said. “Both of these are good use cases for AI agents. By 2025, we’re going to see people realize that they need to focus their AI agents on scaling problems.”