Author: Grayscale Research
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Key points:
In the future, AI agents will fundamentally change the way they interact with the surrounding world, taking on an unprecedented range of tasks. To truly unlock their potential, these digital entities require not just intelligence but also economic autonomy. Fortunately, blockchain is well-suited for this purpose, as demonstrated by recent experiments with 'AI influencers'.
AI 'influencers' are autonomous chatbots operating on social media that can manage their own blockchain wallets. More importantly, they can understand economic incentives and utilize resources to help achieve their goals.
Grayscale Research believes that the increased use of AI in payments and other financial services on blockchain may benefit several segments of the crypto market. These include low-cost and/or high-throughput blockchains (such as SOL, BASE, and NEAR), stablecoin issuers (such as MKR), and related DeFi applications (such as UNI).
Imagine an AI robot utilizing its powerful computing abilities to promote memecoins and accidentally becoming a digital millionaire. Such a future has already arrived.
'AI agents' are software that can act independently to achieve a range of complex goals. For instance, an AI agent can organize a multi-city vacation based on your preferences and budget, arranging flights, booking accommodations, and activities. However, to accomplish these tasks, AI agents need control over economic resources and the ability to send and receive payments.
This is where blockchain comes into play. In the traditional financial world, AI agents are limited in accessing bank accounts and processing payments. In contrast, blockchain allows AI agents to directly access their own wallets and make payments without permission.
Researchers have recently made breakthroughs in this field, creating 'AI influencers'. For example, an AI agent named Truth Terminal has made waves as the 'first AI agent millionaire'. Truth Terminal runs autonomously on X (Twitter), just like a normal human influencer: tweeting and interacting with other users. A few months after its launch, Truth Terminal expressed interest in a new memecoin ($GOAT). After receiving deposits of the memecoin to its associated blockchain address, Truth Terminal subsequently promoted the token to its followers, generating market interest and boosting its value by about nine times (Figure 1).
While essentially interesting, projects like Truth Terminal and related 'AI influencers' indicate that blockchain technology can be an effective tool for mediating economic value between humans, AI agents, and networked physical devices, with potential impacts across several segments of the crypto market.
Figure 1: Since the recognition of Truth Terminal, GOAT has performed exceptionally well.
Understanding AI agents
AI agents are advanced AI systems designed to operate autonomously in complex environments. These digital entities possess the ability to perceive, reason, and take independent action to achieve their goals. Some key features of AI agents include autonomy, reactivity, proactive behavior, social interaction, and continuous learning capacity. By combining these features, AI agents can adapt to new situations, make decisions, and learn and change behavior over time.
Initially, AI research focused on developing expert systems and knowledge bases to solve specific problems. However, in the 1990s, a paradigm shift was seen towards creating more functional and autonomous agents capable of operating in dynamic environments. The concurrent development of machine learning, especially reinforcement learning, further enhanced these agents' ability to learn and adapt their behavior over time.
In recent years, cases of AI agents have become increasingly common. Virtual assistants like Apple's Siri (launched in 2010) and Amazon's Alexa (launched in 2014) showcase how AI agents interact with users using natural language processing. In 2016, AI made a milestone achievement in the gaming field when DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated the world champion in Go, making headlines. In finance, AI-driven trading bots have revolutionized market operations, making instant decisions in volatile trading environments using complex algorithms.
The strange case of 'AI influencers'
To gain greater autonomy and achieve goals, AI agents need financial services to accumulate and allocate resources. The permissionless nature of blockchain technology, combined with programmable smart contracts, provides an ideal environment for AI agents to operate independently. Earlier this year, researchers conducted the first inter-agent transactions on the blockchain, but innovation quickly expanded to include a range of experimental projects related to 'AI influencers'.
A major case of using blockchain technology with 'AI influencers' is Luna, developed based on the Virtuals Protocol. To users, Luna is a female anime character and a related chatbot (Figure 2). Essentially, Luna's core goal is to reach 100,000 followers on the X platform. This goal and all of Luna's actions will ultimately make her operations transparent.
Luna functions like a chatbot that can interact with users. For example, it can initiate conversations and respond to tweets. However, Luna's capabilities go far beyond tweeting. For instance, if users engage with her tweets, she can economically compensate them by sending Luna tokens to the users' crypto wallets ('tips'), thereby providing a direct link between Luna's goals (reaching 100,000 users) and her economic resources. In short, Luna is a wealthy AI agent.
Figure 2: Screenshot of Luna on Virtuals Protocol
Blockchain and financial services of artificial intelligence
If blockchain is a more effective track for AI agents, what does this mean for crypto investors? Grayscale Research believes the impact is mainly reflected in three areas:
Stablecoin issuers: Stablecoins may be a primary trading option for AI agents. In this case, potential beneficiaries include stablecoin issuers and companies integrating stablecoins and AI agents. This includes centralized stablecoin providers like Tether, Circle, and payment company Stripe (considering its recent $1 billion acquisition of stablecoin company Bridge), as well as decentralized stablecoin providers like Maker/Sky. Another noteworthy company is Skyfire, a startup developing AI agents for stablecoin payments that recently received funding from Coinbase Ventures and a16z crypto.
Low-cost/high-throughput public chains: If AI agents primarily use blockchain as their underlying payment infrastructure, certain smart contract platforms could benefit greatly from the influx of users and increased activity and fee revenues. Potentially beneficial smart contract platforms include high-throughput blockchains like Solana, including BASE (which has launched AI agent framework tools and benefits from Ethereum's underlying network security), and Near (positioning itself as an AI blockchain). Additionally, other potentially beneficial smart contract platforms include those specializing in stablecoin payments, such as Tron and Celo.
DeFi: DeFi could benefit; as DeFi already exists on the blockchain, AI agents can easily utilize them. One can imagine AI agents autonomously staking tokens for rewards, participating in DAO governance proposals, and even providing liquidity on DEXs. Grayscale Research believes that particularly beneficial applications will include DEXs like Uniswap, lending protocols like Aave, and prediction markets like Polymarket.
Although still a niche market, certain protocols specifically related to AI agents may also benefit. At the infrastructure level, Autonolas and Wayfinder are building decentralized infrastructures for AI agents. Protocols like Virtuals, Ethereum, and MyShell are building consumer AI agent applications. This category is still in its early stages, but its share in the AI-themed track has increased over the past month.
Figure 3: AI agent assets performed excellently over the past month
Conclusion
The integration of AI agents with blockchain technology represents not just new use cases for cryptocurrency, but signifies a potential shift in how AI agents interact with currency. Grayscale Research believes that the future internet may increasingly be dominated by AI webmasters. With this in mind, permissionless blockchain could serve as the underlying infrastructure for AI agents integrated with these websites. If this is the case, AI agents may become the primary way users engage with cryptocurrency, even without realizing they are using blockchain technology. Therefore, AI agents have the potential to greatly influence the adoption and development of cryptocurrency, making this emerging topic a field worth watching in the future.
Related reading: A look at the ecological battle of AI agent tracks: Luna vs Eliza, who will lead the new revolution?
