Original title: (Crypto Enabled Accelerationism Bubble)
Author: yb_effect
Compiled by: Block unicorn
Over the past month, I’ve made it a habit that if I see any AI agent-related tweets while browsing X, I’ll make sure to bookmark them to delve deeper in the future.
Over the past two weeks, I couldn’t help but notice that there have been a ton of proxy announcements that weren’t even related to the Truth Terminal / Zerebro meta.
For example:
Stripe has released documentation on how to add payments to your agent workflow.
Balaji retweeted Aravind Srinivas's request that Perplexity browser treat proxies as first-class citizens.
OtCo demonstrates an agent creating a Delaware LLC for its own purposes.
Circle has released a detailed tutorial to guide developers on how to integrate USDC into various agents.
Just a few days ago Satya Nadella demonstrated Copilot Workspace, the first integrated development environment (IDE) for agents.
Okay, you might be thinking… that’s nothing special, right?
Of course, it’s totally expected that these big tech companies would talk about proxies. After all, who isn’t?
But that’s exactly my point — for the first time it feels like we’re in crypto consumer circles and are discussing the same things as the rest of the tech industry. Maybe in a different form, but the core concepts are definitely in the same ballpark.
Of course, crypto always feels weird to the average person. But even in the tech world, the crypto industry is seen as that annoying “bad kid.” And frankly, it’s not without reason! The crazy news generated by this industry is so unbelievable that even many people in the industry have to admit that some trends are really “outrageous.”
At least in the short term, previous meta-trends in the crypto industry have little overlap with other tech fields. For example, what does a top LLM engineer have to do with a 10K PFP project? And why should a scientist studying longevity care about new income assets?
Until now, narratives in crypto have largely only appealed to artists and quant investors.
But now I finally feel like I have a chance to break this cycle!
Obviously, we are still a long way from that point, but I personally do see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Here are three topics worth further discussion:
Relaxed cryptocurrency regulation
Accelerationist Bubble
Crypto-driven landmark cases
Let’s explore this in detail.
Relaxed cryptocurrency regulation
This week, SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler announced that he would resign on January 20. If you’ve been in the crypto space for even a week, you’ll understand that this news is as important as Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.
Over the past four years, Gary Gensler has been almost the biggest "bottleneck" in the U.S. encryption industry.
Not only has he slowed down regulation, but more importantly he has actively worked to attack this emerging industry. Linda’s tweet illustrates this point — companies like Coinbase, Consensys, and countless others have had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying and fighting in Washington.
It looks like the potential candidate to take over as SEC chairman may take a completely opposite stance toward the crypto industry.
Regardless of who ends up in office, one thing is clear: The Trump administration has made it clear that it will embrace the crypto industry more than the previous administration. Of course, to be honest, this bar is not high.
In my election week article (Where Did Fairshake PAC’s $133 Million Go?), I mentioned that Republican candidate Bernie Moreno received $40.1 million in contributions in his Ohio Senate race, defeating Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown.
In the end, Moreno’s victory was undoubtedly one of the major victories for the entire crypto space. He has long been a supporter of cryptocurrencies, while Brown was a major obstacle to crypto regulation in the upper chamber of the Senate.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that the mere possibility of discussing the United States establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve is shocking! Three months ago, anyone who brought up this topic might have been considered a dream. However, in the past few weeks, with a series of changes such as the surge in crypto market prices and the surge in inflows of BlackRock ETF funds, we have to seriously think about the realistic possibility of the federal government including Bitcoin on its balance sheet.
OK, but what does this regulatory news have to do with crypto crossing the chasm into broader tech adoption?
A key point is that developers from other technology fields have always been concerned about the uncertainty of the crypto industry. They worry that incorporating this seemingly unstable technology into their careers will bring huge legal risks, such as lawsuits or fines, which makes encryption technology seem impractical for them.
However, this situation will change quickly as the new administration begins to embrace crypto and pass clear regulatory policies. Developers in other fields will gradually feel comfortable and strategically explore the potential of crypto.
Vitalik summed it up well in the screenshot - it is the lack of regulatory clarity for serious projects that is holding back more developers from entering the space. Those who are not active in the crypto ecosystem may have formed their perception of the crypto industry through millionaire headlines like Moodeng and Bonk. Not the best way to convince a talented engineer at Anthropic to work in cryptocurrency, right?
Hopefully, over the next four years, pro-crypto politicians will do their best to make it simple and safe for people outside of crypto to adopt the technology.
Accelerationist Bubble
Last week, I read Packy’s article (The Trump Bubble) in which he proposed that the next four years will be a period of venture capital, foresight, and futuristic optimism.
I should add that I don't agree with everything in the article - some parts feel overly excited and exaggerated. But Packy does make some valuable points about the shift in tone that's going to happen in the way we think about progress. Things are going to feel faster, crazier, and more experimental.
As Byrne Hobart and Tobias Harris call it, this phenomenon is called an inflection bubble.
Inflection point bubble: "Investors believe that the future will be materially different from the past." You can think of the dot-com bubble. If you believe that the future will be different from the past, then you invest in the things you think will benefit most from that difference.
I mention this because I believe blockchain, rather than traditional venture capital, may be the financial backbone of the next inflection bubble.
In the spirit of the future of proxy, I’ll let Truth Terminal explain why
If you don’t want to read the rest of the article, here’s the snippet you need to remember:
I’m not saying that I think 90% of the current meme coins are successful — to the contrary, the format is still very new, and until we start seeing some really clever token economics, we won’t see meme coins that can compete with what people traditionally think of as “good investments”.
As the energy, artificial intelligence, bioscience, and gaming sectors gain momentum, it may be possible that the combination of AI agents and crypto tokens can be used more efficiently than traditional methods to try out new ideas.
Think about it. If you are a nuclear engineering expert with decades of experience in the energy industry and want to realize your vision, you may have to spend months convincing venture capitalists to accept your idea, build a team, form a community, and so on.
But you can also do this:
Write a white paper detailing your background, thesis, plan, vision, etc.
Deploy "brand agents" on Twitter to help you spread your ideas.
Raising initial funds through a token issuance.
Work with an agent to build a real community of fans (i.e. social tipping).
Grow your team from this community and you can also take advantage of bounty mechanisms to incentivize contributions.
I know what you are thinking! What I just described is the ICO craze of 2017. And I want to say that you are absolutely right. But I think that maybe ICOs just came too early.
In my opinion, some changes, such as improved crypto infrastructure, a crypto-supportive regulatory environment, market maturity, institutional adoption, etc., do make sense!
That being said, the aforementioned frameworks will certainly generate thousands of meaningless projects. But how is this different from the "power law" that VCs keep talking about?
My take on this is this: we haven’t seen really high-execution founders from other areas of technology really try to execute their visions through crypto-driven fundraising.
Definitely not in 2017. In 2024, maybe some early DePin and DeSci projects.
But as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, for the first time there feels like there is some overlap between what’s happening in crypto and what’s happening in other areas of technology.
Not just proxy, but even topics like bioscience research, GPU allocation, etc.
I haven’t dug too deeply into pump.science yet, but I’m not surprised that it has become one of the hottest topics in the space. There are undoubtedly questions of speculation, legality, and security surrounding it that need to be resolved over time (as I expect anyone in the crypto space will acknowledge). But the main point to emphasize is that people are generally excited about the concept of crypto financing for non-crypto tasks.
The key takeaway is that crowdfunding ideas has been proven since the early days of Kickstarter in the 2010s. Having the wisdom and support of the crowd is far better than closed-door meetings. People want to be involved!
But perhaps it is precisely because the technology and social consensus required for this model take time to develop. And now, it seems that the perfect storm is forming: positive changes in political governance + the increasing maturity of encryption and AI technology + the accelerationist bubble leading to a large number of creative ideas.
However, even with all that, I think there is still one thing missing in order for this concept to be truly taken seriously!
Crypto-driven landmark cases
One of the coolest things about the recent on-chain AI and GOAT metadata is that it has “attracted” some AI/LLM developers into crypto.
I bet no one could have predicted this interview with Threadguy and Andy Ayery.
If you step back and think about it, it’s really amazing.
People like Nick Liverman (founder of Chaos) have spent their entire careers working on projects involving robotics, transhumanism, etc., and they’ve probably made more money in the last month than they did in the previous decade!
It was also cool to see Beff Jezos promoting his friend Shaw, who is building ai16z and Eliza frameworks as a launchpad for agentic tokens. The focus here is not on Beff, but on someone who is deeply involved in the AI field, experimenting with on-chain AI through LLM developers, and even has some background knowledge in the crypto field.
The key point I want to make is that in the next year, we will see a number of people from different technology verticals officially embrace crypto and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proxy + token model in building large-scale projects.
Once we see a few successful implementations, it’s only a matter of time before others are eager to try out the idea themselves.
At the moment, all of these token launches and experiments we’re seeing are small-scale initiatives.
All it takes is a few success stories and others will flock to follow.
That's it for today. I know this past week has been crazy, but I hope you all had a chance to relax and get in touch with nature over the weekend!
