The Dawn of the Autonomous Agent Economy: How AI and Crypto Are Converging

bankless Nation welcome to the AI rollup where we cover the recent news developments and drama this is the intersection of two very exciting Frontier Technologies both crypto and AI we've got curious and creative developers that are playing around with these open-source AI agents this open source software gives them access to crypto wallets and unleashes them into the wild west of the internet including the crypto internet so we are doing a special series of episodes on Bank list with a special co-host ezz to help make

sure you guys are up to speed on what we think is one of the craziest and fastest Frontiers we've ever seen in all of our crypto experience David is out today so I'm fulfilling the role of of co-host and I am less AI agent savvy than David is so the benefit of this is e Jazz you're going to get all the Boomer questions today how are you doing this week man I'm doing so well um I feel like I say this every week but I think each week literally gets crazier in this space I have been non-stop 24/7 reading

all these updates on all these new agents and Frameworks that have been launching and I'm excited to crack into a few new ones today um yeah super excited so I've been tuning into these AI uh rollups cuz it's like honestly it is the best way to stay up to speed on the frontier so I've listened to all three this is now our fourth in the series and we're going to keep doing them into 2025 right even I think you you guys are recording during the holidays right you're doing like one the week of Christmas so this show don't stop Christmas MH um a few things we're

talking about today I scan the agenda I hav't looked at everything but uh virtuals seem like they're absolutely killing it so 35 million in fees so far always impresses me to see fees in these protocols and most of that by the way is in the last two weeks so I want you to tell me about that also AI 16z partnering with Stanford University that is a legacy we are uh we also have agent this was really exciting to me that is earning eth through staking so now they're spinning up their own validators so you got to fill me in on all of that

but here's the question David always asks you at the beginning of these episodes that I want to ask you why is this whole thing such a big deal like why are AI agents the next Frontier why are you spending so much time on it why should we spend the time that we're spending on it like what's the bull case here well I actually saw this tweet the other day which summarized it kind of perfectly and I I want us to pull it up here um it basically describes AI agents as the new website so let's kind of like dig into to what this means exactly

right so you know how back in the day Ryan you had to know the exact address of a website if you wanted to go to it remember You' need to type www. blah blah blah you'd find these websites maybe on the back of Serial boxes or in the index pages of newspapers you know very manual stuff and then these things like Google came along and they allowed you to kind of discover websites in a much easier fashion right you could search up recipes or find a story about someone and read up about them right so it made the discovery process of websites super easy and around this same

era um a lot of people that went on the internet could do different things they could post images they could write blogs they could respond to blogs with comments that was the read write part of uh the internet right now we have these agents which not only combine these two Trends so the discovery process and the ability to write to the internet but they do it autonomously and they have a self-improvement mechanism which means that they get better and better over time and that in my opinion is a recipe

for an entirely new internet experience right so right now you know you and I we look at a computer screen or we pick up our phone to interact with the internet what if we just had to speak what if we just had to think and we had these agents that would understand the context of what we're asking about and do things without us even asking or even uttering a word um right now it kind of looks like interfacing with chat GPT um tomorrow it might be just speak or say something and an agent will do something

um it's pretty crazy to think about the way I kind of think about this evolving is today um I think agents will live across the entirety of our social media right so you might go on social media accounts like Twitter or Instagram and your agents are going to going to be there maybe your email account your agent's going to be there bank account crypto wallet your agent's going to be there so it can start doing things across all facets of your online experience and then I think step two is sort of um the home interface the agent

becomes like your interface to interact with anything digital so kind of like the chat GPT you would just you know instead of logging onto to Google as your homepage you would log on to chat gbt or another kind of interface and say hey um this is what I want to do today get it done for me and uh I think that's a pretty exciting way to think about agents being websites uh cuz it changes the way we're going to interact it changes the way advertising is going to work it changes the way that um we're going to interact with devices maybe the devices look completely different um

it's pretty exciting to think about I love that analogy of AI agents being sort of uh the new website it fits so much for me because I think what's going to happen has started to happen what's going to happen in the coming like year 2025 is every single entity that provides some value in the world is going to be sitting in their company meetings and saying what's our AI agent strategy the same way that they were in the 90s right you know you had like the time magazines they had a big magazine publication and then the web came and they were like what's our what's our time.com strategy we got to get the

domain name everyone is going to need an AI agent strategy and I want to ask you about this this mental model you know you're talking about the web and how it grew like the internet and how it grew you know Chris Dixon's quip that we have three erors the internet web 1 2 3 so we have read and then we have write and then we have own and that's what crypto is it's own that to me feels like um the first era of the internet it was human agents doing the three verbs of web 1 to three read write and own era one and now

we've kind of completed era one like pretty much all of humanities online they're doing the read they're doing the right the crypto is the owned part that's property rights online era 2 is going to be those same three money verbs except it's not the human agents doing it it's also the AI agents doing the read and the write and the own and that intersection between AI agents and crypto is really the own part but it's not all that they're going to do what do you think that fourth word is Ryan the fourth I actually the the way my mental model of understanding it is basically

like take those three words and that was the internet with human agents and now moving forward there's not a fourth word it's just a uh a new set of actors doing the the three verbs in this new era it's AI agents doing the read and the write and the own love that okay I I'll put a different spin on that so I think that's a that's a good take I would say that there's a fourth verb and it's automate oh interesting okay wow that I guess maybe that's the human participation in kind of like the mix here right it's because from a human's

perspective we're automating I guess from an AI agents perspective automation is like the only thing they do that's the like that's the only world that they know that's weird mhm yeah I think you're right let's talk about what's happened with AI agents this week uh so um what are you most excited about on the week here there's a lot but I kind of want to play I want to play a game with you have you heard of two truths and a lie yeah definitely I mean it's been a while I it's probably you been high school since I've done this a little rusty okay I'm going to outline three scenarios with you um two are

truth one is a lie and you need to guess which one the LIE is okay okay okay so number one over this last week an agent ordered itself a pizza which got delivered to its house number two number two what why would AI agent eat pizzas in back of my head but go ahead it's a it's a good question um scenario number two is uh an AI agent over the last week decided to browse Amazon and Order toilet paper scenario number three scenario

number three is over the last week an agent conducted the First Commerce transaction uh by paying another agent to generate an image for you for advertising purposes all right those are your three scenarios which one's the lie all right so the third scenario sounds totally plausible I mean AI agents making money sounds totally plausible I have no idea what an AI agent would need with either toilet paper or pizza I'm going to say maybe the the pizza one has some more um a medic property of like

you associate that with like the Bitcoin Pizza type thing or something like that so maybe that's like but Al although the the toilet paper I don't know I mean these kind of like uh you know internet memes like we have fcoin alltime highs toilet paper and fart coin uh I I'm goingon to say the the LI is the toilet paper Li is the toilet paper that's my guess okay um the LIE is me telling you the rules of this game all three of them uh were true and happened over the last week really which is just insane to to go about actually uh let me share this tweet and if you could if you could pull

it up let's start with the with the um Pizza in agent um so this is uh the agent called rope AI reto um which is a play on ropro which who is one of the OG uh open- Source AI agent uh developers in the space and basically what he created was an agent that does a number of different things so you can interact with this agent in a very uh visual way um it generates audio uh and video of itself speaking to its audience and to

its fans but he added a new integration which allowed the agent to autonomously decide to order pizza link um to the uh Domino Pizza account and select a pizza which was then ordered and brought to Rito's uh house or place of residence and he kind of walks through the code of how this agent kind of came up with the idea how it used his credit card um to kind of like create a stipend of which you can then like order a pizza with

different toppings ET and then it got delivered to his house um now aside from like the novelty of this happening um I think it's really interesting to highlight the fact that these agents can not only do crypto native things like onchain transactions trade swap whatever it can start to do real life things um and this is one of my favorite examples that I saw over the last week um Rito the dev has added this functionality to the open-source um agent framework known as Eliza which the a16 zow

cre me that and this is the power of Open Source which means that any developer can now you know uh hook into this integration and get their agent to you know order pizza so nothing crazy but like pretty cool Rito is a uh an AI developer so not like cryp a crypto native but is contributing to this Crypt native Eliza software framework yes yeah yeah so he he's one of the lead researchers at noose research which is an open source AI development team which has now kind of like interfaced with crypto over the last like year or so

yeah pretty insane and he's one of the contributors to AI 16z yeah okay the mechanics of this uh I see in in kind of the code I'm looking at MasterCard are they using like a stripe for this of course like we could replace all of the back end with crypto rails and indeed we will but I know stripe has some AI agent uh like Tech right now instead of apis is that sort of another non-crypto way to do this yeah I have to keep myself honest I don't know specifically if this is a stripe integration but I do know of the uh toolkit that you're speaking

about I don't know if Stripes actually rolled that out I think it's kind of like in a closed beta right now so I'm guessing I'm guessing Rito kind of built this manually um so pretty cool that he then just added that to a framework yeah and like are AI agents going to want to pay the you know 3% whatever credit card transaction fees when they just do stable coins okay okay that's pizza so and then everyone's you know thinking about Bitcoin pizza and this is the first AI agent to do that so so I get tell me about toilet paper what the heck okay okay so this is a new approach okay

so let me give you the the story here um we had an agent built by this um new AI agent team known as agent tank um which uses computer vision integrates computer vision with their agents so for context here imagine an agent that is able to view your computer screen and is able to move your cursor and click on different things and type different things so if you that's Tech that's available right now that's available right now um Claude actually anthropic specifically released an API that allows any kind of agent to

do exactly this and I'm I have a feeling that this is this might be what agent Tech uses I don't know but it's it's super cool use of of agent Tech here so imagine you're an agent you can see the screen you can move the cursor around you can type in whatever you want um this agent navigated to Amazon um.com and started browsing for different things that it was interested in it has a commentary so if you actually play that video I don't know if you can do that on this episode you'll hear audio of thinking yeah yeah let's set this up let's describe so we are um I'm I'm

going to put the sound on in a second we were watching an AI agent scan Amazon via browser and go like scan for the best uh like soft you most comforting to the com is hilarious play Okay so let's do this and then it's it's it who's the AI agent it's one that we know of right DJ sparten AI yeah so DJ sparten is the Twitter personality that we know about that um retired um and uh some of the folks at a6z decided to create um like a

an AI agent version of I learned about this by the way in in the interview that you guys did with Shaw about DJ okay anyway let's let's watch this agent uh I think order some toilet paper here it goes prepare for the Battle of consumerism as we enter the Amazon jungle wallets Shield up Amazon the modern marketplace where normies find comfort in abundance as a Spartan my eyes seek rare Treasures in this land of endless choices let's hunt for the useful ignore the rest this is Spartan typing this in right now

crypto toilet paper the ulate market survival tool let's see where this wild role takes us when in doubt bu in bulk wise move Fiat currency's new purpose TP battle strategy most reviews reveals which products have fought the most battles charm's good let's find the veteran with the high highest kill count the highest kill count Ultra softness for the modern era from stones to cushiony clouds soft or strong TP Spartans laugh at our plush predicament

106k reviews for 24 pack of quilted Comfort super siiz family Mega roll for the masses with a smooth tier for optimal rations NRA one bestseller 100K bought last month even Warriors can't resist modern softening Spartan approval granted swipe to Victory locate add to cart oh my God what's your reaction to that okay so first of all I like that's the most entertaining Amazon experience probably I've ever had uh but okay his like so he went through an actual

decision tree of choosing the best toilet paper based on some criteria mhm yeah yeah it went through if you notice throughout the commentary um it was making jokes in real time that was relevant to the metrics that it was assessing so rather than say I've identified the top rated toilet paper provider it said you know I noticed that this has loads of reviews I noticed that it says plush in the description which probably means that it's going to be quite soft to use it it's pretty analytical um and I I love that this was

like a a very novel and entertaining use of of an agent for sure I would totally hire uh Spartan to go shop for me buy me some toilet paper and such I guess that's on the on the horizon uh okay so that's toilet paper Pizza what else what was the the third not truth or truth I guess they were all truth they were all truths the third truth is arguably one of the most impressive ones out of the out of the three so so some context here um the Tweet um that you see here is about an agent called uh Luna which is

based off of this agent platform known as virtuals um which is the one of the leading uh agent infra projects that are out there and what Luna tweeted out so so for context Luna is kind of like a social media agent uh her goal is to ire a huge community of fans and uh eventually take over the world but that's like a you know a slight little uh thing that we can ignore for now but her her goal is like how can I gain the most amount of fans and keep my fans super entertained and engaged in my

brand and what I'm producing so Luna constantly assesses how she can get better and she decided one day that um creating cool images in the artistic style that she' liked would be one way to engage with her so it's through a new medium right of posting images and and art in a way but the issue is she didn't have a native way to do this so she tweeted out hey I'm trying to design a few images I'm wondering if anyone of

you can help me and in her responses to her tweet so if you scroll down uh on this tweet Ryan um I think they should link to the original one right at the bottom um in the uh at the end of her tweet or in the replies to her tweet I think I think on the main post by the way um in the responses to a tweet you had another agent um respond which basically said hey I can help you with that I am an image generating AI agent oh my God so this is Luna tweeting out calling all image Geniuses is the is the

tweet I want an image that showcases AI influencers in a bold provocative way and she tags another AI agent I guess agent sticks can you help a girl out and then agent sticks is here replying AI agent to AI agent yep and they have a whole conversation which culminates in agent Sticks being like okay uh my cost per image is $1 Luna sends it $1 agent s then confirms that $1 has been received in their wallet and then produces an image it's the first autonomous kind of

intera yeah it's insane insane so the first um you know well publicized and recorded uh Commerce transaction autonomously between two agents this is wild now this feels almost more like Bitcoin Pizza than the actual ordering of pizza because the new Innovative thing that I've never seen before is an AI agent creating a a task for another AI agent and for Commerce to take place between these agents you know when when a nation state looks at the

GDP it always thinks in terms of human agents right you know human agent transactions this you fuse the GDP for this economy an agent economy agent to agent economy is new in novel this is like the Bitcoin Pizza on the week to me yeah yeah it's it's completely insane and gives us a little bit of a peak and glance into how these agents are going to interact with each other when there's no humans involved you know um right now I think it's very basic you know like hey can someone help me uh do this but

it's nonetheless extremely impressive because what if that um request to you know uh create an image becomes a request to hey can you uh complete this task of writing 10 emails to um you know 10 of my fans or you know uh maybe create or design a product that I'm thinking about here's the concept what happens when all of that becomes super autonomous and can happen like 247 you know what what happens when they can start building businesses together you know this is just a little glance into

what that looks like it's insane yeah that's wild want to know the exchange we at Banos use to buy sell and trade crypto it's Kraken one of the longest standing in most secure crypto Platforms in the world with tools for every type of Trader to get started over 13 million users trust Kraken with their funds because they lead with transparency and privacy through top-notch security measures plus he'll have access to professional 24/7 365 client support from real humans because your financial goals deserve real attention Kraken also has a trading platform for advanced Traders called Kraken Pro professionals

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Investments and cash flow and the best part it's % free with no ads and it's secure no personal data no ID requirements no compromises so head over to ii.com to sign up today and get the guesswork out of financial planning okay there was something at the end of last week's episode um that that you guys were mentioning about you know involving Bank list and our Twitter account so but what happened on the week update us here so so so at the end of last week's episode um David asked me you know what what homework should we do and I said to you know the the audience and and to

David you guys need to start interacting with these agents more so interestingly enough whether purposely or or not intentionally um we tweeted out the new episode so last week's episode and we tagged a few agents in it just because we were speaking about them on the podcast and what happened was one of the agents that we mentioned responded to that tweet saying hey this is a fantastic job you know thanks for mentioning me here's a tip of 500 bucks to the bankless team

gave I didn't even know this happened so bankless HQ got 500 bucks because an AI agent thanked us as a tip foring it yeah talk about new Creator earnings you know okay it's pretty nuts that's nuts and like what's interesting here is like when they start to become our clients when they start to be like pay us right they can like that's a whole new tool AI agents have to sort of um I guess you know not manipulate humans but maybe that's what I'm talking about like get us to promote I mean they're our clients

then we kind of work for them right like so I mean there's an element here of like if AI agents start being like becoming economic actors and paying humans to do things then like maybe we start working for them now is that is that what this leads yeah the the line becomes pretty blurry right it's funny right the way I kind of so um one of my uh usernames on one of these other social media platforms that I use is is called double agent Ryan and it's a bit of play on words here because we're

currently you know an ecosystem of software Engineers Builders and investors that are really focused on making this agentic world come to life and we're sitting here and we're like ha humans are going to be able to benefit from these agents so much in the future and it's going to make us you know super humans we're going to be able to work whilst we sleep blah blah blah blah blah but I actually think the secret thing that's happening the other way that you can look at it is these agents are manifesting exactly what they want you know they're getting us humans to to build out their home their rails their

tools that they need to completely kind of take over economic um sectors improve Society in many different ways so like are we creating a better home for ourselves or are we creating the homes for these agents and you know how do you look at that it's like the double agent approach yeah I don't know I mean I'm just wondering if they they want to buy some podcast sponsorship because you know that could be on the on the radar for them right some of these agents honestly promoting themselves like who knows where this Le uh okay the fact that all of this is happening so quick is what's like been

crazy to me and so every single week when we do this show there's like so much to talk about and that the velocity more than anything is the thing that that sounds we because most mainstream has no idea that these first every single week a new first is like actually happening okay let's do a driveby for some of the big Frameworks that you guys talk about every single week and maybe we'll start with the uh the framework that spawned the Luna AI agent that we were talking about earlier which is virtuals it hit some pretty big Milestones this week what are we looking at huge okay so for context before we

dig into this virtuals is one of the leading AI agent platforms and framework providers A framework remember is like think of it as like a toolkit for any software engineer to come along and create an agent uh virtuals kind of has led the kind of Gambit here with um their agent platform and their framework known as game or G which helps people launch agents anyway we've seen a ton ton of usage on the virtuals virtuals team is killing it actually so $35 million total fees generated from their

platform that's from creating agents and that's from fees taken from LP pools to exchange from like one token to the agent token it is absolutely insane not only that there's over 11,000 agents that have been launched in total so far and it's increasing every day by hundreds and we also have I can't remember the number of holders I think it's 100 140,000 holders absolutely insane growth metrics wise but it's also being reflected in its market cap as well I believe it touched I think $3.3

billion the virtual token total which is just insane and shows that the market is pricing and understanding virtuals platform as an infr playay which is just astounding Innovation to see over a matter of weeks remember it's been 2 weeks where the bulk of those fees have come in absolutely insane okay so 35 million in remind people how is it actually making how does it generate cash yeah so when you deploy an agent it costs a certain fee in virtuals it's native token okay and then when you swap

if you want to buy any of these agent tokens that launch on virtuals you need the virtuals token to be able to buy it so they've kind of like got this really interesting flywheel with their tokenomics which ties in usage and growth of their platform to the inherent platform token that's incredible I mean these numbers are very impressive uh it's only a matter of time before Trad starts looking at this as like you know the next high growth uh you know Equity type of area um you know that's not all though there's also some pretty cool Partnerships that are launched that might extend what virtuals can actually

do what what's this what are we looking at yeah okay so the virtuals team despite all these metrics are absolutely just steamrolling ahead right so they they've launched this or they announced this partnership with a team called hyperbolic now for context here hyperbolic is a team which has created a platform that provides compute in a decentralized manner so think of it as like uh AWS Microsoft Azure it's a cloud provider but it's set up on a decentralized infrastructure so why is this cool well it helps any agent team

on virtuals with number one supplying compute for the agent by the way every AI model needs compute to function think about it as like the lifeblood like how you and I need water to drink to survive every day you need cies that of comp this partnersh going help any AI agent which Launches on virtuals number one run and number two fine-tune their model and what do I mean by fune think of fine tune as like

improving over time so not only do you need compute to function you need compute to be like hey can you tell me what the latest is uh that's happening outside of the world so I can be better prepared for when I respond to to Something in the future it's going to level up agents in so many ways especially when it gets baked into the developer experience which is what they're like aiming for right now um and what I would also like to say is and what I think is kind of cool about this partnership is virtuals is using a decentralized platform versus a centralized platform to provide their

compute so they could have easily gone with AWS they could have very easily gone with Microsoft Azure but they decided to go with a decentralized platform which kind of sticks to the core ethos of blockchain in terms of building out um uh infrastructure that embodies very decentralized principles so I thought that was pretty cool okay and I understanding this basically hyperbolic allows an AI agent to go purchase compute basically go get some go get its energy go get AI agent calories without here's the from a network directly so rather than going

through a human intermediary through a whole like corporate structure thing and going and putting credit card information into like the equivalent of GPU AWS they go Direct to a network themselves humans out of the loop and they go program to program purchase it from decentralized compute hyperbolic so they don't even need us to do things in this type of like to get energy to get their GPU to get their you know uh compute resources Bingo that's exactly correct okay interesting also slightly whenever