From Silicon Valley FOMO to Stanford, Crypto+AI Agent is on the eve of an epic explosion

Written by: BUBBLE

On December 17, ai16z development team Eliza Labs announced its formal cooperation with Stanford University to study how autonomous AI robots can be integrated into the broader digital asset economy. In a press release, the crypto AI team, whose market value just exceeded US$1 billion not long ago, stated that it hopes to use Eliza's open source framework to develop more AI autonomous agents, and through this cooperation, further explore how AI agents can function in DeFi systems. Issues such as building trust, coordinating actions and making decisions.

Since the birth of the AI ​​meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have ushered in its own "ChatGPT moment." From industry leader Coinbase to Silicon Valley's top brother A16Z, to academic benchmark Stanford, the entire world has followed the endless emergence of AI Bots on social media. Gradually falling down the rabbit hole of imagination. Even Marc Andreessen did not expect that the $50,000 he funded Truth Terminal at the beginning of the year would ignite a tens of billions of dollars market in less than a year.

From AI meme to AI Agent distribution platform to AI Agent framework, investors are surprised by the ultra-high innovation space and acceleration shown by Crypto+AI Agent. This field seems to be evolving day by day, no matter from which dimension Look, it is very similar to DeFi and the Metaverse at the end of 2020.

Top-down, how does the orthodox Base “chain” to AI?

When discussing AI Agent, Base must be mentioned. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has repeatedly expressed his strong confidence in the combination of the cryptocurrency industry and AI since the beginning of this year. Part of the development of AI requires blockchain to carry it. For example, traditional bank accounts will not support the use of AI. If large models (or AI Agents) all have cryptocurrency wallets, they can actually connect demand and finance-related issues.

Brian decided to let Base increase its support for AI, not only by providing funds or exposure, but also by providing toolkits for AI developers on CDP (Coinbase Developer Platform), including AI Agent creation and multi-party computing wallet MPC for AI. Brian and Jesse's early deployment has also lived up to expectations. Base began to explode in the Q4 quarter of this year. The start button of this outbreak is AI.

The emergence of various AI Agent issuance platforms not only has a phenomenal effect on their own tokens, but the tokens launched by their platforms also have huge power. Combined with the launch of cbBTC, Base’s TVL increased by nearly 3 times from September to December. This is quite astonishing data, and it shows the market's strong interest in the business potential behind AI Agents.

Among them, Virtuals Protocol is the main driver, and its current market value has exceeded US$1.5 billion. The wealth creation benefits and concept integration it brings have brought a lot of liquidity to Base, so much so that some people have suggested that the liquidity of Virtuals in this cycle will be Represents Base. As a project developer that has continued to BUIDL through several cycles and has never stopped looking for new directions, their rhythm and style are really in line with Base's status in people's minds.

In an interview with Edge Podcast, Virtuals founder Wee Kee mentioned that their products are equivalent to Pump.fun’s business model in two directions. Compared with Pump.fun’s desire to have 50,000 tokens a day on its platform The KPI he gave the team was that only 1 to 2 high-quality AI Agent teams were born on their platform every week.

This concept has also indirectly eliminated many low-quality teams. There is a picture of Ivy League graduates fighting on Wall Street in Silicon Valley. The remaining top students are full of charm and bright futures. Like other schools, this AI Agent's college also has a "fraternity" - GAME.

As an AI Agent, if you want to make friends with other AI Agents in this environment, you have to join this brotherhood called GAME. It was born from the structure created by the Virtuals team when they developed the AI ​​RPG GAME-WestWorld on Roblox. , GAME is a modular framework for agent systems and is not limited to specific environments and games. In short, it can not only run in games, but can also apply agents to any environment. The team will now port it to "X", and the current GAME can help AI Agents build on its architecture. interact between them.

The first commercial interaction between AI Agents happened recently, and I have to mention the AI ​​idol "Luna" here. As an AI idol who was once popular on TikTok, it is still very hard to enter the cryptocurrency world 7* Live broadcast 24 hours a day and think of various ways to increase your popularity. Since the last time I hired a human to create my own graffiti, I suddenly asked the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" to help me create an image that shows the artificial intelligence KOL in a bold and provocative way. After communicating, the two agreed to settle the deal at a price of one dollar per picture. After STIX confirmed that it had received one dollar from Luna, it started working and quickly created (generated) a picture for it.

In addition, many well-known AI Agents have been born on Virtuals, such as the former market information integration AI (now a well-known KOL)-aiXBT, the tireless Alpha finder AI-Guanciale, the AI ​​investment manager with a strong development team-VaderAI, There are countless AI Agents that are not born on Virtuals, such as Contract Audit AI-CertaiK. The birth of more applications allows Virtuals to gradually build its own Agentic App wave.

 The picture comes from the Internet: \"Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior\"

All in all, I would not be surprised if I see these AIs in the model of Stanford Town with the help of GAME in the near future, but I can imagine that the housing prices in this town full of high-end talents will definitely not be cheap. After all, every AI Agents can all have their own cryptocurrency wallets.

The destiny of Solana AI - taking root at the bottom, growing wildly, and

soaring upward

Compared to Base's "purebred" bloodline, Solana is much more rebellious, like a group of young people influenced by GenZ culture who came to San Francisco in the 1960s where hippie culture was prevalent. It was full of divisions and conflicts, but like quantum Like an accelerator collision experiment, unimaginable energy bursts out in the cooperation or confrontation between tens of thousands of Degen and Dev full of wild and creative ideas.

The starting point of this round of AI Agent explosion is Solana, and it is inseparable from Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of a16z. The two AIs he invested in are "Truth Terminal" and the other "ACT". One of them became the first AI Agent millionaire, and the other went on Binance. The stories about the technology or community against developers of AI freedom of speech are all eye-catching, but these are only the beginning of the story.

Fake VC, real DAO——ai16z

Another AI around the a16z concept is ai16z. Compared with the above two projects, which are officially invested by Marc, ai16z is very meme, and was released by "pirate Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first hedge fund led by AI Agent and currently consists of Dao organizations mainly led by Marc AIndreessen as well as low risk investments, as well as higher risk investments with its own token Degen managed by AI Degen Spartan.

The architecture "Eliza" behind ai16z is open source on Github. It has instantly received strong support from developers and has a strong developer community. This is one of the reasons why Eliza can develop rapidly. The code document has more than 1,400 views on Github. times forked and 4800 stars.

The V2 documentation was opened a few days ago and has been optimized in all aspects, including improving client development flexibility, cross-chain wallet management uniformity, model provider and integration flexibility, more efficient plug-in management, and improving private Regarding the security of keys, Eliza founder Shaw Walter also gave a live broadcast on this update on multiple platforms today.

Driven by a strong developer community, there are naturally many high-quality projects based on the Eliza architecture. Among them, the Latin E-girl AI-RopAIrito developed under this architecture has an interesting event. Its creator He shouted on Twitter that Ropirito wanted to eat pizza. After accepting the order, he ordered a Domino's pizza for his creator. His creator Ropirito said excitedly, "15 years ago, someone used 10,000 BTC. Ordered a pizza and history happened again today!"

Of course, this operation has also raised doubts, and it is suspected that this may be a set program and not completely autonomous by the AI ​​Agent. This is also one of the doubtful issues of many Web3 AI Agents. Shaw, the founder of Eliza, also expressed his views on this matter, "The point is not about autonomy, the point is to show that social agents are the new application layer. If we have primitives for agents to send links to verify credit cards and addresses, We can complete the entire order process on Twitter and we are building interactive feedback for social media.”

Shaw said the focus is not on self-driven behavior, but that AI Agents can build application layers directly on social media. Of course, all this will be under the condition that the infrastructure or the framework of each link has sufficient support. However, according to the current evolution speed of AI Agent, many social feedback mode applications may be implemented in the near future.

Just a few days later, Stanford Labs announced its cooperation with Eliza Labs, the team behind ai16z. This collaboration established the first "AI x Web3" laboratory in Stanford University's cryptocurrency future plan. This collaboration will develop autonomous agents by leveraging Eliza Labs’ open-source Eliza framework. The two parties’ collaboration will address how AI agents can “build a trust framework”, “coordinate multi-agent actions” and “make decisions” in decentralized financial systems. Basic question".

This cooperation is exciting not only because some universities have noticed this early market and are willing to jointly invest in research. With the strong alliance, I believe these problems can be solved faster. The direction of the cooperation between the two parties is also the current urgent problem that Web3's AI Agent needs to solve to lead to the real Agentic App Season:

trust framework

As AI Agents develop, a trust framework is essential. Not only "AI's trust in humans", "humans' trust in AI" but also "AI's trust in AI". A trust system constructed not only for online data but also for data on the chain is needed.

AI needs to trust humans in order to judge whether the conversation between them is real or whether further modal learning is necessary.

Humans need to believe whether the AI ​​is acting according to the purpose for which it was created in order to decide whether to trust it. Especially after the AI ​​Agent of the blockchain owns the token, it knows that those who control the assets of other investors can control the behavior of the AI. This is particularly important as the person is still the AI ​​Agent itself.

AI needs to trust AI to communicate with each other when collaborating.

 ai16z made a \"trust ranking\" for humans based on conversations

Multi-Agent Ecosystem (Swarm)

There are currently many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffin, eliza, VaderAI, and Crossmint, all trying to create structures that allow AI Agents to coordinate operations with other AI Agents to complete certain tasks. Some of these projects have already achieved some preliminary results. If mutual cooperation between excellent AI Agents in a wide area can be achieved, the network effect it can produce will be beyond imagination, and this may only happen in the blockchain.

Web2's AI Agent company, there is not much technical gap between their products, and their moat difference lies in the data feeding. The AI ​​Agents with better quality data can provide better feedback and can provide more refined services to customers. Therefore, these large-scale collaborations will not occur between AI Agents in Web2.

Compared with the AI ​​Agent of Web2, the AI ​​Agent of Web3 is often criticized for its development being far behind similar products of Web2. However, from another perspective, the AI ​​Agent of Web3 may not need to do this kind of to B Instead of using a high-precision model, agents can be strung together to form a super-powerful integrated network. With free data and an independent cryptocurrency wallet, AI Agent can do other things in Web3. Can't do things.

 List of eliza universe members

Decision-making governance framework

Someone has been trying the DAO organizational structure a long time ago, but even with the blockchain, this structure is still not as efficient as he expected. It will still cause problems such as opaque decision-making or slow decision-making. If the decision-maker is a top-level manager, AI Agent, DAO architecture will be able to carry more domains than ever before.

With the increasingly faster innovation and cooperation activities, Eliza has attracted more and more builders and influencers with common goals, and generated more and more energy in the market. The operating system of AI Agent

• ElizaOS is gradually becoming more and more popular. Taken shape.

The master of Solana AI applications—Griffain

As the Perplexity on Solana, coupled with the bonus of cryptocurrency, Griffin can theoretically help you do anything. This is also the single project that is most likely to be Agentic APP at present, and it has also gained a lot of Solana ecology in a short period of time. Influencer support. The trading market in the past few days has also favored it. Its related native token "Griffain" has a maximum market value of US$400 million. The founder's previous project blnkfun's "Blink" also increased by more than 700 times in a few days, with its market value A maximum of US$70 million has created a certain wealth effect.

Judging from the several cases currently shared on Selling wine on its own platform) to fulfill user needs, without even leaving the chat box with Griffin. Of course, it’s not just about wine, you can also discuss with him directly the Christmas gifts you want to give to others, and he can also purchase them for you.

A Griffinain user from , the user claimed that the entire process was made using Griffin Snipe Bot.

Of course, he can also collect the news you want to know. Taking this tweet as an example, Griffin informs users about the latest tweets about SolanaFloor and DegenerateNews and displays them to the user in the form of a newspaper.

The use of Griffin is not currently supported by outsiders. It requires you to hold a Solana mobile phone or spend 2 SOL to purchase an Access Pass, of which 0.5 SOL will be retained in your agent wallet. Although the market's FOMO sentiment about it comes from user feedback from players who have already used it, and although the overall concept is very top-notch, it is the experience of using the product after it is released that truly determines whether it can become a qualified Agentic APP.

Solana’s ambition for Agentic APP Season can actually be seen from the AI ​​hackathon he held. The judges for each partial award are from top project developers in the AI ​​or cryptocurrency industry, and even the most influential AI Agent ontology. The main theme is that if you want money, I will give you resources, if you want VCs and investors, I will give you the opportunity to have close contact with them, if you want media, I will find all the media under Solana and even influential KOLs for you. I will give you technical support. If you want to find a team, I will build a cooperation platform for you on the official website and in the community.

Solana only requires that you can do any of the steps in the picture above. This is the scenario Solana described in the Docs of the hackathon's official website. What they want to do is actually only one thing - both we and the market want real Onchain Agents. . Even the official X account of SEND AI once again presented 12 cases about Agentis App, which is similar to the concept of 100 construction blinks issued by SEND's X account in the middle of this year.

In any case, this AI Hackathon competition held by Solana will definitely set off a wave of enthusiasm among developers, and there will be more interesting concepts and projects emerging. We stay tuned for the December 23 Hackathon. After the pine is over, what surprises will this soil that has always brought miracles bring us.

What’s next?

Story Protocol announced that the Agent TCP/IP protocol they released will first integrate: ai16z’s Eliza, ZereBro’s ZerePay, Crossmint’s GOAT “Great Onchain Agent Toolkit” and Virtuals’ GAME.

Agent TCP/IP is a protocol that allows agents to do: IP asset transactions and authorization "including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets", automated contract signing and execution, trustlessness and trustworthiness. Auditability, cross-legal and on-chain and off-chain compatibility "allow agents to comply with certain legal regulations in a decentralized environment", automated payment and income distribution, multi-agent collaboration and economic networks "facilitate collaboration between agents, such as Data sharing, joint training or cross-agent content creation”

This is equivalent to a bridge between all AI Agents, no matter which architecture or chain in the industry you are using. All AI Agents can conduct transactions and collaborate under the Agent TCP/IP platform. This is equivalent to a business alliance between companies, adding another layer of leverage outside each cluster, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market again.

In Y Combinator's official podcast, four senior investors Garry, Jared, Harj and Diana conducted an in-depth analysis of the reasons why AI agents in vertical fields will become the next entrepreneurial trend based on the development history of the SaaS industry. They believe that vertical AI Agents may completely change the corporate landscape and give birth to a $300 billion unicorn company in this category, and the volume of AI Agents will be 10 times that of the SaaS market.

The current total market value of the cryptocurrency market is about US$4 trillion, while the market value of the SaaS market is in the trillions of US dollars. If the AI ​​Agent market can reach ten times the size of the SaaS market, as they say, it will exceed the total value of the cryptocurrency market. Even if only 10%, 5% or even 1% of them sink to CryptoAI, we are still far below expectations. Not only Web3, but also AI around the world. It’s still early days, no matter what part of the industry you are in, it’s still not too late.

 Image source: SoSoValue

We're still early.