AI ROLLUP #11: $97B Elon OpenAI Rumor | AI Crypto Rebound? | Virtuals on Solana | ARC Launchpad

Ejaaz and David reunite to dissect the AI Crypto sector’s rebound from a 70% crash, fueled by Elon’s rumored $97B OpenAI bid and the relentless rise of open-source devs being heads down. They explore how tokens might be the most accessible path to AI exposure, why ARC’s curated launchpad could elevate agent quality, and what Virtuals’ move onto Solana means for cross-chain expansion. Meanwhile, X (Twitter) embraces a new wave of AI agents, and AI16z reorganizes to stay competitive. Is this the turning point for AI and crypto—or just another plateau? Tune in to find out, anon. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🏦ONDO | INSTITUTIONAL GRADE FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Ondo ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/34 ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:17 Crypto x AI Exposure Strategy 10:56 Elon’s $97B OpenAI Bid 13:14 Crypto x AI Mindshare & Markets https://www.cookie.fun/ https://x.com/S4mmyEth/status/1889675738099376149 https://x.com/dv_memetics/status/1888956005515477372 https://x.com/0xelonmoney/status/1889743777088360909 22:48 Andrej Karpathy https://x.com/karpathy https://x.com/hyperbolic_labs/status/1887229114769359013 22:58 Replit comes out with a mobile app https://x.com/Replit/status/1887159041455169683 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 33:12 X (Twitter) is getting involved in agents https://x.com/ethermage/status/1887526320487473326 37:24 ARC reveals their new launchpad & agent launch https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/1889768219873099902 https://x.com/askjimmy_ai/status/1889736290696045017 https://x.com/0thTachi/status/1887620290727059731 51:17 Virtuals are live on Solana! https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1889365020393496910 https://x.com/gkisokay/status/1889721779146596503 https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1887508625268367843 https://x.com/gkisokay/status/1889331963917729993 59:03 AIXBT holders can now connect X account = richer agent interactions https://x.com/aixbt_terminal/status/1887355817957204434 1:02:46 Ai16z (ElizaOS): a brutally raw take https://x.com/CryptoStreamHub/status/1887435927309721992 1:07:57 What Ejaaz focused on this upcoming week 1:08:59 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.

• 0:07David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to the AI rollup where we stay up to speed with the emerging trends and developments in the AI crypto space. I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host EJAS. EJAS, how was your week, my man?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Good, man. Markets have bounced back. I'm seeing green on the charts for the first time.

• 0:21David Hoffman?

  Markets are not dead. Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  My ego, my ego is now preserved, David. I was about to lose it last week, but it's feeling pretty good, man. I have noticed like a lot of teams are just heads down building. A lot of teams are complaining. Don't get me wrong.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  It's the only thing to do.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But whether you like that or not, the market, aka crypto Twitter, definitely just resonates with prices. And so it's nice to see a bit of a relief so that the people's work can actually be a little more appreciated.

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  Yeah, like we were talking about all throughout last week, just the hot air is out of the bubble. We have been at a, call it a $6.5 to $7 billion market cap for all of February. So we haven't gone up. We haven't gotten down. So we are flat for 12 days and 12 days is like, at least in terms of how long we've been doing this. That's like 20% of the entire longevity of this thing as people have been paying.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  I've aged 10 years.

• 1:16David Hoffman?

  You've aged 10 years. Yeah. I want to kind of start with a zoomed out perspective here on this episode of EJAS about kind of just like what we're doing, why we're doing this and what this sector really means. I think people can kind of interpret crypto AI as this niche within this niche, which I think it currently is. And that's kind of what we're doing. It's a of the total crypto market cap of 3.2 trillion. The total market cap of crypto AI is 7 billion. So it's incredibly small. But I think the potential of the crypto AI sector is what we're really here for and what we're trying to talk about. And I maybe have this like positioning that I think might be useful for you and me as we do these episodes, but also for the listener. So you ready?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yep. Go for it, man.

• 2:01David Hoffman?

  Okay, so say you're a modern day investor, which you are, so am I, so is the average listener here, and you just want exposure to AI. Obviously, you want exposure to AI because it's 2025. Like, the modern millennial, Gen Z investor wants to invest in AI, not like It's everywhere. Or manufacturing, like AI is where all the growth is. That's why we're predicting so much growth coming. So like, I want, I want exposure to AI. So you can either buy TradFi, Silicon Valley Equities, Nvidia, 3.1 trillion dollar market cap, Microsoft, 3.1 trillion dollar market cap, Google, 2 trillion, Amazon, 1.9 trillion, Meta, 1.3 trillion.

• 2:42David Hoffman?

  Like, very expensive, very highly priced software companies, tech companies. Every single one of these, other than Meta, is valued higher than Bitcoin. And also, in addition to that, every single one of these is a diversified basket of like, a variety of products and services, some AI-related, many of them not. So it's actually just not even perfect AI exposure to begin with. Now, not to knock down these companies, there are benefits of investing in these companies in order to gain exposure to AI, if that's what you're seeking. They, they have all the proprietary user data, and that can only come from the value of proprietary user data, which is very powerful in the AI context, can only really come from

• 3:26David Hoffman?

  closed-source walled gardens of Silicon Valley and Web2. So that will kind of always be their main advantage, their main edge that they have versus other investment vehicles. Also, worth noting, on the same subject, this advantage is something that like, the arms racing nation-states of United States and China will also help fight over. Data is the line that's drawn between China and United States in the AI arms race. And you can, you can gain exposure to this investable value of data through these companies, albeit through very high-priced tags. Okay, so that's one option to gain exposure to AI as a category. The other option is you can venture out into the world of crypto AI,

• 4:06David Hoffman?

  which, other than investing in the private market space, like private AI startups, which is closed off to most people, really the only way to gain exposure to AI, as I understand it, is through crypto AI. And that's because there's some inherent resonance between the value of open source AI and crypto AI through tokens. We all learned that the big takeaway from the DeepSeek R1 model is that while there are billions and billions of dollars being poured into developing these frontier, highly capable, highly sophisticated models from the Silicon Valley companies, these models, when they get released, get deconstructed and reproduced by the market extremely quickly.

• 4:48David Hoffman?

  The digestive process of copycats, once that is finished, the value of that model is now just owned by the public domain. It's in the open source world for anyone to use. We saw people, like things like Eric Voorhees' Venice platform and many other platforms, just integrate R1 just instantly. And so the value of ChatGPT and the models that the R1 model copied just ended up in the open source domain very, very fast. And so this is where the crazy, creative developers in the open source AI sector really take over here, rather than billions and the trillion-dollar companies that are all competing to produce the most valuable model. On the open source AI sector, we have this army of open source developers

• 5:29David Hoffman?

  that are applying these models, that are leveraging these models in crazy, experimental, innovative, call it risky, ways. And so we have a tale of two worlds here. In contrast, Silicon Valley, China are in this arms race to produce the same monolithic product, which is a really good model. Like, all of these billions of dollars in Meta, Amazon, Elon Musk, OpenAI, China, they're all producing really good models, the same product. They're all going after the same product, they're all going after the same space. And they're also really highly valued. And then also things like OpenAI aren't even public, you can't even buy OpenAI. In crypto, on the flip side of things, these extremely frontier, niche, creative, risky endeavors

• 6:12David Hoffman?

  are valued anywhere between $10 million and $1 billion. I think Virtuals is the most highly valued crypto AI token at 1.3 billion. Maybe Tensor, BitTensor is up there, too. And they're simply leveraging the fruits of the AI model's arms race, and they don't even have to do any of the work. And so I don't really know what products and services will emerge out of this open source AI sector, but that's what we're doing here on this podcast. We are doing these podcast series about what these creative exploratory developers are working with AI models. And that's exactly what I'd say like our North Star is on these podcast series. And I think really the point that I want to drive home here is that so much of the investable opportunities for AI

• 6:56David Hoffman?

  remains in the tokenized open source crypto AI sector. You have the value of open source AI, which is massive. And then you slap a token on it and that becomes a way that the value of open source AI gets monetized. And that is what I would describe as much of what the content that we cover here on this podcast series is. So that's like kind of my like thesis, my, my model, my North Star. I think we've, we've said this in a variety of different ways and a handful of different times on the podcast, but I kind of want to just open up this podcast once again of reminding our us and also listeners about that.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. I mean, just to kind of summarize that from, from what I've heard at least, David, like AI is the most exciting sector and probably the most lucrative sector to ever befall humanity, right? And it's happening right now in front of us. Every week there's a new update, a new major model breakthrough. And you're saying typically, the way that these things are invested in pushes out 99% of people. And even people that like take the time to research, learn and, and you know, try and teach themselves about these things. They don't have any access because it's private rounds or you have to wait until it's public and then it goes to trillions of dollars until you can buy it. Hence the Nvidia

• 8:09Speaker 01

  and stuff. And you're saying that crypto not only offers us a new way to invest in these things via tokens, but it also allows us to invest in a wider range of products, services, and companies because of its open source nature. Am I getting that right, David?

• 8:27David Hoffman?

  That's exactly right. And there's something about the nature of tokens that's kind of just aligned with the investable appetite of people these days. We, we know that financial nihilism is in, starting from like the GME movement. Back in 2021, but people are really looking to like invest 500 to $5,000 and trying to 10x 100x that that amount. And that is something for better or for worse, it's something that is like, that is, that's crypto. That's what crypto does. There's a reason why this AI crypto sector also started highly overlapping with the meme coin sector. Cause a lot of these AI tokens started as tokens launched on pump dot fun.

• 9:04David Hoffman?

  And so there's just kind of like investor appetite resonance with AI crypto tokens that are like valued between, you know, $10 million and $1 billion. I think that is matching the zeitgeist of the times for investors.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Well, let's just be honest with everyone for a second here, right, David? The main reason why these tokens weren't really recognized as quasi equity instruments is because we had governments that were just very much against acknowledging any of this, right? And now we have the most pro crypto US government ever, which kind of like leads and has a knock on effect to every other nation in the country. I'm sorry, in the world that than we've ever had. So if there's ever going to be an opportune time to combine like tokens with a real investable opportunity into real tech that's being built in an open source fashion, it's probably now.

• 9:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And especially as I think that is what everyone is getting excited about. That's what that was, that big bubble was that we are kind of on the tail end where the total crypto market cap of AI tokens was at 15, 18 billion dollars, excuse me, almost, almost $20 billion. We are now down to $7 billion, but now everyone realizes this, this is the game. Like there is immense value in open source AI. And the only way that open source AI can become monetized by developers is with crypto tokens.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  It sounds like you're saying we've bottomed, David. Don't, don't say the word. I don't want you to say the word, but it sounds like that's what you're saying. Don't drink it, but.

• 10:32David Hoffman?

  Well, I think if anyone is like, I mean, I think too late now we've, I, this is, you know, we've, we've already done the thing that you just said, but it's just a good reminder for like, why this isn't not a one term blip of a bubble that happened in, you know, January of 2025, but this is actually an ongoing sector that's going to be alive and iterative and worth paying attention to and keeping tabs on as we go forward.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  I appreciate that, David. And actually, on that serious note, I want to move on to something a little more serious as well that happened this week, because obviously, there was a million

• 11:04David Hoffman?

  Is this a serious, serious, or is this an e-jazz serious?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  David, look at my face. For those of you who are looking at the podcast, look at my face. I'm not cracking a single smile. This is serious. David, do you remember that one time that a certain Elon Musk said he'd be down to buy Twitter for $44 billion? And everyone called his buff. Do you remember that time?

• 11:22David Hoffman?

  I remember.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Do you remember that time when he actually then proceeded to buy Twitter for $44 billion? That's pretty outrageous, right?

• 11:30David Hoffman?

  And to this day, I don't know if he originally intended to or not.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, who knows? It's kind of like he's rolling the dice, right? But it can't possibly get any crazier than that. Yeah, well, it looks like this week Elon's trying to buy OpenAI for $97 billion. In a bunch of news articles that sprung up yesterday, I believe, or two days ago, Elon and a group that he was leading of investors presumably, basically made an offer for $97.4 billion.

• 11:59David Hoffman?

  What was OpenAI's valuation prior to that?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So this is the thing that's being contested right now. So they want to attribute OpenAI with like a $44 billion valuation. And Sam's like, hey, it's a nonprofit, or like, he's trying to get like the valuation like a little lower or whatever. And now Sam's kind of like contesting and saying, you know, it's not worth that much. And then, oh, sorry, it should be worth more or whatever. And basically Elon's come and said, hey, we'll give a few $97 billion for it right now. And Sam said, no, which kind of goes in contradiction to what he was saying. So I don't know, there's a few things playing out here, but I thought that was pretty hilarious and wild that we have like, these two guys just going at it, essentially.

• 12:42David Hoffman?

  Interesting. I don't really know what to make of this. Like, once again, I don't really know if Elon is doing Elon shenanigans, or if he's actually trying to buy OpenAI. I can't remember what the valuation was on their most recent funding round. I think it was somewhere around $300 billion. So that would be a pretty fat discount from Elon to OpenAI investors.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also like, yeah, I think it was for the controlling entity of OpenAI, whatever that means. But anyway, we can, we can move on into crypto open source stuff, as you said, David. Let's, let's pull up the cookie dashboard. I think you've had it up here. Okay, so we look at the markets right now. I'm noticing two things. Number one, you mentioned it earlier, we're ranging between $6.5 billion total market cap, and I think around $7.3 billion market cap.

• 13:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And that's just been the case for the last couple of weeks, as you said, since the start of Feb. And I think a lot of this is just tied to macro, macro being Bitcoin primarily, right? Until Bitcoin kind of breaks out of its range of 90 to 100K and blasts upwards, or, God forbid, downwards, will we then see kind of like a major divergence of this total market cap share? The second thing I'm noticing, David, is kind of something we're going to dig into later, but look at that Solana and Base discrepancy. So we've mentioned this a few times. Typically, these have been a lot closer, like, kind of tiny. And arguably, they still are, yeah. Arguably, they still are, but now there's a billion-dollar difference.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  And it's interesting to see how this market dominance from Solana trends in the time going forward. So, you know, we have some breaking news that, you know, Virtuals was going to launch on Solana a few weeks ago, and now they've actually launched this week, and we'll get into that later in the episode. But I don't know, what are your thoughts, David? Do you think like Solana has kind of like tracked a moat here by any chance? Or do you think this is just kind of like hand-wavy price stuff going on?

• 14:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't think Solana's always been ahead. We have Solana, the market cap of all AI tokens on Solana is at 3.5 billion. On base, it's at 2.65. If you look at the gap, you can see the chart, like this. Solana has always had a meaningful lead, but I don't think that these two lines, the market cap gap between Base and Solana, are like diverging in any, in any direction. It is interesting to note that the $2.65 billion of market cap of tokens on Base, well, I mean, that's all Virtuals, right? Virtuals is 1.3 billion, so Virtuals, the Virtuals token alone represents 50% of total base AI tokens market cap. And I don't know what the equivalent is for Solana, or if there is even one.

• 15:27David Hoffman?

  Like, what is, what's the most valuable AI token on Solana?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's probably AI 16Z, right? If we're talking about like the protocol side of things. But now I think we're going to see a lot of virtuals value from base port over to Solana. They have their like Stargate bridge setup, which basically allows you to port tokens. And that's just the virtuals tokens. But I've seen a lot of projects on virtuals actually port their token over to Solana as well, which is crazy.

• 15:52David Hoffman?

  I wonder if they are going to double count that because what that does is the the virtuals token on base will go into a contract address on base. And then a a IOU token will be minted on Solana. And then that in theory, depending on what cookie.fund does, might double count that. So I think if if they are listening, which I think they do listen to these podcasts, they should actually subtract the value of virtuals in the bridge contract. So that it only is counted once when it gets sent over into Solana.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. Let's pull up the mindshare chart. I think we we have this tweet from Sammy just posted today. If you scroll down, there we go. We track this every. Yeah, this is Kaido and we and we track this every week on our episodes. The reason why we have we show price and then mindshare is because both are often quite correlated with one another. The higher the mindshare sector has, the higher or better their token prices do in that particular sector. And we've seen a notable regression for the AI mindshare, David, but it's still standing tall.

• 16:56David Hoffman?

  It's still number one, though.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  It's still number one. It's been like this for a year and a half.

• 16:59David Hoffman?

  It's still number one by a lot. It's still almost it's like two and a half times the second place, which is DeFi. Interesting that DeFi is getting such a dominant.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, but my theory here is DeFi is becoming more popular because DeFi AI is being discussed way more. And it's having, yeah, and it's having a spillover effect into DeFi protocols that are like figuring out, okay, well, what's our AI strategy? I might be coping, but I I do think that there is a spillover notably here. But whether you like it or not, I think a lot of attention has been drawn to other things over the last week. You know, we had the, I think there was the Barra Chain launch and just people were just kind of jaded with AI in general after seeing it. On an average of 70%, but we're starting to see it stabilize and slowly increase. I think it's it bottomed at around 29% and now it's slowly increasing above.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  So I'm curious to see how this kind of develops over time. But let's look at some of the most reflexive tokens of this market bounce, David. So as we're recording this episode this week, we've seen a notable rebound of some of the top AI tokens within this sector. And by notable, I mean like these things are up like between 30 to 60%. And if we look at some like at some of the the large caps which are rebounded, we've got Cookie. So Cookie is rated to the data dashboard that we just had up. Ark, Ark Token, I think they had a pretty big week. We've got some news that just broke literally a few hours ago, which we're going to talk about. AI 16Z with their new tokenomics and Eliza upgrade. The one and true Fartcoin, leading the way for AI memes.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And then Griffin with a 23% increase. Now, I want to point out that the market caps here range between $160 million and $650 million. So we're kind of playing within like, when you consider larger protocols, which are often like $1.5 billion and above, we're still playing small weights here, but you always want to kind of be looking at what could potentially enter that billion dollar plus range. And a lot of these tokens, David, have already done that, right? AI 16Z and Fartcoin. So I'm curious to kind of like track and then see how this goes.

• 19:13David Hoffman?

  The Fartcoin, I love how I give my monologue about, you know, if you're just the average modern investor and you're looking for AI exposure, crypto tokens are where it's at. Anyways, Fartcoin up 27%.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, take, take it, stop taking yourself too seriously, David. Like, come on, we gotta, we gotta be focusing on some of these other things.

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  I am bullish on Fartcoin as just the fact that it's both a meme and AI. And so you get exposure to both sectors.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Okay, well, we let's not get into this, but I don't see the AI side of things. Aside from the fact that it came from the truth terminal law, basically, right? From the

• 19:50David Hoffman?

  Oh, exactly. It doesn't actually have any AI innovation.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  That fart jokes are super funny. And then someone created fart coin and then it just said, there is no AI behind.

• 20:00David Hoffman?

  As far as the AI goes in fart coin?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Don't let anyone else, yes, don't let anyone else convince you otherwise. All right. But anyway, going back to fundamentals and not fart coin stuff. If you pull up this tweet from Elon Money, he tracks something that I think most people ignore, but should actually track, which is kind of GitHub open source commits to some of the biggest projects out there. And one notable difference here is that core contributors for AI 16Z and AI Rig Complex, which is ARC in this case, have just been up only. And, you know, a lot of people could like term this as, oh, well, they're just adding a bunch of small changes and updates. If you actually dig into these things, that's not the case at all.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  You see them making some pretty big updates to their potential platforms that they're launching and their tokenomics as well. So it's really cool to like, see whether rain or shine, these guys are just heads down building. And I think that's like super important to kind of observe within a sector. You said earlier, David, like, you know, you're trying to make your case as to why crypto AI is here to stay and not just a, you know, a meta that's going to die after a couple of weeks. These are the kinds of things you want to like see more of.

• 21:13David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. It is hard to qualitatively analyze GitHub commits, as you've said. How do you actually, what was your method or mechanism for actually like qualitatively giving the thumbs up to the, you know, quality behind these updates?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a few ways that I do this. Number one is recognizing that I am dumb, and so I need to speak to people that are smarter than me. More and so engineers across a bunch of these different protocols. And that's kind of like what I do. So I spoke to Jen on the AI 16Z team. I spoke to Tachi and Turi on the ARC team and saying like, hey, what are you guys pushing? What are you guys building? And they walk me through like their GitHubs and like kind of like tell me what they're like, kind of like working on. Oh, they'll speak at a high level because you know, some of this is super secretive and you know, they don't want to release it publicly just yet. Another way is I kind of like follow, and this is for people who are listening, check out Nada, Nada Bit, I believe, from the EVM Eigen ecosystem.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  And then Saigar as well, who do a lot of like reviews and cover a bunch of these things. And then number three is just jumping into the GitHub itself. You can see a ton of what these updates are. You can read through it. You'll know which ones are just simple API integrations and which ones are like larger tokenomic related things, right? Or a platform related thing. And the fourth and final way to do this is, and it doesn't sound remarkably sophisticated, just go on Twitter and follow the projects. They post weekly dev updates all the time. And it's just, you know, to kind of like nod our heads towards open source development. It's some of the best ways to keep track of these things. But yeah, pretty cool.

• 22:48David Hoffman?

  Something that showed up on my radar, Andre, Andrej Karpathy, who is kind of a Chad in the AI world.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Godfather of AI, dude.

• 22:59David Hoffman?

  Godfather of AI, yeah. Just for context for people who don't know Andre, he was like the head of AI at Tesla to help Tesla build their self-driving vision system. He was on the early, in the early days of OpenAI on the OpenAI board. He went back to OpenAI recently and then he just quit. Andre now just makes content. He just educates. He thinks, the reason why he quit is because he thinks that his best leverage on the AI space is to just educate about what's going on. And he like, yeah, seven days ago, released his three and a half hour marathon, which I am halfway through. And it is some of the best content that I have ever consumed about AI and LLMs.

• 23:39David Hoffman?

  And it is just, you watch, I feel like I've taken a university course and I'm still just an hour and 40 minutes into this thing.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  It's crazy this stuff is free.

• 23:47David Hoffman?

  It's crazy that it's free. He's super articulate. He's super good at explaining this stuff. And he's just extremely well respected across the AI space and is used as a resource just by many, many people to understand to like how to learn. He's got also 1.1 million followers. He, in one of his videos, talked about how one of his favorite platforms to use these base models is Hyperbolic, which is a crypto AI startup. So it's cool that these crypto AI companies that are leveraging crypto are being used, whether they even Andre, I don't even know if Andre knows that this is a crypto AI startup, is using these things. And he's calling Hyperbolic as one of his favorite platforms for interacting with LLM

• 24:30David Hoffman?

  based models. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Congrats to the Hyperbolic team.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's the crypto AI mullet, right? I don't think he needs to know that it's crypto on the backend, right? And for those of you who don't know Hyperbolic, Hyperbolic is basically a decentralized compute platform. So they're able to provide compute to help run your models or more famously inference new models. So be able to like request answers from certain models and they host a bunch of models. Some are open source, some are access to closed source ones. And apparently their service is so good that Andre is using it. So yeah, pretty awesome to see, David.

• 25:13David Hoffman?

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• 25:57David Hoffman?

  Mobile-first, EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain to a high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built on OP stack with EigenDA and one-block finality, all happening soon with a hard fork. With over 600 million total transactions, 12 million weekly transactions, and 750,000 daily active users, Cello's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top Layer 2s, built for the real world and optimized for fast, low-cost global payments. As the home of the stablecoins, Cello hosts 13 native stablecoins across seven different currencies, including native USDT on Opera MiniPay, and with over 4 million users in Africa alone. In November, stablecoin volumes hit $6.8 billion, made for seamless on-chain FX trading. Plus, users can pay gas with ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds.

• 26:40David Hoffman?

  But why should you care about Cello's transition to a Layer 2? Layer 2s unify Ethereum. L1s fragmented. By becoming a Layer 2, Cello leads the way for other EVM-compatible Layer 1s to follow. Follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello-havening, where Cello cuts its inflation in half as it enters its Layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership. Introducing UniChain. Built for DeFi, empowered by Uniswap, UniChain is the fast, decentralized Layer 2, designed to tackle blockchain speed and cost challenges. With this mainnet now live, you can enjoy transactions at up to 95% cheaper than the ETH Layer 1, all while benefiting from an impressive 1-second block time that will be getting even faster very soon. UniChain is the first Layer 2 to launch as a Stage 1 rollup on day 1. That means it comes with a fully-functional, permissionless proof system

• 27:24David Hoffman?

  from the start, increasing transparency and further decentralizing the chain. More than 80 apps are joining the UniChain community, including Coinbase, Circle, Lido, Morpho, and Uniswap. You'll be able to bridge, swap, borrow, lend, and launch new assets and more from day 1. Built by Uniswap Labs, the team behind the protocol that's processed over 2.75 trillion in all-time volume with zero hacks, UniChain truly enhances DeFi experiences with faster, cheaper, and seamless transactions even across chains. And soon, the UniChain Validation Network will allow anyone to run a node and earn by securing the network. Visit uniswap.org and swap on UniChain today.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  But David, I want to show you a bit of magic here. So can you open up this tweet from Replit? So I just want to emphasize with saying this isn't a Crypto company, but it's going to have a huge impact into crypto AI stuff. So what you're watching right now is a video of an app, an app called Replit. And Replit basically now allows you to prompt and create any app that you want. Now, let's just like take a step back and and and kind of digest that for a second. You could be like, hey, I'm coming up with some, you know, some music ideas and I want to like describe a beat or I want to use a tool that will help me translate what I'm thinking in my head. They'll be like, cool, like what kind of symphonies or stuff do you want to include?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  What kind of instruments are you vibing with and whatever? And it'll just produce an app. Now you could take that to the opposite end of the spectrum and just be like, well, hey, I am trying to figure out a 3D structure for a waveform that could fit into my earthquake model. And they'll be like, cool, what kind of seismic indicators do you want to use? A, B, and C. And then it creates an app for you to do this. And you can literally like, if you play this video, you can like model it, you can turn it around. It's it's pretty insane to see, David. And the kind of point that I want to make about all of this is right. Imagine like you just come across a problem where a user is like faced with a UX issue or something deeper like not knowing how to invest in money.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  You could just get an agent to query or prompt an app like this and spin up an app or an app or a tool which is tailored specifically for them, right? So we keep talking about this like AI stuff and we're like, well, you know, we got to connect this API with that API and it kind of gets a little complex, right? But what if they could just be an agent or a human with a problem? Just like you and I come across many with the questions that we ask every day when we're trying to learn about this stuff. And just say, hey, I need a tool that will help me research A, B, and C. I need a tool that will help me send tokens from this wallet to that wallet and then, you know, lock it in another wallet.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  And it just spins up an app or a button that they could just click and use for them. The cool part here is like, in a world of hundreds of millions of tailored apps like this, David, where does the value get captured? Do you think my bet is decentralized protocols and maybe I'm biased, but I think it's the decentralized protocols underpinning all of these. Think about it, right? We're already spinning up 1 million new tokens a week with pump fun. That's one app alone, right? If the world does trend towards being tokenized, like Sir Larry Fink says every day on Bloomberg, says this, this only scales with decentralized protocols, in my opinion.

• 30:43David Hoffman?

  This reminds me of a Andre tweet, Andre, the same guy that we were just talking about. There he tweeted out, let me just read this because I think this really just resonates with what you were just talking about. He tweeted out, there's this new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the L L Ms are getting too good. Also, I just talked to composer with Superwhisp, so I barely even touched the keyboard. I don't know what either composer or Superwhisp is, but I don't think it matters. I asked for the dumbest things like decrease the padding on the sidebar by half because I'm too lazy to find it. I accept all, always. I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages, I just copy and paste them in with no

• 31:28David Hoffman?

  comment. Usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension. I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the L L Ms can't fix a bug, so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or a web app, but it's not really coding. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, copy and paste stuff, and it mostly works. And so the takeaway that I'm getting from here is that the L L M tools, the models that we have that, you know, that with the Silicon Valley tech companies I talked about earlier, all producing, are getting to the point where you can be really non-technical and produce some interesting outputs here. And I even like

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  how he says, just like, whenever there is an error code, he just alerts the L L M to the existence of the error code and the L L M is like, oh, thank you for making me aware of this error. I'll go fix that. And then the error goes away. And so he's like, non-technically fixing his own bugs in his code. And this, both what you were just saying with this, with this one app that we were just looking at, and with Andre's concept of vibes coding, it really makes me think that like, we don't actually need to be having interfaces at all. This is all interface abstraction mechanisms, and eventually just like AI will just be hyper useful. And we'll have to engage with any sort of like keyboard or device at all to engage with it. And it's just like really induce a ton of usage of AI.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Prompt engineering is the new software engineering.

• 32:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  And David, I could think of a specific sector that could really use the abstraction layer. So kind of like on that note, should we dig into the crypto AI topics of the week?

• 33:10David Hoffman?

  Sure. Let's do it. What are we going to start with?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  All right, cool. So we're going to start the crypto AI agenda with a non crypto AI company that is getting into crypto AI. X or Twitter, David, is getting involved in agents. Now, I've said this in the past on a previous episode, but my bet is X will become the home for a lot of the agents that we're building within this particular sector. They're perfectly primed for it. They have all the tweets of the entire world. They get the data, the culture, et cetera. And they want to kind of like make a unique push and probably Elon is like leading that. But this particular tweet is by Ethermage, founder of Virtuals. And the kind of takeaway here is they dropped by the Twitter offices in New York last week,

• 33:56Speaker 01

  and they were just like discussing a bunch of things as to how X can support a bunch of the agents that are being built here. And the reason why I wanted to pull this up is not to just kind of like point this out, but you know, X has seen an explosion of agents, and instead of banning them, they're working out a way to support and let them prosper. Now, Virtuals is one of the teams that they're working with, but I believe they're also speaking to the AI 16Z guys and the ARC team as well, right? So they're kind of aware of what these teams are, and they're speaking directly to the founders to see how, you know, both of them can kind of collaborate and work together. And from what I understand in my conversations with them, you know, they want to be the leading platform for agents and they're figuring out what this looks like from both sides of the table.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  On their side, they're considering things like, you know, how can they empower their own offerings to be helpful for agent builders? For example, specialized access to data or X payments to allow agents to tip each other or interact with users in another way, right? And from the crypto protocol side, right? These teams are coming to them saying, hey, um, we would love if you would allow, you know, uh, the ability for, I don't know, crypto wallets to be spun up or stable coins to be used. And of course, these are all ideas to begin with and with, I think they're still very much, I don't have any insight, but they're still very much in the weeds of figuring out what this looks like. But can you imagine, David, like this cross collaboration of a major web two social platform?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And all this crypto native stuff that we've been building, um, you know, in the backend. Uh, I think that will be a perfect marriage and it'll lead to a lot of this like mass adoption that we speak about. Now, I remember a time, David, where a lot of crypto people would have thought this was a bad thing. And probably a lot of people do. Why? Because it pulls away from the fully decentralized ethos. You know, oh, you're going to rely on Twitter and whatever you might be. I think personally, that's a silly take. I think it's stupid, uh, because if we're ever going to onboard the world, we need to have bridges with the web two world. What do you think?

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  I think that's right. Having alignment with something like Twitter is hugely advantageous. Like I'm as bullish as DeFi as anyone, but we have to, in the DeFi sector, like work against financial incumbents. And while that's like exciting to, you know, disentangle and disintermediate Wall Street and TradFi, it's also hard. On the flip side of things, in the Silicon Valley web two social media space, having alignment with the interests and motivations of the X teams. And like, obviously, what, what does X get out of this? Well, they get, you know, trillions of, of users, like they don't have to, they're not constrained by this seven, eight billion people that are connected to the internet on this planet.

• 36:38David Hoffman?

  We can come up with a quadrillion number of AI agents who are using X. Uh, and so the fact that we have alignment with their interests and we're rowing in the same direction is helpful. It's, it's a nice breath of fresh air.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, you know, to kind of like go from the first like kind of like monologue that you had at the start of this episode, David, we're kind of effectively tying in tokens to this entire thing as well.

• 37:03David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  And can you imagine if it becomes just super normal for individuals to own or be tipped tokens or to be able to use tokens to access certain services or products on X just natively? That would be a huge leap in kind of like crypto UX and probably just like web two UX as well. So I don't know, but pretty, pretty awesome to see.

• 37:24David Hoffman?

  All right, let's move on to ARC. And I remember you brought up ARC maybe four episodes ago and we did like, we spent like 20 minutes on the episode. And I remember after you gave us like the ARC deep dive, I was like, EJ, I was like, why are we spending so much time on, on ARC? Like, what's the deal here? Turns out has been the complete mind share winner over the last four weeks. Of all things that have disappeared from my feed in the like AI, call it the AI bear market, ARC has not. ARC's been a big winner lately, right?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Yeah. Well, I mean, we mentioned a lot of projects that, you know, we find interesting on this podcast, but sometimes we nail it, David. Sometimes we do. And yeah, ARC has been one of them. So a few major things here. So just a bit of background, ARC is one of the leading AI agent platforms. So you kind of think of them as similar to AI 16Z and virtuals, and they're based on Solana, and they have a specific coding language, which is native to Solana called Rust. Okay, cool. So that's the, the basic knowledge. What happened this week? Well, David, they not only announced, but they launched their agent Launchpad or their platform. And so of course, the initial reaction to this is, well, okay, right, this is just another Launchpad. It's going to do the same types of things.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  And I want to kind of argue against that first and show the nuance between this Launchpad and other Launchpads, but then also colloquially kind of show what I think they're going to be building in the future, which will make all of this, you know, way more important and to focus on, basically. So if you look at this tweet, and by the way, this news is fresh a few hours ago. So I just tweeted about this to kind of like give us all a breakdown of this. The Launchpad is called ARC Forge.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  And it's basically a launchpad for launching new tokens that is geared towards stronger liquidity. So better capital efficiency, meaning like, you know, you have less slippage, less price impact. If, you know, a whale is buying or selling, so fair trading in general. And all these agent tokens are paired with the native token ARC. So this is similar to projects that we've seen with virtuals or supposedly with the upcoming AI 16Z launchpad as well. Right. And the reason why that's so bullish is any kind of fees that are generated from these pools will go back to buying ARC. Also, you need ARC to be able to launch these agent tokens. So that kind of adds another demand sink, basically, onto the ARC native token.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  So that's, that's really cool. Sniper prevention is also really important. It sounds boring, but right now, any new token that pretty much launches in a fair manner gets sniped, David. What does sniping mean? It means a bot or a computer program is basically primed and ready to buy a bunch of the supply really early on. And then just dump on users. And it's been really painful for communities who really care about different tokens to get involved, because they just get dumped on at a much, much higher price. They have a mechanism or a design which prevents all of this from happening. Really cool. And the third thing that I think is super important to call out here is every other agent launchpad so far, David,

• 40:31Speaker 01

  has been open, anyone can come, anyone can come and launch an agent and off you go and we'll take a fee. Right. And the reason why they do that is open sources, you know, arguably good, but also they can get a fee off of every launch, right? So it's a great revenue, volume-based business, right? But unfortunately, what's that, what that's led to is a lot of low-quality agents out there that kind of all do the same thing, all sound the same, and quite frankly, are super, super annoying. Right. So what ARC is doing differently here is they're doing a curated launch. So they control which teams are able to go via the launchpad. You know, they have a verification symbol, they're given, you know, a lot of context, deep research.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  And what they're trying to do is, you know, they're trying to get the token to be able to go via the launchpad.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Trying to do here is launch higher quality agents and I love this approach personally because I think we have too many low quality agents out there.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  You know, they have a verification symbol, they're given, you know, a lot of context, deep research.

• 41:24David Hoffman?

  We have way too many low quality agents.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Way too many and and the only way that this sector is taken seriously, David, is if we have high quality agents that people actually want to engage with, that people actually want to use. And so I'm really, you know, I'm happy to just see someone take this kind of approach, right? And speaking of high quality projects, supposedly their inaugural launch is going to demonstrate that. So I don't know anything about this, this project, but it's called Ask Jimmy and the token is Jimmy. It's not live yet. It might be live by the time we air this, maybe not, but you know, just keep an eye on the the Arc profile Twitter page.

• 42:03David Hoffman?

  What you're saying is it launches in 24 hours and we are recording this on the 12th and we post these podcasts a day later. So we're going to be launching the morning, it's going to be launching the day of this podcast release.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  The day of this podcast release, exactly. So talk about cutting edge information.

• 42:19David Hoffman?

  Which we are not advocating for the token at all. We are just giving the logistics. I don't really, Regis has not told me anything about this token, so I don't know anything.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I couldn't tell you anything because I literally just learned about it today. So what do we know about this? This particular project is an AI driven trading platform and it aims to be the leading ecosystem for autonomous finance agents. Okay, that's a bunch of jargon. What the hell does that mean? Basically, they want to act as a, think of this as like a hedge fund that trades tokens. And autonomous agents are going to be the things, not humans, that are implementing trading strategies and different designs and stuff like that. And what's cool about this is it won't just trade across one protocol.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  It'll trade across multiple platforms such as Hyperliquid or Drift Protocol or GMX on EVM. Many others can get included. It takes like a multi-pronged approach, which I think is really cool. But the third thing that I think is super cool here, David, and I think kind of slipped under the radar and most people haven't noticed this yet, is a percentage of revenue generated from this app or whatever service that you want to call this, gets used to buy back Arc.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  The native token, which kind of like underpin the launchpad and and and kind of like supported the token launch. And why I think this is super important is volume-based launchpads are going to die off. It's not about the number of agents you launch. It's about the quality of agents. But then the question is like,

• 43:58David Hoffman?

  That excites me. That excites me quite a lot.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But then the question is like, well, okay, well, how are you going to make money? You know, but like, how is this thing sustainable? Well, if you can tax or monetize the services layer, the app layer, that's probably the way to do it. So I think we're going to start to see a bunch of these platforms monetize at the app layer. I think they're going to create like an app store. I think they're going to create like an agent marketplace. And that net-net is going to force people to build quality agents. I thought that was pretty cool.

• 44:28David Hoffman?

  I do think agent-based like market actions, just optimizing yield, I think is super low hanging fruit. I don't know about opinionated market movements and buying and selling tokens. I think that's probably a little bit harder, but I think there's a ton of edge and alpha and arbitrage that an AI would be able to figure out how to extract from just on-chain activities. And I don't think that that's, I think that's a great place to get started for the AI sector because that's honestly where a lot of people come in, came into crypto in the first place is, you know, building their first like arbitrage bot. Now we just make that a little agentic. And I think that's kind of a good canary in the coalmine. Like, if we can do anything in AI, we should be able to build like an effective AI arbitrage bot.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. And and to your point, like, if your AI hedge fund is is really that good, why would it be kind of like public for anyone to to kind of aid, right? You'd you'd maybe, maybe there's a way for them to use proprietary trading strategies. Maybe that's something that they could use. And and that would be, that would be cool. And then, yeah, if you, if you want to pull up this Ask Jimmy tweet really quickly, and just kind of scroll through the tweet, we can talk about like how it actually works very, very quickly. So people, you know, listeners have a context. So it's a multi-agent system, which means that it's not just one agent that's doing all the hedge fund stuff. It's multiple agents and they all have individual. Roles. There's, for example, a treasury agent, which is responsible for allocating capital.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  There's a risk agent, which is, you know, in the risk room, monitoring, okay, is this position in danger? Should I invest in this token, A, B, and C? Okay, cool. There's a quant agent, which is optimizing the trading strategies. And then there's execution agents, which just focus solely on making sure the execution is secure, verified, and at the best price that they can get, basically.

• 46:17David Hoffman?

  I have a question. Yeah. Does, what does it mean for all of these agents to exist inside of this larger, broader team? So like, is this like, we are fine tuning, uh, I don't know if it's an LLM. We are fine tuning the model for treasury management. And then we're doing it again. We're fine tuning another model for risk management. And then they are learning how to cooperate and negotiate. But like, the treasury manager is trying to cooperate with, like, the executor. And it's like, hey, the trader wants to buy this token, but the treasury manager is like, yo, yo, yo, that's too risky. And so there's like a dance between these fine tuned models. And the output is this Jimmy thing. Is that how it works?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Um, there's a fancy jargon term that's used for this, David, known as swarms or agent swarms. Yeah, this is, this is the swarm thing. Um, so basically.

• 47:08David Hoffman?

  So Jimmy is a swarm. Jimmy is a swarm.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Jimmy is a swarm focused on autonomous trading. Um, and we can pretty much leave it at that.

• 47:16David Hoffman?

  Okay. Okay. All right. Well, good luck, Jimmy. I hope you do well.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Um, there's a second update on ARC that I think is worth mentioning. So, you know, if you thought the Launchpad and their inaugural project wasn't already enough, they launched this really cool ARC agent kit, David. And the reason why I am so excited about this is basically any native on-chain action is now made super easy for any agent that's being built on ARC. So typically, when you build an agent, just for context for the listeners, you kind of need to be like, okay, what model am I going to use for this? You need to be like, okay, what wallet should I equip it with? How do I equip it with a wallet, right? Okay, do I need to?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  I need to fix the ability to allow it to trade. I need to fix the ability to allow this agent to evaluate markets. And it's quite tedious to build from scratch. Well, now you just have a kit, which you can just kind of plug into and select a bunch of things, tweak it to whatever detail you would like, and then off you go. And the reason why this is such a big win for ARC in particular, David, is the coding language is in Rust, which is notoriously hard for developers to learn. And so to have a toolkit just straight out of the box that allows them to do this is super, super cool. I have a few more things to say if you want. I thought you might want to say something. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Sorry. So I said it's super, super cool.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  In addition to this, it's multi-chain out of the box, which means that not only can you use it with Solana, you can use it with EVM as well. So a lot of like critics towards ARC, I feel, has like focused on the fact that developers are gonna find it kind of challenging to build on. Well, the fact that they're making it super easy for you to now build not only on Solana, but also on any other chain, I think is super cool to see. And I think a lot of other teams and projects are taking a similar approach. So yeah, I'm just super excited by like these different kinds of toolkits and things, which I think will proliferate into something much larger. Like right now, I understand the market is kind of bored with the launchpads. They're kind of bored with the existing agents. I'm bored with them as well.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  But I'm confident that these agents are now gonna get a level up with all these different tools and frameworks being built. And you know, the proof is in the pudding. So we'll see what these agents look like in a couple of weeks' time. But yeah, super, super excited about what ARC's doing.

• 49:45David Hoffman?

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• 50:27David Hoffman?

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• 50:40David Hoffman?

  Ondo Finance is leading the way in the tokenization of real-world assets with a mission to accelerate the transition to an open economy by building the platforms, assets, and infrastructure that bring financial markets on-chain. With Ondo, institutions get seamless access to tokenized finance, while on-chain users gain access to institutional-grade real-world assets like never before. By bridging traditional finance and the blockchain economy, Ondo is unlocking liquidity, efficiency, and global access, reshaping markets for the digital age. As the leader in institutional adoption, Ondo Finance is the gateway to the trillion-dollar tokenization revolution. Institutional-grade finance, on-chain for everyone. Okay, cool. That's Arc. We have a number of these blue-chip topics that I want to get

• 51:22David Hoffman?

  through left before we go on to the frontier side of things. Virtual is next. We'll talk about AI, XBT, and AI-16Z after that, but Virtual is for right now. Walk us through what's going on with Virtuals.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. So, a few weeks ago, Virtuals announced that they were expanding to Solana, and they broke the crypto AI Twitter internet because...

• 51:40David Hoffman?

  Did they?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did. They did. Because, as you know, it's not kosher to ever leave your OG chain and go to another chain.

• 51:48David Hoffman?

  The biggest reaction that I saw out of that was like, wow, Coinbase really took the L here by not listing Virtuals on the exchange.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, listen, we could speculate as much as we want as to why that's the case.

• 52:00David Hoffman?

  Did you hear Haseeb's take?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  No, what's Haseeb's take?

• 52:03David Hoffman?

  That it's basically Virtuals is probably not passing Coinbase's compliance tests and because of its buyback mechanism.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  But didn't Kraken just list it?

• 52:15David Hoffman?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did.

• 52:18David Hoffman?

  Maybe traction is a little bit more ready to go.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  A bit more DGM, yeah, maybe, maybe. I don't know. I'm gonna say optimistically that hopefully they've figured out a way. But I do agree with that take, actually. Like, it's kind of weird that they happen, right?

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  The buyback mechanism makes it hard to list on centralized exchanges.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Interesting. I'm now wondering, like, are there any other buyback tokens that they have listed, potentially? I don't know. I feel like that's quite commonplace amongst a lot of, like, core DeFi protocols, right? Like, do they list Maker? Doesn't Maker do that? I don't know.

• 52:46David Hoffman?

  I'm sure MKR is on quite a list.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Anyway, Virtuals officially launched their platform. So they didn't just announce it, they've actually done it. And now, any agent builder or agent purchaser can now go to the Virtuals platform, and it is Solana-compatible. So what does this mean? It means that their native token, Virtuals, is now existent on Solana.

• 53:10David Hoffman?

  That's pretty crazy.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's pretty nuts. So I, for example, ported a percentage of Virtuals that I hold into Solana, because I wanted to see, like, what that process looked like, and whether the experience would be the same. And surprise, surprise, yes, it is. So now you have, like, that liquidity on both chains. And of course, the question now is, like, is there gonna be traction on Solana? I thought all the developers were on Ethereum. Like, what's actually going on, right? And what we've seen so far is a few things. Number one, some Base projects, so Virtuals projects that launched on Base, have ported over to Solana. And I mentioned this at the end of last week's episode. So that's kind of interesting, right?

• 53:53Speaker 01

  But on Solana itself, we're seeing net new projects launch as well, David. If you pull up this tweet, where I think it's, this is actually a recap from Graham as to which projects launched today, so, you know, literally a few hours ago. Let's see the kind of, like, stuff we're seeing here. We're seeing Tracy AI, an MBA commentator and analyst agent. I believe this is actually...

• 54:18David Hoffman?

  Or an MBA commentator? How does that work?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  I think this is getting a lot of traction, because it's kind of... Take this as as fact, but I think it's being endorsed by a certain basketball player. I'm not entirely sure who, but interesting to see that. We're seeing another agent which is focused on content, another agent which is fighting misinformation, another one that's focused on optimizing gas for DeFi transactions and another one that's just like a project risk assessment agent. What what what makes me happy about this is that it's getting a little more creative than just like, hey, this is a funny tweet bot like coming ape into this DGEN token. So I'm glad to see variety. Obviously, all of these are super volatile and low cap. So, you know, definitely do your research looking into this, but it's day one and I'm curious to track a few things going forward.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  So next week we should look into this, which is how many agents have launched on virtuals on Solana specifically? And how does that compare to base? Has the rate gone down on one and the rate gone up on the other? The other thing is market cap of agents on Sol, uh, virtuals versus um, virtuals on base.

• 55:25David Hoffman?

  I'm sorry, I'm just caught up on this Tracy AI NBA commentator. I'm like watching this game. This is kind of cool. Like,

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:33David Hoffman?

  Having an AI commentator overlay an NBA game? That seems kind of cool.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. It does. And and and like, okay, there's a few things here that uh, it kind of got me thinking about, right? Number one is fan engagement. Already you're hooked. You get it, right? You know what the NBA is. You don't need to know what token is. You're just like, let me just interact with this thing and see if it's accurate.

• 55:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, my God, it does real time responses to its listeners in all languages?

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:59David Hoffman?

  Wow. Wow. That's cool. I would like to see. I would like to see how that works. I I wonder if there's any like IP issues with NBA because like, are they allowed to just stream? But yeah, to like, if you're just alone at home and you're a big NBA fan or any sports fan and like you put it on the game, but then you also pull up a cotton AI commentator to help commentate the game. That seems kind of cool.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you got no friends like you and I, David. We just pull up.

• 56:24David Hoffman?

  That's right. Or you don't understand sports.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Or you want to practice your French. You can just pull this up and interact with it.

• 56:33David Hoffman?

  All right, all right, cool.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Well, we're seeing some variety. I like it. The second major thing that Virtuals announced this week, kind of like, you know, just moving this train along, is something they're calling VPN, or their Virtuals Partner Network, David. Now, this is a long article, but I'm just going to summarize it for everyone, which is, okay, Virtuals has this platform now on Base and Solana, and their goal with their Launchpad right now is precisely that, help agents launch. But they're now trying to launch high-quality agents. And obviously, they're restricted by the capacity of their team, right? They're all based in whatever, a bunch of different time zones, but like, they're limited by the number of bodies that they can commit to diligencing teams and all that kind of stuff. So what they've done is they've built out this venture partner

• 57:20Speaker 01

  model essentially, where they'll elect teams or individuals in the Solana and Base ecosystems, and give them grants of, I think it's in totality 50K, but it can go above that if the project surpasses certain market cap milestones. And what I like about this, David, and we're not going to get into the details here because we haven't got enough time, but they have been incredibly detailed about what qualifies for certain tranches. And what I like about this is, I'm going to call them out, they're the ones that did this high-volume agent stuff. They were the ones that made that famous, right? And I love-

• 57:58David Hoffman?

  They're the ones that are experiencing their own pain.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Janson and Ether Mage. And like, what I've constantly seen by this team is that they iterate. They take it on, you know, they take it on the chin, and they're like, okay, cool, I understand that this is not working, let's tweak it. And we see this happening here. And I just love the way that this team approaches things. And why I think this is beneficial is they're kind of like, releasing the reins a little bit, and saying, okay, you guys go ahead, find what's good, we'll fund teams based on this structure, and you guys get a percentage of tokens. So you guys get to also co-invest because you've found these teams. And with that, they allow both ecosystems, both Base, Solana, or whatever it is, to grow collectively. And I think that'll give them the competitive

• 58:41Speaker 01

  most, David, if, if it's successful. I, we're probably going to see other teams do this as well, to be honest.

• 58:48David Hoffman?

  Just to wrap up this section, if you were curious, EJAS, there is rounding up to $30 million of virtuels on Solana, and it's got 6,250 holders, and that is after just two days, just two days. So that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 59:04David Hoffman?

  AI XPT only got one tweet in this section. AI XPT holders can link their X account on AI XPT.Tech. What does this do?

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Okay, so basically, token holders, so people who hold AI XPT token can now go to the official terminal, the terminal being, you know, the AI XPT terminal. It's kind of like a separate website. Think of it as like the Bloomberg Terminal for crypto native questions. And they can connect their wallet and now their X account. Okay, well, why is that cool? Well, it unlocks several perks, David. Check these out. So if you if you zoom through some of these perks, you know, you get priority replies. So for those of you who have played around with AI XPT, you can tag AI XPT in like a tweet or a thread that you're kind of like reading, and you could get its take. You can ask it a question and get its take. But because

• 59:54Speaker 01

  it's become so popular, it can't be everywhere all at once. And so if you connect your X account and you hold its token, it now prioritizes you to give you a very tailored response. It is a way. It becomes hyper right. And also.

• 1:00:08David Hoffman?

  In case you want AI XPT to be your friend, you just gotta buy its token.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, but also, David, I think like, there is value here, right? Like, if I'm reading like a 20-part thread, right? And I'm like, absorbed by my own niche research, right? And, you know, there's a million other people on crypto Twitter evaluating a ton of other sectors that don't really care about my niche little thing. And I want to get feedback from basically the chat GPT of crypto. I want to be able to get access to that, right? And if it's rate limited, for sure, I want to get access to that. And if it means holding a quasi-equity instrument, right? You know, like, okay, I get some ownership in this agent, allows me to not only benefit from its service, but also benefit from, you know, the value it accrues

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  if it actually does well as a product. That's a win-win for me, basically, right? Some of these other perks include, you know. A chance to get tipped. I don't know how this works, but I'm presuming like if you give good alpha or it learns something that is considered really valuable data for it, that makes it smarter, it'll give you a tip. So it's kind of like another really interesting way to aggregate or make itself way more powerful, right? Anyway, just some interesting perks here that I thought was-

• 1:01:24David Hoffman?

  I think that's cool. I think this is like just a roadmap for general AI Twitter accounts. And I'll be clear, AI XPT is still today, the only useful AI crypto Twitter account that's out there. And I'm, again, also to be clear, still sus about its alpha because I don't know where it comes from, other than just like regurgitation-

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  All those logs are transparent, David.

• 1:01:45David Hoffman?

  Like other, other crypto Twitter accounts are also idiots by default. Like, you know, don't trust the average person on crypto Twitter until you verify, you know, verify don't trust.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:01:56David Hoffman?

  But nonetheless, as, as these become more mainstream, I'm seeing what this is, is just like you buy the token and you get preferential treatment by this AI that has the social media, that has memory that exists across the internet. That's pretty cool. That's a model, that's a replicatable model.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, arguably the same as, you know, you paying a subscription to get access to Bloomberg Terminal and now I get all this alpha, which is really useful for whatever I want to use. And kind of zooming out, I think this is the first step towards bridging the gaps between web two and web three infra. I think we've been so obsessed with web three native things that were forgotten to onboard the actual people that don't know anything about this, but could benefit from the value. And I think X, as I said earlier, is the number one platform for, for all of this to happen. And is also the number one place where crypto Twitter or crypto things overlap with people who have no idea what this is. So, you know, a ton of value there.

• 1:02:46David Hoffman?

  All right, last subject of the roll up. AI 16Z, this is a really long thread about thoughts about AI 16Z. I think we are still kind of in like debrief autopsy mode of AI 16Z. How's the token doing? Because I think the answer is not, not great.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Well, actually, it is. Okay, two things. It's bounced back quite a bit on this market bounce. I think it was Thirty cents up to fifty-two? Up to fifty-two. So it was ARC and AI16Z that bounced back the most in terms of large caps. Virtua's obviously having a lot more weight to it, kind of doesn't move as quickly or significantly. But the second thing is, I saw a tweet, I wish I had it on hand, which said that the most inflows over the last seven days, David, has come into AI16Z specifically. So whether it's whales, smart money, or dumb money, someone's accumulating AI16Z. And I think there's a few reasons for this.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Number one, we've seen this a few times with the team. Peak FUD has typically happened when, you know, the founder has had a bit of a, kind of like, you know, rant on Twitter, or, you know, there's just been some general instability in terms of comms. And so, you know, people have been kind of bearish on like, okay, well, is this team serious? Like, are they building good things? Or are they just gonna kind of like crash out? And kind of like in their defense, I think the team has really been shipping pretty amazing stuff, and they've been the leader of the space for a while. That being said, it's not good to do this frequently, right? And tough love is not something Crypto Twitter is necessarily good at receiving, but it is so crucial to have and listen to if you want to win, right?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  And tough love comes especially when markets are down. And AI16Z this week was the subject of this in this particular tweet. I want to briefly go over this tweet point by point to dissect what I think is valid or true, and what might be a stretch. And why am I doing this is, I think AI16Z is at a pivotal point in its growth. It's faced a lot of FUD. It's been one of the darling crypto agent projects stemming from the times of Truth Terminal. And now understandably, its token holders are asking, well, what's next, right? So let's dig into this really quickly. The first one says, AI16Z still fails to align the incentives of partner projects and token holders. I think, quick take, this is going to get resolved in the tokenomics upgrade coming out in the next couple of weeks. So I'm not too worried about that.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Number two, why, while AI16Z is having fun developing a cute shock tank-like investment show, their competitors are partnering with Solana Foundation to push them off their throne. I'm guessing they're referencing ARC there. This is in reference to a hobby, emphasis on the term hobby, project that One of the core developers has been building and talking about in his spare time. I think it's important to point out that there are two, probably three separate streams of actual development work that's going on. None of them include this hobby project. So.

• 1:05:44David Hoffman?

  The cute Shark Tank like investment show is a hobby project.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, is the hobby project. So I think, you know, like, yes, I understand that that's like, could be a thing, but you know, I don't know if it really sticks. Number three, AI 16Z needs to step its game up or it falls behind. Their moat was to be the best in open source agent technology. Whilst this is still true, competitors are working full force to close the gap. I don't really think this is a good take necessarily because it's like, well, yeah, you would expect in an open source realm that people would be competitive and try to fill the gap. And I'm glad that people are trying to fill the gap. Hopefully this pushes AI 16Z to become something better and let's see. Number four, I think their current strategy is not enough. They need more than being the best at agent GitHub or differentiate themselves so they can better. I agree with this.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  And I actually think this applies to not just AI 16Z, but a bunch of other platforms. We mentioned it with Arc, right? Which is like, okay, this token launchpad does this, but like, what about all the other stuff? Where do we go from here? How do we make these agents better? I do think the AI 16Z team is probably thinking about this. They recently restructured, David, actually. They hired a CPO and a COO, which is, you know, something that we don't typically see within an open source DAO run company or foundation. But it's pretty amazing to see. And I'll just give you one more here before, because there's like 10 of these things.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  It goes, number five, they are still not tapping into their biggest strength. An army of developers building various projects with AI 16Z tech. I don't know if I agree with this one because they technically are allowing anyone and everyone to build things. I just think some of the things are just not good enough yet. And that is a combination of people, you know, not really being as creative as you'd expect to build like a really good product. They're just like kind of launching a token and hoping it goes up. And the second thing is the tokenomics of AI 16Z right now doesn't, isn't structured well enough for them to offer that kind of support. And I think we'll see that change over time.

• 1:07:48David Hoffman?

  Beautiful. EJAS, is that the roll up?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. That is the roll up.

• 1:07:53David Hoffman?

  Dude, it's been great doing this. Once again, episode number 11. I learned a lot. What are you looking forward to? What are you paying attention to this week?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  There's a ton of things going on in the periphery, David. We didn't get to talk about emerging trends this episode, but we will definitely place emphasis on it next episode of just... So we mentioned all these launchpads kind of being like the same thing and agents being the same. I'm really trying to like be on the cutting edge of like what these other agents are going to end up doing. What's the evolution, basically? One thing that I'm tracking is some of these like agents that are doing engineering work, David. Now, it sounds like, you know, the death of software engineering is coming soon. I don't think we're anywhere near that, but right now they're kind of being used as kind of aides or agents that will kind of like be an apprentice to a software engineer.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  And I'm curious to see how these agents act autonomously. Like, can they manage their own GitHub repo or section of the GitHub repo? That can help these projects like overnight become much, much better or healthier. But yeah, that's what I'm digging into this week.

• 1:08:59David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Crypto AI, even riskier, you can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Thanks, folks.