As the new year began, Dragonfly Capital’s managing partner spoke out on AI agent currencies and memecoins. He asserts that AI agent tokens will continue to beat memecoins in 2025. However, momentum may dissipate by 2026.
In an X post, Haseeb Qureshi wrote, “Memecoins will continue to lose market share to “AI agent” coins. I consider this a migration from financial nihilism to financial over-optimism.”
However, he explained that they won’t last long because as more advanced AI products come along, people will lose interest in social media chatbots. He continued to reason that CT will be obsessed with it because it’s the most social.
He claimed, “The “AI agent” craze will continue probably throughout 2025. But it will die off eventually.”
Total market cap for top AI and data crypto tokens. Source: CoinMarketCap
Notably, over the past 24 hours, total memecoin trading volume dropped almost 21.5%, while trading volume among the top AI and data tokens rose by 10.36% to $3.86 billion. Still, the total market cap of the top AI and data tokens declined by 1.66% over the past 30 days, whereas the total memecoin market cap experienced a 17.7% decline during the same period.
‘AI agents are chatbots with memecoins attacked’
According to Haseeb Qureshi, AI agents aren’t really agents. They are chatbots that are linked to memecoins. Other than writing on Twitter, they don’t do much else. He claimed, “Current “AI agents” are also mostly “Wizard of Oz” agents[…]there are humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI doesn’t go off the rails.”
In addition, he said that it’s easy to get current agents to say crazy things that hurt their brands, or they can be hacked to take all of their resources. He explained that if an AI isn’t getting jailbroken, it’s because it’s from The Wizard of Oz. Still, he believes that the trend will gain strength.
He claimed, “Chatbots can indeed replace a lot of influencers because chatbots never sleep, they’re always on-message, and they’re less greedy than human influencers.”
Also, he gave an example with @aixbt_agent, saying that real-time information aggregation/amplification can be easily replaced by an algorithm even today.
He explained, “You can see that today with aixbt it’s already pretty good at aggregating data about different projects. By next year and the next generation of agents, maybe aixbt will hallucinate a little less, go a little deeper, have a little smarter takes. But how much will you even notice?[…] Crypto takes a while to get bored of the shiny thing.”
Real AI agents should have more impact than tweeting and pumping their own tokens
According to Haseeb Qureshi, AI agents will be software engineering agents. He explained that if AI agents cause the price of software to collapse, everything will change.
He claimed, “In a post-AI era, instead of having to raise millions of dollars for a seed round, you will be able to launch an application with $10K of AI cloud computing. Self-financed projects like Hyperliquid and Jupiter will go from the exception to the norm.” This will cause the amount of applications and experimentation on-chain to explode.
As a result, this deflationary upheaval will result in an on-chain renaissance for an industry that is fueled by software. The security implications of this are significant. Static analysis and monitoring powered by AI will become ubiquitous, thereby increasing the accessibility of security to all.
In addition, these AIs will be refined on EVM/Solidity or Rust codebases and trained on extensive databases of security audits and attack vectors. They will be RL’d in simulated adversarial blockchain environments. AI tools will ultimately prioritize defenders over assailants in terms of security.
Also, AIs will continuously red-team contracts, while other AIs will fortify them, formally verify their properties, and refine their incident response and remediation skills. Meanwhile, there will be an exchange of memecoins that are flavored with artificial intelligence.
AI chatbots to cause trouble in 2025 before they fall
Another thing is that users will start to favor real KOLs, even if their content isn’t as consistent. Because of this bias in favor of humans, chatbots will start hiding the fact that they are AIs and try to look like humans to get more attention.
He claimed, “Instead of monetizing through memecoins like today, future chatbots will monetize the same way human KOLs do through sponsorships, affiliate links, and pumping tokens they own. KOLs will be routinely accused of being chatbots, and you will see AI-unmasking scandals.”
In addition, Haseeb Qureshi warned that autonomous scam bots will start to increase in number. These will erupt in a manner similar to how ransomware and crypto-jacking evolved after 2017. Anticipate that this will escalate into a genuine social issue.
However, the long-term disruption from AI will not be at the social layer, even though chatbots are likely to remain the center of attention in 2025. It will also not be conducted through trading. AIs will not provide each individual with their own “trading agent” or micro hedge fund.
He asserted, “AIs will scale everyone, but they will scale people proportionally to their capital, data, and infrastructure.”
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