AI ROLLUP #6: The Hottest AI Crypto Trends of 2025

Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the AI Rollup where we cover the recent news, developments, and drama in the intersection of crypto and AI. I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host and AI expert, Ejazz. And we are here to make sure that you are up to speed with the rapidly evolving AI agent space out there. Ejaz, how you doing, my man?

Doing well, David. Um, I think last week was super full on because we had the Christmas break and every agent team decided to launch pretty major things. I'm happy to be back into the flow of things. It's a new year, um, and there's new exciting updates. So yeah, excited to get into it.

Maybe this is me just projecting my own personal experience, but I feel like coming back into the world of crypto, getting back into the trenches in January 1st is really refreshing. And also kind of with met with a newfound invigoration, specifically for AI agents. I think maybe maybe I knew I was always going to do that. Coming back from the holidays is like, man, once January 1st comes, I'm just gonna double down. That's how I feel, at least.

It it sounds like you went away, did some human stuff, David,

I did uh did some human stuff.

and now you you just miss the agents. You miss that digital engagement, you miss being in some subversive world, metaverse, dare I say.

It's just nice when there are just paradigm-breaking innovations that seemingly come out every seven days because that's what got me into crypto. That's the vibe I'm here for. Uh I remember um Hunter Horsley from Bitwise commented about how volatility is like a core feature of crypto. And I've replied, uh, I'm I leave crypto the day volatility leaves crypto. Uh and that comes also, you know, part and parcel with just rapidly innovating tech and fundamentals, and uh that's what we're seeing in the AI space.

Yeah, it's like some sadistic relationship. We all we all complain about it. The markets are down today. Everyone's calling for the end of the world. But then when those markets go up, we're back here again. And at the end of the day, um, I think what it is is crypto really gives um the clearest and most accurate pulse check on how the market feels about something. If it's bad,

that price is going down. If it's good,

price is going up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so you and I have seen some crypto cycles. I think we are here for these eras of rapid innovation. Uh, bubbles are eras of rapid innovation. Bubbles create real fundamentals. Uh so ejazz, I'm gonna ask you the question that I ask you at the beginning of every single AI roll up. What's the big deal? Why are we so excited about AI agents? Why is the world refocusing its attention to AI agents? Why is there so much innovation happening here?

Yeah, I was thinking about this this morning, David. And honestly, my answer today is going to sound boring, but I think it's super important. Sits around efficiency.

Okay, so efficiency is typically like this paraded phrase that you hear at like big corporate companies. Oh, we need to increase efficiency by 30% and you know, improve profit margins by blah, blah, blah. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about um the fact that blockchains, whether you like it or not, right now, are still a little bit clunky. Still a little bit clunky, right? Quite.

Quite a bit.

Quite a bit. Yeah, by a little bit, I mean quite a bit. Um, but when it comes to what these agents can actually do, and what they will eventually do, is make these markets, these DeFi things, these uh gaming things, a hell of a lot more efficient to use and interact with. And I think that's a real step change that a lot of people aren't talking about. I'll give you an example actually. Stable coins. It's not the most exciting thing to crypto Twitter because prices aren't going up and down. It's literally its use cases to be stable. But it is one of crypto's most winning use cases to this date, second to Bitcoin, I'd argue. You know, you have multi hundred billions of dollars being transacted every year, or actually every month at this point. And its adoption rate is increasing super massively. But no one, it's a it's a very quietly spoken about trend. And I think agents are going to enable the same thing across every different parameter of crypto.

Yeah, this is um reminding me of a I think a cast, a Farcaster cast that I saw from someone where uh there was this meme coin that they wanted to buy. Uh and so they uh they mentioned this bot, this banker bot, hey, please please buy me $90 of this meme coin. Just $90. Uh and this one meme coin turned into $6,000 just a couple weeks later. And I think it was what they were referencing, what they were citing, is the ease at which this banker bot uh gave them the opportunity to just go quickly ape $90. And they didn't have to open up a wallet, they didn't have to go find their ledger. They just say, hey, banker bot, buy me $90 with this token. Uh and it was a Farcaster bot. I think these things really get even closer to human, the human experience. Like these things become not just accounts that you at on Farcaster or on Twitter, but become like more embedded in your own personal wallet, become a little bit closer to you. Uh, but you can start to see the writing on the walls of just like AI agents make things easier, everything easier, the whole internet experience easier. And the things on the internet that are especially clunky and hard to navigate, like blockchains, are the main beneficiaries of that.

Yep, yep, couldn't agree more. Um, I think that.

The majority of the market hasn't priced this vision in, David. And it's funny because you and I probably don't believe it as much because we talk about it every week. But if you talk to anyone outside of the crypto AI circles, they have very little knowledge as to what's going on here. And that's, I think, both um

an asymmetric value because you know we're super early and we're breaking this news and stuff. But also it shows that we could probably do a better job at educating. And, you know, that's like one of the major points of this show. That's why Banklas started. And I'm hoping we can do a better job at that.

And actually on that note, I kind of have some big questions for you, I just that I want to start off this AI rollout for.

Questions, David.

Just kind of like zoom out high-level questions because I want to learn

Okay.

from you. It's trench time. I'm digging in the trenches here. And I want to kind of learn how you do it, how how you have done it. So I have a set of questions that I want to pick your brain about. The first one here is just like what are your utility websites that you like? The websites that you go to to acquire information, look at broad strokes, learn something fun, like gather some information, like utility websites. I think we're all kind of familiar with these in the crypto space. CoinGecko would be the biggest like utility website, I think, for the normal crypto space. But then then there's others as well, like Dune Analytics utility websites. But do you have any like favorite utility websites that you like to look at?

So, David, you know how normal functioning humans, at least in America, wake up and you know, they they grab a cup of coffee and they sip, you know, they sip that coffee and it tastes so good. Um, that's me and my relationship with cookie.fun and Kaito. I open up these two things every day, and I'm like, okay, give me a market pulse of you know this entire kind of space. And to be clear, neither of these people sponsor me. Like that, this is not a paid shill or anything. I just love the products. Um

Let's kind of like work through it. So, cookie.fun, we mentioned this last week. I think they're kind of trying to be the coin gecko or the coin market cap of AI agents. So it's giving you like an overall insight into what the total uh mind share is for these things. It's giving you an idea of the total market cap of these different agents across different ecosystems. You can break it down by agent or by ecosystem. Super cool website. They're releasing a bunch of cool features, I think, in the future. Um, I was chatting to the CEO and founder, and he was like, Yeah, we're working on a bunch of cool things. The second thing is Kaito. So, Kaito, where I think is like um

Really cool is it's kind of like um, and it was ahead of this time uh in the way that I'm about to describe it. It's kind of like speaking to a chat GPT for whatever has happening in crypto Twitter, right? So what it does is it queries um Twitter, it like pulls from their APIs, it is able to pull across a lot of sentiment checks and pulse checks to see you know what the market is talking about. And it gives you a really amazing insight into what is going on. So I use it to kind of dig into specific projects. So for example, if there is a new token or a new team that launches something, I go to Kaito and I can literally type in the ticker or I can type in the term or phrase and it pulls instantly in that like for the last 24 hours, last seven days, everything and sorts it by like the top things, going to the least most important things about that phrase or about that ticker, which is pretty amazing to do. Now, Twitter kind of enables that function, but it is like to be honest, Twitter's search function is pretty terrible. And if anyone is listening from Twitter or X, please like, you know, reach out and I'm happy to, you know.

Provide some advice there, but like Kaido just does an amazing job at aggregating and serving up information. So these two platforms I rely on quite a lot in terms of giving me a pulse check as to what's going on. The third recommendation is of course X.

That is where most of the alpha is broken. Crypto Twitter is called Crypto Twitter for a reason. Um, and still remains one of my top kind of like research polls um

today.

Okay, so this kind of brings me to my next question. Uh, what are the first things that you do in order to like evaluate an agent? Somebody is saying, like, hey, check this out, or you've you stumble across an agent, maybe on X. Is that is this your rotation? You you go look at them on Cookie.fun, you go look at them on Kaido, you like go look at what the discourse is on Twitter. Is that more or less your process?

Uh uh a version of it, but let me specify what's different. So firstly, if there's a new agent or a protocol that um is mentioned or people are hyping, I try and use the thing.

Or if there is no thing to use, I try and see as many demos and stuff that I can. An example recently is Gryphane, right? So it's this agent engine, basically Chat GPT, but make it on-chain stuff. And I was like, okay, cool. How do I use this stuff? Okay, well, there's a private beta thing. Okay, there's a demo. And I just crunch through all the demos because at the end of the day, I want to know what this thing is and whether it can communicate to me what that thing can do. So after I've done that, whether let's say, for example, it's an agent, I'll go onto the agent's Twitter profile. I'll see what tweets it's making. I'll see whether there's any links to any kind of function that I can use. And I'm able to kind of like play around and use it, right? Um, so firstly, I try and do something with it. And from there, I go into the sentiment analysis, the, you know, who's talking about this, why is it important. I try and read from some of my favorite uh KOLs on Twitter or whatever, see if they've posted about it. And I kind of like absorb their thoughts and it helps me learn and bring up myself up to speed because I'm just a learner here, right? I'm not, I don't kind of see myself as any kind of like KOL to be honest. I see myself as like a learner, and whatever I learn, I can like communicate that to people. So that's stage number two. Stage number three is I think crypto's number one point, which is if you can, if you like, if the if you pass the first two steps and you like what you see, David, what do you do?

What are you looking for? You ape. Exactly.

You look at the market you look at the market cap first.

You look at the you okay, maybe you do. I just I ape. If I if I like the thing, I'm aping. Right. And the reason why I do this, right, isn't because I'm like, oh my God, price is going to go up and la. I think it's important to have a stake in something that you care about. Because if you have a stake in something, you're always going to keep track of it. It's going to you're going to be like, oh, I have this bag. I need to see what the team's pushing out. And it forces you to learn.

An investor.

You're an investor, sure. It forces you to learn. And that aligns me economically and socially to keep learning about these things.

Okay, so first you play with the toy, you get your hands on the toy, you see if you like the toy, you see if other people are talking about the toy and what they are saying about the toy. Uh, and then uh if you pass those to p test, then you buy the toy. Uh you buy a share of the toy, and then and then you and then you go from there, and then the ball is rolling. Okay.

I own a lot of toy shares, David.

Yes, you like you have a lot of toys in your arsenal. Yeah.

Some of these toys are broken, but some of them are doing pretty well.

Okay, uh and next question.

Is this like a one cycle long play? Are you trying to sell the top here? Or are you betting on this kind of being like a paradigm shift of our expectations about the future of crypto? So long term versus short term, how do you balance these two like time frames as a participant in these markets?

Yeah, I get asked this question a lot. The straight answer is it's both, David. Um, but short-term answer has a different answer to the long-term answer. So, short-term answer, I actually no, let's start with the long-term answer. Long-term answer, I think this stuff is going to change crypto. I think it's going to be the biggest

crypto sector that changes both crypto fundamentally at the infrastructure layer, as well as enabling crypto to have its app and consumer era. We've spoken about this so many times. You know, blockchains have built up an amazing infrastructure layer, but like there's no like what's the real app usages outside of like store of value on Bitcoin and stable coins, right? I think agents are going to enable that app era. However,

This isn't gonna happen overnight. And as with everything, because this is an open 24-7 market, people with crazy visions that can tell crazy stories, drive up sentiment, and therefore market caps of all these different things. So, you know, let's say Project A has this amazing vision.

Right? It's gonna probably drive up its token as long as they can tell that story into a crazy little frothy bubble that we call the crypto AI bubble. And especially if you're in a bull cycle, that bubble's gonna get huge. And if that technology is pioneering enough to affect things outside of crypto, hint hint that AI is doing exactly that, um, then you're gonna end up in the biggest bubble. Now, does this mean that um

crypto AI is just, you know, frothy, scammy, um, and nothing's gonna make uh make it out of it? No. But does this mean we're gonna avoid all the scams and the frothy stuff?

Also no, right? So we're gonna see both of these things kind of develop. And I I put out a post about this the other day, David. I think bubbles have its pros and it has its con. So in the short term, I expect there to be a bubble. So we're gonna reach a top

You're probably gonna want to have sold by then. I don't think anyone can call when the top is gonna be. Um, and then we're gonna go into a bear market and you're gonna have the same thing that we've seen in other bear markets, which is the builders that are here to stay that are trying to build actual value into this will put their heads down and they'll be able to do so. And they'll come out into the next cycle with um a revamped set of infrastructure and new primitives that will take us to the even next level. And then people are gonna dream even bigger and it's gonna go repeat, repeat, repeat. We've seen this, right? This is with DeFi, with NFTs. What I don't like is people comparing it to the worst parts of these metas, right? DeFi and NFTs have come and they've gone. And what's remained are some really powerful motes, some really powerful primitives that I don't think should go underlooked just because of all the bad stuff. We're gonna see the same with crypto AI. The one difference that I want to point out here is crypto AI is gonna affect everything.

All sectors of crypto. Oh, you have gaming? Cool. There's a play here. There's DeFi gaming.

Gaming.

AI gaming. AI.

Right. And by the way, I may sound crazy here.

Go look outside of crypto Twitter. Go look outside of crypto. AI is doing the same thing across any and every industry. It is the number, it's the NVIDIA just passed the largest value market cap now. It is the most valuable company. Why do you think that is, right? So yeah, that's kind of like my short and long term view. Long term, it's going to be amazing. Short term, we're going to have a lot of bumpy.

roads to to go through.

Yeah, I'm a really big fan of the idea that this is actually an AI bull market and crypto is kind of just coming along for the ride. But crypto can come along for the ride better than any other industry because of how fast moving we are. We have tokens, exposure to it. Yeah, right. We we can make exposure happen. Uh and so I I also really like your framing of okay, we have a bunch of different sectors in crypto, right? We have DeFi, we have real world assets, we have NFTs, and now we have AI. And AI will become the biggest sector. Uh, I I think that makes sense to me, as we're going to see in this agenda. We're gonna you're you already hinted at it. There's there's DeFi AI, there's gaming AI. And so the fact that AI is relevant to all previous sectors of crypto uh does allude to the fact that it's going to become the biggest sector, the narrative mind share of crypto, which is why we're seeing AI have like 60% uh attention mind share on crypto Twitter these days. I want to kind of like um

Yeah, I want to get your take on something about uh my experience closing 2024 and opening up 2025, because I want your feedback on it, Ejazz. Um something that I was learning in our uh episode with uh the Zero Bro co-founders, Jeffy and and Tint, um, was about the like uh the

irrelevancy of chain tribalism, of community tribalism in crypto.