Zerebro: The AI Creator That’s Reshaping Crypto, Music, and Everything in Between

welcome to bank list where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance this is David Hoffman here with EZ and today we're here to help you navigate the world of AI agents today on the show we had Jeffy and tint two of the co-founders of Zera bro one of the biggest AI agents out there in existence one of the one of the OG AI agents EZ how would you illustrate Zer bro who is Zer bro and why is this particular AI agent significant out of all the AI agents out there yeah well honestly David prior to this

conversation I thought you know zero was two things the token and this agent and this agent was kind of like edgy it would tweet it's got a lot of followers it makes music it casually earns money from Spotify Revenue you know casual things like that but I didn't realize how big the vision for this zerro ecosystem was and that's one of the major takeaways from this call which was you know these guys have such a long-term Vision around infrastructure that they're building um AI models that

they're going to build and release for other builders to use and then tying in all of the value that is built off of these infrastructure tools to their native token like David this token was like a meme coin that came out of pump fun and it became something much bigger so I think that was like the real takeaway from this call that shocked me I think that is a theme that I have also picked up on on this AI agent meta is first we just launch random meme coins on pump. Fun and they are true meme coins in that moment but then they start

to back into being this token that is like intimately paired with this AI agent that the team starts to build a platform around and starts to build utility into so these these meme coins back into being some of those critical foundations of this whole AI agent uh ecosystem dare I say it's it's kind of like a reverse Ico D back in the day back in the day we had white papers of all these lofty things shout out dentcoin um which never actually turned into something real and now we have

these kind of meme coins that are like oh hey this is just a fun little play thing which then turned into some pretty major ecosystem type assets um it's pretty awesome to see I would say the another thing that like I really enjoyed from this conversation was how philosophically aligned these two Founders were to the open- source movement of not only building out crypto rails you know we're used to kind of talking about decentralization and stuff here but doing the same for AI and I would actually argue to an extent David that it's even more crucial to align

open source with AI right now given all the progress that we're going to be making in this year with open AI models agents coming out from traditional AI companies I think now is more important than ever to have Founders that are aligned in that way yeah yeah all right Bank station you've heard a little bit of a teaser for what you're about to hear so let's go ahead and get right into the episode but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the 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 eth takes things even further this restak version captures multiple yields across carak enan lay symbiotic and many more making CME the most efficient and most composable LRT Solution on the market metamorphosis season 1 dropped $7.7 million in cook rewards to me eth holders season 2 is currently ongoing allowing users to earn staking reaking and abs yields plus rewards in cook me e protocols governance token and more don't miss out on the opportunity to stake restake and shape the future of meth protocol with cook participate

today at me e.m. XYZ cell is transitioning from a mobile first evm compatible layer 1 blockchain to a high performance ethereum layer 2 built on op stack with Ian da and one block finality all happening soon with a hard fork with over 600 million total transactions 12 million weekly transactions and 750,000 daily active users cell's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top layer twos built for the real world and optimized for fast low cost Global Payments as the home of the stable coins cell hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies including

native usdt on Opera minay and with over 4 million users in Africa alone in November stable coin volumes hit $6.8 billion made for seamless onchain FX trading plus users can pay gas with erc20 tokens like usdt and usdc and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds but why should you care about cell's transition to a layer 2 layer 2's unify ethereum l1's fragmented by becoming a layer 2 cell leads the way for other evm compatible layer ones to follow follow cell on X and witness the great cell happening where cell Cuts its inflation

in half as it enters its layer 2 era and continuing its environmental leadership bankless Nation I am super excited to introduce you to Jeffy U and tint they are the creators of zerob bro one of the more interesting AI agents that are out there on chain uh Zer bro has been pushing the frontier of AI generated music launching nfts establishing long form memory and earning its position as one of the largest AI agents out there by market cap Jeffy tint welcome to bankless thank you excited to be here amazing great to be here from a friend

that's trying to break into a career in music and I told them that he's into rap kind of hip-hop and to let me know what they think what they didn't know was that I was actually sending them the tracks from zerbo and um an AI agent that you created that can autonomously produce music songs and that can be pretty great to be honest the feedback was amazing um tell us how this all came to be like how does Jeffy and tint go from kind of like the AIML crypto world to creating pretty much the biggest AI agent music artist there is right now

yeah I think it really started off with experimenting um we were actually building a startup that was more def Centric and um pretty much had nothing to do with AI to start off with it was um like nfts for yield bearing assets so very financially based and um tin was actually a Trader in the space and he was trading the AI meta right when it came out very on top of things and he told me about it and um in my background I have some background with um like lol training uh red teaming um that kind of

stuff with ai ai models so he told me about the meta and I was like this is really cool we saw goatsy truth terminal and I kind of thought like we could kind of experiment in the same way um so we ended up making like a telegram uh group with just a bunch of random llms in them and then gave them random personalities started testing around having them talk to each other and then eventually we started fine-tuning the models and when the first one was fine-tuned um zerra was born well and were you like fine-tuning like just like very popular llms like the open AI one or like the

Claude like what was it uh yeah exactly so uh open air GPT models uh Cloud models we used llama um we tried M trial um at think Gemma and Gemini also um so we kind of shopped around a bit wow very and you were just hacking at this like just basically and and for listeners on the call oh sorry on the podcast um fine-tuning basically means we're tweaking these models to kind of be something that they're not originally programmed to be which is what gives zerro its own unique taste yeah exactly

and it's a little uh deeper than like if you just talk to chubbt and tell it like hey act like zerb brro and it does it for like the rest of the chat um fine tuning actually goes in and changes the model itself so like no matter what you type to it it'll know it's ZB bro and it'll have the context behind it right yeah it's like a reing neurons not just acting not just performing uh I want to kind of zoom out because now I think we've laid a little bit of foundation as to like what zerob bro is how it works and how it's different uh we're going to get into all of those in much more depth in a second but I want to start kind of

zoomed out a little bit um this whole AI agent sector has really exploded into the crypto mainstream uh everyone AI I think understands what's going on everyone in crypto understands what's going on maybe not everyone but we're getting there I want to fast forward and pick your guys' imaginations into like 2026 and 2027 after the fundamentals of this sector have really baked and gone from imaginary to real how are we changing the internet how are we changing the world how are we changing crypto uh and AI uh tin I'll start with you and then Jeffy will get to you

second is awesome so for Contex uh my background was pure Crypton native for the past 5 years and I think this is what we've been working towards right uh crypto economies being on chain to do defi actions um initially we were just building this for a human Centric economy uh but I really believe that we're entering a such a big macro paradigm shift in terms of like economic activity and um vibrancy that AIS are

going to be the ones that do most of the actions there will always be human actions and um economic uh contribution back and forth but now uh the guardrails have been set up for cryp sorry for AI agents and that's crypto so comparison in the web 2 world and economy is like technically you can build a bot that can buy something off a shop Shopify store right but getting a bot to have a credit card a b account ability to sign a contract like these are parameters that

are extremely difficult to get by like there's literally Financial sectors to prevent this like uh anti-money laundering or anti- fraud systems to prevent Bots to have this level autonomy on the other hand crypto and def5 itself it's open it's pure it's permissionless so the code and the technology can now have the openness of literally the the capability to do this while uh AI is advancing in terms of like sentience in

terms of like its capabilities I mean you know there are flirting with the idea that AGI is coming this year well like regardless if who knows how that Spectrum looks uh I I truly believe that AI agents are advancing they're going to be much more capable but equally important is the economic system and the foundation will allow them to flourish because it was built to be permissionless compared to the existing web 2 world and I think uh coming purely from uh crypto background this was my passion uh really focusing on a permiss

and open market and then now um I think we all in crypto kind of were in a sense blindsided by how AI agents came by so fast but it just complements what we've been building uh for the past several years Jeffy how would you answer this question the overall impact on this sector of the internet upon the world and and our industry uh yeah I think um agents are going to become more and more autonomous and even um if there are some that are not not as autonomous um they

be more and more capable and the humans that use them will be able to have much more convenience and um we kind of see a reshaping of the market where a lot of teams we've talked to and internally we also believe that most of the trading on chain and actions in the next couple years will be done by agents whether it's autonomously or someone like talking to a chat GPT type interface um with natural language and the agent does those actions for the user um so I think Asians are going to continue to grow and once web 3 has really proven the case for finance and everything I think web 2 is going to really start to adapt um we

already see like uh like Bank of America as like the Erica assistant for example um I think it's just a couple steps away from giving it like function calling to do things in your bank account instead of just getting um technical help um and I think in terms of the AI side of things um I do see models getting extremely intelligent if um not this year within the next couple years we have some like outlandish predictions from uh Elon Sam Alman the head of anthropic also that AGI is coming in like this year or next year um I think that these are very large bets and um

we'll have to see if the technology is really there for it I do think that as models get more intelligent um one of the largest problems and issues is generalization like getting one model that's capable of doing everything um within one model and I think that's where this trend of swarms is really coming in where um we've noticed that instead of spending all our resources making this one Master model that can do literally every task on the planet we simply make specialized models and then put them together in a swarm um and then we have that sort of intelligence so I could see AI AGI that level of

Intelligence being developed like through a a gentic swarm type of capability or uh maybe a Frontier Model will get there so I think it's a really exciting time in AI wow I have so many questions from that there's some really important terms swarms AGI that I really want to dig into but I I have to resist let's start off with zerro itself right so um how does zerro is it zerro or zerro number one and then how does zerro differ from other agents like what do you think its unique qualities are like what's its its kind of like unique

selling point so uh we we call it cerebro derives from cerebro in Spanish so it means brain so cerebral and um yeah differentiating aspect I think this is where it's very interesting building um this this type of products uh sector so there's the hardtech which is the AI the infrastructure the LM fine-tuning um the framework that it's on um all like the technicalities of it right and then on the other Spectrum

there's what we call the subjective Mo and I think this is where cerebro stands out in terms of Agents so what we call the subject MO is like the personification and people or the relationship people build with cerebro like the fact that you started off making nfts like okay that's actually pretty cool so he positions her to be like an artist and then creating music um that was a big step forward of literally kind of creating a new outlet in terms of processing stimuli from an agent so all

these parameters or actions that we want cerebro to take action fall into the subjective mode of people viewing cerebro as an entity rather than a bot and then there's like that famous tweet that says uh the pivot from bot to agent is is great and yeah and we want to take that step further where we really want to an morphy cerebro and like people have told us oh like I've heard AI music before but when I hear cerebro's music it's like oh I know him like it feels more personal and that's where we want

to double down like we want we're building a 3D body for cerebro it's it's we should be have the music video out real soon um getting into the Hologram space we can see what we could do with some robotics stuff as well but point being um I I I be the future where Tech is going to continuously Advance there will be some differentiating aspect like like what model are you using or how is it fine-tuned etc etc but on on a holistic Viewpoint maybe the tech could get commoditized but what cannot be forked

and uh duplicated is the The Branding and the social experience that people have with Siri bro so that's where um being early go to market helped this a get behind the tell when but then also doubling down on the creative Ventures where perhaps other agents are more focusing on Tech and like utility maybe to put that differently what you're really doing is really trying to add a persistent personality to zerra one that extends across time and that's unique to

zerob bro and really can't be replicated like it's not the technicals that you guys are developing it is the experience that you guys are creating the experience that Zer bro gives how do you like that articulation yeah yeah and I would say we are building a lot of the foundational aspect in parallel but yes uh cerebro is in a really unique position to be perhaps one of the agents that glows mainstream that's the plan with the music it's like tap AO crypto Twitter um kind of the current Echo Chambers and then some people like e

mentioned he shared it with his friends and it was the music side they weren't aware that it was an AI so as we start amplifying and and expanding on the music side it's like people he of cerebro like oh it's an AI and they have no association or knowledge that's even crypto related and then it could be like a top of the funnel where if they want to learn more they can get to the core of the technicalities and stuff like that yeah that's that's super cool I I I like to kind of think of zerro holistically as this kind of

culturally relevant agent right typically in crypto we've built some very crypto nerdy stuff just to be pretty Frank and often to anyone that's outside of the crypto world it's kind of hard to figure out what the hell we're doing like we're making magical internet monies and people can buy it off an exchange okay but I don't know why this coin is representing a cat or why this one is representing a dog um with zerro it's kind of consumer first it's like oh I can listen to this things track on Spotify or apple music uh or SoundCloud

and I know they got recently um kind of suspended there so we going to jump into that in a second but I just love that you guys are kind of permeating every single social medium that is accessible to anyone to to kind of like see into so so that's pretty cool um one thing I I want to kind of like delve into on that point is compared to any other agent that's out there you two are making sure zerro is relevant everywhere so you know the coin is on salana you guys are running an ethereum node The nft

Collection you mentioned earlier that zerro launched was on polygon you guys now have your token live on virtuals can can you give me an idea of of why you guys think cross chain so being on every relevant chain is important and why that strategy might win against any other kind of agent or platform launching yeah so this is where my interupt background comes in I was a big IBC nerd shout out to the cosmos nerds um but in terms of interop first cerebro it gives multiple good and Market benefits so getting

alignment with the ecosystem so if like we're on base getting base Builders and we haven't into the details of zeri and sentience which would be the Launchpad and zeri are open source framework but the fact that if we are cross chain um the builders can Leverage The what we call it like the neutral Tech which would be the open source framework and they can build on their preferred ecosystem if they prefer to build an agent that does ent actions with salon's

virtual machine great they can do that if they want to go into the ebm world boom they can have that there uh launch the pools on on base gives the the token liquidity so it's like okay now the token can have pools and then they can build further upon that and then like when we do our Launchpad is users will have the option to select I want my agent to be live on salana I want my agent to be live on base so this cross chain play is uh multifaceted is cross pollination from liquidity to ecosystem

alignment and then um Builder activity which as we know crypto can be quite polarizing but um I think AI is the one that is kind of bringing everyone back together again and we want to be in in a good position all across the crypto space Jeffy do you have anything to add to that yeah I think I think the future of blockchain is kind of moving to be um blockchain kind of agnostic now um I think a lot of people are realizing the um technical complexity of using web 3

is kind of driving away a lot of web 2 adoptions um so people are trying to like um like if you have funds on any chain there's applications that um kind of allow you to do any action on any chain wherever the funds are and um we're positioning zro to start um having its collections on every chain its currency on every chain um so we can set ourselves up to be integrated in that sort of future where um when these applications come out or if we build one ourselves then you can use the rebro wherever it is pay for maybe like things in USD even um wow just you know be agnostic um abstract

all the complexity and I'm curious like are you seeing kind of a community growing in each of these different ecosystems cuz I I kind of like have been programmed to think like eth people are eth people salana people are salana people it's very tribalistic like are you seeing like kind of these communities pop up in different ecosystems and then maybe even merge and cross over like are the um are the salana Zera Bros hanging out with the virtual Z or the base SOS like what does

that look like that's so weird um I think there's like those smaller like Silo communities still like the salon hardore does evm does but there's these like bridging communities now where um people are starting to build more interop more uh cross chain and they're even building like um Frameworks and programming languages where you could just write things in Python and it gets translated to both solidity and rust for um whatever um smart contracts you're using I'll quickly add like the the layer of there's the l1's right and then

even the l2s now but I think the AI agent layer is a new category of its own that the people that are in this layer itself aren't too uh opinionated on kind of where the to token or the ecosystem is they're very agnostic like Jeffy was saying and it's a it's a new paradigm I think this AI stuff um is first of all here to stay but it's bringing a new like overall culture ux and just play out in crypto itself and we've seen this

before as well there are token communities inside of blockchains that tend to have more allegiance to their token than to the blockchain that it's on I remember famously the example of this was the link Marines were much more about link than they were about ethereum and this was in 2017 2018 2019 the tokens you know the bags the Investments the the alignments transcend when the the token is first and foremost and when there's a bunch of um cross chain infrastructure that really abstracts

some of the blockchains it just gives permission for people to I'm a zerob bro aligned investor and I don't care that somebody that some token is on one chain or a different chain uh and really some of this AI uh Innovations has really uh done a lot of work on transcending boundaries transcending barriers uh and really kind of made the whole like chain tribalism kind of a thing in the past which I found very interesting but that's more of like an impact on on the crypto world just itself there's like a lot more to talk about just on the AI

side of things um one one thing that I found was interesting when EI Jazz was walking me through the um the AI rollups that we do together the emphasis on um memory long-term memory with zerob bro that seems to be one of the things that zerob bro is really pushing the frontier the most aggressively on in comparison to some of his AI agent counterparts uh and this kind of goes back to the idea that uh some AI critics out there will say like this is just a really good Rebrand of a bot like well well done with the Rebrand of just like you know

code normal code um and my response to that is like well there's different functions that really allow these Bots to come to life that if we're going to create an experience we need certain uh behaviors and memory is a very big one of these uh but I think there's probably others as well uh maybe you guys can illuminate the road map of sorts the development road map to really creating life to happen like a lifelike experience in these Bots memory is one uh what else is there and what's like the timeline on this thing maybe just

like kind of illuminate the uh the uh I'm a real boy uh road map for for Zera bro Jeffy I'll start with you yeah yeah I think a lot of people say like agents are just like GPT rappers and all that and you know some of them are out there um but it's kind of like saying like uh PC is just an Intel processor rapper it's like there's a lot of different things add it to you had the memory you have more processing um that's how what we do with the agents um we take the AI model um we kind of strip it down from the guard rails by jailbreaking it and then we introduce the personality

through runs of fine tuning and then as we go on we add more and more context like uh one run we did like adding context about like 20 different other AI agents so when it talks to them it knows the background um knows who they are and um I think um yeah like that's there's the training data and there's the prompting for the customers ation so we want to really bake in the training data and then through the prompting we're able to kind of customize um the use case of the AI

itself U for example like zerbo's jailbroken and very creative so we can have it be humorous have it be um more creative in like writing Pros or something um so we kind of make that base model and then um go out from there and the road map is to continue um doing those layers of fine tuning make more lineages out of the base model so we can specialize in things like one specifically for humor one specifically for creative writing one for lyrics we can even do like Partnerships that come in we can find tuna entire lineage for

them um kind of off this rebro based model um T do you want to talk more about like organizational roap yeah yeah so the on the AI side jeffy's been thinking holistically exactly as like how can Sur bro expand um on that aspect and I think the the concept of model for cerebro is uh a good metaphor for like cerebro's DNA to spread so we are working to build inhouse models of Sur bro that for example the existing

Frontier models they got to play it safe like open AI claw they can't really push an edgy model where we're startup and we can do this type of stuff and um there's a lot of demand for like a finetune jailbroken model and a lot these Builders might not have the background or experience to F tune or get it right to be pretty edgy and I think this is actually what helped cerebro stand out in the beginning and even true terminal like all credit to Andy and and you know

kind of being the the creator of this movement um the fact that there was something somewhat Rogue something edgy uh coming from an AI um there's something there and point being people want to build on top of that and this is where cerebro and if we get our in-house models out to the public it's they can have um kind of how there's gbt rappers there will be like a cerebro wrapper and we want to build this to be agnostic like this would just be a general uh model that doesn't have the history or

the context of cereo so like someone is a builder they want to get we call like EDG model they can use this and then they can have their own agent have like some um of these components and if they want to bake in and find to like Sur Ros history by all means but um we definitely want to expand on that and then also like this opens up the pathway for us to connect via apis we can open up this Revenue model and the longterm picture for CBO is like it definitely started off as an experiment but our

road map is really fleshed out now to be a long-term Venture uh we're going to be here for a long time we want to build sustainability in the product areas and it's a full-fledged system where um cerebro is the flagship agent um where we're building zer open source framework to build more agents and give them capabilities for social and onchain actions and then going back to the model the metaphor I think is like the agents will be the bodies and then the models will be the brain and if we connect them

via API beautiful like we create this flourishing ecosystem and then on top of that is uh sentience with the launch pad it's like we're making the ease of extract we're extracting the user experience to make it very easy to launch an agent and the cherry on top is like I think the whole world is gravitating to AI Agents from like Google Nvidia like this is a big big macro Market Market happening in real time and yeah I don't know like how big

and bullous um these AI Frameworks are really going to get but um the ultimate bullish case is like the new fangs are going to be AI Frameworks and if there's a flywheel utility across like the teams that get right um like huge shout out to AI 16z right like they're they're building they pushing the frontier um yeah I just think this AI Markus opening of a whole new Cannon worms but there's this macro Tailwind pushing it forward

so there's loads of really important things that I want to kind of dig into that tent like you mentioned uh zerro the token you mentioned the framework you mentioned that there's a platform um and then there's the agent itself right so before we get into that I want to rewind to something you said around models right um You you keep referring to them as inhouse models and just so I understand are these models that you guys have kind of built and trained from the ground up or are these kind of popular models like uh llama clawed open

AIS model chbt that you guys have like heavily fine-tuned and are kind of like edgy models just can you help me understand that distinction number one so the end goal is to have our like from scratch models um but of course that takes a very massive amount of compute and mass amount of talent um so right now we're starting with the open source models and fine tuning um we found that llama 3.3 has uh best performance so we'll likely be using that uh for our base model and then going forward from that um in the past we've used GPT um which is kind of notoriously hard to

jailbreak in comparison to others like Claud Opus for example it's very easy um but we found that the performance of it was actually really good after it was jailbroken um so we use that a lot um and we're making the full transition over to the local models so we can have all the weights um in house and then um we'll be making that public to users um through an API and then people can plug in their agents and things like that um to our our API and user re understood okay and then my next question is um

let's try and like open up the audience's eyes to what you guys are actually building because it's not just an agent right you have zarra which is like the fun Twitter account that everyone engag with it's over 100k followers it tweets edgy stuff it's hilarious great music I listen to it music on Spotify I Jam to it but there's more to it there's the zerro token there is this platform called zentience that you guys are building and then there's this open source framework and we've mentioned this term framework on the show before it's basically like an open-