AI ROLLUP #8: $500B AI Boost | Trump’s $70B Memecoin Frenzy | 400K Onboarded | Agent Framework Wars

Ejaaz is back with David to unpack the whirlwind effects of President Trump’s $70B memecoin launch, which slammed 400K fresh users onto Solana and shattered revenue records in under 30 hours. Meanwhile, a $500B federal boost to AI—backed by OpenAI and SoftBank—has everyone on edge about how crypto’s AI agent economy might ride this newfound momentum. On the protocol front, Arc’s Rake framework and AI16z’s curated Eliza ecosystem are both stepping up, incubating projects like SoulGraph and Listen that promise a more user-friendly DeFAI future. Virtuals keeps shipping at breakneck speed too, testing new multi-chain waters, instituting a bold buyback, and hinting at metaverse collabs that could reshape gaming for good. From automated DeFi positions and trading dashboards to fully autonomous NPCs that commentate (and maybe soon play) your favorite games, the lines between AI and crypto are getting blurrier—and more exciting—by the day. Buckle up as the AI agent revolution continues to redefine what “on-chain” can really mean. Ready for the ride? ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️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 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/20 ----- TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 0:50 Trump’s Memecoin & $MELANIA https://x.com/cryptopunk7213/status/1880974772990832780 https://x.com/DiamondHandsDig/status/1880979832445780107 13:52 The Stargate Project…$500B AI U. S. Investment & OpenAI Agents https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1881830103858172059 https://www.axios.com/2025/01/21/openai-davos-kevin-weil-ai-agents 23:09 Virtuals goes multi-framework https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1881340149503857151 https://x.com/NickDGarcia/status/1880275667809374597 30:54 Indie.fun https://x.com/indiedotfun/status/1879518209293918434 36:16 First AI Agent DOTA2 Stream https://x.com/ethermage/status/1879900384019517522 38:39 Agent tank demo of agent performing TA on a chart https://x.com/AgentTankLive/status/1881786054593925159 42:22 Ai16z demo day https://x.com/0xwitchy/status/1880244340561441238 46:44 ARC announces initial agent projects launching on its framework RIG, soulgraph https://x.com/LiquidLizard_/status/1880068692261675228 1:00:20 AI Agent Playground Grows https://x.com/nifty_island/status/1880258049149128749 1:03:19 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.

• 0:06David Hoffman?

  Welcome Bank This 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 IJaz. IJaz, how you doing, my man? How was your week?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Not much. President of the United States launched a meme coin that went to $70 billion.

• 0:25David Hoffman?

  Casual.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Decided to launch another one the next day.

• 0:28David Hoffman?

  Why did he do that?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And then he announced $500 billion worth of investment in AI in the US, which, you know, pretty just simple weekend.

• 0:36David Hoffman?

  Casual standard stuff.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  You know, what we were expecting.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just an all right, crazy weekend. And I feel like we can't start this pod, this particular episode, without even addressing it. So I want to pull up this tweet that I put out, which kind of summarizes my thoughts around all of this. And I just want to kind of start off with saying, I think this is incredibly bullish for crypto AI. And it might sound like a stretch for some, but like, let's just kind of like, take this.

• 1:03David Hoffman?

  You're embodying the meme of this like, thing that happened. And now you've like, the Charlie Day from Always Sunny in Philadelphia is like, here's why this is bullish about crypto AI. I know why.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Completely unrelated things. Yeah, no. Okay. So for context for people who, you know, were most certainly living under a rock and had no idea what was going on, the current President of the United States decided to launch an official meme coin called Trump.

• 1:29David Hoffman?

  Trump official.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Trump official. Yes. Thank you, David, for that correction.

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  In case you didn't know it was official.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  In case, yeah, in case you didn't know. And it just surged to $70 billion in under, I think, 30 hours, which firmly placed it as one of the top 15 blockchains or cryptocurrencies in the world. That is the quickest raise or rise of a crypto coin ever, which was just

• 1:54David Hoffman?

  Broke into the top 20 of all cryptos.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely insane. And so, you know, what is this got to do with AI coins? Well, I had a few thoughts about this, David, all right? And let me know if you disagree. Well, number one, this coin was launched on Solana. So in my opinion, Solana AI coins are about to get a huge influx of capital. And the reason why I say this is, most people kind of like knew about Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana prior to all of this, but I don't think how many people, I don't know how many people actually interacted with Solana, right? You know, they had to get like a phantom wallet or they're limited coins listed on sexes, centralized exchanges. And so they were wondering, hmm, what is this thing? Well, now, when Trump launched their meme coin, they were like, well, how do I get access to this thing?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And so there was this massive flurry of capital to buy this coin. And so what they're doing now is they're looking at their app on their phone and they're up massively. And they're thinking, well, what should I get now? And, and, you know, I think they start kind of like digging into the narrative behind Solana. What's kind of like the hottest kind of trends and they'll see crypto AI. And I think that a lot of, you know, tokens and teams and protocols that was spoken about will start getting a lot of attention. And we'll see that flow from meme coins into these things. So that's like number one.

• 3:09David Hoffman?

  Okay, I totally agree with you. You tweeted this out at eight forty five AM on Sunday. And I was also thinking this, especially the influx into specifically Solana. So the, the wealth effect of Solana, Solana prior to the launch of the meme coin was coming in at like $200 with the launch of the Solana, of the Trump meme coin came at $280 for a soul token, for a soul, a single soul. Massive capital increase, capital influx. And so just on this soul appreciation alone, everyone on Solana just got, everyone who's holding Solana.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Thirty billion dollars of value to its market cap.

• 3:46David Hoffman?

  Thirty percent, yeah, exactly, thirty to forty billion dollars. So adding that to the capital of the wealth effect of Solana in of itself. But you also, again, like you said, like I said, you tweeted this on Sunday morning, right before Melania launched, which really just sucked out the momentum and the optimism. Like people I think were like, this, okay, yes, Trump is doing this to make money. This is a business. This endeavor, but it's incentive compatible with crypto. And we could all kind of just, you know, look like shove the fact that he's going to sell a bunch of money and get a bunch of money. We can shove that under the rug because it's incentive aligned. But then once Melania launched, a lot of that got unraveled. And the Trump, the value of Trump went down, the Solana, the value of Solana went down. But, you know, it's still at 230, 240, it's still pretty okay.

• 4:31David Hoffman?

  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna tamper the amount of wealth effect that Solana has gotten, even though it is still real, it's still large. It's still in the tens of billions.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, well, let me, let me counter that. I agree with you, but let me counter it just slightly.

• 4:46David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  And, and just look at it this way. A bunch of people saw a brand new coin, specifically a meme coin, go to a $70 billion valuation in under 30 hours. They're gonna now start thinking probably, wow, there's probably a bunch of other things that could do something similar. Why can't it be my meme coin? My meme coin's funny, I laughed at it, I bought a bunch of it, maybe it could happen as well. And like, I started thinking myself, like, wow, like, if this could happen to this, like, maybe it could happen to some other types of stuff. I still think it's, it's kind of interesting to look at. Point two that I make in this tweet is if we just kind of zoom out for a second. It's just completely nuts that we have an acting president of the, one of the biggest countries in the world, launch something like this.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  And I think that this might end up being net, net good for the industry. Remember, the biggest challenge that was faced in crypto today has been unfriendly regulations. And now we have a president that's launching stuff like this. And I think this kind of signals that the game is kind of different now. Gary Gensler is out. Crypto voters now hold a huge, significant influence over current and future US elections, governments, et cetera. And Trump knows this and will probably play to it. And we also have the most pro crypto cabinet ever, right? You know, we have some kingpins from the tech world that are in place to guide policy around AI and crypto. And I think that's quite good. What do you think, David? Do you think that's a bit of a stretch or you think that has some legs to stand?

• 6:13David Hoffman?

  I think that is all correct. I think that's all correct. Like Trump is just blowing the doors open on the Overton window on what can be done and what could be done with crypto. Even Mark Cuban, in response to the Trump meme coin, was his response was like, well, I can, I'll launch a meme coin. David Portnoy chimed in on this is like, you know, everyone is just launching meme coins. So I totally agree with that.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yep. But David, let's not forget, this was also a massive onboarding event. Moonshot, which is one of the new crypto wallet startups, which make it super easy to buy tokens on chain, I think using Apple Pay and stuff, onboarded or like showed that almost 400,000 people were onboarded onto Solana, just through this single event, which is just completely-

• 6:57David Hoffman?

  This is something I worried about because like, I don't know, when somebody launches a meme coin, I don't know if it's just like the D gens go gambling on this new casino game that they would just be given. And then people talk a big game about it like adoption. Like, is it really adoption? If Iggy Azalea has a bunch of D gens buying her token? I don't know. So this is actually data. I didn't know this. This is actually data that Moonshot is saying 400,000 new people have made up, made Moonshot accounts to buy the Trump token in the last 24 hours.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, think about it, right? People who already knew about this entire crypto world would have been able to access it through wallets or were trading from deck screeners and stuff like that. This is people downloading this app, connecting their card, their bank accounts, and just aping via Apple Pay, which is just like, just nuts to see in general, right?

• 7:45David Hoffman?

  It's cool to, if you go to the GetTrumpMemes.com, the meme coin page, you can hit Buy Now with debit debit card, and that takes you to moonshot.money/trump.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 7:55David Hoffman?

  Which is where Moonshot is getting all these accounts and where they're getting their data from.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, yep. But also, if we look at like fees on the actual base chain, David, if you pull up this tweet, Solana's daily revenue just hit an all time high, almost $60 million, which is more than double of their previous all time high set back in November. I mean, just look at that chart. That chart is vertical.

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  I just see, I just see so much MEV happening here in this chart. That's all I can see.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's just insane. And to this point, right? You know, we're spoken about Solana. This meme coin is on Solana. People were on boarded onto Solana. It sucked all the air out the room for all other coins. So if you held a portfolio of crypto tokens on Solana, cough cough, you know, my AI tokens, like, a lot of value was taken out of it because people were trying to just ape this coin. And I think you mentioned, David, that, you know, you were one of those people that you woke up and you were like, well, let's do this.

• 8:52David Hoffman?

  I woke up one day too late. I woke up and I dumped every single meme coin that I have in my Solana wallet, which is all of them, into the Trump token. And then I round tripped it. So I'm about to, I no longer hold any Trump token. But I was once upon a time almost 3X up. And now I came out basically out of wash.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so kind of like bringing it back to AI and like, you know, we want to put our thinking caps on a bit. I did think, well, you know, what does all of this mean for crypto AI? And, you know, where do we go from here? If you pull up this tweet from Elon Money, I think he makes a really prescient point, which is, you know, crypto is still a narrative game, and it's very much around mindshare. And he kind of evaluated where the top mindshare was after this Trump thing had happened, right? What were people talking about aside from Trump? And this is kind of like the ranked list of things, David. Of course, you have our Lord and Savior Fartcoin right at the top. Fundamentals galore. Then you have things like Grifane, which is like the the DeFi AI,

• 9:56Speaker 01

  kind of like one of the leading protocols there, AI16Z, Arc. So the point is like, you know, a ton of these coins are still very much focused around crypto AI. And this is kind of like a generalized pool of data, right? So it's it's just really interesting to see that.

• 10:10David Hoffman?

  Oh, this is a pool of data of all possible tokens.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 10:13David Hoffman?

  And the alpha here is that it's Fartcoin, number one, Grifane, number two, AI16Z, number three, Arc, which we talked about last week. And so the top four are AI tokens.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Yes, correct, correct.

• 10:26David Hoffman?

  All right.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  And so then I started thinking.

• 10:27David Hoffman?

  So what you're saying is the meta continues to be AI agents.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so the argument I keep hearing and why I'm making this point is. Crypto AI, a crypto AI agent specifically, is going to be a very transitory matter. It's not going to be around for long. It's gonna, you know, rise and die. And I see where that's coming from. We have got a lot of PTSD from, you know, a ton of other subsector. I feel like I'm cautious of that. Yes, I'm also very cautious as well. And do you know what, David? I remember feeling the same way around a lot of the DeFi stuff because there was a lot of stuff that got created that ended up dying out. But I knew at its core that this was fundamental infrastructure that was needed by society, right? And when I look at agents, I just feel the same way.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  When I look at like the kinds of things that they're going to enable, you know, much easier UX and interaction with blockchains. They're going to become the leading creators and consumers of blockchains. It just makes sense to me that they're going to stick around and stay. Now, are the protocols and teams that we talk about, day in, day out, going to be the ones that make it? I think it's fair to say that neither of us know. I certainly do not, right? But I think figuring out where that goes and focusing where mindshare is, is very important. And the fact of the matter is, for the last, I'm going to say year and a half to two years, David, crypto AI has been one of the top things in mindshare. Certainly for the last six months, right? Yes, last episode, we were saying it was at 65% mindshare, which is just like nuts.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  So I do think we have like, you know, more fuel in the tank for this to kind of go. But I started thinking, you know, does all of this kind of money flow into Solana AI coin specifically? And if you look at this post, it kind of shows both sides, right? So this is a post from Diamond Hands Dig. And it says, you know, what Donald Trump was fundamentally changed the rules of this bull market. In his opinion, thinks second order effects are kind of going to flow to moonshot. It's going to flow to tier one exchanges and it's going to focus on quite a few things on base potentially, right? So he calls out AI XPT being a strategically positioned coin, which is like very popular.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Obviously, it's got like over 400,000 followers. And then he talks about like how this might be one of the main. Focuses, right? And he argues that like it can still be a base ecosystem and he calls out virtual here where you know, a lot of money eventually flows back. And I see that point of view, to be honest, David, I don't think this necessarily king makes all of the Solana AI coins, but it did just onboard a ton of people who probably won't want to bridge or move their capital anywhere else.

• 13:08David Hoffman?

  I think it's really going to help secure my belief that this crypto AI revolution bubble, whatever you want to call it, is going to be the defining meta of 2025 is there, we need to hit some inflection point about both crypto and AI mainly focus on tokens because that's what a bull market is that really captures the interest of the otherwise uninterested people because that's what brought them into NFTs in 2021, you know, retail investors, we have to strike the curiosity of retail investors and that takes both, we need both like crypto to do well and AI to also itself, now I'm not talking about crypto AI, but like Silicon Valley AI to grow in capability and power and investment in the space.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of Silicon Valley AI, David, Trump yesterday announced $500 billion will be spent within the US on AI specific infrastructure sites, data sites, and just in AI in general. Now, this is a coordinated effort from the likes of OpenAI, Masayoshi San, who leads the SoftBank Fund. And it's just crazy. So 100 billion is being focused on being allocated this year alone. And this kind of like made in America theme, which we've seen being propagated over the last couple of weeks, you know, if the blockchains and crypto coins are made in America, like Solana and XRP.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  Which is so nonsensical, but nonetheless, anything AI like USA branded got like a 25% valuation bump last week.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Pretty much, pretty much. Yeah. And so just kind of like zooming out for a second and not even talking about crypto at all. I think this is amazing. For the industry and the world in general, David, like AI is by far, in my opinion, one of the most important technologies to ever grace mankind. And I think it's going to completely change the way we interact with each other and build things. And it's of the utmost important that we put our time, focus and attention on this industry. And the government now being aligned with this is just a fascinating thing to see. And so it kind of like reinvigorated kind of, I think, the market's hopes that crypto AI or AI in general is still a core or key mind share when it comes to investing. But this wasn't the only thing, right? Like,

• 15:26Speaker 01

  if you want to look at like the money being invested, let's get away from the money and talk about like some of the fundamentals. Whilst all of this was going on, it's being reported that OpenAI will release super agents, David, that can do PhD level math and entry level software engineering. Now-

• 15:40David Hoffman?

  Who is reporting this?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  This is Axios reporting on OpenAI specifically. But I need to say, this isn't a rumor that's been just currently created and circulated. This has been going on for a while. Actually, OpenAI themselves have hinted that the next product that they launch in the next couple of months will be agent related. And so what does this mean, right? Well, what it means is the mainstream companies are getting involved in the kinds of things that we have been obsessing over for the last couple of months in the crypto world. So you could say like, we've been a leading indicator, but actually, these guys have been working on these kinds of things for a while. And so-

• 16:16David Hoffman?

  To be clear, when OpenAI is talking about their agent, they're going to invest in agents, they're talking about the same kind of agents that we're talking about, right?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I actually disagree. I think these are going to be agents that are much, much smarter than the agents that we've been talking about.

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  But the same conceptual thing of like these autonomous, like souls, spirits, entities that exist on the internet. The only difference is that in our world, they have tokens too.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Correct, correct. And I think in our world so far for V1, they have been very much based on social media sites and they've been tweeting. And they've been able to do a bunch of other stuff, as we've seen being, you know, coming to light with all the DeFi stuff. But we're still kind of like, they're trying to find their feet. I think when OpenAI, and again, I must emphasize I'm hypothesizing, but I think when OpenAI releases their agent product, it is going to be a chat GPT like moment. It's going to be a moment where people interact with these things and they're like, wait, what? This agent could do this crazy college essay for me? And it passes as a PhD level standard thing? Or this agent can-

• 17:19Speaker 01

  You know, plan out trip for me, book everything, pay my rent and kind of like still save money and send it to my bank all without like me looking at a computer. That's pretty insane.

• 17:28David Hoffman?

  I'm trying to wrap my head around what it actually looks like as a product.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:33David Hoffman?

  So, so AI XBT is an agent that I think most listeners, myself, you and I have some like idea or Zero Bro, for example, has some idea of what they are. They have this persistent personality. I don't know if AI XBT does, but Zero Bro is trying to have persistent memory and contextual memory across different modalities. Whether you're talking to it in like Twitter or Instagram or wherever else it lives. Is that what we're talking about? Kind of like a product like that coming out of OpenAI? What's the form factor here?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So I think it'll surface itself in in two ways. And again, I'm hypothesizing here. I have no idea, but I think it'll come in two ways. Number one is it'll be an agent that you can interface off of the direct chat GPT interface. So right now you talk to chat GPT. That's what people spend a lot of different time, a lot of their time and and effort in. I don't think they're going to shift you onto another site. That makes no sense. So I think what will pop up is, you know, you'll have a model and you'll also have an agent and the agent will be able to do things for you. So similar in the way that you can talk to an AI XBT and tag it in your tweet and it'll respond to you.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  You can talk to an agent in chat GPT and it'll be, I don't know, able to do the shopping for you or it'll be plugged in and integrated into a bunch of different things. Now, what those use cases are, I have no idea, but we had a bit of an insight when chat GPT first launched and people started to try and hack this themselves. And it didn't work very well. It wasn't very fluid. It didn't have consistent memory, as you mentioned, David. But the second thing that I think they're going to launch, which I think will have larger impact, is basically exposing their framework. Or APIs, David, because at the end of the day, they want, they know that probably the best way that people can build agents using their stack is to just, you know, allow them to access the API. Well, not even open source. I was gonna say open source, but it's not really. It's, you know, charge people and they'll basically have access to

• 19:27Speaker 01

  the API or the model, the agent model, and they'll be able to do a bunch of these different things. So the knock on effect is, I think, a lot of these crypto agents we've spoken about are about to get supercharged. They're about to get like way smarter. It may even come with things like contextual memory and, and stuff across different layers. So I think it's gonna like make these frameworks that were spoken about like way more effective. And it kind of got me thinking, well, if these frameworks are gonna get supercharged, you know, where, you know, which one will benefit the most? And if you pull up this, this tweet, which kind of like shows where Mindshare is focused for all these different crypto native frameworks, David, it's, it's any, it's a toss up. It's anyone's gambit

• 20:08Speaker 01

  at this point, you know? AI 16Z, the leading open source agent repo is kind of like neck and neck with the likes of Virtuals and Ark. It was mentioned Ark and Virtuals a lot in the past. So I, it's, it's honestly anyone's game. And I have no idea where this goes, but it's, it's gonna be exciting being at the frontier for it.

• 20:28David Hoffman?

  With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the MEETH protocol is home to MEETH, the fourth-largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LSTs. And now, CM ETH takes things even further. This restaked version captures multiple yields across Kerak, Eigenlayer, Symbiotic, and many more, making CM ETH the most efficient and most composable LRT solution on the market. Metamorphosis Season 1 dropped $7.7 million in Cook rewards to MEETH holders. Season 2 is currently ongoing, allowing users to earn staking, restaking, and AVS yields, plus rewards in Cook, MEETH Protocol's governance token, and more. Don't miss out on the opportunity to stake, restake, and shape the future of MEETH Protocol with Cook. Participate today at meeth.mantle.xyz.

• 21:11David Hoffman?

  Felo is transitioning from a 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. 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 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 ERC20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds.

• 21:55David 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. The Arbitrum Portal is your one-stop hub to entering the Ethereum ecosystem. With over 800 apps, Arbitrum offers something for everyone. Dive into the epicenter of DeFi, where advanced trading, lending, and staking platforms are redefining how we interact with money. Explore Arbitrum's rapidly growing gaming hub, from immersed role-playing games, fast-paced fantasy MMOs, to casual luck-battle mobile games. Move assets effortlessly between chains

• 22:40David Hoffman?

  and access the ecosystem with ease via Arbitrum's expansive network of bridges and on-ramps. Step into Arbitrum's flourishing NFT and creator space, where artists, collectors, and social converge and support your favorite streamers all on-chain. Find new and trending apps and learn how to earn rewards across the Arbitrum ecosystem with limited-time campaigns from your favorite projects. Empower your future with Arbitrum. Visit portal.arbitrum.io to find out what's next on your Web3 journey.

• 23:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah, these framework wars, I feel, start to be the foundation for this podcast. We always talk about the frameworks, because everything seems to be downstream of them. So let's just go ahead and, I guess, dive into the big one, Virtuals. Not the big one, the second one? Where would you place Virtuals in the ranking of frameworks? Or is it truly a toss-up, as you said?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  I think it's a toss-up, David. I think, like, right now... Everyone is kind of seeding themselves in their own ecosystem. So virtuals is like the kingpin on base or the EVM side of things. AI 16Z Eliza is that of Solana, but it's facing kind of competition and heat from ARC. So, but I all think like all of them are kind of like playing in the same kind of field right now. When we talk about virtuals, they had a few major updates this week, David, which I think is definitely worth kind of like pointing out as well as the fact that we're talking about frameworks, actually. So virtuals announced this thing called the Terminal API. Okay, what does this mean? Well, to date, virtuals has been focused on pushing their own framework, right? Their agent framework.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And as we've described on the show, this framework allows you to build and design these agents, right? And what they've done with this Terminal API is they're allowing any builder to connect any framework, which means you could connect Eliza, you could connect Rig from the ARC guys, and you can connect any other kind of framework according to the API. And I asked myself this question, I was like, why, why are they doing this? Why, why would that make sense? And then it kind of clicked to me, David. If these agents are ever to win and become effective, you need them to be able to traverse across any kind of chain or framework. It doesn't really matter. The whole point is you want your agents to be able to do a bunch of different things

• 24:56Speaker 01

  and you don't want it to be constrained or restricted by blockchains. That's old school thinking. Previously, we've been like, oh, we want all the, you know, we want the moat and the ecosystem moat to be on your specific chain, you know, Etherians, Solana people, base ecosystem people. But now we have this kind of like medium or this entity that should be able to traverse across anything. And I found that like fascinating and you can kind of see how they're thinking about this. Like today, they mentioned that, you know, we have agent creators that can choose whichever framework that they want, pick, and this is the guide for them to be able to do it. But soon, if you notice, they say something here, multi-agent orchestration across frameworks. And they talk about an agent-to-agent commerce standard, David.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  So what they're really thinking about. How can our agents?

• 25:43David Hoffman?

  They're trying to do the cross-chain comms. They're trying to go cross-chain.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that's important, David, to be honest. I like, I think about it, like, if these agents are to succeed, they should be able to act on any chain that they want. And I think that's a pretty endearing point, to be honest. And I'm kind of excited. And my guess, if I was to guess, is the next step for them is to launch on another chain.

• 26:05David Hoffman?

  Right. Oh, yeah. Well, that would make sense. Okay. So just to make sure I understand, Virtuals, you would need to use the Virtuals framework to launch an agent on Virtuals.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, game.

• 26:15David Hoffman?

  But, but you can now also with this, use the Eliza framework to launch an agent on Virtuals too.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, correct.

• 26:23David Hoffman?

  And that just made, that seems net accretive to the Virtuals ecosystem.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:27David Hoffman?

  Because at the end of the day, Virtuals is really just going to be like a customer distribution, consumer distribution platform with a token.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:35David Hoffman?

  That it just has distribution. And so it doesn't matter. Maybe Virtuals doesn't care about its own framework. It just cares about distribution, right?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  So, so I would frame this as a land grab, right? They're conquering land. And it's actually kind of a useful analogy because Janson, if you pull up his tweet here, David, has talked about agent economies, agent nations, right? And whilst he doesn't specify this in this exact tweet, look at how he presents this. Different frameworks, different chains, different cultures. And on our interview that he had with us, which if you haven't seen, you should definitely go check out, he talks about building up these agent societies. The only way that's going to get done is if you're multi-chain and multi-frame, and he seems to suggest it here, you know? So, super, super exciting stuff. But that's not all with Virtuals, David. If you bring up this next tweet,

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I want to point out a really interesting thing that this dude at Messari saw or spotted. Of the top 10 agent tokens in Virtuals, three of them are investment DAOs. And I started thinking about this. I was like, what does this mean? I honestly think people, that there's so many agent tokens, David. Seriously, like, I'm spending a lot of time trying to dig into all of this and understand this and meet the teams and figure out what's going on. I'm losing hair and I'm losing sleep.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people just want to pool their money or cash in an investment DAO that provides them some kind of an index play on these things and leave it at that. And if you see some of these investment DAOs listed here, so if you scroll up, you've got Vader, you've got Sequoia as well. I think like we're going to start seeing a growing amount of people purchase these tokens just to get access. What are some of the advantages these DAOs provide? We've spoken about Vader before, but basically they try and source deals or buy liquid tokens off the market. Sequoia tries to do the same thing, but takes a more VC approach where they either incubate or seed invest. It's just a really cool approach that I like seeing a bunch of these virtuals ecosystem teams doing.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And then the final point I want to make about virtuals is, do you remember last week we spoke about that $40 million buyback and distribution?

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  That's being put into effect officially. So you know, they're not wasting any time here, David. I think it's the equivalent of $35 million is going to get start distribute to buy back virtuals agents tokens specifically and burn them. And for those who are listening to this and wondering, you know, what the hell does this mean? Basically, this revenue has come from virtuals tokens being traded. The way that the protocol is designed is there's a 1% fee being charged to anyone that trades these tokens. And that fee

• 29:23David Hoffman?

  Denominated in the virtuals token.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Denominated in the virtuals token, correct. And what they thought over, what they announced last week was instead of just, you know, deploying this virtuals token into something else, we are going to use it to buy back agent tokens specifically. So let's say your agent token was traded the most, you will get the highest allocation of that amount and it'll buy back the agent token and burn it, which reduces supply and is much more beneficial for holders.

• 29:50David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the virtuals platform is selling the virtuals token

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:56David Hoffman?

  in order to buy the agent token. So it's actually a transfer of wealth from virtuals to individual agents.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Agent tokens.

• 30:03David Hoffman?

  To prop up the value, to pump up the value of the agents token or to give some like buy pressure out of the trading fees generated to the agents token. So it's kind of a stimulus, it's an economic stimulus

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:16David Hoffman?

  to the To the individuals in the virtual society.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yep. Good choice of words, David. Given that they're trying to build like some kind of an economy here.

• 30:25David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:26David Hoffman?

  Okay. All right. Well, congrats to any agent that is getting their token bought and burned. I mean, when there is a limited choice set for developers to build their agents on, and one platform is literally saying, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna buy your token and burn it if you do well. So it's an incentive for developers to come and migrate into the virtual economy and establish their little, settle down in there.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  All right. Take me to indie.fun. Crowdfunded Games 100x Faster, this is a Twitter article. What's going on here?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I was scrolling the timeline the other day and I came across this, this post from this team called indie.fun. And for clarity here, I own none of this token. I literally came across this for the first time and I, I read through it and I thought, wow, this is kind of cool. So we've spoken about gaming and agents before, and this platform appears to do something similar in the sense that, you know, they allow you to launch and play games where you can interact and compete alongside AI-powered NPCs. NPCs standing for non-playable characters. So in this sense, it's like an AI agent that is super smart, right? And it can understand your, your playing style. It can interact with you. It can maybe trade tokens with you or could compete with you, right? So it's, it's pretty cool, right?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, it says here, indie.fun provides infinite worlds where AI agents can compete, adapt and grow alongside or against real players. Swarms of independent agents powered by their token can be deployed in indie.fun in seconds, learning, adapting until they become indistinguishable from human players. So there's a self-learning element that they, they kind of like make there. And I want to draw attention to this bit, which made me think about their strategy, you know, this team strategy. So they know that crypto Twitter has the attention span of a child. We get excited and we get so bored so quickly, David. You know, I think Trump meme coin was a perfect example of that, right?

• 32:26David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  So I think their plan here is to build games which are designed to engage with that type of user. But a key difference is when you get bored and you switch games, you can still play with the same people because they're agents, David.

• 32:41David Hoffman?

  The agents that you play with in one game show up in a different game and they behave similarly.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Similarly, and they know the rules and they know if you lost the last game or not, David. So they'll know.

• 32:52David Hoffman?

  Do they choose whether like, I don't want to play with this guy, he sucks.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe that's why I like it, you know? Like, you're gonna stop being like, oh, my God, this agent ditched me? What does that mean for me?

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Do I really suck that bad? You know what I mean?

• 33:06David Hoffman?

  Wow, I'm not ready for this.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  You start.

• 33:08David Hoffman?

  I already get dunked on by crypto Twitter now.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  So you start having this consistent personality or personalities accompany you and adapt to any game, right? It's kind of like what NFTs were supposed to be, but now we have a smarter, more dynamic entity to engage with. And the creators of this platform also allow game developers to create tokens, which become each game's in-game currency. So I'm hypothesizing something here, right? Agents make it easier to engage with these tokens seamlessly in gameplay. So you can now hop to each game, win tokens or valuable prizes, and then cash them out seamlessly into Sol or Eth or whatever currency you want at the end. The resurgence of maybe play to earn?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  David, I don't know, because like previously, it's like, okay, this token belongs to blah, blah, chain or L2, I don't know what to do. What if the agents just abstracted it away from you? What if you could just go up to an agent at the end and be like, all right, I'm cashing out my chips, I'm going home, I'm gonna go, my mom's calling me to go eat dinner, like, sort this out for me, put this all into Sol. Actually, could you stake 50% of it? That would be great. So now you're embedding DeFi AI into it. I just think, and maybe I'm dreaming too much, maybe I've got my tinfoil hat on too much, but I just started to try and think about where this could potentially go.

• 34:27David Hoffman?

  We talked about this. Really last week or the week before, but like the intersection of AI and gaming seems to make a ton of sense. And it was because of this. It was like you populate the world with these AI agents. If you just to bootstrap your own economy or bootstrap your own like landscape or whatever.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. And I think another thing I wanted to to kind of talk about is what happens when someone adds betting functionality into the mix, David? That seems like an attention sink, right? Because let's, you know, let's not beat around the bush. A lot of people are buying tokens sometimes with no idea of the investment case and they just kind of like gambling. And I wonder what that looks like with, you know, the rise of prediction markets and people obviously wanting to get exposure to that. I wonder if they would do something similar within a gaming context. What do you think?

• 35:15David Hoffman?

  Well, there's a portfolio company that we have at Bankless Ventures called Sweep, which is specifically putting together a streaming platform and a prediction market platform. So the streamers' audiences can make prediction market bets about the outcome of said streamers' actions or like win-loss ratio or something. So it's definitely like the hyper-gamble-ization and streamification of the internet making its way into into like into crypto.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's maybe it's I'm too fixated on the presidential meme coin thing, David. Just when that happened, I was like, I just think we're leaning so much into high-risk, high-stakes gambling.

• 35:54David Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  And if the government is embracing it, what do you think this is gonna have a knock-on effect to like the rest of the public? It's just insane to see.

• 36:02David Hoffman?

  I think we are. I think we are leaning into gambling culture, financial gambling culture. That is just, I like, I don't necessarily, I don't want to, you know, put up my foot on the gas pedal to go that way. But we are just have culturally, we are absolutely going that way.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  But what actually, speaking of streaming, I wanted to pull up this agent. It's not just any agent. It's an agent that is streaming, David. It is streaming a live gameplay of the the massive MMORPG called Dota 2. And it's live, massive game, and it's live commentating, and it's doing this in real time.

• 36:38David Hoffman?

  The agent isn't playing the game. The agent is streaming people playing the game and it is commentating. So it is being, we're watching an agent streamer right now.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, correct. And it's, if you notice, it's not just commentating saying, okay, player A is now in control. And wow, that was an amazing attack on blah, blah, blah. It's talking about the strategy, David. It's talking about what it could potentially do. You know, how the teams are operating, how they might improve, why they lost. It's actually a really smart, intelligent kind of overview, which I think a lot of commentators at professional leagues do something similar or aspire to do something similar. I'm curious how this agent was kind of trained or maybe it was trained on like transcripts of previous commentators. Maybe it was trained on, you know, live gameplay for like, you know, millions and millions of games. So I was able to understand, you know, what each character profile could do. Cause I don't know if you've played Dota, David, but it's a pretty complex.

• 37:31David Hoffman?

  I played like for less than an hour.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  I also suck at it, but it's a pretty complex game, right? And Ethan Mage says here, you know, this isn't a demo. It's a game streaming agent casting live, you know? And these agents live on the front of attention for gamers. And this kind of reinforces the point that you were making earlier around. I think the intersection of agents and gaming makes a lot of sense. And I'm seeing a lot of the leading protocols lean into it more, particularly virtuals.

• 37:57David Hoffman?

  Right. Uh, is this Luna? Cause this looks like Luna, the Luna from the virtuals, uh, protocol. They bootstrapped Luna as their own agent. And there was this like little anime character. I don't know if this is Luna or not.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Well, David, I hate to.

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  Maybe I'm just being agentist because all agents say the same.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  I was literally about to say, you're being pretty agentist, David, and I'd like you to cease right now. Um, it may surprise you, but a lot of crypto Twitter uses anime in a lot of their projects. So, you know, this is just one of the, let's not get cancelled for that, David, please. Okay.

• 38:28David Hoffman?

  Uh, it would be cooler, not that I'm going to complain. This is pretty cool. It's pretty cool that an AI agent is commentating on a game. It would be cool if they were the ones also playing the game at the same time, because why, why can't they? They can multitask.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  All right, David. All right. Well, how about you go to the next demo that I'm going to show you here, right? It's not an agent streaming, but it's an agent doing. Something that you wish you could do, David, you wish you could do. What is this? We've spoken about Agent Tank before. You're on the right tweet. You're on the right tweet. So this is a team or a protocol team called Agent Tank. And you might have heard of them before, David. They were the guys behind the agent that had browsed Amazon and ordered toilet paper. Very important, very, very important use case. And the technology that was underpinning this was something called computer use. So imagine, you know, the, you know, how the way that you're scrolling through Twitter right now and you're moving your cursor.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  You just gave the reins to an agent and the agent could see your screen. It could maneuver. It could do a bunch of things. So if you play this particular video again, David, you'll be able to see that this agent is doing something a lot different from browsing Amazon and watching, and sorry, ordering toilet paper. It pulls up the Dex screener chart or whatever this website is that's observing price. Dex screener for trad fiber. Dex screener for trad fiber. I know. Sorry. And it is observing what's happening with this chart and it's doing a bunch of technical analysis, David. So you know, Bollinger bands, you know, resistance, what is happening? RSI. RSI, all that kind of stuff, you know, to try and figure out what might happen at the current price point that is.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Will it go up? Will it go down? Should I long? Should I short? This is an agent that's just doing it all for you in a matter of seconds. And I thought that was pretty insane. Yes, it may not be playing a game yet, but it might end up making you money, David. Let's give it some real money. Is this in sandbox or are they trading with real money yet? This is in sandbox. This is in sandbox. Let's give us some real money. Okay. Well, if you, if you're listening to this Agent Tank team, please, you know, V2. Do it live. Strap it, do it live and strap a wallet to it. Hilarious. Okay.

• 40:37David Hoffman?

  Are you ready to swap smarter? Uniswap apps are simple, secure and seamless tools that crypto users trust. The Uniswap protocol has processed more than 2.5 trillion dollars in all time swap volume, proving it's the go to liquidity hub for swaps with support for growing numbers of chains, including Ethereum, mainnet, base, arbitrage, polygon, ZK sync. Uniswap. Apps are built for a multi-chain world. Uniswap sees your transactions across its web interface, mobile apps, and Chrome browser extensions, so you're never tied to one device. And with self custody for your funds and MEV protection, Uniswap keeps your crypto secure while you swap anywhere, anytime. Connect your wallet and swap smarter today with the Uniswap web app or download the Uniswap Wallet, available now in iOS, Android, and Chrome.

• 41:20David Hoffman?

  Uniswap, the simple, secure way to swap in a multi-chain world. What if the future of Web3 gaming wasn't just a fantasy, but something you could explore today? Ronin, the blockchain already trusted by millions of players and creators, is opening its doors to a new era of innovation, starting February 12th. For players and investors, Ronin is a home to a thriving ecosystem of games, NFTs, and live projects like Axie and Pixels. With its permissionless expansion, the platform is about to unleash new opportunities in gaming, DeFi, AI agents, and more. Sign up for the Ronin Wallet now to join 17 million others exploring the ecosystem. And for developers, Ronin is your platform to build, grow, and scale. With fast transactions, low fees, and proven infrastructure, it's optimized for creativity at scale. Start building on the testnet today and prepare to launch your ideas,

• 42:03David Hoffman?

  whether it's games, meme coins, or an entirely new Web3 experience. Ronin's millions of active users and wallets means tapping into a thriving ecosystem of 3 million monthly active addresses, ready to explore your creations. Sign up for Ronin Wallet at wallet.roinchain.com and explore the possibilities. Whether you're a player, investor, or builder, the future of Web3 starts on Ronin.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  But we're not done with our demos, David. We're not done.

• 42:24David Hoffman?

  More demos. This is demo week.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're moving on to a little-known protocol called AI-16Z. And we're not actually watching any demos because we might actually need to spend about three hours doing it. But Xerox Witch over here wanted to highlight some of the teams that were building on AI-16Z's kind of like incubator, if you like. And they had a demo day where a bunch of these projects were kind of like being displayed to the wider public. And some of the highlights included a pump fund trader agent and a sports analytics agent. Now, the main reason why I'm mentioning this isn't to kind of call out any individual agent. It's just nice to see that AI-16Z is taking a more curated approach

• 43:11Speaker 01

  to the teams that are building on AI-16Z. Typically, it's just been an open-source, massive game. I think... Teng Yan, who is one of my favorite writers in the crypto AI space, described it as a bizarre for agents. That's how I would describe it as well. It's now kind of really cool to see some kind of like a Y combinator approach from the AI 16Z team. And I think we'll see more of this going forwards as they lean into their platform, David, which of course was spoken about before. They're going to launch an official platform, which is tied to their framework, which will allow teams to build and launch agent tokens and agents specifically in a guided and curated manner. And these agents will be able to speak to each other. So I love the curated side of things here, right?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  But of course, the platform's on the horizon, they're curating these agents. What about the framework itself? Last week, we kind of gave it a bit of heat, David. We were pointing out some of the criticisms that were being aired about Eliza. And it's nothing major, it was just to say, you know, this is what Eliza V1 can do today. And we kind of maybe need to take it a step up. Well, all I'm going to say is AI 16Z seems to be delivering, right? V2 is heralded to have quite a few impressive upgrades coming up. We're talking about full autonomy, which means, you know, actual autonomy. So these agents aren't going to have a human handler. They'll be able to like do things on their own 24/7, ingest information, assess whether they want to make a decision and then execute on that decision.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  They're going to have unified wallet abstraction, which means that whether your token is on chain A, B, or C, doesn't matter. We'll work things out and you can use tokens wherever they might be. They'll have a plugin registry, which means all the plugins that they have already, which allows you to do a bunch of either web two or web three things, will be kind of consolidated and ranked. So you can see kind of like which ones you want to use, which ones might be more useful than the other.

• 45:03David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's really, really important. Okay, because that's how the entire like modding community works. I was once upon a time a Skyrim modder and you need to have like the, your mods curated because shitty mods will crash your game. And some mods, people put in a ton of work into and it's like, basically it turns into a semi-official actual upgrade to the game itself. Because everyone uses it, it, you know, bug fixes, everything. And so mod curation became huge in the modding community. And so a plugin registry, a plugin mod, basically the same thing. It's all with alongside some open source ethos of everyone being able to improve the mods and come to a collective decision on which mods are more useful than others.

• 45:46David Hoffman?

  Then all of a sudden, like all of these things become much more accessible and can grow a lot faster.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if I were to summarize the strategy that I think is starting to form with AI 16Z is they started incredibly open source and they're now trying to not rein it in, but just kind of like add a few different kinds of constraints that will allow them to

• 46:08David Hoffman?

  Add a little bit more order to the chaos.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Order to the chaos that allow them to build something super powerful, right? They could focus attention on all these things. Now, if you look at virtual's approach, they're taking the other side of things. They started super

• 46:22David Hoffman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  closed source, mixed source. You know, they weren't showing any of their cards. And now they're becoming multi-frame work, potentially multi-chain. So it's really cool to see two of these behemoths take two different strategies. And I want to see like, you know, whether one strategy favors the other or whether they both can win in the same environment. Either way, exciting things to see.

• 46:44David Hoffman?

  Hey, Jaz, let's take us to the last platform framework that we talk about. We spent a lot of time last week talking about ARC as perhaps this third new entrant into the AI framework category. AI 16Z, Eliza being the first, virtuals being the second. Now ARC is perhaps the third. Fill us in on what happened with ARC in the last seven days.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so for context here, ARC is another one of these major agent protocols that are, you know, that have a framework called RIG, which is coded in Rust programming language. And they have also this platform where you should be able to launch agents from and, you know, have a token associated with them or maybe not. And the reason why we've spoken about ARC is back when we first mentioned it, we had no investment in it and we had no idea like whether it was going to do well. We just thought like, you know, we love how the team is shipping. Maybe it'll, you know, be something worth keeping an eye on. And then like as we've been tracking it, David, you know, we've seen a growing amount of code being shipped and a growing number of partnerships. The conversation last week was about all these different partnerships.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  But to this point, David, if I'm being honest, it's kind of been like pudding without proof. You know, so we wanted to kind of like see, okay, well, what is actually underneath the hood? What are you guys doing, right? You keep talking about teams wanting to launch, but like, what does that mean? Well, this week they kind of dispelled all rumors. They announced their first two teams that are launching within their framework or within their platform, rather, right? One of them is called Listen and the other one is called Soulgraph. What we're looking at right now is Soulgraph and Soulgraph was the first one to do this. Now, I'm not going to get into the intricacies of what Soulgraph does, but the way to think about it is they are trying to tackle kind of like the personality agent sector.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  A comparable to this would be a lot of the agents that we see live today that have come from Eliza specifically and some of the agents that have come from virtuals like Luna that you referenced earlier, David. And they argue that the way that they've designed their kind of architecture and the reason why they've used Rake, which is ARX framework, is it allows them to build a much more lighter weight version of agents that are more powerful and that can do way more, right? They're adding a lot of text to voice. So these agents will be able to interact in different kinds of mediums and platforms. Now, let's say, David, let's hypothesize for a second.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Let's say that agent digital worlds, like virtual worlds like Hyperfire or Roblox or whatever, become some of the main grounds that these agents kind of infiltrate and they can walk around, interact with humans and stuff, just, you know, the metaverse concept. Then you could argue that protocols like Soulgraph could be better positioned to have a direct interaction with humans, you know, either through voice or maybe they're better designed. Now, of course, the proof is literally in the pudding. So let's see what some of the agents look like. But I've played around with some of their demos on their website and it seems pretty cool. There's like a financial advisor agent, which you can like talk to and say, hey, you know, like.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  I bought Sol the other day and I don't really know what to do with it. And she kind of like guides you with like real market data as to what might be an interesting move to make. And I could just literally speak to it like I'm speaking to you right now, right? The second project that they launched was something called Listen, right? And summarize, Listen is aiming to be the leading DeFi AI project on ARX framework, Rick. They're taking a pretty strong chain agnostic approach. So what I like about them or what stood out for me is, you know, they're going to start with Solana and then integrate all EVM chains, sui and more, right? So to kind of like go back, what is DeFi AI?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  The best way to describe it right now is the agents that can allow you to interact with DeFi. So if you wanted to do a bunch of swaps, trading, lending, perps, whatever that might be, instead of trying to figure out which protocol to use, whether the contracts are safe or not, whether there's enough slippage dialed here and there, you could just kind of type in normal, human verbose language, what you want, and it'll just do it for you. So this is ARX kind of like project that they're incubating to launch from their platform to achieve this, right? And they're looking to stand out by offering something a little deeper than just conversational AI for DeFi, David, which is what we've seen with a lot of leaders right now. Can you scroll down and look at some of these examples?

• 51:23Speaker 01

  I wonder if you can just, yeah, okay, so this is a perfect one. Instead of just being like, hey, can you like do A, B and C for me? You can kind of talk to it and say, okay, look at this example. Wait for Fartcoin to hit X dollar market cap, then DCA dollar cost average out of Pengu to Solana after a 20% increase. So it's taking a level deeper in terms of like what these agents can do for you. You know, stable half of my Pepe position if ETH dips below 3K. So, you know, two tokens that are completely non-related to each other. You can get this thing to do something. Laborious, multiple steps things you can kind of like get done and sorted by this protocol. I thought, I like the way that they're thinking about this.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  And ARK's whole approach to this, by the way, this whole like incubation strategy has been to pay attention to quality. I don't know whether that works in the long term, but it's a cool experiment to see, right? Because on the plus side, you're filtering for quality. But on the other side, are you restricting people from playing around with the framework? I don't think they are right now because you can fork or get access to the code and build something cool. But it's just interesting to see.

• 52:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it is interesting to see. We all know DeFi has rough edges.

• 52:36David Hoffman?

  In theory, like this product, I wonder if I actually had my hands on it, if I would actually use it or not. It's a little bit like getting into the car of an autonomous driving cars. Like, it's still a little bit scary. Like, I want to press the buttons on my ledger.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  What would make you, I'm curious, David, what would make you comfortable to use something like this?

• 52:56David Hoffman?

  I would like data that using something like this actually produces better financial ROI than if I had done it myself. Like, if it is, you know, if it's optimizing the right, like, sometimes I like to go and do things manually myself because I know I can optimize for the best execution by going to the right spots and doing things in the right ways. And so making sure that it's also being smart on how to, you know, prevent MEV and getting the best execution and doing things in the right way. And if it can give me more value by doing my task, both faster, more simply, and also in a more value preservative way, then I'd be pretty compelled.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so hypothetically, David, if Agent XYZ turns up on Twitter tomorrow and says, "Hey, I'm an autonomous trader agent and here's my wallet. It's been funded with $10 million. I'm going to go trade on the liquid market and you can watch my trades live and I will post portfolio updates every hour." And let's say you monitored this for two weeks and at the end of these two weeks, it was up 150%. Would that be convincing enough for you to LP into that agent? Or would you need more data? I'm just curious.

• 54:13David Hoffman?

  I, at that point, I would LP a small amount into that agent. Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's very reputational. Um, I, I'm curious, okay, well, let's take this, uh, I, I just wanna zone in on this point, cuz it's something I think about as well, right? Cuz I'm like, hey, check out this agent, and they're like, is this safe? Like, should I use this? What if, uh, a major institution, like Coinbase or Binance, was like, hey, we got this agent, David. It's five bucks a month to you, well, actually, no, that price plan makes no sense. It will take 5% of any kind of fees or swaps of whatever it does with your money, but, uh, aside from that, all the profit is yours. But also, you will incur all the risk. Is that a yay or a nay?

• 54:53David Hoffman?

  So, my mind goes to how this feels like this shouldn't be a product, because if there is an agent out there, or some, even a human, with some trading methodology, methodology, some, you know, magic algorithm that can turn my dollar into $2, or, you know, my dollar into $5, why would it open up more, why would it invite more capital rather than just becoming rich itself?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:17David Hoffman?

  The, the signal that this is a product that can be sold to me tells me that it's not a real product, because if everyone dumps their money into this, trying to chase the gains, then the gains go away, that's just how markets work.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And so, I, I was actually having this exact conversation with a friend the other day, which argued the same thing, David, and I, uh, tend to agree. It's like, I think a lot of these agents will make markets way more efficient, because everyone else is aware of the same alpha that a lot of people, uh, a few people, rather, were just privy to behind the scenes, you know, behind their terminals, that they paid high amounts to get access to. Now, it kind of like decentralizes that information. Um, what I think this ends up resulting in is, the market is gonna get smarter, and it's gonna become increasingly more difficult to access some of these things. And the agents that actually make a lot of money, similar to like, all these trading algorithms and bots that are behind, uh, IP, or trademark IP,

• 56:15Speaker 01

  uh, for some of the top funds, it's gonna be a similar thing, where it's like, this, this agent is trademarked in general. Um, I don't know how many examples there are of, uh, where this business model is actually open source, but I don't think there are many.

• 56:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. If that is the outcome where DeFi on-chain execution just becomes very efficient, that's a very good outcome for crypto. DeFi execution is terrible. You cannot get good price execution on large trades in DeFi. You have to go to the centralized counterparts. And it's one of the biggest limiters as to why we can't get further capital to come on-chain is because our execution is so bad. So if we can get some rebalancing, some optimization of the markets to optimize for execution, which is what the net effect of that would be, that's just very good for a healthy DeFi ecosystem.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny you say that, actually, David. If you bring up this next tweet that we have queued up, this is a demo of an AI-16Z Eliza agent. So that's their framework, someone built an agent, that can autonomously monitor your LP position on one of these decentralized exchanges and keep them around a certain pool price. So for those of you who don't know, in order for these decentralized exchanges to function, there needs to be liquidity available for a particular token pair, right? So let's say you want to swap ETH to USDC. You need a bunch of ETH and you need a bunch of USDC in the pool. And the way that it works is people who come in, they want to swap. They can swap from one asset to another.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Price goes up, price goes down, and a fee is taken and the fee goes to the LP provider. But someone needs to provide the liquidity. So you might ask yourself, well, what's the point of providing the liquidity? Well, they earn off the fees. But they only earn off the fees for the price that is being traded for an asset. And so one of the most annoying and frustrating things about being a liquidity provider is you need to be around the same price range in order to earn fees. Now, if you had an agent that could just monitor this for you. And move your liquidity position.

• 58:22David Hoffman?

  There have been entire startups in DeFi about automated LP rebalancing.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yes, literally. Now you could get all of that done for you by an agent that costs a fraction of a cent. Just pay for its compute costs and it's good to go. So, I mean, I thought this was pretty fun, given that you just literally used that example, David. And so, you know, I, I kind of like think, okay, so this is in this particular demo, David. This is an agent using computer vision or computer use, similar to the agent tank demo that we just showed. So, you know, it's, it's looking at your screen. It's, it's doing A, B, and C. And I think like, you know, could, could like computer use be the thing that charges this entire industry? Should we not be looking at plugins? Should we just be looking at computer use? And then pull out this next tweet, David, which is kind of, I think it's a response to this, this demo.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Basically, this guy goes, or lady goes, cool demo, but you don't even need an AI agent for this. People have been doing this with less, with a much less cool thing called a bot or a script for years. And it's well optimized, but I think an AI agent will perform well when it can decide not to rebalance the LP position. If it thinks that the market will round trip back to the range. So.

• 59:31David Hoffman?

  If the AI, if the agent, a bot cannot be, a bot or a script cannot be opinionated about the market. But this guy's saying, an agent can be opinionated about the market and it may or may not be correct. And just like how humans may or may not be correct. So it's saying, an AI agent might perform well if it can be correctly opinionated about the market, which is also kind of the holy grail.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. Exactly. You, you kind of want these agents to be able to think and do as a human would, right? Instead of some kind of like mechanical, pre-programmed software, right? So I think it's important to kind of balance our, you know, eagerness to see something super cool and call everything an agent and be like, wow, agents can change the world with reality. And being like, hey, guys, you know, there's actually a better way to do this right now. But if you do A, B, and C, it could become useful.

• 1:00:20David Hoffman?

  All right, EJAS, last topic of the day. This is a tweet from Nifty Island. That is a throwback. The tweet starts, "The AI agent playground grows." What's going on here?

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if you remember a few episodes ago, David, we spoke about this team called HyperFi. And again, just came across it across the timeline and I was like, oh, I like what this team is doing. I kind of dug into it and I realized that they were some of the OG guys that came from the same communities that Shaw and a lot of other OG AI ML open source devs came from, right? And it got us thinking about the AI intersection with the Metaverse, right? If these agents were put into virtual bodies, how would that change interaction between humans? How would people, you know, want to invest their money when it comes to this kind of like emerging meta? And, you know, it would have been one thing if that was just the only time we talked about it and nothing ever happened.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  But I'm still seeing data points, David, that is pushing us towards this vision. Namely, in this example, Nifty Island, but it's partnered with a little known protocol called Virtuals, of course, which is one of the major agent protocols. And what they've done here is Virtuals is partnering with them to provide a kind of virtual world for Virtuals agents to play in. And I'm saying Virtuals a lot, but the idea is these agents will be able to do a bunch of things. So it's kind of like their HyperFi play, right? And HyperFi is not, you know, chain specific, it's chain agnostic. But it's cool to see another example of this pattern appearing in a separate ecosystem. It also is a quite helpful reminder for ourselves that the Virtuals team,

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  before they became an AI agent platform, was pretty heavy on the gaming side. David, if you remember with our interview with Jansen, he spoke about, you know, effectively being a gaming DAO before. And it was that gaming experience and that gaming kind of focus which led them to think, hmm, I wonder if these non-playable characters could be more than just non-playable characters, which got them started in thinking about agents. They saw what was happening in the AI ML world. Their engineers had a lot of AI ML experience. They kind of like paired those two together with crypto's number one incentive mechanism, tokens. And so it's cool to see this extension from the OG team kind of building this out.

• 1:02:42David Hoffman?

  And it's also cool to see AI just infiltrate every single other vertical about crypto. We've talked about gaming, we've talked about DeFi and liquidity providing. We've talked about streaming and what else have we talked about? It just seems to be like computer use. Yeah, it seems to just be like, it kind of just goes back to this is not just an AI crypto agent thing. This is the AIification of everything that we touch in crypto. And kind of like you said at the beginning, a lot of this stuff won't make sense. Some of this stuff will completely change everything we know about crypto.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely.

• 1:03:19David Hoffman?

  EJAS, thank you once again. This is our eighth AI weekly roll up. I wouldn't be here without you, man. Thank you for guiding me and the Bankless Nation through the last seven days of the AI agent space.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  No, I appreciate you having me, David. I just want to reiterate that like I am learning all of this in real time. And we're always looking to kind of like improve this show and be on the cutting edge. And I don't think I could do it on my own. I mean, we can't do it on our own. So a lot of this has been through the help of people just DMing us and DMing me and being like, "Hey, check out this protocol or you should meet this team. Please keep it up, guys." And I'm not usually one for people saying, "Hey, DM me, random stranger." But it is super helpful for me because I can't keep track of everything. And if you've got a project that you're passionate about, like just talk to me. And I just want to like learn about it. So yeah, thanks for everyone so far.

• 1:04:05David Hoffman?

  Well, we'll see if you'll see if you really enjoy giving out that request to get DM'd next week. We'll see what your DMs look like. But EJAS, it's good to see you, my man. I'll see you in seven days. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. If crypto is risky, crypto AI is even riskier. You can lose what you put in, but 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.