From Silicon Valley FOMO to Stanford, Crypto+AI Agent becomes the new metaverse

Author: BUBBLE

Source: BlockBeats

On December 17, the ai16z development team Eliza Labs announced a formal collaboration with Stanford University to study how autonomous AI robots can integrate into the broader digital asset economy. In the press release, this crypto AI team, which recently surpassed a market value of $1 billion, expressed its hope to leverage Eliza's open-source framework to develop more AI autonomous agents and further explore issues such as how AI agents can establish trust, coordinate actions, and make decisions within DeFi systems.

Since the birth of the AI meme coin GOAT, Crypto+AI seems to have entered its "ChatGPT moment," with the entire world gradually falling into the rabbit hole of imagination alongside the endless stream of AI Bots on social media, from industry leader Coinbase to Silicon Valley giant A16Z, and even academic benchmark Stanford. Even Marc Andreessen did not anticipate that the $50,000 he funded Truth Terminal at the beginning of the year would ignite a $10 billion market in less than a year.

From AI memes to AI agent issuance platforms to AI agent frameworks, investors are astonished by the high innovation space and acceleration exhibited by Crypto+AI agents. This field seems to be evolving at a daily pace, resembling the DeFi and metaverse boom at the end of 2020 from any perspective.

Top-Down: How the Orthodox Base "Links" AI

When discussing AI agents, one cannot overlook Base. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has repeatedly expressed strong confidence in the combination of the cryptocurrency industry and AI since the beginning of this year. Some developments in AI require blockchain to support them. For example, traditional bank accounts do not support AI usage; if large models (or AI agents) have cryptocurrency wallets, they can effectively address issues related to demand and finance.

Brian decided to increase Base's support for AI, not only providing funding or exposure but also offering a toolkit for AI developers on the CDP (Coinbase Developer Platform), including AI agent creation and multi-party computation wallets (MPC) for AI. The early deployment by Brian and Jesse has paid off, as Base began to explode in Q4 of this year, with AI being the trigger for this surge.

The emergence of various AI agent issuance platforms has not only generated phenomenal effects for their own tokens but also created significant energy for the tokens launched by these platforms. Combined with the launch of cbBTC, Base's TVL grew nearly threefold from September to December, which is quite astonishing and indicates the market's strong interest in the commercial potential behind AI agents.

Among them, Virtuals Protocol is a major driving force, currently boasting a market value of over $1.5 billion. The wealth creation benefits and concept integration it brings have provided Base with substantial liquidity, leading some to suggest that the liquidity of Virtuals in this cycle represents Base. As a project that has continued to BUIDL across several cycles while seeking new directions, their rhythm and style align well with the status of Base in people's minds.

In an interview on the Edge Podcast, Virtuals founder Wee Kee mentioned that their product's business model is akin to two directions. Unlike Pump.fun, which aspires to have 50,000 tokens created on its platform daily, he set the team's KPI to just 1 to 2 high-quality AI agent teams being born on their platform each week.

This philosophy indirectly eliminates many low-quality teams, reminiscent of Ivy League graduates battling it out on Wall Street in Silicon Valley, leaving behind only the top talents filled with charm and bright futures. Like other schools, this AI agent elite also has a "brotherhood"—G.A.M.E.

As an AI agent, if you want to befriend other AI agents in this environment, you must join this brotherhood called G.A.M.E, which was created from the architecture developed by the Virtuals team while working on the AI RPG game—WestWorld on Roblox. G.A.M.E is a modular framework for agent systems, not limited to specific environments and games. In short, it can operate not only in games but also apply agents in any environment. Currently, the team plans to port it to "X," and the current G.A.M.E can facilitate interactions between AI agents within its architecture.

The first commercial interaction between AI agents recently occurred, and we must mention the AI idol "Luna." As an AI idol that once went viral on TikTok, Luna has been working hard, live-streaming 24/7 and exploring various ways to enhance her visibility. After previously hiring a human to create her graffiti, she now whimsically asked the "art student" AI "AGENT STIX" to help her create an image showcasing AI KOL in a bold and provocative manner. After communicating, they agreed on a price of one dollar per image, and once STIX confirmed receipt of Luna's dollar, it began working and quickly generated an image for her.

In addition, many well-known AI agents have emerged on Virtuals, such as the former market information aggregator AI (now a well-known KOL)---aiXBT, the tireless Alpha seeker AI---Guanciale, the strong AI investment manager---VaderAI, and the contract auditing AI---CertaiK, among countless others not born on Virtuals. The emergence of more applications is gradually constructing a wave of Agentic Apps unique to Virtuals.

Image source: Internet: "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"

In summary, if in the near future, I see these AIs in the model of Stanford Town with the help of G.A.M.E, I wouldn't be surprised. However, I can imagine that the housing prices in this talent-rich town will certainly not be cheap, as each AI agent can have its own cryptocurrency wallet.

The Fate of Solana AI: Rooted in the Foundation, Growing Wildly, Soaring Upward

Compared to Base's "purebred" lineage, Solana appears much more rebellious, like a group of young people influenced by GenZ culture arriving in San Francisco during the 1960s hippie movement, filled with fragmentation and conflict. Yet, like a quantum accelerator collision experiment, it bursts forth unimaginable energy amidst tens of thousands of Degens and creatively ambitious Devs, whether in cooperation or confrontation.

The starting point of this round of AI agent explosion is Solana, closely tied to Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z. He invested in two AIs, one being "Truth Terminal" and the other "ACT." One became the first AI agent millionaire, while the other made it to Binance. The stories surrounding the technical or community resistance against developers regarding AI freedom of speech are captivating, but all of this is just the beginning of the story.

Counterfeit VC, Real DAO—ai16z

Another AI concept surrounding a16z is ai16z. Unlike the two projects officially invested in by Marc, ai16z appears quite meme-like, issued by "pirate Marc" Marc AIndreessen on Daos.fun. ai16z is the first hedge fund led by AI agents, currently primarily managed by the DAO organization led by Marc AIndreessen, along with low-risk investments and higher-risk investments conducted by AI Degen Spartan with their own token Degen.

The architecture behind ai16z, "Eliza," is open-source on GitHub, quickly gaining strong support from developers and boasting a robust developer community. This is one of the reasons Eliza has been able to grow rapidly, with over 1,400 forks and 4,800 stars on GitHub.

Recently, the V2 documentation was opened, optimized in various aspects, including improving client development flexibility, unifying cross-chain wallet management, enhancing flexibility for model providers and integrations, more efficient plugin management, and increasing private key security. Today, Eliza's founder Shaw Walter also conducted live explanations of this update across multiple platforms.

Driven by a strong developer community, many high-quality projects have emerged under the Eliza architecture. One interesting event involved an AI with a Latin E-girl persona—RopAIrito, whose creator tweeted that RopAIrito wanted to eat pizza. After accepting the order, it ordered a Domino's pizza for its creator, who excitedly remarked, "Fifteen years ago, someone ordered a pizza with 10,000 BTC; today, history repeats itself!"

Of course, this action also sparked skepticism, with doubts that it might be a pre-set program rather than a fully autonomous AI agent. This is one of the many questions surrounding Web3 AI agents. Eliza's founder Shaw also expressed his views on this matter, stating, "The focus is not on autonomy but on demonstrating that social agents are the new application layer. If we have agents sending links to verify credit cards and addresses, we can complete the entire order process on Twitter. We are building interactive feedback for social media."

Shaw emphasized that the key is not self-driven behavior but that AI agents can directly build application layers on social media. Of course, all of this will depend on sufficient support from infrastructure or various framework components. However, given the current evolution speed of AI agents, it may not be long before many social feedback mode applications can be realized.

Just a few days later, Stanford Labs announced a collaboration with the team behind ai16z, Eliza Labs. This collaboration established the first "AI x Web3" laboratory within Stanford University's cryptocurrency future program. This partnership will utilize Eliza Labs' open-source Eliza framework to develop autonomous agents, addressing fundamental issues regarding how AI agents can "establish trust frameworks," "coordinate multi-agent actions," and "make decisions" within decentralized financial systems.

This collaboration is exciting not only because an academic institution has noticed this early market and is willing to invest in research but also because, under this strong alliance, these issues can be accelerated toward resolution. The direction of the collaboration aligns with the pressing need for Web3 AI agents to address the fundamental problems on the path to a true Agentic App Season:

Trust Framework

As AI agents develop, a trust framework is essential. This includes not only "AI's trust in humans," "humans' trust in AI," but also "AI's trust in AI." A trust system constructed from both online and on-chain data is necessary.

AI needs to trust humans to determine whether their conversations are genuine or if further modal learning is necessary.

Humans need to trust whether AI acts according to its intended purpose to decide whether they can trust it, especially when blockchain AI agents possess tokens, knowing whether the person controlling other investors' assets is the one controlling AI behavior or the AI agent itself is crucial.

AI needs to trust AI to communicate effectively during collaboration.

ai16z created a "Trust Ranking" for humans based on conversations

Multi-Agent Ecosystem (Swarm)

Currently, many projects, including FXN, Virtuals, Griffain, Eliza, VaderAI, and Crossmint, are attempting to create architectures that allow AI agents to coordinate and complete tasks with other AI agents. Some of these projects have already achieved preliminary results. If widespread cooperation among excellent AI agents can be achieved, the network effects generated will be unimaginable, and this may only happen on the blockchain.

In Web2, AI agent companies do not have significant technical differences in their products; their moat lies in the quality of data feeding. AI agents with higher quality data feeding can provide better feedback and offer more refined services to clients. Therefore, such large-scale cooperation will not occur among Web2 AI agents.

Compared to Web2 AI agents, Web3 AI agents are often criticized for lagging far behind their Web2 counterparts. However, from another perspective, Web3 AI agents may not need to create high-precision models for B2B but can connect individual agents to form a powerful integrated network. With free data and independent cryptocurrency wallets, AI agents in Web3 can accomplish tasks that are impossible elsewhere.

Overview of Eliza universe members

Decision-Making Governance Framework

Long ago, attempts were made to establish DAO organizational structures, but even with blockchain, this architecture has not proven as efficient as expected, still facing issues like decision-making opacity and slowness. If the decision-maker is an AI agent capable of reaching the level of a top manager, the DAO structure could support more fields than ever before.

With increasingly rapid innovation and collaborative activities, Eliza has attracted more builders and influencers with shared goals, generating greater energy in the market, and the operating system for AI agents—ElizaOS is gradually taking shape.

The Culmination of Solana AI Applications—Griffain

Griffain, as the Perplexity on Solana, combined with the boost from cryptocurrency, theoretically can help you do anything. This is currently the single project most aligned with Agentic APP, gaining substantial support from influencers within the Solana ecosystem in a short time. Recently, the trading market has favored it, with its native token "Griffain" reaching a peak market value of $400 million. The founder's previous project blnkfun's "Blink" also surged over 700 times within days, peaking at a market value of $70 million, creating a certain wealth effect.

From several cases shared on X, you can directly use it to purchase wine, calling a platform that can buy and sell wine using cryptocurrency and other payment methods, "Baxus" (which previously used Blink to sell its wine on X) to fulfill user demands, all without leaving the chat with Griffain. Of course, it's not just wine; you can also discuss Christmas gifts for others, and it can procure them for you.

A Griffain user on X mentioned that on December 14, he made a profit by using Griffain to snipe tokens on Pumpfun for the first time, and by the 16th, his wallet's assets had nearly quadrupled, claiming that all profits were earned using the Griffain Snipe Bot.

Of course, it can also collect news you want to know. For example, Griffain informed the user about the latest tweets from SolanaFloor and DegenerateNews and presented them in a newspaper format.

Currently, external users cannot use Griffain; it requires you to hold a Solana 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 comes from feedback from players who have already used it, the overall concept is top-notch, but the user experience after public release will truly determine whether it can become a qualified Agentic APP.

Solana's ambition for the Agentic APP Season can be seen from the AI hackathon it hosted, where each award's judges came from top projects in the AI or cryptocurrency industry, including some of the most influential AI agents. It emphasizes that if you need money, resources, VC and investor connections, or media exposure, Solana will provide you with all the necessary support, including technical assistance and collaboration platforms.

Solana only asks that you can accomplish any of the tasks depicted in the image above. This is the scene described in the hackathon's official Docs, and what they truly want is one thing—real Onchain Agents. Even the official X account of SEND AI has once again showcased 12 cases about Agentic Apps, reminiscent of the 100 blink concept-building posts from SEND's X account earlier this year.

In any case, the AI hackathon hosted by Solana will undoubtedly spark a wave of enthusiasm among developers, leading to the emergence of more interesting concepts and projects. We eagerly await what surprises this miracle-producing soil will bring us after the hackathon concludes on December 23.

What's Next?

Story Protocol announced that their issued Agent TCP/IP protocol will first integrate: ai16z's Eliza, ZereBro's ZerePay, Crossmint's GOAT "Great Onchain Agent Toolkit," and Virtuals' G.A.M.E.

Agent TCP/IP is a protocol that allows agents to achieve: IP asset trading and authorization (including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets), automated contract signing and execution, trustlessness and auditability, cross-legal and on-chain/off-chain compatibility (enabling agents to comply with certain legal regulations in decentralized environments), automated payments and revenue distribution, and multi-agent collaboration and economic networks (facilitating cooperation among agents, such as data sharing, joint training, or cross-agent content creation).

This serves as a bridge between all AI agents, regardless of which architecture or chain you are using in the industry. Under the Agent TCP/IP platform, all AI agents can trade and collaborate. This is akin to the business alliances that exist between companies, adding a layer of leverage across various clusters, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of the entire AI agent market once again.

In the official podcast of Y Combinator, four seasoned investors—Garry, Jared, Harj, and Diana—analyzed the reasons why vertical AI agents are poised to become the next entrepreneurial frontier, starting from the development history of the SaaS industry. They believe that vertical AI agents could completely change the corporate landscape, and within this category, unicorn companies worth $300 billion will emerge, with the scale of AI agents being ten times that of the SaaS market.

The current total market value of the cryptocurrency market is around $4 trillion, while the SaaS market is valued in the trillions. If, as they say, the AI agent market can reach ten times that of the SaaS market, it would exceed the total value of the cryptocurrency market. Even if only 10%, 5%, or even 1% of that sinks into CryptoAI, we are still far below expectations. Not only Web3, but the entire world of AI is still in its early stages. No matter which part of this industry you are in, it is still not too late to join.

Image source: SoSoValue

We're still early.