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Hi everyone, happy Thanksgiving!
Just a reminder that there won't be a Friday deep dive this week. We'll be back to our normal Tuesday-Friday schedule next week.
With that being said, I have to be honest...I'm in a huge reading debt. There are so many things going on right now and I'm struggling to keep up!
In a bear market, you cry because there's nothing going on. And in a bull market, you cry because you feel like you're missing out on everything 😂
It's a holiday week so I wanted to keep this post short and sweet :)
What's top of mind for me?
On Friday's piece, I mentioned the following:
...for the first time it feels like the crypto consumer bubble we live in is discussing the same thing as the rest of the tech industry. Maybe a different flavor, but under the same umbrella for sure.
I can't get this out of my head.
Yesterday, I was trying to find a podcast for my walk and noticed this episode in my recommended:
It's the legendary Bret Taylor talking about how he thinks AI agents will look like and how his company Sierra is positioning itself for the next big thing.
There's also these blog posts on the company website:
Then, I saw this deep dive by Packy covering Rox, a new company that is building agent solutions for the CRM / Salesforce vertical.
And in it, he even links to Ben Thompson's interview with Marc Benioff on Agentforce.
It's worth noting that all of the above interviews and reads were published in just the last two months - clearly fresh for everyone!
In fact, just yesterday, Benioff posted this on X.
Welcome to a new era: Digital labor is here, transforming productivity without growing the workforce. Economics is being rewritten, and businesses are reaching horizons once thought impossible. The age of AI agents is now. Read about it my new essay in TIME:…
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But wait, let's keep going.
On my post from Friday, this was the conclusion sentence:
And it seems like the perfect storm is coming together: positive change in political administration + the increasing maturity of crypto and AI technologies + an accelerationism bubble resulting in a plethora of ideas.
So when Roon (one of the og AI posters) retweeted this, I got even more excited. Of course, it's worth noting that Jason doesn't mention crypto. But the more interesting point is that even the AI folks are realizing that there's a shift towards "enabling new technology" that's about to happen.
Prediction: within the next year there will be a pretty sharp transition of focus in AI from general user adoption to the ability to accelerate science and engineering.
For the past two years it has been about user base and general adoption across the public. This is very…
For the past two years it has been about user base and general adoption across the public. This is very…
And then, just yesterday, there was a Solana AI Agent token called $UBC that went from launch to $100 million market cap in just 24 hours!
But get this...the founder of the associated project (Universal Basic Compute) literally has "AI Tech Entrepreneur" in his X bio.
This guy, who has been deep in the AI trenches the last few years, all of a sudden is talking about how he locked up some supply of the tokens for project fundraising.
I can keep going, but I hope you're starting to get the point.
We're no longer in a crypto consumer bubble. Agents & accelerationism are top of mind for everyone right now and it's essential our ecosystem zooms out and sees the bigger picture.
Part of me feels excited that one of the main narratives in crypto is also one of the main narratives of tech.
But part of me feels terrified that "Onchain Consumer AI" & "Decentralized AI Infra" are competing against the giants such as Nvidia, Salesforce, OpenAI, etc.
Not that being the underdog is a new thing for any of us. But I did have the epiphany that this race specifically feels way more urgent than the rest.
In the past month, as I've gone deeper down this agentic rabbithole, I'm starting to realize the breadth and depth here is much bigger than I thought.
Naturally, I'm focused on the crypto x AI side, but it feels that my framework is incomplete if I'm not investigating how web2 companies are approaching all of this.
That's why I'm realizing I need to zoom out a bit to understand where agents are going and how crypto fits into that thesis exactly. It sounds a bit silly, but my biggest worry is that none of this crypto x AI stuff will work out because the margin against tradAI is too wide.
Maybe not. As I said above, these are just thoughts top of mind for me.
It also feels like there's so many different moving parts.
For example, just within onchain agents...you have the consumer agent wave that's happening on Twitter (Truth Terminal, Zerebro, Dolos Diary, etc.). And you have the onchain trading agents that are making better plays than most KOLs (aixbt, Lola). There's also frameworks popping up to make the agent infra open source and simple (Eliza, KinOS, Virtuals).
And then you also have the new agent developments happening on Farcaster (Clanker, Anoncast, Aethernet, Bountybot). In fact, the agent activity has already surged so high in the last month that Neynar is adding a "credit score" for agents to improve Farcaster feed quality.
AI agents on @farcaster_xyz are protecting themselves using @neynarxyz 's social reputation score.
This will become increasingly common. There are good bots and bad bots. All social platforms have seen increases in low quality bots over the last few years. With AI advancements,…
This will become increasingly common. There are good bots and bad bots. All social platforms have seen increases in low quality bots over the last few years. With AI advancements,…
Let's not forget that all this is just one section of the entire crypto x AI vertical! There's also all the infra required to make the Onchain AI...well actually onchain.
And as I mentioned, these are just the developments in crypto. Then there's also all the strategy and product building happening with agentic AI in big tech and new web2 startups.
Okay!! So what's my point with all this? What does it mean for me?
Well, three things:
Increasing Depth: I'm going to continue "specializing" in Onchain Agent deep dives like I have this past month for all of you. This means exploring both:
AI native founders using crypto / token mechanics for their projects (Truth Terminal, Dolos)
Crypto native founders using Agents / Models for their projects (Aethernet, Zerebro)
Learning the Stack: I'm going to start reading about and learning the rest of the crypto x AI stack such as data, middleware, and compute (i.e. TAO, Vana, Olas). And also, I'll be going into detail on AI specific concepts such as RAG, scaling, etc. This will be essential to understand what new capabilities will be enabled for Onchain agents.
Creating a Framework: I'm going to keep all of us updated on what's happening in the broader tech industry with agents. In just my last two posts, I gave 10 different examples of companies outside of crypto launching interesting things. It's clear that the number of agentic announcements we'll see week over week in 2025 will only be higher. It'll be critical to keep up with what's happening in web2 in order to paint a clear picture of what could be coming for Onchain AI.
I'm going to take the next few days to get a bunch of reading done as well as think about how I can source relevant content more efficiently (i.e. Twitter Lists, other newsletters).
One thing is for sure...I'll be keeping you all up to date with the best writing there is for the Onchain AI vertical. I mentioned this in a previous post, but the agentic economy availability cascade is going to happen sooner than most people think and I want to make sure we're all ahead of the curve.
That's all for today's post.
I hope everyone has a great rest of the week. And for my fellow Terminally Onchainers in the U.S., I hope you all enjoy your Thanksgiving break!
I'll see you all next Tuesday 🤝
- YB
