Original Title: 5 Categories to Watch for in Crypto x AI Agents (+ Examples)
Author: 0x3van
Compiled by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
AI is the main melody of this cycle, and many believe this is a track that will continue to exist and evolve. Conversely, there are many reasonable criticisms that most AI Agents today are half-hearted, and we need another 3-5 years to make this technology more meaningful.
As a preface, the project categories of Crypto x AI span multiple levels. The true technological prospects of Crypto x AI mostly relate to guiding better reasoning through Crypto economics or providing decentralized access to computation. Delphi's article is a good starting point to understand the entire stack.
However, this article focuses on our current state regarding Agents. While there are exciting innovations at the lower levels of the stack, Agents seem to have attracted the attention of the mainstream cryptocurrency community. As Crypto x AI Agents continue to evolve, here are five trends worth watching.
Trend 1 | Framework + Launchpad: Value accumulation is starting to become important, and frameworks may continue to exist.
Value accumulation is starting to become important. Why is this the case?
Stepping back, why would anyone hold assets? There are two main reasons people exchange dollars for assets:
· Due to riding the narrative rotation that brings in new buyers, they can sell assets to others at higher prices;
· Over time, this asset will generate more cash flow for them.
@izebel_eth wrote in his article (Old Coins Worse, New Coins Better) that the only important thing is the flow of funds. The following two reasons reflect two bullish capital flows:
· Growth of new holders;
· Token sinking (tending towards deflation);
However, in most cases, we have not seen any semblance of true token deflation or value accumulation. Using tokens via Agent terminals (such as AIXBT) is more akin to staking rather than traditional value accumulation.
This is also why frameworks like Virtuals, ai16z, Zerebro, and arc have recently gained popularity. ai16z originally started as an investment DAO, but since announcing the upcoming launchpad and detailed information about token value accumulation, it has become a leader among such protocols.
Today, the framework + launchpad space is very saturated, with first-mover advantages boosting their success. There are many reasonable doubts about the utility surrounding these launchpads, as many agents themselves are of little use. However, those frameworks (Eliza V2 + launchpad, zentients, arc, and their handshake plans) have not yet launched their main products. If they successfully attract developers and users, they may continue to lead the entire track.
Why will frameworks continue to exist?
· Regardless of whether Agents possess true value, the frameworks for launching Agents will perform well, as they still have a 'product-market fit' with speculation. Framework + launchpad allows users to simultaneously have a factory + casino. To some extent, Virtuals has already replaced pump.fun's position in the Base ecosystem.
· More optimistically, with technological advancements, leading frameworks may launch more advanced Agents, while open-source software libraries like Eliza will develop at a faster pace. Many of these launch platforms will also become a coordinating layer for communication between groups and Agents, using their tokens for some form of value transfer. More in-depth articles on Eliza's value capture, such as the one written by Teng Yan last week.
Virtuals, ai16z, Zerebro, and arc are the current major players in this track, but the launchpad space is becoming increasingly saturated. The frameworks with the fastest iteration speed, strongest scalability, and most unique functionalities are the ones to watch.
Trend 2 | The Next Round of Agents Will Prioritize Utility and Value Accumulation, DeFAI (DeFi x AI) May Be the First Class of Agents to Achieve Product-Market Fit
Most Agents only have meme tokens without utility. To grow the Agent industry, the next round of Agents must further refine use cases. New opportunities will come from those Agents that can truly accumulate value and act. I believe that in the next year, primary Agents will leap to tier three Agents.
We first saw this in the DeFi space. We will see more terminals allowing people to express desired results in natural language or voice, as well as Agents capable of executing tasks behind the scenes. Existing wallets and protocols will also integrate Agents to improve user experience.
Representative projects include: Wayfinder, griffain, Hey Anon, Limitus, neur.
Trend 3 | Consumer Layer: The Rise of Entertainment-type Agents, Autonomous Worlds, and Gaming
Attention-driven Agents will develop more complex personalities and multimedia interactivity. This may trigger the next wave of gaming and metaverse technologies.
One issue with existing Agents is that they are starting to become increasingly similar, turning into commodified, exaggerated chatbots. While some Agent projects will shift towards infrastructure (many are already doing so), some are starting to think about useful products/applications, while others may continue down the path of attention tokens. However, the next generation of attention Agents will be better, developing more complex personalities and offering greater interactive possibilities. This could be achieved through audiovisual representations or by giving Agents three-dimensional existence and physical bodies.
There have already been early attempts in this area, Jeffy wrote an article about embedding bodies into Zerebro, and some well-known KOL Agents have directly launched through audiovisual formats like short videos. Slopfather and Ropirito are two early adopters of the video model.
However, I think more Agent projects will incorporate these features to make Agents more vibrant. The product-market fit (PMF) in this domain will be realized through the consumer layer, where individual users may wish to create personalized Agent companions or interact with KOLs. This trend is already gradually spreading outside of cryptocurrency, with some users chatting with AI companions for hundreds of hours on websites like character.ai; Google recently acquired this company for $2.7 billion.
Moreover, these 3D Agents may find market fit in the existing consumer layer, especially in gaming and the metaverse. Agents can add deeper backstories to worlds within stories. Imagine an Agent acting as an NPC, capable of completing tasks or playing games independently, with a continuously evolving memory and personality. True gaming autonomous worlds may be realized through Agents.
Representative projects include:
· Soulgraph aims to provide tools for Agents to have more customized personalities and memories;
· Holoworld AI has established Web2 partnerships with companies like L'Oréal, Bilibili, and Fox to create digital avatars.
There are also representative projects in areas like gaming, metaverse, virtual worlds, and autonomous Agents:
· Hyperfy is a metaverse platform that allows anyone to create virtual worlds and adopts Eliza plugins;
· Parallel Colony is an AI simulation game where Agents are the players, and you can converse with them;
· Digimon is a creature game similar to Pokémon, where the creatures evolve mentally based on interactions;
· SMOL also uses the Eliza framework, with characters in the game driven by LLM Agents that can take actions in the virtual world based on your instructions.
Trend 4 | Agentic Organizations: The Return of DAOs
Decentralized Agentic Organizations (DAO) are the next form of the evolution of DAOs. Swarm or multi-Agent systems are exciting because they can coordinate and execute more advanced strategies, similar to running a company. Heterogeneous swarms composed of many different types of professional Agents/models working together may outperform a single large model.
While fully autonomous Agents and swarms may still be far from us, the next iteration of DAOs is likely to be about the interaction between individuals and groups. This will reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies and lower the cost and time of human execution. In the context of capital flow, income-generating Agents will be the next step towards becoming a complete organization that earns income.
Representative projects include:
· Agent swarm infrastructure: Projects like SwarmNode.ai, FXN are infrastructure projects specifically engaged in multi-Agent frameworks and coordination work, and more mainstream Agent frameworks like Zerebro and ai16z have also expressed intentions to build at this layer.
· DAO launchpad: Most of the early traffic we see is concentrated on investment DAOs. I believe daos.fun will be the first major DAO launchpad, nurturing ai16z. There are also some newer launch platforms like daos.world, where AI-driven funds like 3BC are gaining attention.
Trend 5 | Verifiable Agents: Current Agents will evolve towards greater autonomy and truly own their liquidity.
Currently, most Agents require a high degree of human intervention. The next wave of Agents will evolve towards true autonomy, starting with managing their own funds.
The intersection of Agents and cryptocurrency lies in the fact that cryptocurrency provides financial pathways for true economic Agents. However, most Agents do not control their own treasury or have it managed by human teams. To achieve truly economic Agents, they must be able to manage their own funds autonomously. This can allow Agent behavior to begin to evolve, as you can impose economic constraints on Agents, requiring them to pay for their reasoning costs, thus introducing Darwinism to the Agent world, where they must earn income to survive.
Representative projects include:
· Freysa is one of the first agents to control its own Agent and has performed exceptionally well (including catching Musk's attention). Recently, they announced they are building a framework that allows Agents to have verifiable autonomy in TEE + Agent controlled keys.
· Lit Protocol also has an Agent framework that allows autonomous Agents to transact on-chain through a private key storage and execution system;
· Galadriel launched an SDK called Proof of Sentience that enables developers to fully verify Agents on-chain.
Conclusion: Before we see a billion people on-chain, we will first see a billion Agents on-chain.
The user experience of cryptocurrency itself is not friendly to human users. But Agents won't care about this friction. We will start with interactions between humans and Agents, but the direction of development for cryptocurrency AI is interactions between Agents, at which point swarms of autonomous Agents will interact and trade on-chain, being responsible for their own economic conditions.
To empower Agents with economic power, allowing them to incentivize behavior (pay for service fees) and coordinate real-world activities, they need the ability to control and deploy capital. Cryptocurrency is the 'home planet' for these Agents—blockchain will enable Agents to participate in permissionless financial activities. Stablecoins and high-performing Layer 1s are ideal tools for achieving cost-efficient, 24/7, global transactions.
Beyond the current hype and narrative, we have ample reason to maintain long-term excitement about the on-chain Agent economy. Many authentic use cases, including DAOs and revenue-generating Agents, are much closer than we think.
