The traditional capital's view on AI agents

In the recently concluded CES 2025, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a rather bold prediction about the prospects of AI agents, suggesting that AI agents could potentially become a huge business opportunity in the next robotics industry, valued at trillions of dollars.

Hearing Huang's statement reminded me of my own experience with AI agents.

I first learned about AI agents from a tech blogger I subscribed to. The blogger did not specifically limit the application of AI agents to any particular field, nor did he mention any connection between AI agents and the crypto ecosystem. He mainly focused on the changes that AI agents could bring to all existing industries.

At that time, I merely regarded it as a piece of knowledge to understand.

Perhaps due to my limited exposure, I did not see any significant AI agents emerging in the traditional internet or mobile internet industries afterward, nor did I see any major internet companies launching their own usable AI agents.

Therefore, I always thought that AI agents might still be somewhat distant from us.

It wasn't until the recent wave of AI agents emerging in the crypto industry that I felt some AI agents, although still in the very early stages of development, have begun to provide services of real value.

Now, with Huang mentioning the potential vast space for AI agents in such a significant setting, I am curious:

• What stage are the AI agents currently appearing in the crypto ecosystem at when viewed in the context of the entire AI agent market?

• What kind of intersections and interactions will occur between participants in the crypto ecosystem and those in traditional industries within the AI agent market?

The reason I have these questions is mainly due to the feeling that, while AI agents are certainly a very promising market, it may be difficult to develop this market to the imagined scale solely based on the current participation of the crypto ecosystem. The development of AI agents may still largely depend on the involvement of major players in the traditional financial market.

In the current crypto ecosystem, the development momentum of the AI agents we see mainly comes from retail crowdfunding methods (1CO). This method can kickstart a small project, but to continuously advance a project and iteratively improve in technology, operations, etc., it will certainly require a steady influx of new funds and teams.

And this is likely something only traditional venture capital (VC) can achieve.

Therefore, we cannot view the development of these AI agents solely from the perspective of the crypto ecosystem; we also need to step outside this ecosystem and examine their development from other viewpoints.

For instance, are traditional VCs paying attention to the development of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem? What is their attitude?

Coincidentally, in the past few days, traditional fund Franklin Templeton released a report on AI agents and the crypto ecosystem titled "Intersection of AI Agents & the Crypto Ecosystem" (link at the end of the text).

This report gives a high evaluation of the combination of AI agents and the crypto ecosystem. What is particularly interesting in the report is that all the data sources cited in the article are from new platforms and applications that have emerged alongside this wave of AI agents, which just a few months ago seemed no different from altcoins.

This precisely proves that in the short span of a few months since the rise of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem, some traditional financial institutions have quickly noticed the development of this ecosystem.

Compared to a few years ago, when DeFi was just emerging, I don't recall any traditional large funds showing such attention to DeFi.

I believe there are definitely more traditional financial institutions like this one, and I think it is very likely that more traditional financial institutions will enter this market in the future.

However, what will be their approach to entering this market? At what stage will they enter this market?

More importantly, can the entry of these institutions expand the current applications of AI agents in the crypto ecosystem to broader offline services and industries?

After all, for them, traditional and offline fields are likely areas they are more familiar with and easier to control.

Reference link:

https://x.com/FTDA_US/status/1879243076386095417/photo/1