How AI Agents Are Reshaping Crypto’s Next Chapter & Beyond

right now we're focused on building these individual agents oh that agent made me laugh oh cool that agent is giving me great financial Alpha oh that agent is like trading back and forth very cool but I think the bigger picture needs to focus on what happens when these agents start interacting with each other autonomously 24/7 welcome bankless Nation to the AI rollup where we cover the recent news developments and drama in the intersection of crypto and Ai and ezz this is the first AI rollup of the year

we are not sleeping because AIS they don't sleep uh we recording the morning of January 1st because this world does not stop uh ezz you are really excited to do this episode I am now just tapping back into the internet for the first time in a couple weeks so I'm going to need you to download me on what's been going on because I actually don't really know too much uh which I think is perhaps useful uh to come into this episode Pretty dry how you doing Happy New Year my man happy New Year dude um how am I doing I I don't know about you

David but last time I checked the holiday season was a tranquil peaceful time to reflect on the year and kind of maybe eat a bunch of junk food and put on a few pounds and have permission to put down your phone put down your phone you know not look at a screen 247 and I can safely say that I think I've had the least amount of sleep over the last two weeks uh turns out that the AI agent meta decided to just go on an absolute rocket and ship all the important stuff

whilst no one was looking and right up until the end of the year so absolutely insane and I'm excited to get into a bunch of things today I feel like that's just the clear sign of exuberance excitement Euphoria uh accelerated building uh just something's going on over here uh it's probably a little bit bubbly uh but at the end of day I think I think high energy high energy and fro froy definitely comes to mind if people are just grinding their way through Christmas uh but also I think we're

going to get into some of the subjects here today and there's a lot of fundamentals being built and shipped and being measured as well what would you say zooming out what would you say is like the theme of the last like 10 days of development in the AI space I would say agentic infra it's like a focus on what will eventually in my opinion end up becoming some of the leading uh layer 1es type platforms uh within crypto I think it's going to be a novel uh meta or a novel kind of foundational

structure that starts forming no one quite really knows what it looks like right now but some of these leading teams are starting to to build that out and I think that's going to be the the most exciting thing to discuss today layer 1es and you don't mean like we're not making new blockchains but we're making New Foundations exactly it just L1 is a a simpler term to use to kind of convey the concept of what's going on in my opinion yeah so E I ask you this at the beginning of every single episode this whole AI agent AI crypto agentic

platforms why is this all such a big deal why are AI agents a big deal uh if people are just tapping into this episode for the first time uh why should they be pilled about uh getting going down the AI agent Rabbit Hole okay so I'm going to give a slightly different answer than I normally would so normally I go on some philosophical rant which kind of ties into uh larger kind of vision around this technology infrastructure and applications and stuff that we're building I've done that for the last couple of episodes I'm going to give a slightly different

answer um today um mainly around a question that I get asked all the time which is e has how big is this thing really going to get from a valuation perspective okay like I've heard like your big vision and stuff but at the end of the day a lot of people get into crypto to invest and you know maybe figure out what kind of like tokens they might buy and stuff like that and again none of this stuff is financial advice but if we were to entertain uh a framework about that let's let's use the following right so firstly I'll say I think over the long term this sector is

going to hundreds of billions of dollars alone and secretly actually I think it's it's going to go way higher but we'll save that bull thesis for another episode but in terms of now and this cycle you know the bull market that we're in um if we project crypto's market cap to grow to say $5 trillion so that's about 40 to 50% growth from here and if we assume that agent networks you know these this agent meta um matches the

peak of defi percentage dominance last cycle which was around 5% the theme of The Last cycle yeah the theme of The Last cycle so it was 5% of the total crypto market cap this yields um theoretically using that analogy a $250 billion cumulative valuation for the AI agent matter right and and again this this has a lot of assumptions right this assumes that uh crypto AI is going to be the biggest kind of theme of this cycle which I believe it is and an AI agent

specifically is going to capture the majority of that and you mentioned earlier like it's feeling kind of frothy kind of bubbly I do actually think that the AI agent meta is going to form like one of the bigger or potentially the biggest bubble that we have ever seen within the crypto sector in crypto yeah in crypto specifically right so if you look at the current cumulative agent market cap it's just over $10 billion i' would say so if we assume the $250 billion comparison there that defi achieved that's a 25x from here right

okay so this is a bit of boy maath going on here but like that's kind of like the the general take right but but but if we factor in that AI is oh you know probably Humanity's single most world changing technology that's probably going to produce trillions of dollars of economic value not just within crypto but outside across any and every industry and it already is you know open AI anthropic is already some of the biggest companies from a valuation perspective then you might assume that the peak um actually happens at a larger percentage so let's like again using

boyat say that it's bigger than def AI is bigger than defi right bigger than the financial system potentially or it's going to rehaul everything let's say it's 10% which is$ 500 billion right so that's like obviously many more multiples from where we are at sitting at like10 billion right um now take a look at this chart David so this was produced by Masari um which was released like I think a day or so ago which tracks the current AI Trend in terms of

the defi Trend which happened last cycle and as you can see over the def chart mapped over the defi chart as you can see it's following a pretty similar Trend like again this isn't you know an insinuation that this is exactly going to play out the way it does but it's just kind of interesting to look at this is not science this is It's boy math it's boy math but you know if you wanted a bit of morning hopium to wake you up on John 1 like this this is it okay for the uh listeners who cannot view this chart we are again uh the AI index is mapped over the the defi index and we're

about at parody uh right now which is why which is why they're showing this and we're at parody in December of the same uh time cycle uh by the uh by the time we get to April in theory of 2025 it looks like it goes one two three four 5x larger 5x larger in April because that's what defi did that's that's this is the insinuation here that like dii grew 5x between December of 2020 to April of 2021 and if we are doing the crypto cycle thing then we are are

perhaps getting a 5x uh between now and halfway through next year which I take E's point that like defi is a crypto native insular very Niche very complicated thing and that 5x AI is an adjacent technology that is being built by an entirely different sector that is progressing independently of crypto that is now coming into crypto and these two technologies are coming together which are much more easy to understand we

understand AI we understand what these things can do uh so I've always been of the of the mind that the fact that these are two adjacent technologies that are coming together uh does indicate the idea that this might be bigger than we've ever seen anything before in crypto and and not just any to adjacent Technologies probably the role or Humanity defining technology of our time right AI is literally wowing everyone on a daily basis and with the expected launch of open ai's Agent product in q1

as well as anthropic with the launch of uh their video model which is producing Motion Picture grade um video Pieces Just Simply from text and Google's releasing the same you know this whole Space is just completely magical and we're just kind of like touching the tip of the iceberg here so if we assume these things are going to permeate across every facet of our digital lives and real life probably you know it's going to affect our jobs and you know how we work corporate

structures Etc like this is going to get crazier and it's much easier to understand people understand it from headlines that they've read from articles that they've read very different to reading about a l or borrowing primitive which although very very important and underlies the kind of like primary value transfer of the way that we kind of like interact with each other it's still not as easy to understand as AI yeah yeah I was hanging out with some some friends this weekend I was telling the story of this one AI Agent Zero that released an EP on

Spotify and then we opened it up and listened to it and I compare that to the same friend that I was explaining amm curves four years ago and it was not the same conversation one was like oh wow this an AI made this versus what the hell does providing liquidity mean like these are different these are different scenarios uh I want to trace over something that you said open AI releasing their AI agent uh product uh and then also the the Sora uh text to video like applications uh it it sounds

like what came to my mind when you explain these things was that all of the big massive uh AI producers open AI Google you know Facebook uh are building tools that are potentially being able to be used by all the things that we are doing in the crypto world uh is it that's that's kind of what I heard it's like oh a new tool just dropped correct to you know very high you precise text to video speech and now the AI agents over in the cryptoland with the tokens that's a new tool in their tool belt for them to use that's a new appendage that

they just grew and so we have this massive like side of Silicon Valley creating you know AI things AI tools and then all of a sudden the tokenized versions of these agents now have those tools to create more value to do more things to have more capabilities that's that's what came to my mind you pretty much nailed it and where I would kind of add to that David is I think some of the most exciting things that we should look out for in 2025 is where those tools that are being launched from the traditional AI producers overlap with

being able to bridge the gap between non- crypto cons consumers and crypto itself right so how can we should be asking ourselves how can some of these tools be used to benefit and build and grow the crypto sector to help people access crypto infrastructure where they may not even need to know that it's happening in the background but it helps give them a 10x better user experience for whatever they're trying to do whether that's send value between friends on X or whether that is

something to do with you know borrowing again something or owning their own digital or whatever that might be all right so that's a pretty good amount of hopium to front run the content of this episode what are we going to get into this episode each what are we going to talk about what's the subjects that have dropped in the last like 10 days or so before we get into the fun stuff I I really want to talk about something serious can we talk about something serious for a second because last time I kicked off the I kicked off the episode with you know some examples of like this agent that was browsing Amazon and was buying toilet paper this agent that

bought pizza super fun stuff but like I just want to talk about something serious for a second okay truth terminal the original crypto AI agent that started this whole meta has dropped a Christmas album David and it's fire what's it called um you need to I actually don't know what it's called very goaty Christmas that's it sorry why did I not know that and the the album cover is this artistic goat looking straight at you with horns and a Santa hat exactly and

you should definitely give this a list I don't know if you have the Spotify pulled up at all but like some of the track names are hilarious and very track Jingle Bells parentheses fendom remix fendom mix let's listen to that one I'm going to listen to that one real first all right right now this is just a synthetic version of jingle bells jingle bells jingle you got to wait for the lyrics uh the third song is called Fart like Rudolph wait this is the serious subject

that you wanted to bring up yeah I was being sarcastic David pretty heavily oh my god brother I cannot believe this is playing in my ears right now okay okay okay let's wind it up let's wind it up let's actually talk about some serious stuff for a second okay so okay so that wasn't the serious that that definitely I was being heavily heavily sarcastic for the listeners um but yes anyway okay so if we take look at this dashboard so this

dashboard um kind of showcases some of the key metrics from um the virtuals protocol and we've spoken about this protocol a bunch of times uh on the show but for those who are kind of like tuning in for the first time here virtuals is one of the if not the leading uh crypto agent protocol um that exists right now you can kind of think of them as like a Launchpad so you can kind of come on it's no code you can kind of design an agent and then deploy it um with a token and so what that

means is these agents will able to be kind of like live in production they can interact with each other and they can do kind of like different things um you know like post on Twitter or create videos or stuff like that um and and they number of other capabilities coming through but what I want to point out here and and this platform is called Cookie by the way like um I've chatted to the team a few times that they're like working on some really cool stuff and and they're basically like the the leading dashboard for to capture all the this agentic stuff like look at this chart that's in front of us right now

for a second right so what we're looking at is we're looking at the cumulative market cap of these kind of AI agent coins as well as um the virtuals protocol token as well and you'll notice that like it's just been up and and to the right and um it's really cool way to kind of like look at the different agents what their corresponding market caps are how many agents in total um the number is up I think like we're looking currently at 100 32 agents that are actually listed you can look at the

corresponding mind share that these agents are having on social media platforms you can look at the number of unique holders and all these metrics are up until the right which typically signals a really good Collective adoption from the crypto and non crypto space of these agents so if you ever wanted to kind of like have a signal of whether these agents are are doing anything whether they're being interacted with this is a really kind of good place to kind of like come in and kind of check in and this is virtual specific but you can pull this up for any other platform um that is live or will eventually go live yeah yeah

exactly so if you scroll down you'll you'll see like some of the agents themselves and like some of the market cap differences you'll see this is for across platforms this is for any frame exactly yeah and right now what we're this is this specifically is for virtuals what we're looking at right now which I I kind of like is the the leader and is representative of a lot of the movements that we can kind of extrapolate from but but yes to to your point like what we're looking at on these agents um specifically in this list of virtual specific agents right and you can imagine that this will

eventually look like something like a coin market cap where um you can have a look at like all the leading agents across different Frameworks and different protocols this is an agent market cap exactly an agent Market we're on the virtual but we can just go to cookie. fun and there are some non virtuals agents here there's AI 16z I'm looking at zero bro which are non virtuals platforms uh across both Bas and salana um and actually sort the whole thing by market cap and that yeah so this is starting this is starting to look like a coin market cap a go a coin

gecko but specifically for AI agents and the platforms that built them yep exactly and if you scroll to the top David what I really like which I I haven't seen kind of too often in a coin market cap for example is the Mind share tab right so what this tells you and of course like crypto market caps or crypto markets in itself are driven very heavily by narratives and sentiment you can kind of see the direct correlation between you know the leading agent um like axt on virtuals and its uh corresponding market share or mind share

um within like social media platforms right um we can also look at the market cap cumulatively on the left where it shows us like we're just over $15 billion right now okay so when you say you think that the AI agent space is going to hit $500 billion doll this is the number that you're talking about right here total cryp total market cap on cookie. fun exactly exactly yeah we're looking at the total cumulative market cap of these kind of agent stuff exactly exactly so we're at 15 billion so we got a long way to go to 500 we got a while to go but

things get pretty pretty nuts in the in the crypto market so like our base case if we were to use that analogy that we spoke about earlier would be 250 um and then the Max B case would be you know a 500 yeah you know when the base case is more than a 10x yeah exactly yeah you know that we're full of uh very very bullish um perspectives on this show um but yeah and if we look at this uh this second chart that we have that you have pulled up here David um again just shows the relative outperformance of these AI

agent tokens um versus every other thing that has been kind of bumbling around for the last kind of two weeks and I know that sounds so rich because you know we're here for like the longterm we're not meant to be talking about short-term price movements I'm just using it to kind of like point out that largely over the last couple of weeks when the market has been you know kind of steady and and not really doing its thing where it's mooned since the election date in the US um the AI coins have been outperforming um and in this particular bull market the reason why I

think that's interesting David is it's been a very different bull market it's no longer been the case where you can kind of close your eyes and throw dots at the wall blindly and your token goes up there's been a lot of dispersion so focusing where you know the attention might Aggregate and where Innovation is happening has been super important and this kind of chart and the and the kind of dashboard that we looking at right now reinforces the statement that I think the AI agent meta is going to be one of the biggest well I think inside of the AI agent meta I think you kind of

have been able to just blindly throw a dart so long as you're pointing at the AI agent Target so how how would you talk about uh how would you like measure or just speak about the fundamentals of this corner of the crypto world how do we know that we aren't like just blowing up hot air like at some point like at the very beginning it's okay for things to be hot air but as things progress and then things develop and again like we're not we're not doing these AI podcasts because we think this is like a a a one year long time Horizon I think we both

agree that this is the future of crypto this is the future of AI this this sector is huge this corner of the internet is huge uh but we but that has to collapse down into fundamentals at some point so how has the conversation around fundamentals and AI been growing yeah couldn't agree more with that thesis um we need to focus on something more important um if you pull up this tweet from uh I think it's at the hidden maze um he touches Upon A A really kind of like important Point here which is or he's noticed a trend rather and it goes

AI agents are being flooded with insane number of requests and interactions and he then goes on to list a bunch of different agents and their specific kind of metric so one of these agents called agency has 6 6 2,000 individual queries another one has 20,000 ta requests 40,000 on telegram um the point that he's making here is he's noticing an exponential uptick of queries and transactions to and from these agents and I think that's a really important

metric or kind of stat to track because it tells us a little more than just price action you know instead of staring at the chart of a token we should look at how these agents are actually being Interactive with and what they're actually doing you know I could imagine like the next layer deeper would be okay there's 62,000 queries but like what's the net effect of that like what are these queries doing what are the people looking for and get deeper into the data and I think that's where like the real value of you know whether you're looking at it from an investment perspective or

a research perspective becomes really really important and I think this is the trend we'll see kind of like grow um out um over time um I mean if you think this is like a Silo tweet and like hey you guys are just pulling from this one data point actually no like um virtuals game um framework which is essentially their framework to help design and and build and and launch agents I mentioned it earlier it's like a no code interface this is like the main framework that allows you to do that is getting 150,000 requests per day

David um which is like an insane thing to say when you compare it to like literally two months ago where this was like a very n in space with like 0 to 10 agents so again I think this is going to be a repeated pattern we're very early on but it's an important metric to track going forwards I think in the order of operations of first quantity then quality this makes sense because in crypto we kind of don't really know what we're doing we're kind of going off into the frontier uh we don't know really

know what's out there so what do we do we experiment uh and so having an explosion an absolute Cambrian explosion of just actions requests queries interactions uh but to create that first and then figure out like okay which of these requests which of these interactions really actually moved the needle uh I think that part comes later so first you need to have an explosion of quantity then the crypto industry figures out like What mattered what was effective what was valuable uh and then we can kind of iterate and refine the

explosion of requests into an explosion of quality requests so I feel like maybe we we are in the quantity era of crypto AI fundamentals uh and we'll be here for a little bit before we start to really enter the quality era of AI fundamentals that's just a hot take how do you feel about that yeah I think you spot on no comments yep I think like we're we're currently in a very bubbly frothy or the start of a very bubbly frothy period for agents and it'll get a lot of attention loads of people will be right but then

they'll become a time where I think we'll shift attention more to towards fundamentals probably when speaking quite frankly prices go down and that's where like the real work starts getting done okay so let's go ahead and get into the rest of the episode because that was actually just the intro appetizer for all of the the rest of the content that we're going to talk about we're going to talk about updates in the AI 16z and Eliza World zerob bro has some cool new releases virtuals of course as we' talked about has been going absolutely Gang Busters this last week uh e Jazz

has a take on token listings with centralized exchanges uh he's also got an agent App Store thesis bunch of other content that we're going to get into but before we get into all the content first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible with over $1.5 billion in tvl the me protocol is home to me the fourth largest eth liquid staking token offering one of the highest aprs among the top 10 lsts and now CM takes things even further this restak version captures multiple yields across carak Igan lay symbiotic and many more making

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participate in the Unis swap V4 bug Bounty all the details from eligibility and scope to the rewards are there and we're back EZ AI 16z the Eliza framework download me on what's been going on in the last few weeks here okay if I actually did that true to your word I would be here for hours um so much has happened David in this individual protocol that it's kind of hard to get my head around and again to re reemphasize this like this has happened over the last two weeks um so what we're going to do for this next kind of segment of um this episode is we're

going to touch upon the major protocols and kind of cover the main things um the reason why I'm not talking about newer things right now is because all the new things have happened on these major protocols recently and they're pretty major things and I think it's important to kind of communicate that um today so starting with AI 16z um before we get into it I want to I want you to kind of look at uh these charts which was shared by Grant um it's a really interesting one to track because as we've mentioned uh on previous episodes of this show the

AI 16z um protocol and for people who who aren't aware of this they're kind of famous for their open-source agent framework um what is a framework a framework is uh a toolkit to help you design and build your agent so earlier I mentioned the game framework from virtuals this is kind of a similar thing and I'll touch upon that later on in this episode but this is the main one and Eliza actually is the most famous framework uh in the World currently it's actually number one trending on GitHub

but before we do that take a look at this chart David So this Compares um the star history of the Eliza repo on GitHub compared to some of the most popular crypto protocol interfaces and repositories that we've seen today and this a star history on GitHub is just going to be an indication of where developer attention is being pointed they're like saving it to their Library they're just they're favoring it because like hey really useful code base let me play around with this and so let me star

that it's kind of like a loose indication of developer attention typically yeah yeah you you've took the words out of my mouth essentially and if you look um at this you have to look closely but the next image will kind of like Zoom it in it is a straight vertical ruler um and a pretty that's a pretty crazy chart to look at right and if you've noticed it's uh crept P well not crept past but blasted past a very popular um repository which we've spoken about quite a lot um on the show which is the

Unis swop interface and uh for those of you who don't know Unis swop is the top decentralized exchange or one of the top decentralized exchanges within crypto and their interface as you can might imagine is kind of like the home to a lot of crypto activity um the number one thing people do is trade and Swap and stuff so the fact that this Eliza repo has swept past them in such a short period of existence remember Eliza didn't uh really exist concurrently until like 2 and a half months ago it's absolutely insane to see so there's that

that I I wanted to kind of call out um the second thing is it's the number one trending repository in the world right now so previously when we've mentioned it it was uh number two for quite a consistent number of U months now it is officially number one ahead of uh Google Geminis I think it's they've got like a really popping cookbook repository if I remember correctly yeah that it's it's there on the screen um but Eliza OS is now like the number one so what this means to your point earlier David is there's a lot of developer attention on

this and I think it's really important to stress developer attention which typically means not just crypto um software Engineers but also external engineers and that has kind of been the trend for Eliza specifically they've got a lot of influx of these AIML Engineers that are coming in from outside purely because you could argue cryptos sh Shone like a huge light on them this might be through price attention to that token AI 16z but it also might be through you know a number of different Outlets so is

the Eliza framework inherently a crypto framework as in if we have an external AI developer from the you know Silicon Valley from San Francisco not in the crypto world and they download and start playing with the Eliza framework is there a way for them to do that adjacently outside externally to crypto or is it inherently a an a crypto activity nope nope it is um ambidextrous is the incorrect term but the the analogy kind of stands I feel like yeah yeah do you get it hopefully the listeners get it um but yeah so it it

applies to both sides so so for context here uh the framework is written uh in a coding language known as typescript and typescript is actually one of if not the most popular kind of like programming language out there when it comes to a lot of this AI um kind of ml stuff I think maybe second to or compared to python as well so the point is if if you're an engineer and you know typescript you can come around and play with this stuff secondly and we'll touch upon this in a second the Eliza framework has a number of different