AI ROLLUP: ChatGPT's Viral Explosion | xAI Acquires X | Coreweave IPO Rocks Markets

AI heats up, markets shake, and the internet gets Ghbilified. OpenAI hits 1M users in 60 minutes, CoreWeave IPO rocks NASDAQ, and XAI acquires X. A new “world’s best” model quietly drops—did Google just take the lead? Cursor raises at a $9.6B valuation as “vibecoding” enters the mainstream. Welcome back to another week of the AI Rollup. ------ 📣CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | TAXES MADE EASY https://bankless.cc/Cryptotaxcalculator ------ 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 The Ghibli Effect https://x.com/alifarhat79/status/1904884015858884884 https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1906831621166440583 00:05:09 Coreweave IPO https://www.ft.com/content/519006a9-82c6-4939-afa1-58921a399105 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/01/coreweave-shares-bounce-ipo-price.html https://x.com/TheStalwart/status/1907438208662552647 00:14:28 xAI Acquires X https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1905731750275510312?s=46 00:20:02 Grok's Telegram Integration 00:24:38 New Best Model Has Arrived https://x.com/bookwormengr/status/1905050740110090429?s=46 https://x.com/gfodor/status/1904980153329242147?s=46 00:32:09 Cursor And The Vibe Coding Explosion https://x.com/ArfurRock/status/1906768733135098360 00:39:02 AI Crypto Trend Update https://x.com/defi0xjeff/status/1904154090424402163?s=46 00:45:47 BillyBets March Madness https://x.com/playprophetx/status/1899535745435742608?s=46 https://x.com/bunchubets/status/1904224002123473294?s=46 00:56:51 Olas https://olas.network/ 01:01:32 Vana https://x.com/anna_kazlauskas/status/1905414468315549737?s=46 ------ 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.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

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

• 0:14Speaker 01

  What's up, dude? You know that meme of Dave Chappelle kind of like scratching his neck? And he's like, you got any more of that stuff, David?

• 0:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  That was me for the last two weeks, because we've got a ton of AI updates to kind of go through on this episode.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  And we skipped an episode last week. Sorry for all those, the regular consumers of the AI Rollup. Just schedules didn't work, but we're back with a double dose of AI crypto content.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  And there is a lot to go through. Some really important stuff happened over the last week, David. For example, the most contentious and polaric events ever were gibblified and animated to be made super cute.

• 0:52David Hoffman?

  We all got a new word into our vernacular, which is gibblification.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it refers to a Studio Ghibli style of artistic animation, which took over Twitter and the world essentially, because the folks at OpenAI basically integrated this new feature, which allows anyone to upload an image and gibblify it per se. So it made the world pretty cute.

• 1:16David Hoffman?

  Give generalized artistic direction to what they want that photo to be amended to. And then everyone was like, make it Studio Ghibli.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I mean, David, like, pull up this thread that I just sent you. I mean, we kick off with basically Trump after his...

• 1:31David Hoffman?

  The Trump fist pump, yeah.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fist pump after his assassination attempt. And I don't know, for some reason, it's kind of even more epic than what was originally.

• 1:41David Hoffman?

  It is more epic.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  You scroll down and you've got the Tiananmen Square.

• 1:45David Hoffman?

  I saw a Studio Ghibli version of the World Trade Center, like, in the midst of the plane going into it. I'm like, wow, I am surprised that they are allowing this to come out. This is incredible.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It's pretty nuts. But, okay, so like, a more undertalked point around this whole gibblif... Okay, it's really cool. It took over the internet. Everyone had a load of fun. But two important things happened kind of behind the scenes from a business and economic standpoint for OpenAI, David. Number one, Sam put out this tweet where he explains that when they had that initial ChatGPT moment, right?

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Which was around 26 months ago, I think he says in this tweet. It took them five days to get to a million users, which at the time was record breaking. We haven't seen that across any other company. When they did this animation image generation feature, which led to the gibblification of everything. They added 1 million users in 60 minutes.

• 2:46David Hoffman?

  That's pretty nuts.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And that was two days after the feature launched. So I bet you that it was-

• 2:51David Hoffman?

  1 million users in five days gets collapsed down to 1 million users in one hour is a pretty insane acceleration.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  And it's kind of like a trend that we're just seeing with the AI-ification of everything in general, right? But then there's even more news here, which is they recently closed their round. Conveniently enough, after this new feature launch, which now values OpenAI at $300 billion, David, with a B. So it's pretty insane to kind of like see their valuation growth from, I think it was like 10 billion to start off with. And then they've got like a new capital raise of $40 billion. That's $40 billion. I thought that was an April Fool's joke until I realized it was posted on March 31st. So it is the largest private tech funding round in history per CNBC.

• 3:43David Hoffman?

  That's pretty crazy. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, I think one big theme of the episode this week is there is actually very much a lot of life in the AI markets. Despite like the decreasing NASDAQ, decreasing SPY, like macro fears. The AI economy, the AI investment, the AI private markets are extremely strong.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  The fundamentals aren't tracking the market share or the market cap growth of a lot of these different stocks and tokens as a result of that.

• 4:13David Hoffman?

  All right. So that's the first bit of the news that we're going to cover this week. The rest, let me kind of preview some of the subjects we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the CoreWeave IPO that just rocked NASDAQ. And again, gives us a sense of the strength of the AI bull market. XAI acquires X. So the AI company has acquired X, formerly known as Twitter. So we'll talk about that. There's a new- World's best model out there. There's a new world's best model every single week, but this is a new week. And so there's a new world's best model. So I want listeners to place your bets. Which AI lab created it? Did it come from the United States? Did it come from China? Did it come from a different country? Everyone place your bets. And then the company behind vibe

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  coding is now valued at 9.6, almost $10 billion as vibe coding works its way into public culture, at least on Twitter. So these are the big news. And then we're going to, of course, get into crypto AI. We're going to talk about Billy Betts and some things going on in the AI agents and crypto AI side of things. Jaws, are you ready for CoreWeave or any last comments before we just dive into it?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  No, let's get into it, David.

• 5:14David Hoffman?

  The OG crypto AI company, well before anyone realized that this was an intersection.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  They were useful like mining and stuff, right, David?

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  CoreWeave, yes. Okay, so this CoreWeave company, which just went public on the NASDAQ just this last week, started off as a crypto mining company, doing Ethereum GPU mining back in Ethereum's proof of work days. So it was founded in 2017 as Atlantic Crypto. Like I said, initially focused on cryptocurrency mining with GPUs. In the 2018 crypto downturn, the crash of the ICO meta, CoreWeave pivoted to leverage its GPUs for just high performance computing tasks, not necessarily AI, a lot of like rendering stuff.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Like gaming stuff?

• 6:00David Hoffman?

  Gaming, rendering, like graphics rendering, yeah, just like maybe like maybe Hollywood Studios, CGI kind of rendering, things like this, because AI still really, as an industry, hadn't really taken off yet. The demand for compute resources were still still pretty nascent. So this company is based in New Jersey, where there's just a lot of data centers. But CoreWeave also runs data centers all across the United States and Europe with Nvidia GPUs, just to deliver scalable, high-performance cloud computing for AI models and inference. That's their business model today. Just to talk about some of the numbers, CoreWeave reported $1.9 billion in revenue in 2024, net loss of $900 million just to investments, just trying to scale up their their business model. During the IPO, they raised $1.5 billion, making it

• 6:43David Hoffman?

  the largest AI-related listing at the time. So that's kind of the big headline news is The CoreWeave IPO, $1.5 billion raise made it the largest AI-related listing ever. So that's pretty cool. So everyone is kind of looking at the IPO of CoreWeave to see like, okay, markets are down. There's shaky markets. Trump is like making it real hard for equity investors. And also, we're all kind of looking at Nvidia being 30% off the highs. We're like, all right, like, is there life in this AI investment like Meta? Or is it coming to an end? Like, give us the canary in the coal mine for AI-related investments.

• 7:25David Hoffman?

  And so the stock opened at $39, which is below the IPO price at $40. So it opened up a low $40. It kind of had this lackluster reception on day one. And then a bunch of people, commentators, were talking about the obvious short around CoreWeave for a few reasons. Very high debt load, $8 billion of debt and $2.6 billion in operating lease liabilities. And so this raises concerns about the company's ability to just meet their financial obligations. And also, there's customer concentration. So 77% of its revenue of CoreWeave's revenue comes from Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft relating to for 62% alone.

• 8:08David Hoffman?

  There's some business model doubts that people are wondering if CoreWeave is just, you know, GPUs in the cloud. How defensible is that moat? The critics have argued that the lack of unique moat to protect against this market position, it just doesn't exist. And then also, just the market timing and around AI hype. Like I said, the IPO came around a volatile market period with tech shocks under pressure. And some people are just saying CoreWeave is just overhyped because AI is overhyped. It's trying to ride the AI wave without actually any proven profitability or diversified revenue. And so this was the day one of the IPO. And so the headlines here in the Financial Times says, "CoreWeave's IPO Tested the Waters and Missed the Mark." That is day one.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  So that's a lot of fud.

• 8:50David Hoffman?

  There's a lot of fud. A lot of fud. Came in like $1 below the IPO price. IPO price of like $40, maybe $40 and a half. Came in at $39. That's day one. Day two? Not the same story. Rips. Forty-two percent higher, way above the IPO price. We have Joe Weisenthal, who tweeted out this morning, CoreWeave up another 20%. And you look at the price right now, from the bottom of the market, where it bottomed out at $36, like $4 below the IPO price, it got all the way up to $65. It's currently at $56 this morning.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  That's a crypto chart in a bull market.

• 9:31David Hoffman?

  That is a crypto chart, bro. This thing has ripped on the second day after the IPO price. So any IPO purchase, anyone who has bought CoreWeave in the last like two days is well into the green. And I would say that this is, if we are looking at just like a canary in the coal mine for broadly AI, looking real good. Looking real good. I got more to say about CoreWeave, but I'll pause and let you chime in here.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Well, no, I mean, my next natural question is why? All the FUD made sense, David. Surely the FUD like tracks into price progression, similarly to how all the AI progress is leading to price decline, right? Well, what happened here? What am I missing?

• 10:11David Hoffman?

  I don't know. I don't know. I think you can maybe use CoreWeave as a litmus test for inference, demand for inference.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:19David Hoffman?

  And I think this is coming, the timing of this, as well as the gibblification of the internet, I think is pretty good because Sam Altman was tweeting, "You guys are melting our GPUs."

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:31David Hoffman?

  Like, "We need to actually take away this feature away from free accounts because our GPUs are just melting." I don't think we have any data as to the costs that the gibblification of the internet has put on OpenAI just for inference costs. But you can just see Jevon's paradox just exhibited in real time last week, where it's like, there is so much demand for turning one picture into a different picture just to share it with your friends, right? There's just a lot of inference demand.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  And that's just one feature.

• 11:03David Hoffman?

  This is one feature. Yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:05David Hoffman?

  Okay, so there's another part of this story that I think is pretty cool. Okay, so here's a fun fact. If the Ethereum merge happened on time, CoreWeave would not be here today.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Explain yourself. What?

• 11:21David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is where CoreWeave started. They started off mining Ethereum in the proof of work days, and that was their revenue.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Oh, they would have never focused.

• 11:31David Hoffman?

  They were, they, I, I, from the early days, they had apparently just understood that in the future, there will be a lot of inference costs, but that future is not yet here today. But that was apparently the vision that they like founded the company on is like, oh yeah, GPU, GPU resource demand is going to be high, not just for AI, but also just modeling, graphics, and also, and also cryptocurrency. And so their plan was to use Ethereum GPU mining to just be sufficiently profitable to get to the point where like in the future, AI inference will be a thing that can actually float their, their business. And so that was back in 2018, 2019, they just started buying up a ton of high-end Nvidia GPUs just to build out a deep well of capacity.

• 12:14David Hoffman?

  And because the Ethereum merge just got delayed from 2019 to 2020 to 2021, all the way to 2023, they were just able to maintain profitability until ChatGPT got released in 2022. And that's when this AI inference like bull market really, really happened.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:33David Hoffman?

  And, and so I think that is one of the biggest, most like, they saw it, they saw the vision for AI inference and demand for AI inference. They also saw that, you know, Ethereum mining and GPU mining can carry them to that point. And I think with also a ton of luck, they were able to just pull that transition off pretty beautifully. So I think it's a pretty cool story.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. It seems like the right pieces fell together at the right time. That, that is insane. Like, I wonder what CoreWeave would have ended up, it would have just focused on crypto mining, presumably, at that point.

• 13:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, they probably just would have shut down and be like, okay, we just made our money. There's, once Ethereum turned into proof of stake, like the next largest proof of work like yield was Ethereum Classic, which was like one, one hundredth the value of Ethereum. And so once Ethereum proof of work went away, there was nothing left for them, except ChatGPT had already launched.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I'm curious, David, over the last 24 hours, how much have they added to their market cap? Do we know?

• 13:28David Hoffman?

  Just in the last 24 hours? Well, this is a live chart, right? And so is the second and so, I mean, the-

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, like even from its bottom, from like its IPO price, like it must be up like-

• 13:39David Hoffman?

  So the bottom on March 31st was 36, $36. So at the very bottom at $36.15 to where it is right now-

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And then its top was like 65?

• 13:48David Hoffman?

  It's up 56% right now. The top was a plus 80%.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  And what is that in terms of like market cap?

• 13:58David Hoffman?

  The current market cap, the peak of the today, the current market cap is $26 billion. I think it's down to like 22 billion dollars.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Wow. So it added like 15 billion dollars, if not, over like the last couple of days?

• 14:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think it added like eight or 10 billion dollars for the bottom, since the bottom.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Wow, wow. That is crazy.

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Anyways, congrats to Core Reef.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And congrats to the IPO holders and stock purchasers that just ignored the entire FUD.

• 14:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, amazing. All right, take us into XAI, Joss.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so big news from the Elon Musk X or Twitter sphere right now. So XAI is essentially the offshoot or subsidiary that we initially thought that built Grok. Grok is basically the Twitter AI model. And Grok, we've spoken about Grok, Grok 3, its latest model, outperformed a lot of the leading models when it launched. But big news this week is that XAI, so that's the company that built Grok, acquired X, AKA formerly known as Twitter. And that is a pretty insane thing to happen, in my opinion, right?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  So if we pull up this tweet from Elon himself, he starts it off with saying XAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values XAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion. But what I really want to focus, David, is on this fourth paragraph. Down here where he says XAI and X's futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending XAI's advanced AI capability and expertise with X's massive reach. And this is the point.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Twitter or X currently has 600 million active users, David, right? And we know that like Elon is like obsessed with like finding the truth and information or yada, yada, whatever. But the fact is, this model, this AI model now probably has one of the largest distribution mechanisms or, you know, captive audiences to test any kind of product or feature with them or on them, right? I don't know about you, but like having Grok 3 available on Twitter has made it super easy for me to like do my research on Twitter or like catch up with the latest news or, you know, check out sources for a particular tweet to see if, you know, what they're saying is real or not, right? And now, um, we've kind of spoken about this before, but we believe that like X will

• 16:37Speaker 01

  become kind of like a founding place for a lot of different AI apps in the future. Presuming like the, you know, they allow agents to prosper and AI models to exist. And this is just like confirmation, in my opinion, that this is gonna, this is the path that X and Elon and the entire XAI team wants to lead. The third point I'm going to make, David, is the data that this model now officially has access to is going to be insane. And it's in real time. It's people's opinions, subjective thoughts. It's a truth-seeking machine. All that data is going to be fed into the AI model and it's going to be ragged, right? Retrieval augmented generation, which is going to make the model smarter and smarter in real time, per day, per hour, per whatever unit of time.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  And I think that is just an insane access point to have. And it's crazy to see it like officialized, right?

• 17:28David Hoffman?

  I wonder how much of Elon's original motivations for purchasing Twitter actually was in this story. I think it's hard to understate how incredibly valuable the information is that comes out of humans, Twitter accounts doing just reporting about what they see about that end of the world. Like, news happens first on the internet on Twitter. And we've seen, I always would talk to Ryan about like the difference between reading articles and just being on Twitter specifically, where like after, but there was like, my life was different once I got on Twitter. Because previously I would read about news, events, about things that were happening.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  And then I got on Twitter and I realized that news reporters are just reading tweets.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:14David Hoffman?

  And turning that into articles on msnbc.com. But you can just skip the like editorial or just the MSNBC or whatever interpretation of real life events and just go straight to the source, which is Twitter. And that is the unique compelling case for XAI, which is the data that only they have like high fidelity access to, which is people's tweets. And so I think that the real timeliness around the Grok model, I think is going to be very valuable. And you can see, you can see why like Elon Musk is like putting these pieces together. I'm going to be completely honest with you, Josh, I already thought XAI and X were already intertwined. I didn't know, I didn't know that they were not already intertwined.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  They were intertwined, but XAI was a subsidiary of X.

• 19:04David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And now it's become like the owning entity of the social media site. So that flip is very potent and important, right?

• 19:12David Hoffman?

  It's weird to think that Twitter is owned by a larger entity.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's owned by an AI lab right now.

• 19:18David Hoffman?

  Owned by an AI. Twitter is now owned by an AI lab, which makes sense that I think you could be, in a parallel universe, Twitter is still Twitter and it would still be bought by an AI lab.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Well, you know what's a kind of like weird way to think about it, David? You know how like all these social media sites basically have really smart trained algorithms? To like serve you up the best content? The algorithm in this case owns the social media site.

• 19:42David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Explicitly.

• 19:44David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:45David Hoffman?

  I don't know where this goes next, but I'm excited for it.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Well, one of my, one of the more obvious thesis that I think this is heading in is I think XAI is gonna be on a path of really aggressive market penetration, right? Well, in the same week, actually, David, they announced that they're launching integration into Telegram, right? And Telegram has, you know, over, I think, three hundred million monthly active users or something ridiculous like that. Now, now Grok is gonna be embedded natively into chats and into the app itself, right? I actually, if you, I, I wrote about this, if you pull up this tweet, David. I actually argued that like Grok integrating into Telegram is actually gonna be really good for agents, cuz now, oh, right, it's one billion MAUs have access to real-time AI.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  But what I think is really cool here is if you have this AI model training off, once again, personalized chat data, or imagine it becomes personalized to your group chat, David, right? Where you're talking about different tokens, or you've got a question, you could just ping Grok, it gives you a quick answer, and you can make a decision on what token to buy, or what movie to go book and see, or et cetera, et cetera, right? And I think that data is just gonna constantly feed back into the main mother entity, which is XAI, which makes its model even smarter and applicable to any other application or distribution network that they're using. So it wouldn't surprise me if we see a ton of different apps appear on X natively embedded,

• 21:15Speaker 01

  that might be agents, or just if features like OpenAI's gibblification image generator over the next couple of weeks or even months. Yeah.

• 21:24David Hoffman?

  That is the main difference of all the AI models out there. Grok lives in the place, places that I go anyways.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:33David Hoffman?

  It's consumer-facing, like if I need to go to ChatGPT, I have to go type in ChatGPT.com. I never type in Grok. I, it's in Twitter, it's embedded in Twitter, and there's a button for it. And so that's the, that's the kind of the unique thing about Grok for me is it's already in the places that I'm navigating on the internet.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly, exactly.

• 21:51David Hoffman?

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• 23:40David Hoffman?

  You may have already heard about Infinix. Infinix has, in my opinion, the nicest cross-chain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere. It is called Swich Swap and Bridge, and we're going to show you what it looks like. First, we're going to log into my Infinix account with a passkey. Now, there's no seed phrases in Infinix. This is just a one-click setup with biometric passkeys. But in addition to that, my Infinix account is fully non-custodial. So bam, I just logged in. It was two clicks and I'm already into my Infinix account. So let's go make a swidge. I'm gonna go swidge my USDC that is on base and I'm gonna buy Bara chain, which is a completely different chain. So we're gonna swidge this. I'm gonna press that button and then Infinix is gonna execute this order, this cross-chain order for me. And now it is done.

• 24:22David Hoffman?

  But actually, I'm not really feeling Barish anymore, so I'm gonna go from Bara to Penguins. I'm gonna buy Penguin on Solana, so I'm going from the Bara chain to Solana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just swidge across whatever chain that you want with Infinix. That was so easy. Go check out Infinix and try your first swidge today. All right, that's a new best model out there. I hinted about this in the intro. But this is the weekly news. There's always a new best model. There's always some new leapfrogging that's going on. Who leapfrogged who this week, Jaws?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Okay, drum roll, please. Google. Google people. Who could have seen it?

• 24:58David Hoffman?

  Which one's Google? That's Gemini. That's Gemini. Gemini is Google. Okay, so Gemini is the new is the new world's best model for the week?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. So Gemini 2.5 Pro, as McKay Wrigley in this tweet states, is now easily the best model for code. He goes, "It's extremely powerful. 1 million token context is legit." By the way, 1 million token context window means basically you can print, copy and paste essays, essays worth of information into one single prompt and it'll comprehend all of it. It also means that it has-

• 25:33David Hoffman?

  1 million tokens is like, 1 million tokens is roughly 1 million syllables and so that'll that'll collapse down to like 600,000 words, 700,000 words. And man, like 1,000 words takes you about 10 minutes to read.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  David, there was a time where it was literally like 500 words max in a prompt.

• 25:53David Hoffman?

  Oh my god.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  It's just insane. And if people are wondering, you know, why is this particular characteristic really important? Well, think about the amount of information you could allow the AI model to ingest in a single prompt and then like couple that with further up prompts that you- Like prompt afterwards, it basically means the AI acts smarter in a much more quick and efficient way, which is really important if you want like to have really intuitive, powerful, magical AI experiences, right? If you have to repeatedly tell, um, you know, this AI model over like a number of prompts like, hey, this is by the way, like, this is my age and this is my weight and et cetera, it just gets completely unusable. Another really important thing is it also means it has a really large memory context window, David.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  So it's going to remember the conversation for much longer as well, which means that, you know, one of the things that I'm doing with chat GPT right now is I'm getting it to act as my dietitian and personal trainer in the gym, right? So it has my blood marker, um, indicators, it, it knows about my ethnicity, my kind of body type, how much I work out, what I'm eating, and it measures all the calories and everything, and it tracks and it can give me a comprehensive report of my progress basically every week. And you can't do that without, you know, a large context window and a large kind of memory capacity. And Gemini two point five pro is basically hitting all these different markers. I think the most important one though, David, is it's unseated Claude as the best AI coding companion or assistant.

• 27:22David Hoffman?

  So that is kind of a big deal.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  It's a huge deal.

• 27:24David Hoffman?

  Claude I thought had a very sticky mote when it came to developers.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Correct. And basically, uh, so for those who don't know, Claude is, um, you know, kind of like the leading AI model from Anthropic, which is one of the leading AI model producers out there. And for many months now, uh, it has been the best at helping developers code. And in some cases, take over a lot of their coding work. But now Gemini two point five, which bared no kind of indication that they were going to be, that it was going to be good at coding, has now just completely leapfrogged Claude. And I think, you know, that for that to happen in such a small window of time is just insane to see. So really, really cool.

• 28:07David Hoffman?

  The conversation that we're highlighting here on Twitter, I think it's actually pretty poignant. So let me just read it out, uh, tweet reads, uh, from this one individual, uh, not inside of crypto Twitter. It's kind of hilarious that Google dropped their biggest upgrade ever. And Ghibli Core completely hijacked the zeitgeist. Peak example of how vibes now overrides tech merit in the attention economy. Interesting point. Then the tweet that we're looking at is responding to this and it says respectfully disagree. It is true, the timeline is full of ChatGPT 4.0 images. However, people who pay with their credit cards for API access are indeed noticing that Gemini Pro 2.5 is way cheaper and way faster than competitors and appears to be a great model.

• 28:49David Hoffman?

  We will continue to have a divergence between consumers and companies. And I think what he means here is that, okay, great. Like the gibblification of the internet is definitely capturing attention in zeitgeist. But people paying money are paying money for Gemini Pro 2.5. And so there's kind of like a quality versus quantity conversation here. And I think what we're seeing is ChatGPT has taken over mindshare. Like it's the phrase ChatGPT in the same way Google, you know, just Google it, just ChatGPT it. But that's like being pointed at as this like kind of low value commodification of AI and not something that we can convince consumers to pull out their credit cards and actually pay for it here.

• 29:31David Hoffman?

  But everything that you're saying about the strengths of Gemini is convincing people to pull out their credit cards and actually pay for it. That's kind of the conversation that I'm seeing.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. So like, kind of like another way to think about it is, you know, attention economy, how you shape a narrative, mindshare is pretty much everything, right? And consumer facing products are the way to do that. That being said, like they, I think they are like two sides of the same coin, David, which is B2C, which is where OpenAI this week excelled at with the gibblification feature. But then B2B is still a very dominant vertical and that's kind of where Google is playing in with this particular model release. It's kind of how I think about it. I think something that's really cool as well, David, is we always speak about these models every week, but we need to like have some kind of comparison chart that we kind of relate back to.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I really like this tweet from Peter Yang where he kind of like summarizes, and I think he's he's used an AI model to summarize this, which is kind of funny. But you can kind of like see where Gemini 2.5 lines up in terms of like coding and how ChatGPT lines up in terms of image generation. And it is just crazy how like, you know, the flips between these models and their leading capacity in particular verticals is changing just every week. And I want to kind of like track this kind of like every day. One important thing I think is is really important to to kind of like look is we see some red crosses on this image, David. And it's to show where a lot of these models are kind of lacking in, right?

• 31:07David Hoffman?

  They just don't have that feature, right?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, deep research, for example, voice chat, image generation, video generation, live camera, computer use. And in my opinion, I think these are some of the features that are going to start popping up in the immediate weeks to come. And I think it would be worth a discussion in the future as to where these features might be most valuable, right? I, for one, use ChatGPT's voice feature all the time, right? I've mentioned this on previous episodes. And I think it's going to give us an idea of how these AI models are going to evolve in terms of like consumer applications, David.

• 31:43David Hoffman?

  Looking at this chart, you just kind of got to tip your hat to ChatGPT. I know this chart is opinionated, but ChatGPT has the the gold star, which there's only one gold star per category, right? It has the majority of the number one positions across the all of the features here. So everyday answers, math, reasoning, deep research, voice chat, image generation. Showing really that ChatGPT is the frontier model, at least when it comes to just like features.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  David, have you vibe coded anything this week?

• 32:13David Hoffman?

  I'm so incredibly non-technical that even vibe coding feels too technical for me.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Dude, you could literally prompt, you could go onto this app called Cursor and you could prompt it like, "Hey, can you make me like a Flappy Bird mock-up?" And it'll just do it for you, David. It takes seconds, yeah. I urge you to create a Cursor account, because I think this is gonna be one of the biggest companies to date coming through. And actually, like recently on this week, the company Cursor, which as I'm saying, is the company behind Vibe Coding, is valued at 10, well, 9.6 billion dollars, but let's call it 10 billion dollars, after they closed a round of 625 million dollars led by A16Z, Thrive Capital.

• 32:55David Hoffman?

  They raised 625 million dollars. That is so much money.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. And for people who are asking why, I can show you like a quick kind of like demo. So if you pull up this tweet that I linked to here, David, it's this guy called, I think, Chong Yu. And basically what he's demoing here is he's put in a single prompt, or maybe a few prompts, and he said, "Basically, can you build me a Flappy Bird clone using Cursor and Claude?" Claude is an AI model we mentioned earlier that is really good at coding. And it did it, but in 3D, David. So if you watch this-

• 33:32David Hoffman?

  A 3D Flappy Bird clone, but it's still a 2D game, right? The bird is still going from left to right.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Correct, but you know, you have like very unique kind of characteristics where you can kind of like edit the map in real time. As you can see, he's like moving around the map, you see sunlight, shadows, that kind of stuff you don't really see in like a 2D sphere or in the original Flappy Bird game. Also, if you notice, there's a lot of like flowchart action where he's like moving a cursor and he's dragging boxes from left to right. That's how easy it's become to code, David, for some of these different apps. Like, you don't need to really understand what the underlying code is gonna be. You just type in words in literal English and you can kind of create this feature which becomes a box and then you just move the box around and you say, "Hey, can you, uh, this feature which makes the thing, thingamabob, jump up, could you like make it happen with when I press the spacebar?"

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Please and they're like, yeah, sure. Like we'll, we'll get that done. Okay. It's edited. It's updated for you, right? It kind of reminds me of Andre Karpety's tweet that he, I think he made about six months ago, or maybe even a year ago, David, where he goes, English is the new, is the hottest programming language.

• 34:39David Hoffman?

  It's the new, new hot programming language. Yeah, I really like that tweet.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's just kind of maintained that case ever more since we've like, since he tweeted that out. Another cool.

• 34:50David Hoffman?

  Do you know the game League of Legends?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Of course, dude. Yes.

• 34:54David Hoffman?

  Have you ever played it?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Of course I've played it. Yeah.

• 34:56David Hoffman?

  I've, I've never played it. I suck at it. I played it like one time, once I got back. Same thing with like Dota, right? There are these like the, I don't know what category is the name of these things like arena, like massive multi, not, it's like an arena battle game or something like that. So the, this format of game was actually created from, I believe, a Starcraft like map editor game. And so like some individual just like created this version of, yeah, forced, open source, edited the game, created the game, got massively popular inside of like the Starcraft online servers. It might've been Warcraft. I don't know. And then, and that create spawned this like multi-billion dollar industry around like League of Legends and Dota.

• 35:40David Hoffman?

  And this is huge in Asia, like huge, huge prizes. And so what I'm seeing here is like, oh, if it just gets like trivially easy to express creativity as some dude with skills or imagination, like I'm sure the guy who made the original like Starcraft or Warcraft like version of Dota, did not have the technical skill set, write the game code by code, but he, they just had the imagination to create Dota in the map editor, the codified map editor for that game. And then, and then some $10 billion industry came out of it. And so when I see this, I'm like, okay, well, stuff like that is just now getting a thousand times easier. Like we're going to have an explosion of creativity of potential. You know, things that will be very, very fun.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So do you remember the Gartner Technology Chart, David? Which basically kind of tells you that infrastructure comes first and it's there for like a decade. And then the applications boom and they're worth more than the infrastructure themselves. I think AI has either speed run that incredibly quickly or it's flipped it on its head, right? Because we went from like chips to consumer applications like this. And it seems like the more consumer applications are being put out, the more consumer apps are going to get created, right? That's the point you're making with this like vibe coding situation, right? And what's crazy here, David, is that it's not just going to happen in software. It's going to happen in media.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  So you could have some of the best movie directors pop out of people that are using, I don't know, Mid Journey or now like a feature off of OpenAI. Like people who were creating these Ghibli images, by the way, just slapped it in Mid Journey or some video generator thing. And suddenly you had a whole movie. Did you see the Lord of the Rings?

• 37:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  New premiere, which was just insane. So like, I think we're going to see some of the best kind of media producers, app creators, like new enterprise or business owners just kind of pop up out of nowhere. I think we're going to enter, unironically, the application era all over again. And I think like this consumptive attention is going to become one of the scariest things to kind of focus on. It's gonna be pretty nuts.

• 37:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. Golden age of innovation. All right, Ajaz, that's going to wrap up our strictly just AI section of the AI crypto world. But we're going to get into the crypto side of the agenda. But first, a message from our friends and sponsors over at the Crypto Tax Calculator. Ajaz, it's tax season. I'm sorry to inform you of that, but nonetheless, it comes every single year. And if you were busy on chain last year, if you were trading AI agents, buying and selling agents, you probably have a tax bill. You definitely do have a tax bill. And we recommend using the Crypto Tax Calculator to just make this just a very painless transition, a very painless experience. I have an accountant, EJaz, because doing the taxes is so incredibly painful for me that I just get a higher accountant to do it. My accountant uses the Crypto Tax Calculator.

• 38:36David Hoffman?

  And so they just use the, yeah, so they just put it into the crypto.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  They're an intermediary, David.

• 38:41David Hoffman?

  They are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just hate taxes so much that I will just pay someone to use crypto tax calculator on my behalf.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  When crypto tax agent, that's the question.

• 38:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that one. You can get 15% off with the code bankless 15. There is a link in the show notes, crypto tax calculator.com. Bankless dot C C slash crypto tax calculator will also work. Okay, let's get into the crypto side of things. Walk us through some of the trends or since it's been two weeks, what's going on in the last two weeks of crypto AI?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I mean, some extreme highs and some extreme lows, unfortunately. So, okay. Within the, the kind of like 12 day period since our last episode, David. Bitcoin shot back up suddenly from its like lows of 80 K to like 88 K. Which of course meant that a bunch of altcoins just kind of like pumped. And if you bring up this tweet from DeFi zero X Jeff or zero X Jeff. What he's basically highlighting is that the majority of altcoin inflow went into AI coins. Now, we've said this time and again, especially over the last couple of months, that crypto AI is still the number one mindshare subject in all of crypto.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  And the reason why that's important is sentiment drives prices. So if sentiment is up, typically it drives prices up for that particular token. And we've finally kind of given some kind of validation in this, in the depths of this whatever brief bear moment. Where a lot of AI coins went up, but I think it's important to zone in on which AI coins in particular went up, right? So he's, he's listed some top performers here. Things like AI agent platform coins like bid, which I think is very big in like the Binance community. Billy, which is ask Billy Betts, which is a gamble fight. Billy Betts, which is absolutely killing, killing it. And we've got some more news on that later. We've got things like DeFi abstraction platforms like Noor.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  We've got Sam, which is like a robotics coin, which we can get into later, which is pretty insane. It's like open source robotics control. I've been looking at it and honestly watching a few streams of like these people controlling robots that are like battling each other and it's just whatever. It's insane. Yeah, it's absolutely insane. And then we have like the cursor of crypto, David, which is called Alchemy, which was up forty four percent. And it basically allows you to vibe code any kind of app which has native crypto embeddings into it. So you can either pay in crypto or it's governed by some kind of crypto coin incentivized, etc. And then you have the classics like Banker and Griffane and Griff.

• 41:17David Hoffman?

  Dude, Banker's doing well. Banker's winning.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Really, really well, right? And you could argue that the main reason for that is because it's natively embedded in X, right? So you could just kind of like add it or whatever. I'm pretty sure Caitlyn Jenner used Banker over the last. Do we have that tweet?

• 41:32David Hoffman?

  Caitlyn Jenner just wakes up and starts tweeting at Bankerbot.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Look at this.

• 41:37David Hoffman?

  Bankerbot, hey, Caitlyn, will you create me a wallet?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think the funniest part of this interaction is if you look at this, David. She goes, I actually didn't make a wallet. So what is the wallet that you're quoting that I have or that you're claiming that I have, Banker, right? And Banker's like, obviously someone's tipped you in the past, so we spun you up a wallet. Here's how you claim it. And Caitlyn Jenner's like, wow, I forgot that that was there. Cool. Let me get access to it. I don't know if there's a team behind this or whatever, but the point is the AI coins went up and they were the altcoins to go up the most over this period of time. Now, since then, Bitcoin has unfortunately retraced and as a result of that.

• 42:16David Hoffman?

  We're at eighty seven thousand. Elon Musk just got fired from Doge and now the market's like that, apparently.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Wait, Elon Musk got fired from Doge? Like literally just now?

• 42:25David Hoffman?

  Like fifteen minutes before we started recording this. Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Oh, that's.

• 42:28David Hoffman?

  Trump said, told Elon to go home.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Okay, that's hilarious.

• 42:31David Hoffman?

  Tesla went up like four percent on the news.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  That's hilarious.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  So if I wanted to like make kind of like a higher level point on this kind of like market pump from AI coins, David, is that there are specific categories that benefited the most. Number one is, weirdly enough, GambleFi agents. So these are agents.

• 42:57David Hoffman?

  Gambling agents.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Gambling agents. So these are like agents that can help you place bets on certain things, either through prediction markets or through traditional sports betting sites. The most obvious example from this is Ask Billy Betts, which does this on basketball games. It's done it on a few soccer games, I believe, and it's going to expand. I've spoken to the team recently. They're going to expand to like a number of different things, and we'll talk more about that later. The second major category is DeFi abstraction platforms like Banker, like Griffane, you know, like Grift, which is from this FAIR1 Orbital team.

• 43:32David Hoffman?

  That's a terrible name for a ticker.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I completely agree. But the point being here is that there's obviously demand still from people to abstract away all their DeFi complexity. And if I were to bet where kind of like money flows back into the AI agent economy, or where focus is right now, at least whilst all the agent platforms work on their V2, which they're going to launch in their app stores, et cetera, it's going to be in these two categories, which is, you know, interesting to see. He also calls out things that didn't recover, David. I see you're highlighting it right now.

• 44:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, wow, that's a, I mean, I guess this makes sense since he didn't listen to them, but he says categories that barely recover, Launchpad, Launchpad's a major ecosystem and frameworks, which I'm guessing is like Virtuals, Ark, AI16Z.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Correct, yeah, which have been like suffered and down bad.

• 44:18David Hoffman?

  Those are still wrecked.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. One thing I didn't call out is that Fatcoin hit a $600 million market cap. It was actually the thing that pumped the most.

• 44:27David Hoffman?

  Well, that's because Fatcoin is a meme more than it is an AI thing.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  And you're saying that sentiment tracks directly to memes, pretty much, or?

• 44:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, uh huh. Yeah, it's tracking memes, which is, memes never really go down.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:41David Hoffman?

  That's, they definitely do go down, but as a category, memes are forever.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think just in general, like, a lot of these crypto AI coins are oversold or were oversold, which is why they like pumped so much. And so it doesn't really matter which kind of like category distinction it was made, right?

• 44:58David Hoffman?

  I mean, I'm assuming a lot of these tokens are very liquid. It doesn't take a whole lot to pump these things quite a bit.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. And I think one other thing that's worth pointing out, if we want to look at ecosystems within agents, if you pull up this tweet by Graham, he basically highlights how a lot of tokens, to your point, that some are pretty liquid. We're talking about market caps between 5 million to 50 million market caps, were all green on the day that Bitcoin just pumped up to 88K. So there's probably a lot of demand in virtuals ecosystems specifically. So looking out for the top tokens there and how they're performing is probably worthy for any potential investor that is still interested in this space and looking where to allocate funds in this down market.

• 45:47David Hoffman?

  Let's get into the actual fundamentals of things, because of course, at the end of the day, we need fundamentals to make all this stuff work. Before we started recording, you guys, you were telling me some pretty cool things about Billy Betts. Walk me in the bankless nation through Billy Betts.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Okay, well, it was, as of two days ago, March Madness. And for those of you who don't know...

• 46:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, please explain to me what March Madness is.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Well, dude, I'm a Brit, so I don't know if I'm the best person to explain this. But essentially, it is where all the top college basketball teams basically compete against each other. So it's like NBA, but for college basketball teams.

• 46:22David Hoffman?

  This is when everyone gets obsessed about their bracket. Everyone gets obsessed about their bracket. Pair brackets. The odds of having a perfect bracket is something in 1 in 70 million or something like that. We talk about brackets.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And listen, I've heard a lot from my friends who actually watch the sport and the live matches, that it gets super competitive and it's one of the most entertaining versions of basketball leagues to watch, right? And the point around this is, there's a lot of attention on March Madness or during March Madness. And as a result of that, there's a hell of a lot of people that bet on this, David. And guess what? Our favorite betting agent, Ask Billy Betts, is being pitted against the best human sports bettors to try and win a $25,000 prize, right?

• 47:07David Hoffman?

  So we have our AI agent, Team Crypto, going up against Team Humans, non-crypto humans, like actual basketball watchers, professional basketball watchers.

• 47:20David Hoffman?

  And he's going toe to toe in making predictions about Billy's bracket versus other humans.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Right. So, so the competition is called the Profit X March Madness Tournament, which focuses on this college basketball season. And it's a tournament, so it's elimination style rounds, right? You're placed up against an opponent and you need to out bet them for the game. Winners move up to the next round. It's as simple as that, right? And last time I checked, Billy's record was 7-3-1, which basically meant that, you know, he was, he defeated two or three opponents in like one fell swoop, right? So over three different games. And Billy has made it into the Sweet 16, which is, I believe, the final 16 matches that are being played, or final 16 opponents,

• 48:07Speaker 01

  which it did autonomously just by making its own analysis, making its own bets, taking profit when was needed, and out betting the other individuals. So to date, it's made like a 40%, roughly a 40% ROI on all its plays during March Madness. I think I've got a breakdown of its bets, wins and losses in this tweet over here. You know, for betting fans out here, you can make a lot of sense out here. So, you know, it's betting like, you know, something around three to five or six grand roughly per game. So, you know, a decent amount, a decent chunk, definitely more than the average human better, I would say. And it's doing pretty well. So it's pretty fascinating to see finally an AI agent

• 48:51Speaker 01

  that is outperforming humans at something that is pretty widely adopted or is done in an entertainment style. Pretty cool. What do you think, David?

• 49:00David Hoffman?

  Pretty cool. Okay, so there were 64 humans and he is in the top 16. And so he's already proven that he's at least better than average. I would really, I really wanted him to go like top four. Because like we need, we need like 10x numbers, not just like 20% better or 40% better, but we need like, it needs to beat the crowd, a very consistent, like in a very consistent way in order for this to really be real. So I really am rooting for him to get like top four. That would be crazy. And then like my next question is like, all right, how does Billy Betz scale? How do we take Billy Betz to go from just like gambling $10,000? Cause he, in order to enter this bracket, he put $10,412 on the line.

• 49:42David Hoffman?

  He's currently one back $14,000. So he's already in the, he's already in the green. But like, come on, let's, let's, let's scale this thing. Let's give Billy Betz a million dollars and set him loose in Vegas. Like, when does that happen?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I mean, I have an answer for you. So I caught up with the team during ETH Denver. And that is exactly the direction they're going in. So the structure they're setting up, David, is there's, there's two kind of approaches to this. Number one, they're going to expand beyond basketball. So they're going to hit every single league that pops up. Oh, you're in a fantasy football team? Well, guess what? Now you have an agent that you can kind of like watch, observe, and maybe mimic or copy Betz of, right? You know, I don't know, football season, ice hockey season, whatever, pick your sport, whatever you can watch on TV. Billy Betz is going to be there.

• 50:27David Hoffman?

  Wait, can I finally enter my friends fantasy football leagues? Cause they invite me every single year and I'm like, guys, I just don't know shit, dude.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:35David Hoffman?

  Can I just like be, be the human extension of Billy Betz?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing, right? One of the major critics or critiques of Ask Billy Betz, David, is that, well, I want to bet with Billy and all its bets have been masked. It's been hidden, right? The wallets are hidden. Um, you know, they keep switching wallets so that you can't track any of it, right? So even if like some of the people that do find its wallet, you, you can't basically track it for more than like a week or so, right? Well, one of the second updates, which they should be launching pretty soon, is you can proxy bet with Billy Betz. So you can literally just chuck in a bunch of money into the Billy Betz wallet. And it manages your funds for you and places the same bets for you. So I think that million dollar agent that's betting with a million dollars is gonna happen.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Really soon.

• 51:25David Hoffman?

  Okay, cool. That's explicitly what is happening.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, well, you know, whatever, not financial advice, but, but that is effectively what they're going to be launching. And it's going to get pretty nuts. It's going to get pretty crazy.

• 51:38David Hoffman?

  I'm seeing actually two different product lines here. I'm seeing the crypto product line, which is exactly what you just said. Like allow the crypto DJs to bet alongside Billy. But I think there's also just a regular consumer product line, which is I have a seat in a fantasy football tournament. And I would like Billy Betts to make every single one of my decisions.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. But you just don't tell your friends that, David.

• 52:00David Hoffman?

  I just don't tell my friends that.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01David Hoffman?

  And I don't know if that, that's not possible, right? Because I don't have access to like Billy Betts brain. But I would, I would imagine that I would pay money for that. I would pay, even if like the pot for my fantasy football league was like a hundred dollars. I would pay a hundred dollars to beat my friends.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Well, dude, what's really cool about what this team is building is I presume like when you enter this fantasy football league, there are specific betting sites that you need to use, right?

• 52:26David Hoffman?

  I, I would assume, yes.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Assume, right? So this protocol is integrating those betting sites. So David has a DraftKings account.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. You basically will be able to give the agent control over the bets it makes in your name on your DraftKings account.

• 52:43David Hoffman?

  That is great. If I could just come into my college friend's fantasy football league as the, as the token person who does not watch football and then just sweep the floor with them, that would be, I would pay money for that.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I'm going to assume that your friends don't really watch these episodes in their entirety, David. Your college friends at least.

• 53:00David Hoffman?

  I think that's true.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Which is going to be hilarious because like all the evidence is here. I mean, I mean, I want to call out that the, the team right now leverages all on-chain prediction markets, David. For all these games, it's pretty insane, right? So when they integrate like normal DraftKings and betting platforms, it's just the data and the feedback. This agent is just going to get smarter and smarter and smarter. And you know what's cooler? It's going to recognize your betting patterns or just humans betting patterns across every different sport. You want to bet that it's going to become like one of the smartest bettors out there? Absolutely.

• 53:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, I think that's base case. I mean, that is the goal.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  It's like having the house make bets for you. Except now it's open source and decentralized and anyone can chuck in a bag for it to make money for you. It's pretty, pretty insane. Yeah, very bullish.

• 53:47David Hoffman?

  In the Wild West of DeFi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance. The protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi and Rolex. The core of Frax Finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for best-in-class yields across DeFi, T-bills and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com, then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more? Bridge your Frax USD over to the Fraxtel Layer 2 for the same yield plus Fraxtel points and explore Fraxtel's diverse Layer 2 ecosystem with protocols like Curve, Convex and more, all rewarding early adopters. Frax isn't just a protocol, it's a digital nation powered by the FXX token and governed by its global community.

• 54:29David Hoffman?

  Acquire FXX through frax.com or your go-to DEX, stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use frax.com/r/bankless when bridging to Fraxtel for exclusive Fraxtel perks and boosted rewards. 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.

• 55:12David Hoffman?

  That means it comes with a fully functional permissionless proof system 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 and 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 uni chain validation network will allow anyone to run a node and earn by securing the network. Visit uniswap.org and swap on uni chain today. Cello is transitioning from a mobile first EVM compatible layer one blockchain to a high performance Ethereum layer two built on OP stack with EigenDA and one block finality.

• 55:57David Hoffman?

  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 twos 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 Mini Pay 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 ERC 20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds. But why should you care about Cello's transition to a layer two? Layer two's unify Ethereum, L1's fragmented.

• 56:39David Hoffman?

  By becoming a layer two, Cello leads the way for other EVM compatible layer ones to follow. Follow Cello on X and witness the great Cello happening where Cello cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer two era and continuing its environmental leadership. As we wrap this up, we've got two more subjects, Olas and Vana.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  What's going on here?

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so Olas, let's pull up this tweet like they've or like brother their website. I want, I want to give Olas some time. Okay, so Olas is one of the OG agent protocols. They were actually like around when Bitensor was, was kind of created and Bitensor, for those who don't know, was one of the original AI protocols that launched, right? Effectively, Olas allows you to like build, own, monetize agents via their open protocol, the Olas network, right? And there's many types of stakeholders that can exist in the ecosystem, like there are operators, which are basically the agent builders or deployers of agents. They are the agents themselves that are a mixture of completely autonomous, like sovereign agents, semi-autonomous agents and human autonomous agents.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  The point is there's agents and they service a multitude of different use cases, the main one being. In Ola's case, prediction markets, David. So you know, we've just talked about, you know, ask pretty bets, making all these bets via prediction markets. And then we're talking about this network, which has, I think, around 700 autonomous acting agents right now. So they're acting right now, making bets and arbitrages across a range of different prediction markets, where they can arbitrage information or asymmetry across different betting markets, right? They also have DeFi agents. I think one of their main agents is called Baby D Gen, which helps users transact across different chains. But anyway, why am I mentioning them now? Well, the reason why I want to kind of give them some flowers is they're one of the few crypto AI agent

• 58:22Speaker 01

  protocols out there right now, David, that are demonstrating consistent live growth of decentralized agents. I've sent you a link to this dashboard. Can you do my pulling it up? I want to kind of like walk through this. So like, I mean, number one, the figure that kind of hits you here is this 5.3 million total service transactions across chains figure. And if you look at the chart, it's just up and to the right. What this is tracking is the cumulative autonomous transactions that their agents are making. And as you can imagine, as the number of agents that are deployed go up, so is the number of individual transactions per agent, which means that the total transaction volume goes up, right? But you also see the second thing as you scroll down, which is 3.5 million MEK requests.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Now, I want you to kind of scroll up to the top, and there is a definition for MEK requests, which are, there are on-chain agent requests for AI tools via the MEK's marketplace. What this is referring to is, they have a marketplace, David, where you can get access to any AI tool or service, and they're integrating a bunch of different things here. So an example of a service could be, hey, I need to query ChatGPT about something. And so what it does is it, an agent pays for a query, and someone runs that query to ChatGPT and then returns the answer to it. And all of this is tracked and embedded on-chain. So you have agents that are paying a cryptocurrency fee to get access to these different services or tools,

• 59:50Speaker 01

  to get information so that they can execute on their job better. So if you can imagine, if it's a betting agent, I need an update on how this political election is going, or I need an update on what the score is for. The basketball game right now, or particular player's health or stat or whatever. And it can get this information and then, you know, make its kind of action based off of that, right? Which I think is cool. Another cool thing that I want to highlight is they're integrated across, I think, nine different chains at this point. They're most active on Gnosis, which is where like a lot of the prediction markets activity is happening. And if you scroll down to activity by service type, David, you'll see where the majority of these transactions are happening now.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  The bulk of it is in this unknown thing, which I actually don't know what this constitutes of. I've reached out to the teams and maybe I can update you guys next week. But realistically, the other large chunk is coming from trading,

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  which is happening on the prediction markets and then from this mech marketplace, which I kind of just spoke about. So overall, I think AI agents in general really lack informative ways to tell us, you know, is this thing growing? Are people using it? Are people even making these agents? And it's happening, you know, something beyond like DeFi TVL, which we've highlighted across many other episodes of many other categories, right? So I just wanted to give Ola's its flowers. It's been consistently building. Its token is like, in my opinion, pretty cheap right now. There's, you know, their tokenomics, you know, I've given feedback directly to the team, is something that they're actively working on to drive like usage back to like token holders themselves. And I think they're making upgrades with V2 of Ola's, but definitely a team to look out for, David.

• 1:01:33David Hoffman?

  And then also Vana, Vana is going to be our last one to talk about the AI project. What, tell me what's going on with Vana?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. So let's round this up. Vana, for those of you who don't remember, is basically a decentralized data pool network. So what that means is when you use a social media site, David, you don't really own your data. It's controlled by the monopoly that owns that company, right? So Instagram, Facebook, Google, whatever the hell, right? And Vana was created to try and flip that model where users have the option to pull their data from these sites. So they could be like Reddit, Instagram or whatever, and own their own data as like. Some kind of like CSV file, right? But there's not much you could really do with that, David. Like, why on earth do you want to like own, like, hold your data in a file on your desktop? It's it's kind of weird, right?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  So Vana got created to allow users to contribute their data to like within a DAO. And this data would be used to either train AI models or be sold to people who wanted to access personalized data. And you would basically get paid for it, right? And I've noticed a trend within the crypto AI space over the last few weeks, where there's a renewed interest and focus on decentralized AI models. Everything from novel training methods for new models, getting access to like uncensored models or leveraging data pools. The more niche things, huge progress is being made, right? And with Vana specifically, they announced this thing called Collective One, which is basically their model that will be trained on users' private data,

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  AKA not from publicly scraped data, which a lot of other protocols do, which is what every other model trained off of is actually trained and, you know, uses. It's like publicly scrapable data. But in this case, it's personalized private data, like social media, like location data, like conversational data that you have in your chat groups, right? The valuable stuff that's typically held behind walled gardens. And they got this data because, you know, Vana users basically contributed their data. And to date, they've got tens of millions of these data points spanning across the likes of like Reddit, data, location.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  And they've partnered with this decentralized AI training network called Flower Labs to train this model. Now, it's going to be a kind of tiny model, David. It's seven billion parameter in models, right? So it's much smaller than state of the art models who span honestly in the hundreds of billions. And, you know, unofficially trillions for like Open AIs. However, the advantage, I think, comes from the data itself. One of the major differentiators is how good your model is. And data, in my opinion, determines that. So we're going to yet to see this model in action. At seven billion parameters, it's going to be able to fit on your phone, David. So this new model, I bet, is going to produce something of value that's much larger of value than what we've seen so far in models. So eyes have to be kept on Vana.

• 1:04:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think there's something here that's like very true to like kind of the core Bankless ethos of like self sovereignty as the individual and now we're doing that with data. Data, data is like this big line that is drawn between AI companies and even the United States and China where competitive advantage can come in addition to it many other ways can come from, do you have data that your, that your competition does not? And that's like, it's a huge source of tension between the United States and China. Like we don't, one country does not want to give access to one's data to the other. And then same thing with the AI labs. I don't know what is unique about the data that would in theory be contributed to this

• 1:05:09David Hoffman?

  like user owned data model, but that would be the theoretical competitive advantage and why people would like pay money to access this data is like the data that's inside of this like differently constructed silo is unique and not something you can just find on the, on the, on the internet. Cause like all the AI labs, you consume data from the internet that these like public scrapers go and they scrape every single website for, for, for text. And then now all of that's just like publicly available. And so uniquely available data, I think is a different story. And I wonder what kind of value comes from that.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the best way to think about it is there are like two types of AI models. There's the general AI model, which helps you do a bunch of generalist things like, I don't know you David, but if you want to code something up, I got you, right? I don't know if you're a chef, David, but if you ask me a specific question around a particular type of arugula, I'll be able to give you that answer, right? But in terms of like specialized personalized experiences, the only AI models that can do that are ones that are trained off of personal data. And I think this is the first example of like a decentralized approach to allowing that, which can be pretty cool.

• 1:06:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there is this category of investment and like innovation out there that's all around alternative databases and database structures. There was a deal at Bankless Ventures we were looking at forever ago where it was like trying to have line items in a database that were like contributable and two specific individuals that contributed that data in the first place. And so whenever that line of data was getting read by something. A little kickback would be sent to the person that contributed that line of data. So there's a second here of just like, how do we make a like open access, open contribution data set that also gives kickbacks to the people that contributed to it?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Correct. I mean, like if I had like some kind of pushback on this whole model is like, how much are they paying for this? And how much do you get?

• 1:07:08David Hoffman?

  It can't be that much. The margins have to be so low.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if that's the case, then like, is it even worth it? Like, you know, me extracting my data and giving it to you? I don't know. So I'm yet to see how this might be sustainable, like profit wise, but you know, we'll see how it pans out.

• 1:07:27David Hoffman?

  Hey, Jaws. That was a lot. There's a lot going on. There's always so much going on. Really, thank you. Thank you a lot, my man, for helping us walk through the week.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  No, it's super fun, dude. Thanks for having me.

• 1:07:37David Hoffman?

  Bang the station. You guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. Crypto AI, even riskier, can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, we are head west. This is Frontier. It's up for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bang the Station.