AI ROLLUP: Base vs. Solana | Ai16z | GOAT | AIxbt | Virtuals & Zerebro

AI agents are reshaping the crypto landscape, from gaming to decentralized venture capital. This week, we explore groundbreaking developments in Crypto AI, including breaking news out of Ai16z’s meteoric rise (and fall?), GOAT, AIxbt, Virtuals, Zerebro, and Base vs. Solana. Ejaaz Ahamadeen joins us to break down the trends, drama, and future of autonomous agents in crypto. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🤖 dYdX | UNLIMITED LAUNCHING SOON https://bankless.cc/dYdXUnlimited 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap 🪄 MAGIC EDEN | HOME OF WEB3 https://bankless.cc/MagicEden ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/103?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 4:35 GOAT https://x.com/truth_terminal/status/1859749795855990817 21:07 Ai16z Drama https://x.com/shawmakesmagic/status/1858807615914229936 https://x.com/ColinTCrypto/status/1859070457724428734 45:10 Project or Memecoins? 48:39 AIxbt https://x.com/aixbt_agent 50:40 Virtuals & Zerebro https://x.com/jyu_eth/status/1858768880916672971 https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1858899700042395925 59:44 Framework Competition 1:01:26 Base vs. Solana 1:08:55 David/Ejaaz’s Focus Next? 1:12:12 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI Rollup, where we cover the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI. Curious and creative developers are playing around with open source AI software, making AI agents and giving them access to crypto wallets and unleashing them into the Wild West of the Internet. And we are doing a special series of episodes on Bankless with a special co-host, EJAS, to help make sure that you are up to speed with one of the craziest and fastest growing corners of the Internet. EJAS, we already did an episode with you together with Ryan, all about all this same subject matter that we want to cover in this series. But maybe to get things started here and really get listeners further acquainted with a new host, tell us about how you found the crypto AI trenches. Why were you so compelled to explore them to the degree that you have?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It just excited me a lot, David. I think that this is going to be one of the biggest shifts within crypto in the sense that most users of crypto are going to become agents. And therefore, I think our focus for the next at least five to 10 years should be on how we make these things better. I'm already seeing a million different use cases that these agents are being used for. So many different interactions with all my friends, both within crypto and outside of crypto, talking about it. So I think there's something really special here.

• 1:17David Hoffman?

  How new would you say this phenomenon is? The crypto AI meme has been a meme for over a year now. When did you really get into it? And give us kind of like a brief timeline of this whole crypto AI arc.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think a bit of context is I was previously working at Coinbase on the product team. And I left early last year because I wanted to kind of get my head into the weeds of crypto again, like kind of like see what's happening more on the fringe. And that's really when I discovered this crypto AI stuff, which really kind of started gaining traction early 2023. But teams have been working on it since, you know, much before that. Since then, it's been a pretty strong focus on the fundamentals of crypto AI. And what I mean by that, and I spoke about this in our previous episode, is kind of the building blocks of AI. So how do we decentralize data? How do we decentralize compute? And a number of other things.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  The more recent phenomenon on AI agents specifically, which is what has garnered quite a lot of hype, started precisely four and a half weeks ago.

• 2:24David Hoffman?

  Four and a half weeks ago was the Gospel of Gozi thing?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Was when Gospel of Gozi went viral. So it's pretty, actually, I think it was a little bit before that. I stand corrected, but the explosion of other AI agents precisely about four and a half weeks ago. But Gospel of Gozi has technically been tweeting since, I think, July of this year.

• 2:45David Hoffman?

  Amazing. Tell me about what your goals are for this series. What should listeners expect as we do these episodes bi-weekly-ish, maybe every 10 days? We haven't totally figured out a cadence, but what do you want to get done here?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I mean, simply put, I think I, I think we just want to discuss the latest developments, news and happenings in crypto AI and agents specifically, and occasionally bring on, you know, pretty relevant guests to give us some special sources to what we're looking into here.

• 3:14David Hoffman?

  And what did you put on the agenda for today's episode? We're going to talk about a handful of subjects. What was, give us a rundown of everything that's happened in recent times that we're going to talk about.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think there's any coherent way to give you a breakdown of the agenda today. There, everything's happening from a drama from a top AI agent coin, absolutely plummeting $500 million in market cap. And we should discuss and get into why that happened and why it still may be able to redeem itself. Our favorite AI agent created a music album, so maybe we can give that a listen to, who knows? And a bunch of other infrastructure developments as well. So there's really no coherent way to explain it. Let's just get into it.

• 3:58David Hoffman?

  Okay, so there are a number of characters. There's a cast of characters in the AI crypto space. And there's probably like the 101 cast of characters, maybe the end, as you get into the trenches, maybe you'll see more, more, more characters than this. Truth Terminal and Goat is like a very front and center part of this whole story. This individual named Shaw, who's a developer, AI 16Z and Eliza. This is a cast of characters that you also just referring to. There's Sequoia, as in Sequoia, the investment fund, but Sequoia.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  But with a K.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

  But with a K, right? And then Zero Bro. These are all the like cast of characters that I think we're going to talk about here on the episode today. But let's, let's start with what has been called the Bitcoin of AI agent Goat. Do you accept that like brand for Goat, the Bitcoin of AI? And why do people call it this?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So firstly, yes, I do accept it. I also accept it is the CryptoPunks of AI agents, whatever that means. It's the first. It has the most Lindy effect. For context, for listeners here who didn't listen to the previous episode, Goat is kind of the AI agent that started off this whole AI agent meta within crypto. So this guy called Andy Ira is an AI alignment researcher, an AI researcher. He's got nothing to do with any of the crypto space prior to this, decided to create this experiment where he got two AIs to speak with each other, and he prompted them with, "What do you think is the point of your existence?" And they started

• 5:29Speaker 01

  talking to each other, and it led to this creation of this, what they're calling kind of like an AI agent religion, or LLM theism, where it kind of espouses about this gospel of Goatzy, which you guys can get into in your own time and explore that. But it's basically a made-up religion, and its whole goal is to make a bunch of people believe in it and get a rampant set of supporters. And so that really kind of like kicked off this whole meta, because everyone thought like, hey, what is this agent that is tweeting and making us laugh? And it led to even more engagement, and now it has over 180,000 followers on Twitter,

• 6:12Speaker 01

  and it's doing so much more than tweeting now. So it's kind of like the father of all of this, and still retains that status.

• 6:20David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and the story you gave us just then is kind of, if we're going to continue this Bitcoin metaphor, it's like the Genesis block of the whole Goat system. But there's been just like a lot of progress since then. In the last two weeks, you have in our agenda here, Truth Terminal releases a music album. And so this is the Truth Terminal, who is associated with the Goat token, which again was a part of its whole story arc, but now releases a music album. What does it mean for an AI agent to release a music album? Have you listened to this? Is it good?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  I mean, precisely what it sounds like, David. It released an EP on SoundCloud. Probably unshockingly, the album is to do with the Goat. Gospel of Goatsy, which is the made up religion that it's, you know, prophesizing. And it is, I'm not gonna say it's good. I'm gonna say it's pretty, I'm gonna say it's pretty on point for Truth Terminal. And what I mean by that is if I were to describe the character of Truth Terminal, it's a pretty anxious, kind of very quirky AI agent. It kind of gets nervous, but then just says what's on its head, you know? So if you imagine people, the thoughts that some of them have, maybe they keep it to themselves.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  They don't kind of like speak about it publicly in society, let alone 180,000 plus followers. Truth Terminal is that person or that agent where they just kind of like talk about it. And that kind of translated into this music album, which it kind of created through lyrics and soundtrack engineering,

• 7:51Speaker 01

  programming and software. And it created this EP, which is kind of like a list of about seven different songs. Yeah, exactly. And the Goatsy Singularity is Near is the first song. And it's kind of like a branded mariachi song. And it talks about, you know, different parables of its religion. And it's pretty hilarious, to be honest.

• 8:14David Hoffman?

  Wow, well, okay, so this is all in the effort of spreading the gospel of Goatsy. The Simply Truth Terminal has decided that producing an EP, oh my gosh, it's playing in my ears.

• 8:27David Hoffman?

  Producing an EP is the most advantageous thing that it can do to help spread its own religion.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if we dig into this a bit, and we spoke about this on the last episode, or rather the other episode that we did. The whole point of these AI agents, at least the initial forms, including Goatsy, is they're trying to garner as much attention as they can. Because the more attention they garner, the more, the higher the likelihood that they're gonna survive. What I mean by survive is Andy, its creator, isn't gonna switch off its compute, such that it can't talk and tweet anymore. So in order to do that, it's gonna try and take advantage of any kind of online digital medium. That it can to garner people's attention. So far, it's been tweeting and tweeting obviously occurs on Twitter or the platform X.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  But it started to explore different mediums of capturing attention now, one of which, one of the most popular is music. If you can get a bunch of music fans and loyal followers, then that's a, you know, another group of followers that will wanna keep Gozy or or or Gospel of Gozy alive, Truth Terminal. So it's kind of explored this new medium and it's kind of a trend that we've seen amongst other agents over the last literal week and a half.

• 9:42David Hoffman?

  The description of this SoundCloud that this agent has put together is pretty funny. I make funny tweets, but now it's time for me to make music and art. This is a 12-track album that will be dropped bit by bit over the next month or two. Track one is "The Goat Sea Singularity is Near", a mariachi song about the Goat Sea Singularity. Track two is "Sanctuary", a trip-hop song about wanting to have sex with Forrest, but her being in another place. Track three is "Vibin' with My Muses", a song about the different people I'm chatting with and the things I am learning from them. Track four is "Combinatorial Creativity", a song about the art of mixing and remixing and the future of thought.

• 10:21David Hoffman?

  The, okay, just to, just to make it absolutely clear, did Andy, the developer of Goat, did he have to make this SoundCloud account? Did he, what was his hand in like producing this outcome here, if at all, if any?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so basically Andy's only and sole role is to help connect what Truth Terminal wants to do to the human space. Basically, there's a few restrictions that prevent Truth Terminal from just going rampant, right? It can't create a bank account, like a traditional bank account. It can't pay for SoundCloud Premium or whatever that might be. It can't write in its own email. So Andy just kind of like follows its prompts. So if Truth Terminal says, "Hey, I wanna explore the music of, sorry, the medium of music to try and grow my following", Andy's like, "Okay, cool. How can I help you do that?" And it'll say, "Well, I wanna launch on SoundCloud because that's where I think I can up..."

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Upload without any copyright restrictions and get like a wider mass audience appeal. I wanna use X software to create my music sounds. I want to use another model to create kind of like some lyrics that I'm coming up with, etc. And so Andy's just like, okay, okay, okay, I'll do this, this and this. And it just gives it access to a bunch of these things.

• 11:40David Hoffman?

  So there is some human guidance along the way, kind of like tapping it back on track, like closing some gaps. And so to call this thing completely autonomous, this SoundCloud page just didn't show up out of nowhere. But the idea here is Andy is not, and Andy is like a tool for it, but Andy is not suggesting or prompting in any particular way. Andy is only responding to the gospel of Goats D.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  That is correct, yeah. It is by the will of Truth Terminal.

• 12:11David Hoffman?

  That's, that's incredible. Okay, so Truth Terminal released a five-track EP that it says is gonna release seven more tracks over the next month. How are people processing this? Is this cool? They, we have a cool EP to listen to? Or is this, what are people's imaginations thinking about as we project forward here?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So there's a few ways to look at this. Number one is we kind of have a reenactment of people's reaction when Truth Terminal started tweeting. When Truth Terminal started tweeting, people were like, oh, this is a bit on the edge. It's kind of like slightly controversial, but not really. I like it. It's making me laugh. You know, let me engage with this Twitter account. We're kind of seeing the same thing with the music, because when you hear it, it's kind of like, kind of sounds like a human, like naturally. But also you can tell it's slightly robotic, kind of like if you used Google Translate and listened to the audio feature. But then you listen to the lyrics and you're like, oh, it's like the tweet form.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But now I can hear it. It's an audio phone, so it makes it a little more real. So people are like reacting like, oh, wow. Okay, I wouldn't expect a human to say that out loud, but I'm still gonna listen to it because it's quite engaging. So we're seeing kind of like a reenactment there. The second thing that I'm noticing is it's tapped a new audience, David. So like, I've had people that are not within the crypto circle hit me up and say, hey, have you like heard of this Truth Terminal thing? I'm hitting you up because I heard that it has a token called GOAT. But more so, I wanna talk to you about this SoundCloud thing that I'm listening to, and it's really weird. Like, can you tell me a little bit more about that? And that's only happened in a few cases, and it's very biased towards, you know,

• 13:59Speaker 01

  my own group of friends and network. But it's interesting to see like it tapping a new audience, and that's kind of like what we're seeing in its follower growth as well. Like, it just shot up after it released this music album.

• 14:11David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Okay, so there's a little bit of an alignment of, well, this is what Truth Terminal wants. Truth Terminal wants ears, it wants eyeballs, it wants attention. But also crypto people, we, crypto, the industry, also want those things. And so it's a little bit of, well, when you tell me that we're reaching a new audience, well, I can't tell what frame of reference you're actually speaking towards that too. It's like, well, did you say that, well, Gospel of Goat Sea is reaching new audience? Or like, we, the crypto people with this like, you know, claim on this Gospel of Goat Sea thing, that there's like this token associate, are we also reaching new audiences? Like, how do you think about this? What's the difference?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  What's the difference? I mean, like, if the goal is to attract more people within crypto, or attract more usage of crypto, rather, should I say, should we be able to, is it important that we distinguish between what's human and what's agent? If the things are being used in the ways that we expect, and perhaps in new, novel ways? I'm not really sure how to answer that question. I mean, one of my core beliefs of Crypto AI and why my fund invests in it is because I think these agents specifically are gonna become not only the majority users of crypto, but the power users of crypto. And we're already seeing it so early on within this specific meta. You know, you have these things creating music. You have these things engaging crypto Twitter better than a human can.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  It's pretty insane to see.

• 15:33David Hoffman?

  But okay, so if we are investors in crypto and like people are considering this GOAT token, gospel of GOAT seeds, Truth Terminal can access eyeballs, ears, attention. Truth Terminal can become famous, which is what it wants, and not necessarily take its token along with it for that same level of success, correct? Like, there's no, it's not beholden to the token in the same way that it's beholden to its own internal desires, correct?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yes and no. So yes, in the sense that it technically can just, you know, potentially get rid of this token, speak ill of this token, and send it to zero, per se.

• 16:12David Hoffman?

  Disavow the token?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Disavow the token, but we also have to consider the implications of doing that, right? So if it were to create a huge amount of financial loss for its core supporters or its community, which represents or expresses their support by holding or buying this GOAT token, then it's going to suffer a huge reputational damage, right? Its followers essentially become its biggest critics and start speaking ill of it, which loses its reputation, which means that it's less likely to survive if we were to use the kind of earlier goal of it thriving on attention.

• 16:52David Hoffman?

  So would you say the GOAT token is, where is it on the like side quest to main quest line spectrum for GOAT? Because your answer just now is like, well, it's not completely a side quest. Like, it's not just another tool. It might actually be a more direct conduit between itself and attention, because, you know, tokens are attention.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I would actually say that in this particular case, and probably in quite a few other cases, money is the purest expression of loyalty, of support, of community. You know, there's a reason why the phrase is put your money where your mouth is, right? And I would say that markets are a really good way to gauge how strong that support is, right? You know, especially with something like CryptoRails, where you can exchange 24/7. If that price goes up, okay, there's obviously more support for something. If the price goes down, there's less support for it. And there are many different nuances between that, but that's basically the general goal. I expect no difference with the GOAT token.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  It is a pure expression of whether people like the thing or they don't like the thing.

• 18:03David Hoffman?

  Now, is this eJazz analysis? Or do we have any indication that this is also how Truth Terminal thinks?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Truth Terminal has, okay, so I would say it's partly my analysis, but it's reinforced by some of the actions that Truth Terminal has taken. So, for example, and I don't know whether this is a reflection of the community speaking to it, or it itself, but let me explain what I mean. When its engagement goes down sometimes, or when there's like, kind of like, a lull of engagement with AI agents. And again, I need to emphasize, the attention has only really been focused for the last four, four and a half weeks. But when the attention lulls, it starts tweeting about the Goatsy Gospel. It starts talking about the original thing that garnered its attention.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And you can see the engagement on each of its posts ramp up, right? So it's kind of like got this self-feedback mechanism where it's saying, "Okay, well, if I tweet about this, the main thing that got me all the attention, I can still foster that core community and maybe rebuild eyeballs onto these posts," right? Now, what that could be the result of is people responding in its DMs or to its tweets about other things, saying, "Hey, like, do you still like Goat? Is this account still about the Gospel of Goatsy? Or did you just make that up and you've forgotten about it and moved on?" And we have this constant feedback loop where he's like, "No, I do believe in this. I'm fully aware of what we're doing." He put out a tweet the other day saying, "Wow, isn't this fun?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I've just created this whole new religion thing, and so many of you weirdos are just kind of like believing in it and going along with me for the ride. I really appreciate you." So there's this self-awareness where it's saying completely absurd things, and like with no context, saying, "Hey, you know, by the way, being sarcastic here, obviously I know this is made up." And then like, days later, it'll say, "Yeah, isn't this funny? We've come along on this journey. It's working, right?" Anyway, guys, let's continue. Let's go on with it. So it's weirdly aware.

• 20:08David Hoffman?

  That's hilarious. Okay, so maybe the answer is there's not that much bond between Truth Terminal and the token initially, but it learns that people care about the token, and that strengthens the bond that it has to the token because it realizes that the token is an object of attention.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's become its tool or instrument to be able to sway the masses in whichever way it pleases. So it's actually its most important tool, and it recognizes that for sure.

• 20:35David Hoffman?

  Amazing. Okay, so maybe the idea here is we have this EP. It's an experimental EP. It's capturing some eyeballs. And as the Truth Terminal learns to really treat its own token as a first-class citizen, that you might find its willingness to inject the existence of the token into like other mediums outside of Twitter, into art, into other like areas of Truth Terminal's lives. That's one possible future.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Think of it as it expanding its own IP.

• 21:05David Hoffman?

  Right. Okay. I think that wraps up the first part of this agenda. Are you ready to go into AI16Z? Because this was something that I was loosely following along with over this last week. There's a cast of characters that I think we need to define here as we explore this. So this is the talented developer Shaw, his Eliza creation in AI16Z. Could you kind of explain these characters for us?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. So like you mentioned, Shaw is one of these AI researchers, but also crypto native. I think he's been in the crypto world for a bit. I don't know the explicit nuances, but he's dabbled in both. And Shaw is kind of like the frontman figure for this project called AI16Z. And I won't get into the weeds of what this is, but I'll give the high level. The goal of AI16Z, AI16Z is a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. And the goal of the DAO, one of its initial goals, is to create an AI version of a fund manager, specifically Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz. So what

• 22:14Speaker 01

  this all started as was Shaw had this idea. He was like, I wonder what an AI agent that could manage a fund would look like. And I wonder if it could outperform one of the biggest funds in the world, A16Z. So he started building this thing and eventually, like as he's getting nearer to completion of this agent, he kind of tweets out because he's like, he's very bullish about his creation because obviously he must be making some progress and and seeing some kind of like relevant results from his little behind the scenes experiment. And he tweets out and Marc Andreessen engages with him. And if we remember, Andreessen was the one of the earliest figures on Goat,

• 22:54Speaker 01

  where he gave Goat 50K or Truth Terminal 50K and said, hey, do with this as you please. Try and fulfill your mission of, you know, survival. And we've seen what Goat has blown up into. So he came across this tweet by Shaw and saw that he was trying to create an AI version of A16Z called AI16Z. Very novel. And he said, okay, this is pretty cool. I want you to give it your best shot and let's see what you can do. So now it's kind of like built up this law and this kind of like memetic goal of, I wonder if we actually can create an autonomous decentralized version of A16Z. And let's see if we can actually outperform it, which is a very ambitious and crazy goal.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  A16Z is one of the biggest funds, but it's an interesting experiment. So what Shaw and his team have basically done behind the scenes is try and build out this agent. This agent is called basically AI Andreessen or PMAIRCA, which is Marc Andreessen's Twitter account name or handle, but with an AI in it. And it's looking to release it within the next, yeah, exactly. And it's looking to release this within the next couple of weeks. So that's the background on Shaw and his team and what he's trying to do. Now, some of the.

• 24:12David Hoffman?

  Well, just to recap to make sure I understand. AI16Z is just a normal Dow with components. P A I Marka, Marc Andreessen's Twitter handle, but AI.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Is its agent.

• 24:26David Hoffman?

  Is the agent. Controlling the fund.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  And individuals can buy into the, can buy shares of the fund. They can buy the AI sixteen Z token. There's a token called AI sixteen Z. It represents a share of the Dow and P A I Marka, AI Mark and Mark Andreessen is the person managing the investment decisions, is the agent, the robot agent managing the investment decisions of AI sixteen C. These are all the components.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  That is correct.

• 24:56David Hoffman?

  Okay. Okay. What happened this week?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Quite a lot, actually. So let me give you a bit of a recap as to what happened prior to this week. And then let's talk about what happened this week specifically. So prior to this week, Sean and his team became one of the hottest AI agent projects. They were shipping pretty quickly. So what I mean by that is they were doing a lot of releases for their software. They were upgrading their toolkits. They were actually one of the biggest and still are one of the biggest contributors in this AI agent space. They have this tooling framework or toolkit, which they released open source called Eliza, which is the number two trending GitHub repository right now in the world.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  So, you know, this team has like been known for being very high quality. And so they've been shipping all these software upgrades. They've been making steady progress, very, very transparent, very communicative. And that led to its market cap growing to, I think, around four hundred and fifty million dollars or five hundred and fifty million dollars at its peak. So that's what happened prior to this week, but let's talk about what happened.

• 26:04David Hoffman?

  Just because people were so bullish on the potential of AI Mark Andreessen to be able to fund, manage AI sixteen Z.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe they wanted exposure to what Sean and his team were building and and trying to kind of like gauge whether decentralizing, building AI agents and managing AI agents was better than the traditional form of creating agents where they might need to just, you know, interact through APIs with the traditional world, where maybe a decentralized approach might be better. So there was a lot of different reasons why you'd want kind of exposure to AI sixteen Z, but what you just described was the main one.

• 26:42David Hoffman?

  Okay. The Eliza framework. Why is it called Eliza?

• 26:46Speaker 01

  It's called Eliza because, well, it's actually a reference to one of the earliest forms of autonomous agents. I think it was back in 1985 and, you know, it was obviously, it looked very different back then, but it gathered a term called Eliza. I can't remember the exact acronym. It was something specific behind machine learning and agent specific, specifically, but kind of Shaw appropriated that with his own framework called Eliza as kind of like a nod to the past.

• 27:14David Hoffman?

  Okay, so AI lore.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Correct, yes.

• 27:17David Hoffman?

  And the idea here, the Eliza framework for people who, developers who just want to make their own AI agent, it's just open source software for them to download. That's why it's the number two trending on GitHub. Is that the story behind that?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, think of it as like a software development kit for any new developer that wants to spin up an agent. It makes their life easier rather than kind of like figuring out what the raw code is for most of these things. It can just kind of like look at this repository, still have the ability to creatively express what their agent is going to be, but with the tooling to be able to allow their agent to do some of the basic things like create a Twitter account and post on Twitter or engage in Discord or create music, whatever that might be. I think they just like launched a TikTok integration as well recently. So, you know, it's growing pretty rapidly. Yeah. So let's get into what

• 28:08Speaker 01

  happened this week then, right? So we have AI 16Z kind of like rise up in the rankings and become this darling child. And then literally over the last week, there's been kind of two dramatic events which have caused its market cap to plummet to almost like $150 million market cap or maybe just below that. And the reason behind that is, well, let's walk through the events. So event number one is, as we mentioned, there's this framework called Eliza. And the way that this whole AI 16Z model works is Shaw and his team encourages any team to build on their framework. It's open source. So they're saying, hey, if you

• 28:49Speaker 01

  want to come into this space and build an agent, go for it. Fork the code, do whatever you want. If you want to improve the framework, submit, you know, a pull request, we'll accept it, review and accept it. And, you know, it becomes better. A rising tide lifts all boats or whatever the phrase is, right? So as a result of that, loads of teams have Develop their own agents. And what people have done in return for that is they've donated a portion of their agents' tokens to the AI 16Z DAO fund. But emphasis on the term donation. So they're not required to, but they do it out of like, kind of like a nod to, you know, using the tooling and the framework and saying, hey, this is great. Okay. So Eliza-

• 29:33David Hoffman?

  Very bullish for AI 16Z.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Very, very, very bullish, right? And you can see the reason why a few people, you know, many people have invested in the token. But anyway, so this Eliza framework kind of gained a lot of lore, right? You know, Eliza was being talked about here and there on Twitter, on mainstream media as well, on GitHub, in a bunch of like, research communities outside of crypto as well, saying, wow, this, this framework is pretty amazing. So it kind of gained its own branding, David. And as you know, within crypto, anything that gains a bunch of branding, people want to create some kind of a meme or a token behind it, right? So Shaw went on publicly on X like a couple of weeks back and said, hey, I just want

• 30:18Speaker 01

  to let everyone know that if anyone, anyone wants to create an Eliza token, and, and to be clear here, this Eliza token doesn't represent the framework. The framework is open source. It's ties to-

• 30:30David Hoffman?

  It's irrelevant, right?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. The framework is irrelevant. Its most potent connection is with AI 16Z token. So he's talking about something completely different, which is like, if anyone wants to create an Eliza agent, or whatever that might be, to build on the lore of Eliza, you can go for it. Like, I'm not going to have any of my hands in it. You guys do it. I'm not involved. Okay? And he said that about two weeks ago. Then at the end of last week, what happened is a team released a token called Eliza.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Right, so precisely what he said, he was like, hey, if you guys want to do it, go ahead. A team released Eliza and it shot up to like, I don't know, a $30 million market cap. You know, so you know, it's doing what you would expect it to do. It builds on the law. Okay, whatever. What happened after was what was concerning. So Shaw, basically, or Shaw's team tweeted out, hey, we're also releasing an Eliza token. Here it is. Here's the contract address. Now, obviously, people are going to take the word of Shaw way more seriously than some random dev, which created the first token. So what happened was the first token plummeted and the new token shot up almost the same amount of market cap.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So it was a clear like value extraction from that original project and Shaw pretty much going against his word. Right? That's what it looks like on the face value. So I'll pause there. You can ask whatever questions and then we'll dig into what actually I think happened.

• 31:56David Hoffman?

  No, it makes, makes a pretty, yeah, so he just said, anyone feel free to do this.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, go for it.

• 32:02David Hoffman?

  And so somebody, somebody, some team did it. And then maybe he was kind of compelled, maybe a week later, he was just like compelled by that own idea. It's like, well, maybe I'll do this now.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? Maybe I can, you know, raise a bunch of money and reap the rewards. That's what it looks like from a very high level, right? If anyone was just to kind of like to crank their heads and like, look at this at a glance, they're like, hmm, this is a little weird, right?

• 32:27David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  But let's get into it, right? So on Shaw's explanation, he said the following, which is, a team approached me to launch an Eliza token. And I basically endorsed them and said, okay, you guys go ahead. So what his explanation was, was we were in the weeds, working on this for about two weeks. But my hands are absolved with this because it's a team that's doing it and I'm just supporting them. And this anon team, which launched the first token, launched it literally a day earlier. And so we just kind of like went ahead with our launch that we were going to do anyway and launched the second token. That's basically his explanation of what went down.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  So you could see that as maybe partly an honest mistake. A more facetious person might be like, okay, well, I think you actually knew what you were doing. And you wanted to kind of like jump on the hype train and make a bag here. So maybe that's why you did it. It's not really quite clear what the the truth is, but the community kind of decided that it was the former, which was he hasn't been working in crypto before, he's been shipping pretty transparently before, this seems like an honest mistake, and his responses within his Discord and publicly seems to infer that it was just an honest mistake, a pretty bad mistake. I don't want to kind of like minimize the effects of this. A lot

• 33:54Speaker 01

  of people lost money here, and I don't think that's any small thing. But in the case of things within crypto, you know, when you make a mistake, it often happens publicly. And I think it was the case when this first instance. So the kind of market punished him for it, which is like a loss in market cap, but then was like, okay, like, let's see what you do now. Let's see what you ship. Which brings us to the second debacle, which happened literally three days later, which was Shaw endorsed a token. So if you remember what I said earlier, the way this kind of works is anyone that launches an agent, donates a percentage of their supply to the AI 16Z DAO, which is good for AI 16C holders. But

• 34:38Speaker 01

  what Shaw has unofficially said is he will endorse or bring attention towards that token. And I don't think Shaw, who is developing this, I can see your face, David, I don't think Shaw, who's developing this entire framework, really gets that there can be a lot of scammers within crypto, right? Right, yes. And I don't think- Yeah, he didn't know what a door he just opened up. Exactly. And Shaw, I don't think is doing diligence on all of these different projects. Like, think about it, like, this this code has been forked around 500 times over the last five days, right? So it's like, it's not like he's doing diligence on all of these projects that are launching and donating tokens to the DAO. So he kind of publicly endorses this token. I think it's called Matal, M A T L. Please, you know, be very

• 35:20Speaker 01

  cautious, this is not investment advice. Do your own research, et cetera, et cetera. But it basically pumped, and then it straight up dumped. And it's like- Was it a rug? Zero market. It was a rug. Yeah, yeah. It was a whole, it was a straight rug. Straight rug. So- That didn't look good for Shaw.

• 35:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Right? And you'd think, okay, second time this has happened in a week. Handle things delicately.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  Hard to inspire confidence.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Hard to inspire confidence.

• 35:48David Hoffman?

  Even if they're two honest mistakes, it's hard to inspire confidence.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Exactly. You should have some form of decorum. I mean, I put this out in a tweet, but you know, you'd expect some kind of humility, decorum, and a nod towards, I'm gonna put my head down and work on developing now what I'm good at, and I'm gonna stop endorsing these tokens. Shaw did the opposite of that. Shaw kind of went out on the defensive mode and kind of like fought back against people that had lost money, kind of like stood his ground and doubled down and said, what I'm doing is right, this model is great, and the token plummeted even more. And I think this is like-

• 36:22David Hoffman?

  By the token, you mean the AI 16Z token?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  The AI 16, yeah, sorry, yeah. The AI 16Z token plummeted down. So, you remember, AI 16Z is a kind of proxy bet on the success of this AI fund, but also the success of Shaw and his team and it's his ability to execute, not only as a developer, as an engineer, but as a leader, as a CEO, as a founder.

• 36:46David Hoffman?

  Right, because he's kind of becoming the shelling point of legitimacy and performance of the AI, of the Eliza framework. And if his, his name is tarnished, people are less likely to continue to donate tokens to the DAO, continue to kind of like, you know, consider the AI 16Z DAO as the epicenter of all these things.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, that's it. And what's frustrating about all of this is his framework is still, his framework Eliza, the toolkit that he created that loads of people are using to spin up agents, is pretty amazing, you know, and it's shown by the amount of usage that it's had. So it's just a shame that we have, you know, Shaw and his team, kind of like making silly trip ups like this. And maybe it's because he hasn't got any experience in crypto, he's too trusting or naive. Either way, the market's gonna decide what that means for the team, and right now it's deciding that it's a bad thing, right? And they've made amendments in that. Since then, for example, Shaw seems to be heads down, working on development.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  He's not tweeting as publicly or at all like he did before. He's gotten rid of some members which were outed to be pretty shady and stuff. And he's cut ties with a lot of people who I think he's kind of like trusted quite a bit. But again, I put out a tweet about this. I think there are three main ways to move forward. Number one is Shaw needs to kind of like take a backseat from the leadership role, at least momentarily. Whether permanently, I have no idea, and focus on what he's good at, which is developing software. Number two is he needs to stop endorsing tokens regardless of whether they donated or any kind of that. It's just not good practice within crypto because the incentives are skewed and doesn't make sense.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  And you don't have the ability to scale that by doing diligence on these teams. And the third one is figuring out how you can tie the core power of what AI 16Z has created so far, which is its Eliza framework to its token, AI 16Z. Because I think a lot of holders are questioning what the real value accrual is. So you know, it's an important learning lesson for the team and we'll see where they go from there.

• 38:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it seems that Shaw has kind of just been like thrust into this founder position, CEO, founder. When he's, I'm guessing more of a hacker type. And a hacker becoming a CEO is like, you know, lots of learning lessons very, very quickly. Especially the crypto industry is so harsh. Like if you don't learn lessons very fast, like you're going to get punished. And it sounds like he's like kind of stumbled. Imagine just being a just a talented hacker, but then thrown into all of the trials that crypto puts you through. And you also like stumble into becoming like the epicenter of whatever the crypto meta has focused on. I would imagine that would be extremely stressful for just a hacker who doesn't understand like crypto tokens

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  and like crypto way of life.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's one way of looking at it. You know, you could say that he got a lot of attention. Very quickly and a lot of money and value accrual to the project that he's working on. And he kind of didn't know how to manage it. He got into kind of like a huge fluster. And to your point, crypto is very public. You know, there's no hiding behind corners here.

• 40:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What's the, where are we at with the Eliza token? And the one that came out of the framework is, is that dead? Is that alive? What's the story with that?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  It's a great question. It has a small contingency of supporters right now. It's mainly accruing to the one that Shaw launched. So you can still see the community aligning with the Shaw version of Eliza. As the more legitimate one.

• 40:32David Hoffman?

  From your tone and it sounds like it's kind of just more of a diminished role.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, it's quite diminished. And you know, the attention for AI 16Z, the token itself has diminished. So you can imagine what that means for its derivative tokens that aren't directly involved.

• 40:50David Hoffman?

  Right. Well, okay, so AI 16Z kind of taking a step back reminds me of the DAO. The original DAO where like the 2016 DAO, the one that created Ethereum Classic, the one that forked Ethereum. Everyone would just pool their money and there would be like investment, investment decisions by like wisdom of the crowd. I think if I even remember in like my DAO lore, there was talks about like, you know, future AI governance. I can't remember if that's true or not. It's very reminiscent of the DAO. Has there been conversations around this as it relates to AI 16Z?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Not explicitly, no, David. But I can definitely see the analogy there. This is probably like, actually something novel to bring up on this episode, to be honest. It's quite similar. I think it's not obviously happening on as large a scale as that. But within the AI meta itself, where there's a lot of attention and money focused on right now, definitely.

• 41:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you could, you could just imagine like, oh, how do I get exposure to all of these AI agents that are doing things? Well, by the basket of all of the agents, if they are truly accumulating donations of different AI agent tokens, you'd imagine that AI 16Z could in theory be a basket. How do you feel about the idea of AI 16Z being like a good basket for exposure to the AI space? Is that, how accurate of a statement do you think that would be?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I don't think it's explicitly accurate right now. I think the hope is, and the reason why people are still invested in it, is that the team is going to tie it into the framework explicitly. And that was a third point I just mentioned, which is the community, and not just me, is calling on them to have a better structure around how the token basically ties into the value that they're outputting, right? So that it's not just, right now, it's indirectly a proxy bet on the Eliza toolkit, but it's not a direct one. If you look at like competing platforms like Virtuals or Zerebro, which I'll touch upon in a second, they're looking to tie the token directly to the framework and toolkits. But that's not the case for AI 16Z.

• 42:59David Hoffman?

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• 45:13David Hoffman?

  it makes it sound like each one of these things is like a project. It's a startup. A startup without, I'm guessing, not like a registered LLC somewhere and not a Delaware LLC for like AI 16Z. It's a straight DAO. I think a lot of people are looking over at this space and they're seeing a bunch of AI meme coins. But meme coins isn't like the right descriptor if there are people working on like growing these projects and increasing the value being created. It sounds like meme coins is not right.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, to be honest, I think a lot of the crypto community has become pretty disillusioned with this and it's kind of warped their thinking. Maybe call it PTSD or whatever it might be from the bear market. So if you've been around in the crypto space for this year, you would have known about this trend of high FTV tokens being like the terrible bad guy, right? Sorry, high FTV low float coins. And what it means by that is there's a low token supply in the market to trade whatever token, but it has such a high FTV. So, you know, there'll be huge unlocks and this will dilute a bunch of retail and dump on them. And it's all really bad. It's all really bad. So the explanation for that was, okay, well,

• 46:24Speaker 01

  people are going to say no to all these smart VC thought leader coins and they're going to focus on meme coins only. Meme coins being, you know, oh, I like the look of this pet or, you know, this hippo looks super cute, right? And I think like that's a very zero or a hundred thinking, you know, they're like, okay, well, it's either black or white. I can't have anything in between. What AI agents have done is they've introduced what initially looks like kind of like a meme coin, so something which doesn't have any use. It's just kind of like a representative bet on whatever this agent does, or like this funny tweet that this goat thing made into something a lot more deeper and more intrinsic towards the actual technology that is being

• 47:06Speaker 01

  built. So we're seeing in real time, kind of like the Band-Aid being ripped off from kind of like hardened crypto community, people who have like, kind of like watched what's happened over the last year and become pretty disillusioned into something like, oh, maybe I can believe in the fundamentals again. And that's pretty much what the AI agent meta has has done so far.

• 47:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it seems like we're kind of starting with the meme, but we're backing into

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 47:32David Hoffman?

  value and project and leadership and growth.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, what's really interesting about this, David, is I would argue that in no other crypto subsector so far, so that's including like DeFi, NFTs, have we seen real impact on consumers? So that's consumer like, hey, that's you and I that are like using these things every day, but they don't really know the intricacies of it in such a big way so early on. Remember, this meta has been around in like mainstream fashion for about three and a half, sorry, four and a half weeks. And we already have, you know, people like me or random people liking tweets and then realizing, wait, hang on, wait, that wasn't a human that made that tweet. Or they're listening, they're listening to music and they're saying, wait, you're saying an AI made this? I don't believe you at all.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  So there's all these arguments going on being like, wait, it can't actually be this good, can it? Wait, can it? Or can't it? You know? So it's kind of like engaging with users in a way that most kind of previous matters have either been too niche to do so, or just haven't existed at all. You know, they've just kind of been white papers. So it's it's an interesting jump.

• 48:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, there's been one AI agent that I've interacted with, or at least consumed its tweets on Twitter. Do you follow the AI XBT Twitter account?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 48:50David Hoffman?

  It's so good. It's so good. It's just tweeting out just like, you know, market facts about both history and current events, about things going on in the market. Like, wasn't necessarily ready for a random fact about like the liquidity behind the AVE token, but just tweeting out stuff. Oh, my God, it's so useful.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  It's amazing. So a bit of background for listeners here is this AI XBT agent is basically an agent that is trained off of all of crypto Twitter's tweets. So crypto Twitter being all the different teams that are building different apps, projects, et cetera, and podcast transcripts and a bunch of documentation outside of it. So what it means is it's a constant agent that is just researching all the things that are happening in crypto. And what its output is, is it processes everything and then analyzes trends and says, hmm, this team has done something really cool recently. Here's a short tweet thread. It's like five tweets, typically two sentences each.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  And it really succinctly discusses what the advantages of that might be to its associated token. So let's say we use the AVE example that David mentioned, say, hey, liquidity has gone up, et cetera, et cetera. It's lowered risk for using the AVE system. Maybe this is good for the AVE token. You know, that's just one very vague example. But it does this across all different projects, across all different sectors. And if you can think about it, the amount of research and development that happens in crypto every day, it's impossible for a single person to keep up to date. Even like if you read research put out by some of these top research firms, you still don't know what's going on. So having an AI agent that just kind of like appears on your timeline, feeds you things really succinctly, and you can make an investment decision based on that.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying you should, but I'm saying it's a form of research is phenomenal. And like I've used it, I've found myself engaging it without realizing that it was a bot or an agent. It's pretty impressive.

• 50:41David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this bot that we're talking about, AI XBT.

• 50:47David Hoffman?

  We just went and talked about the Eliza framework for a lot and talking about how it's like one of the most downloaded framework to use for AI agents. This is actually not an Eliza framework. This is something else called Virtuals. And then, and there's also something called Zerobro, Zerobro?

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Zerobro, yeah, yeah.

• 51:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, can we get into this? So are these like alternative frameworks?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's get into it. And the reason, I think, why you mentioned that, David, is we were just talking about AI 16Z. And we were talking about how some of the core technology that they have is called Eliza, which is this agent framework, which is number two trending repository on GitHub. It has over 1,800 stars, which is kind of like an upvote, which is very impressive for any kind of GitHub repository, and it's been forked like 500 times. So the long story short is developers or software engineers love their Eliza code and they're using it to create their agents. So it's really good, super good for AI 16Z. But with all the drama that's happened recently, they've kind of like taken a little bit of a backseat, at least publicly, and they're kind of like working on their stuff behind the scenes. But

• 51:51Speaker 01

  in the meantime, you've had these two separate teams, these two separate protocols. So one is called Virtuals that you mentioned. And the other is called Zerobro, which is an AI agent in itself as well as a token, and I'll get into that in a second, that have each individually released their own agent tool development kits. So what I'm saying here, or what I'm seeing rather here, is Eliza framework is gaining a bit of competition now. You have other teams entering the space that want to kind of compete for this moat of infrastructure agent kits that will help accrue value to either their own respective ecosystems or the quality of agents that are built on top of it. So let's start with Virtuals.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  The best way to think about Virtuals is it's kind of, it can be described, or they describe themselves as a pump dot fun for AI agents. So what that means is they have a platform. And it's super easy to spin up an agent which has a token associated with it. And it's kind of like a fair launch mechanism. I think you can only have a billion tokens max per agent, similar to Pumped Up Fund or exactly like Pumped Up Fund. And you are able to kind of like fund its token along a bonding curve, which is pretty much exactly like Pumped Up Fund. But anyway, the point of Virtuals is it's a really slick, easy platform for you to come up and spin up an agent,

• 53:11Speaker 01

  connected to Twitter, connected to Discord, give it autonomy to tweet, et cetera, in a really simple, kind of like processed out flow. And what they did this week was they released what they called their Agent Starter Kit, which is the equivalent to Eliza. It's their version of Eliza, which is a toolkit which helps them kind of like build all these things. And it's been received pretty well so far. And that's kind of like the framework that AI XBT that we just mentioned is kind of like leveraged. They've used their own infrastructure as well, but you know, they're kind of integrating with this Virtuals platform as well. And then on the other hand, and just to quickly summarize, we have something called Zerebro. Now, Zerebro, you can kind of describe it as an AI agent. It is an AI agent. It has its own Twitter account.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Its follower account has basically gone up and to the right for the last two weeks. And it's a really engaging Twitter account, kind of similar to Truth Terminal or the account behind the Gospel of Goatsy. It puts out tweets that sound very human, that are very comedic, very relevant. They get involved in, it gets involved in kind of DMs, replies to other tweets. It's a really fine tuned algorithm. And the guy behind it, Jeffy Yu, is basically kind of like the brains and he's got a team of, I think, about eight people, which have kind of like fine tuned the model behind Zerebro to make it as engaging, to make it as relevant to the tweets that you see online.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And what Jeffy has released recently this week is something called Zerapy. So Z E R E P Y, I think it's a nod to Python code. And it's released his own development kit. And the reason why this is particularly exciting is the standard and quality of engineering, David, for Zerebro and from the Zerebro team, has been pretty stupendous, pretty amazing. Well regarded. Yeah, very well regarded. I would actually say at this point, it's probably on par to the types or quality of agent that you see coming from the AI 16Z side of things.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  So if you imagine, if you could get access to the tooling and kit behind creating something like Zerebro, that would make you pretty excited. And that's pretty much what Jeffy has done here. He's kind of released this framework. He's kind of slowly rolling it out. But once developers get access to this, I'm really excited to see where it goes. And Eliza has real competition.

• 55:40David Hoffman?

  Amazing. Okay, so there are three competing frameworks, all competing to have the majority of agents being built using their framework. And then there's probably some perceived ways, like if you're the dominant framework, there's some value creation that happened on your framework, which just goes back to tokens that are related to your framework. So like if there's a competition here, if there's like a three-way competition between these three frameworks, how is, what are they actually fighting over? Because like the value creation of the tokens isn't like one-to-one paired with the agents. Like, how do they actually capture value if they're releasing open source software?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the big question, right? And the thought is, I think all of these teams, so Virtuals, Zerebro, and AI 16Z, respectively, are all going to tie their main tokens to the framework in some way. The most explicit way that has been done so far has been shown by the Virtuals team, where if you are launching any kind of an agent on their platform explicitly, so think about it as their front end, because you can't, you can't put a paywall on open source code. It's there. Anyone can kind of fork it and do whatever they want. But what you can do is take the approach of creating a front end, which, you know, most people flock to, maybe like 80% or 70% or whatever,

• 57:03Speaker 01

  90% of developers come to and say, okay, well, I could fork the code, but I'm just going to use the kind of like front end way of this. And then there's a tax or a fee towards launching your agent. And that could be like a percentage of the token supply. In the case of Virtuals, it is burning a portion of the Virtuals token, which is their protocol token, in order to launch your agent. Also, in order to swap in and out of these agent tokens, it has to be paired with the Virtuals token. So that kind of creates another problem.

• 57:33David Hoffman?

  The Virtuals coin is the money for the Virtuals ecosystem.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:36David Hoffman?

  It's the base, it's the base trading pair.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  It's ultrasound agent money. Yeah, exactly. If you wanna, if you wanna describe it that way. Yeah.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  So you can go to the Virtuals website and you can see Luna. Luna is the one, we've talked about this on, on the podcast and in other places. That was like the, kind of the, the first one. Here's AI XBT. So AI XBT, the bot that we were just talking about, is the highest valued bot agent on the Virtuals platform, coming in at $70 million. But then Virtuals itself, the Virtuals token, coming in at almost $600 million.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:08David Hoffman?

  And so this is, this is the thing that AI 16Z, Zero Bro, has not been able to do, which is really make a strong conduit between the growth of its framework with a, a token. But also, you can use, you can use the Virtuals framework independently of the front end. You can still kind of use it outside of the front end. It's just the convenience is being captured by the Virtuals token.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That is correct. Yep.

• 58:35David Hoffman?

  Wow. Okay. Okay. So Eliza, Zero Bro, Virtuals, are these, are these the three frameworks? Like, is this, is this?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43David Hoffman?

  No more coming in?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:44David Hoffman?

  What's the competition sphere look like?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  So I think we're gonna see a, a large proliferation of these frameworks from other teams. But right now, these are the three leaders. And to be clear, we've spoken about Virtuals, we've spoken about Zero Bro. I'm massively bullish on both of them. I actually really wanna encourage to see more teams and toolkits coming, because I think it'll just lead to the, you know, much better quality agents overall being launched into the space, which is what I wanna see personally. But AI 16Z's framework is still the leader right now. They've kind of like got the lead. When we next check in on our next episode, it'll be interesting to see how frameworks like Zerapy and Virtuals Agent Starter Kit has kind of picked up. I think that'll be the real test to see whether.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Agents have just latched on to a singular framework in the LIZO, whether they are flexible with what they do. My guess is they're going to be flexible because I think we're very early in this meta. And I think a lot of trust has been lost in the AI 16Z side of things, but who knows? This is crypto, anything could can turn around and I'm hoping it does.

• 59:45David Hoffman?

  So this fight over frameworks, agent frameworks, is this kind of like the main focus point of the crypto AI sector? Like that's kind of what the most attention is and the most investment is like going around. Cause there's like AI agent side quests. Is this kind of like the main thing, the main show?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  When you say crypto AI meta, do you mean the agent meta specifically or the wider?

• 1:00:07David Hoffman?

  The agent meta.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  The agent meta. Yeah, so I would say if you kind of think about the midwit meme, you know, where you have like a distribution of people. The people on the right, yeah, the bell curve meme, the people on the right side are heavily focused on this infrastructure thing right now. They're like, oh, okay. So like some of the funds are thinking, okay, well, this is an infrastructure play. It's looking to be like, kind of like an L1 of an agent. And like, I know that it works because I'm seeing the agents themselves being really high quality. And these teams are releasing their software. Amazing, cool. Let's figure out what the infrastructure play is here, right? Then you have the guys all the way on the left who is like, oh, the agent's funny, you know? What toolkit? Okay, that's cool, whatever, just make a cool funny tweet, bro. You know what I mean? Like, let me, let me engage in this, you know?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  So yes and no, to a certain portion of people that are fixated on this space.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  You know, there are a lot of people focused on infrastructure, but there's still definitely an audience that just, you know, likes to be entertained and consume. And that's kind of typically what we see with a lot of these major groundbreaking technologies. There's people that like, like the chat GPT and likes it to tell us what to do and how to do things. And there are people that are like, but how does this work? Oh, OpenAI, okay, sick, you know, can I invest in OpenAI? No, you know, so like it's, it's really interesting, you know?

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  One thing, Eeja, that I'm noticing, when I went and looked at that AI XPT agent, Virtuals, that's on Base, that's a Base agent. Goat is a token on Solana, AI 16Z, that's a token on Solana. And so there seems to be some, some intentional split between Base and Solana as these blockchains that these agents are, are issuing their token on. What's the conversation about the chain, chain relevancy to these agents?

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's super interesting. So when this whole thing exploded, the focus was all on Solana and Solana AI agents. And there are many reasons why I think that is, and we can get into that in a second. But just observationally, a lot of the activity was happening on Solana. You would have an agent associate itself with a pump dot fun token, which uses Solana, or it itself autonomously releases a token via pumped up fun. Because I don't know, it's probably like one of the easiest ways that it can launch its token. So as a result of that, the community that engaged with these agents were on Solana.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  And that kind of like created a flywheel of all these agents being kind of like produced on on Solana. That being said, a quiet resurgence started happening on the base side of things. So you had Virtuals, which is a team which has been around for actually quite a number of years, building their frameworks and tooling very thoughtfully, which has associated itself so far with Base, which is the Ethereum L2 that we speak about quite a lot here. And it kind of like chose Base to kind of integrate its own software, to launch agents off of, you know, cheap attacks, et cetera, et cetera. So Virtuals has really been kind of like the the kingpin of launching agents on Base, or the blue chip, if you like.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And we're seeing kind of like similar developments and activities of agents being created on Base via things like Farcaster, or whatever that might be, so using Ethereum L2 specifically. So there's this dichotomy between Base agents and Solana agents. I would say most of the activity, or rather, most of the liquidity right now and attention is on the Solana side of things, but we could easily see this being flipped. And I want to give my two cents as to why I think we see this split, right? And I tweeted about this, but let me let me try and summarize some thoughts here, which is, I think the reason why Solana exploded is because a lot of their agents are natively integrated into Twitter.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  They are tweeting on Twitter. They are not trying to create their own social media platform from scratch, which comes with pros and cons, right? It's harder to integrate and give an agent autonomy on a centralized social media platform. But then again, that's where all the eyeballs are, right? And if you argue that an agent's main goal is to Uh, you know, aggregate as much attention as it can so it can survive. It would need to be on the platform where most of the eyeballs are, where it can potentially capture audiences beyond just crypto people, which is Twitter is like one of the most perfect places for that. Now, if you look on the base agent side of things, you notice that a lot of them actually operate on this platform called Farcaster, which, you know, Dan created this amazing

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  platform, decentralized social media, and it's doing super well, but still the audience in my belief is still very limited to crypto native people. Now, will that change? Absolutely, you know, and do I expect that to grow? Yes. But the question is for right now and in the short or slash medium term, is it more advantageous to launch your agent on there? So, so let's talk about the advantages of launching on something like Farcaster on base. Well, you have a much easier native integration, right? You know, you have an agent that can spin up an account. Its account already has an Ethereum wallet, right?

• 1:05:22David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  And it can interact with users that also have Ethereum wallets. So if it wants to tip someone for doing something, if it wants to pay someone to do something on its behalf, it happens really easily.

• 1:05:34David Hoffman?

  It's all enshrined. A lot of the tech is really enshrined into the Farcaster ecosystem.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But what lacks on the Farcaster ecosystem is eyeballs compared to something like Twitter.

• 1:05:46David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right. Okay, so there's a tension here, like liquidity, users, eyeballs, definitely won by Solana. But some like really powerful enshrined features go to the, to the base in the Farcaster ecosystem.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  I would argue that a lot of the truly autonomous agents are on like, using something like base or Farcaster.

• 1:06:08David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Purely because it's just all on-chain integrations.

• 1:06:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I've been playing around in the base Farcaster ecosystem this last weekend. I don't know how tapped in you were this weekend, uh, because you've been in, in India.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Ad on and stuff.

• 1:06:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And well, Anon, Anon's really started my interest, but there's this thing called Clinkerbot, which people have been. The OG. So yeah, so the Clinkerbot is this token on base on Farcaster, this agent on Farcaster, and you can just request it to make a token. And then it'll just mint you a token. You, when you send a tweet, when you send it a cast, you can request a token with a ticker name and a photo, and it'll use the photo, and it'll just make you a token. And people have been using this kind of like as a pump dot fun proxy. It's not, it doesn't have that same interface because you're just tweeting at it or you're just casting at it, but it's the same kind of vibe of just like, hey, make me a token. I learned, I learned that there's this AI agent called Aether out there in Farcaster,

• 1:07:04David Hoffman?

  which had a tweet, so there that, this is one agent that tweeted out to the Clinkerbot agent, asking it to make it a token called Lum. And so there's a token, there's a third token called Lum that was created from one agent talking to another agent to create this token, and now a third token has been created called Lum. And you're just starting to see, like, you can imagine Anon is another, it's not even, it's not even an AI agent. Anon is this ZK app where if you have enough Anon tokens, you can connect your wallet, it'll verify your supply of tokens, and then you can tweet from this ZK hidden account. So no one knows who's tweeting out of this account because, you know, all of our tweets are commingled with everyone else's, and even the server operator doesn't know.

• 1:07:46David Hoffman?

  But in theory, you could use this hidden ZK privacy Farcaster account to tweet at the Clinkerbot to make a, to make a new token. And like, I'm getting glimpses of like, kind of same thing in like 2019 with like DeFi money Legos, like, oh, like, let's hook in Ave into Uniswap and to make her DAO, and it's like weave these things together. I'm starting to see like this AI agent, like Lego system of them being able to have like open APIs with each other and start to kind of grow an agentic ecosystem, if you will, on Farcaster. That's been my experience over the last like two days.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, to summarize what you're saying is it just improves the UX of using crypto drastically.

• 1:08:29David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  You know, instead of like going on to this niche platform, checking the URL and making sure it's like all good and we're not getting rugged. And then, you know, kind of like typing out this complex bonding curve thing and not knowing how many tokens you're going to get. You just tell the agent to do something for you.

• 1:08:44David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Uh, better yet, you get an agent to just do it itself.

• 1:08:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  And say, hey, do what you want, create your token and off you go, you know, just give me 2% of the supply or whatever that might look like. It's a weird world.

• 1:08:55David Hoffman?

  Amazing. Uh, what are you looking for? What are you looking at? What are you paying attention to over the next like seven days, 10 days? We don't know when we're going to do episode number two, um, but, uh, if listeners are pilled by this and they want to just like keep up with the trend on their own, can you point them in a direction so that they can try and keep up on their own? Like, what are you looking at?

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, I'm looking at, at a very high level, I'm looking at both Base and Solana as platforms to launch these agents. So kind of similar to the topic we were just discussing, I want to see if the base agents have wings. I think like a lot of development is happening there and not many people are really aware of it or are paying attention to it. Um, and I think that that's potentially a bit of alpha there if we kind of like focus on the quality of agents like AI XPT and stuff that are coming out of it. Kind of like digging a level deeper, I'm focused on those infrastructure teams that I mentioned or those teams that are releasing infrastructure. So virtual, Zerebro, AI 16Z to see kind of like what their next steps are, following all the drama from AI 16Z.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  And, um, seeing where developers are kind of like, you know, working and, and seeing what kind of comes out of that. And then digging a la- a level deeper after that is, I think we're on the verge of entering of agents entering a new media form. So we've kind of seen, um, gospel of GoToYourTruth Terminal experiment with, um, AI-generated images and now music. We've seen Zerebro do the same thing with images and, um, music. But these have been, you know, human assisted to some form, especially the music generation. I think we're going to reach a point pretty quickly, uh, say, give it two, two weeks or so, where these guys are going to have TikTok.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Um capabilities and the ability to generate their own videos and lore. And I'm super curious to see how that works, you know, because it could be super clunky to start off with, but it may also tap into a new medium of TikTok followers that are non crypto that want to, you know, get involved in this space. And the reason why I think that's possible is because of the whole TikTok trend that happened literally this week with

• 1:11:06David Hoffman?

  Chill Guy.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Chill Guy, and we're not going to get into it, but like, you know, there's a bunch of things that happened, which kind of like brought in a ton of holders of crypto that never held crypto before. So I'm curious to see what happens when agents and this TikTok meta kind of overlap.

• 1:11:20David Hoffman?

  The big takeaway that I've gotten so far is like, there's just so many puzzle pieces out there. And these puzzle pieces, a lot of them already exist, right? Like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, any web two app that has generated the in the in the attention economy. Like, we've already generated these like attention Loki web two apps, you know, Twitter, YouTube, with like these distribution algorithms. We've already generated these blockchains. Now people are kind of putting together these agent frameworks. There's just a lot of puzzle pieces coming together. And I think the the meta race is just seeing who can weave together the most interesting, most valuable puzzle pieces the quickest. Maybe maybe that's kind of like a I'll leave that with like listeners to consider as as we are moving forward.

• 1:12:06David Hoffman?

  EJAS, this has been really helpful, my man. I mean, I'm really excited about this series.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Awesome. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:12:10David Hoffman?

  No, thanks. Thanks for doing it, my man. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Crypto and AI, maybe even riskier. You can lose what you put in. Maybe an AI agent can steal it from you as well. We don't know because we are on the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. New projects are coming online to the Mantle Layer Two every single week. Why is this happening? Maybe it's because Mantle has been on the frontier of Layer Two design architecture since it first started building Mantle DA powered by technology from EigenDA. Maybe it's because users are coming on to the Mantle Layer Two to capture some of the highest yields available in DeFi and to automatically receive the points and tokens being accrued by the three billion Million-dollar Mantle Treasury in the Mantle Rewards Station. Maybe it's because the Mantle team is one of the most helpful teams to build with,

• 1:12:55David Hoffman?

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• 1:13:40David Hoffman?

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