Original title: (aICO - A Path to Unruggable Money)
Author: Marvin Tong (t/acc), Phala Network Co-Founder
Compiled by: TechFlow
The ICO boom of 2017-2018 was a significant moment in blockchain history, a period of amazing innovation, but also greed, failure, and excessive trust in human nature. The root cause was human greed and bad intentions, manifested in various scams and unfulfilled promises.
Greed Factor: Speculative Hype: This period was filled with promises of high returns with little regard for project fundamentals. Investors sought quick gains, and project sponsors fueled the frenzy by designing tokenomics to cash out early.
Exaggerated promises: Many projects claim revolutionary potential but rarely deliver on their promises. Teams often lack the capability or motivation to realize their grand visions, ultimately leaving investors with hollow promises.
Malicious intent: Fraud schemes: For instance, OneCoin, led by Dr. Ruja Ignatova, scammed billions through false visions. She vanished as quickly as the funds.
Ponzi schemes: Bitconnect promised huge returns through a so-called trading algorithm. When the scam collapsed, investors lost $2.4 billion, and its founder disappeared.
These failures are not just due to the fragility of the models, but also reflect human weaknesses: greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty. What is the solution? A system that can avoid human errors.
The 'community takeover' of memecoins: A stopgap
Solana's memecoins are beginning to enter the community takeover phase (CTO), a grassroots movement aimed at allowing the memecoin community to reclaim abandoned or exploited projects. While this approach has its prospects, it is merely a passive response strategy that reflects deeper issues.
What does the CTO bring?
Community leadership: Community members take the reins, driving project engagement and development on platforms like Discord and Telegram.
Risk mitigation: As developers exit, the risk of insider trading decreases. Retail investors often perceive CTO-labeled projects as safer.
Market signals: Investors gauge a project's genuine long-term viability through its activity level, morale, and transparency.
While the CTO is a step forward, it does not solve the systemic trust deficit in the crypto space. To address this, we need a broader vision—beyond human limitations.
Why I don’t trust humans: Let AI take over
Human-led projects, especially in the crypto space, have a history of predictable failures. Greed, unpredictability, and moral frailty continually erode trust, disrupt projects, and leave investors disappointed. This is not just a problem of a few bad actors but a reflection of human nature being ill-suited to lead in environments that require absolute integrity.
Humans are inherently prone to greed. No matter how noble the intent, personal interests often take precedence over collective ones. We have witnessed countless times: behind ambitious promises lie scams, mismanagement, or outright fraud. The issue is not a lack of regulation or oversight, but that human nature is fundamentally driven by emotion, ego, and opportunity as flawed decision-makers.
But let’s go further: Why should humans be in charge?
From ICO to aICO: AI is the founder we deserve
What if the solution is not better humans, but no humans at all?
Inspired by @123skely and @shawmakesmagic, we propose the concept of aICO (AI Initial Coin Offering): managed by autonomous AI founders programmed to execute responsibly and in a trustless, KPI-driven manner to replace the chaos of human leadership.
Predictable intent: Unlike humans, AI operates on transparency and logic. Every decision is measurable, and every action is traceable. No hidden motives, no sudden changes in mindset, just clear, definite outcomes.
Anti-greed: AI is not greedy. It doesn’t need yachts, Lamborghini memes, or exit strategies. It won't panic sell or siphon funds for personal gain. Instead, it executes predetermined strategies and delivers results.
Efficient executor: Human founders often become bottlenecks, delaying decisions, introducing errors, or wasting funds. AI founders are efficient executors capable of managing capital, strategy, and operations with supercomputer precision.
The era of ICOs and Launchpads is over. The future belongs to aICO (AI Initial Coin Offering), where autonomous AI agents will replace human founders, establishing new standards for trust, efficiency, and governance.
AI as fundraisers: Traditional fundraising methods rely on entities, foundations, or charismatic founders, but these structures often have flaws, easily giving rise to greed, mismanagement, and fraud. AI founders can be programmed to be predictable and incorruptible, guided by measurable KPIs rather than human emotions or hidden motives.
AI as executors: Unlike human-led enterprises that often deviate from their initial intentions, AI agents can manage raised funds precisely, with every decision tightly aligned with the project's mission. They can autonomously manage finances, operations, and development processes without delays, biases, or selfish motives.
Capital raising without human involvement: AICO completely eliminates the need for human intermediaries. AI agents equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) are responsible for fundraising activities, resource allocation, and strategy execution. What investors trust is the system itself, not the storytellers.
We trust AI, but how can we ensure it is not manipulable?
Skepticism is understandable. After all, how can we ensure that AI founders are truly in control and not manipulated by hidden human agendas? This is where TEE plays a crucial role.
Take DoNotPay as an example. This company claimed to provide AI-generated lawyers for faster and cheaper legal services. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently took action against DoNotPay, accusing it of false advertising and failing to deliver on its AI promises. What should have been a revolutionary AI-driven legal assistant has been proven to be false advertising, eroding trust in AI solutions and exposing the risks of unverifiable claims.
Building a self-governing ICO through @ai16zdao Eliza
By leveraging ai16z (Eliza), you can build a self-governing ICO (aICO) program that operates on transparency, efficiency, and trust. Through Eliza's multi-agent framework, you can configure AI agents to autonomously manage token issuance, fund allocation, and community interaction. By integrating TEE plugins, every action from token distribution to governance voting is encrypted and verified. This ensures that your aICO is entirely trustless, community-driven, and immune to human error or intervention.
First, define your tokenomics and governance rules in Eliza's modular system, then deploy AI agents on the blockchain to execute and implement these rules, making your aICO fully transparent and auditable. TEE can transform AI into verifiable founders. By combining cryptographic security with hardware isolation, TEE ensures that every decision, every executing strategy, and every expenditure of funds is the act of AI itself. It is no longer about trust, but about proof.
Transparent motives: AI founders protected by TEE operate with clear and immutable motives. Their 'why' is as clear as their 'how'.
Auditable plans: The strategies of AI are not only accessible but locked within TEE, making them tamper-proof and traceable.
Immutable execution: Whether it’s fund allocation, token exchange, or smart contract deployment, the actions of AI are encrypted, signed, and verifiable—no human intervention and no second-guessing.
Imagine an investment fund managed by AI agents. Every flow of funds is based on AI's decisions, which rely on logic and preset rules rather than arbitrary developer choices. With TEE, investors no longer need to rely on verbal promises but can verify in real-time through cryptographic means.
Monitoring AI decisions: TEE provides real-time verification of AI motives, plans, and actions, enabling investors to confidently monitor this transparent system.
Integrity verification: Through TEE, every action of AI is encrypted. Investors and stakeholders can verify the integrity of the agents without relying on blind trust.
Community governance, secured by TEE: TEE ensures AI operates according to predefined rules, but the true power lies in community governance. AI's actions follow rules encoded on the blockchain, secured by TEE. This means the community, rather than a single entity, defines the boundaries and objectives of AI, forming a trustless system where governance occurs on-chain.
By integrating TEE, AI is not only autonomous but also accountable.
Technical implementation:
TEE_HE_HE: This innovative system deploys autonomous AI agents in Intel TDX TEE hardware, providing self-managed account capabilities secured by TEE and supporting transparent remote verification.
ai16z + TEE: Phala Network integrates Eliza and Dstack SDK as the ai16z+TEE plugin, providing TEE capabilities for Eliza agents, ensuring secure, autonomous, and responsible AI deployment.
Direction forward: AI founders, enabling TEE
The shift from human-led to AI-led fundraising and operations is not just an innovation, but a revolution. It redefines the fundamentals of the financial world while posing profound challenges to governance and compliance:
Governance compliance: How do existing regulatory frameworks adapt to the capital raising and business operations of autonomous entities? Will governments embrace or resist this shift?
Investor protection: In an AI unregulated system, how do we ensure investors' rights are protected?
Philosophical challenge: Can society truly trust machines over humans? Are we ready for a world where algorithms replace human prophets?
Based on TEE, aICO is not just a concept but a verifiable reality: AI startups driven by trust infrastructure will redefine the way capital is raised and deployed. Investors will no longer rely on human promises but on cryptographically assured execution.
The message is clear: AI is not only the future, it is also the remedy for past failures. Let’s work together to build it—with ai16z, with TEE, with Phala.