Article reprinted from: Felix
Author: YB, Cryptocurrency KOL
Translation: Felix, PANews
In the past month, a large number of tweets related to AI agents have been collected for future in-depth research. In the past two weeks, numerous agent announcements have even been unrelated to Truth Terminal/Zerebro. For example, Stripe released documentation about adding payments to agent workflows; Circle released an in-depth tutorial on how developers can integrate USDC with various agents, etc.
You might be thinking... isn't this nothing special?
Of course, these large tech companies are all talking about agency. But who isn't?
It feels like the cryptocurrency bubble is discussing the same things as other tech industries for the first time. Perhaps with different styles, but certainly the same narrative.
Of course, for the average person, cryptocurrency always feels strange. But even in the tech community, cryptocurrency is viewed as a distasteful industry. This is to be expected. The sheer number of crazy headlines generated by the cryptocurrency industry is simply unbelievable, and even most cryptocurrency enthusiasts believe that some trends are just nonsense.
The cryptocurrency industry currently has little overlap with other technical verticals, at least in the short term. So far, the cryptocurrency narrative has mostly attracted artists and quantitative analysts. But it feels there is an opportunity to break this situation.
Below, we will delve into three themes:
Relaxed cryptocurrency regulation
Accelerationism bubble
Cryptocurrency-driven success stories
Relaxed cryptocurrency regulation
SEC commissioner Gary Gensler announced his resignation effective January 20. The significance of this news is on par with Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.
In the past four years, Gensler has been the biggest bottleneck in the development of the U.S. cryptocurrency industry.
This is not only because Gensler has imposed strict regulations, but more importantly, he has attacked this emerging industry. Linda's tweet happens to illustrate this point: Coinbase, Consensys, and countless other companies have been forced to spend hundreds of millions lobbying and fighting in Washington.
The following image shows that this potential candidate is making a significant 180-degree turn.
SEC chair candidate Teresa Goody Guillén stated, 'Make cryptocurrency great again'
Whoever succeeds Gensler as SEC chair, one thing is clear: Trump is determined to embrace cryptocurrency better than the previous administration. To be honest, the threshold isn't that high.
It was previously mentioned that Bernie Moreno (Republican) received $40.1 million in donations, defeating Sherrod Brown (Democrat) in the Ohio Senate race.
Moreno ultimately won, which is objectively one of the biggest victories for the entire cryptocurrency field. He is a long-time cryptocurrency enthusiast, while Brown is a huge obstacle to Senate cryptocurrency regulation.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the discussions around a potential U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve are crazy. The momentum of cryptocurrencies has changed significantly in recent weeks, with rising prices, inflows into BlackRock ETFs, etc., and now we have to seriously consider the fact that there may be Bitcoin on the federal government's balance sheet.
Well, what does this regulatory news have to do with cryptocurrency bridging the gap into broader technology adoption?
One of the main concerns of builders in other technical verticals is whether cryptocurrency is a reliable technology in the United States, which remains uncertain. The idea of combining this unstable technology with their lifelong work seems unrealistic due to reasonable concerns about potential legal risks such as lawsuits and fines.
But as this new government begins to embrace cryptocurrency and enact clear regulations, others will soon explore cryptocurrency.
Vitalik summarizes this well in this screenshot—it's precisely because of the lack of regulatory clarity that builders cannot embrace this technology. Those not actively participating in ecosystem building may form their views on cryptocurrency based on the embarrassing headlines of Moodeng and Bonk millionaires. This is not the best way to persuade the brilliant engineers at Anthropic to use cryptocurrency, right?
Hopefully, over the next four years, politicians supporting cryptocurrency will do their utmost to enable those outside the cryptocurrency realm to adopt this technology simply and safely.
Accelerationism bubble
Packy points out in the article (Trump Bubble) that the next four years are a golden age 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 excited and exaggerated. However, Packy does raise some reliable points that perceptions of progress are changing. Things will become more efficient, crazier, and more experimental.
This phenomenon, as Byrne Hobart and Tobias Harris call it, is known as the turning point bubble.
Turning point bubble: 'Investors believe the future will be radically different from the past.' Think about it: the internet bubble. If you believe that significant changes will happen in the future, then 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 provides a good explanation:
This is not to say that 90% of memecoins are ready for success—on the contrary, this form is still immature, and it will only be recognized when some good designs emerge in token economics that memecoins can compete with what people traditionally consider 'good investments'.
With the development of energy, artificial intelligence, biosciences, and gaming verticals, the combination of AI agents + cryptocurrency tokens may increase efficiency in trying new ideas by tenfold.
Imagine you are a veteran nuclear engineer who has worked in the energy industry for decades and wants to try to establish your vision. You might spend months persuading venture capitalists to accept your ideas, forming teams, building communities, etc.
Or you can:
Write a white paper detailing your background, thesis, plans, vision, etc.
Deploy 'brand agents' on Twitter to help spread your message
Raise initial funds through token issuance
Work with agents to build a real fan community (i.e., social tipping)
Grow your team from this community, and you can also use bounties
This is reminiscent of the ICO frenzy of 2017. But ICOs may still be too early for the present.
In the author's view, changes such as improving cryptocurrency infrastructure, supportive regulatory environments for cryptocurrency, market maturity, and institutional adoption are actually quite important.
That said, the aforementioned framework will certainly still produce thousands of completely meaningless projects. But how is this different from the power laws that VCs are always chattering about?
The author's view is that there are currently no orthodox, high-level institutional builders from other vertical technology fields intentionally trying to realize their visions through supporting cryptocurrency financing.
2017 absolutely will not. 2024 may see some early DePin & DeSci projects.
However, as noted at the beginning of this article, there seems to be some overlap between the cryptocurrency narrative and the narratives that others in the tech community care about.
Not just agents, there are even topics 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 certainly some crazy speculations, legitimacy, and security issues that need to be sorted out over time (hopefully, people in the cryptocurrency industry can acknowledge this). But it is important to emphasize that people are generally excited about the concept of cryptocurrency financing for non-cryptocurrency tasks.
The key point here is that the model of crowdfunding ideas has been validated since the establishment of Kickstarter in the 2010s. In any case, having the wisdom and support of the crowd outweighs a closed-door board. People want to get involved.
But in reality, the technological and social consensus around this model may take time to form. It seems a perfect storm is gathering: positive changes in political management + the growing maturity of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence technologies + the accelerationism bubble producing a wealth of creativity.
Even so, there is still one thing missing for this concept to be taken seriously.
Cryptocurrency-driven success stories
One of the coolest things about recent on-chain AI and Goat metadata is 'attracting' some AI/LLM developers into the cryptocurrency space.
No one could have predicted this interview between Threadguy and Andy Ayery.
If you take a step back, you'll find it's really amazing.
Some people, like Nick Liverman (founder of Chaos), have spent their entire careers on projects like robotics and transhumanism, and the money they've made in the past month may surpass what they've earned in the last decade.
Beff Jezos is promoting his friend Shaw, who is building the ai16z and Eliza framework as a launching platform for agentic tokens. The focus here is not on Beff, but rather on the fact that through LLM developers experimenting with on-chain AI, deep people in the AI field are even aware of the developments in cryptocurrency.
The key point I want to emphasize here is that next year we will see some people from different technology sectors correctly embrace cryptocurrency and demonstrate the efficiency of the agent + token model in building large projects.
Once a few successful cases are seen, it is only a matter of time before others eagerly try to throw out their own ideas.
All these token issuances and experiments currently seen are 'small potatoes'.
Just a few successful cases can attract a large following.
