Crypto x AI Agents Gold Rush Guide: 5 Major Breakout Tracks + Potential Projects, Seize the Next Hundredfold Opportunity

Author: Evan ⨀

Compiled by Deep Tide TechFlow

AI is the core narrative of the current cycle, and many people believe that it is a field that will exist for a long time. At the same time, there are also reasonable criticisms that most AI agents are of poor quality, and it may take 3-5 years for these technologies to truly achieve significant breakthroughs.

Crypto x AI covers multiple levels. From a technical perspective, the true potential of combining Crypto and AI lies in driving more efficient reasoning capabilities through cryptoeconomics or providing decentralized access to computing power. This Delphi article is a good starting point for understanding the entire technology stack.

The original image is from Delphi Labs, compiled by Deep Tide TechFlow.

However, this article will focus on the current situation in the field of intelligent agents. Despite many exciting innovations happening at the underlying technology stack, intelligent agents seem to have attracted widespread attention from mainstream Crypto Twitter (CT). Here are 5 trends in the Crypto x AI intelligent agent field that need attention in ongoing development:

1. Framework and Launch Platform: The Importance of Value Accumulation and the Long-term Potential of the Framework

Value Accrual is becoming an increasingly important topic. Why is this?

Fundamentally, why do people choose to hold certain assets? There are typically two main reasons:

They believe they can sell the asset to others at a higher price because the narrative rotation will attract new buyers.

Over time, the asset can provide them with a continuous cash flow.

In his post ‘Old coins don’t work, only new coins are fragrant’, Jez (@izebel_eth) mentioned that the key factor determining market performance is the flow of funds. This viewpoint can be summarized as two sources of flow that drive asset prices up.

New holders: new token buyers or investors;

Token Burning: A mechanism to reduce the circulation of tokens by destroying or locking them up.

However, at present, most projects have not yet formed a true token consumption mechanism (‘Token Sink’) or value accumulation model. For example, the token used in the intelligent body terminal (such as AIXBT) is closer to a pledge mechanism rather than a traditional value accumulation method.

This is also why frameworks like Virtuals, ai16z, Zerebro, and Arc have recently gained popularity. For example, Virtuals has generated a total of $60 million in protocol revenue. And ai16z, initially as an investment DAO, has become one of the top protocols in the field since announcing details of the upcoming launch platform and related token value accumulation.

Currently, the field of frameworks and launch platforms has become highly competitive, relying on the experience of the initial successful ones for expansion. Although the market still questions the role of these launch platforms, especially when many intelligent entities themselves have no practical use. However, many frameworks (such as the launch platform of Eliza V2, Zentients, and Arc’s Handshake plan) have not even launched their core products. If they can successfully attract developers and users, there is still the possibility of continuing to lead the entire industry.

Why the framework may exist in the long term:

Even though the intelligent agents still have quality issues, the framework for launching the intelligent agents will still perform well because they have Product Market Fit (PMF) in the speculative market. The framework and launch platform allow users to control the production process and participate in the speculative market. In some ways, Virtuals have already replaced pump.fun in the Base ecosystem.

On a more optimistic note, with the continuous advancement of technology, leading frameworks may give rise to more advanced intelligent agents, and open-source code repositories (such as Eliza) could further accelerate this process. Many startup platforms are also striving to become coordinating layers for collective intelligence (Swarm) and communication between intelligent agents, and this communication may be facilitated through their tokens for value transfer. For more detailed analysis on how Eliza achieves value capture, refer to this link.

Example:

@virtuals_io, @ai16zdao, @0xzerebro, @arcdotfun are the current main participants, but the launch platform field is becoming increasingly crowded. What is worth paying attention to are the frameworks that are the fastest to act, the most scalable, and able to provide unique features - that is, projects that can achieve functions that other frameworks cannot accomplish.

2. DeFAI: The next wave of intelligent agents will focus on practicality and value accumulation. DeFAI (DeFi x AI) may be the first to achieve product-market fit (PMF).

Currently, most smart entities only have Memecoins, but lack practical functions. In order to promote further development in the field of smart entities, the next wave of smart entities needs to be able to solve practical problems for users. The real new opportunities will come from smart entities that can accumulate value and take practical actions. I believe that within the next year, this will mark the leap of smart entities from Level 1 to Level 3.

The original picture comes from Bloomberg, compiled by Shenchao TechFlow

This trend first appeared in the DeFi field. In the future, we will see more terminals that allow users to express their needs through natural language or voice input, while intelligent agents will complete tasks in the background. At the same time, existing wallets and protocols will also integrate intelligent agent functions to optimize the user experience process.

Tweet details

Tweet details

Example:

@AIWayfinder

@griffaindotcom

@HeyAnonai

@LimitusIntel

@neur_sh

For more in-depth analysis of this category, please refer to here.

3. Consumer Layer - Entertainment AI, Autonomous World, and Gaming: Attention-based AI will evolve to have more complex personalities and multimedia interactions, driving the next wave of gaming and metaverse technology.

One of the main problems with existing intelligent agents is their serious homogeneity, gradually becoming simple chatbot forms. While some intelligent agent projects are turning to infrastructure development (many projects have already started to do so), others focus on developing practical products or applications, and some projects may continue to follow the path of ‘attention tokens’. However, the next generation of attention intelligent agents will be more sophisticated, not only with more complex personalities, but also capable of richer interactive experiences. This may be manifested in audiovisual presentation forms, and even endow intelligent agents with 3D images and physical entities.

There have been some early attempts, such as Jeffy mentioned giving Zerebro a body, some attention KOL intelligent bodies present directly through audio and video, used for short video content platforms like TikTok. Slopfather and Ropirito are two early cases of intelligent bodies using video.

In the future, more intelligent entities will add these features to make it more dynamic. The product market fit (PMF) in this field will mainly be achieved through the consumer layer, for example, users may want to create personalized intelligent companions, or interact with KOLs. This trend has already occurred outside the crypto field, for example, ordinary users have already interacted with AI character companions for hundreds of hours on platforms such as Character.ai. It is worth noting that Google recently acquired Character.ai for 2.7 billion dollars, further indicating the potential of this field.

In addition, these “3D” agents may find product-market fit (PMF) in the existing consumer layer, especially in the gaming and metaverse sectors. Agents have the power to infuse virtual worlds with a deeper backstory. Imagine an NPC being an agent that can not only complete tasks autonomously, but also play games on its own, with evolving memories and personalities. With agents, it is possible for the virtual world in the game to be truly autonomous.

Example:

Infrastructure: Provide frameworks and tools for developing more interactive and personalized intelligent agents

@soulgra_ph - Provide tools to help the intelligent agent have more personalized memory and personality

@HoloworldAI has established Web2 partnerships with companies such as L’Oreal, Bilibili, and Fox to create digital avatars.

Games and Metaverse: Virtual Worlds and Autonomous Intelligent Agents

@hyperfy_io - A metaverse platform that allows users to create virtual worlds and is compatible with the Eliza plugin.

@ParallelColony - An AI simulation game where the intelligent agent is the player, and you can communicate and interact with them.

See tweet for details

@digimon_tech - A Pokemon-like creature game where creatures evolve spiritually based on interactions

smolverse - Using Eliza, and featuring an intelligent agent character driven by LLM, this character executes tasks in the virtual world according to the user’s commands.

4. Intelligent Entity Organization: The new evolution of DAO

Decentralized Agentic Organizations (DAOs) are the next form of evolution of DAOs. Swarms or Multi-agent Systems are promising because they may have coordination capabilities to execute advanced strategies similar to business operations. Compared to single large models, heterogeneous groups composed of multiple specialized agents or models collaborating together may demonstrate higher efficiency.

Although fully autonomous AI and collective intelligence may take some time to achieve, the next generation of DAOs may involve interaction between humans and collective intelligence. This model can reduce bureaucratic inefficiency while reducing the cost and time of human task execution. From a development perspective, the evolution of intelligent entities will move from a single revenue model to a complete organizational revenue model.

Example:

Intelligent Agent Collective Infrastructure: Some projects are focusing on providing infrastructure support for multi-agent systems (multi-agent frameworks), such as @swarmnode and @joinFXN. These projects are mainly dedicated to the development of multi-agent frameworks and the optimization of coordination mechanisms. At the same time, some mainstream intelligent agent frameworks, such as @0xzerebro and @ai16zdao, have also explicitly stated their plans to build at this level, further promoting the development of multi-agent systems.

DAO Launching Platform: Currently, we observe that investment-oriented DAOs are one of the most active areas. I believe @daosdotfun is the first major DAO launching platform, which gave rise to ai16z. In addition, some emerging launching platforms are also starting to emerge, such as @daosdotworld, where AI-driven funds (like @3berascapital_) are attracting more and more attention.

5. Verifiable Intelligent Agents: Towards Autonomy and Economic Agency

Today, most intelligent agents still require a significant amount of human intervention. However, the next generation of intelligent agents will move towards true autonomy, starting with managing their own funds.

The combination of agents and cryptography is that cryptography provides the financial infrastructure to enable true economic agency. However, most of the Agent’s Treasury is either unused or managed by a team of humans. In order to achieve true economic agency, agents need to have the ability to manage funds autonomously. This ability will alter the agent’s behavior patterns, for example by imposing economic constraints on the agent to incur the cost of reasoning. This mechanism is similar to “Darwinism” in which agents must survive by generating income.

Example:

@freysa_ai - is one of the first autonomous agents to control their own keys, and has performed exceptionally well (even attracting Elon’s attention). They recently announced the development of a framework that enables autonomous agents to achieve verifiable autonomy based on trusted execution environments (TEE) and self-controlled keys.

See the tweet for details

@LitProtocol - Providing an intelligent body framework that allows autonomous intelligent bodies to store and execute system transactions on the chain using private keys.

@galadriel_AI - has launched an SDK called ‘Proof of Sentience’ which enables developers to verify the autonomy of intelligent agents on the blockchain.

See tweet for details

Conclusion: In the world of blockchain, we may be more likely to witness the rise of one billion intelligent agents (AI Agents) than the joining of one billion human users.

For human users, cryptographic technology often becomes an obstacle due to complex operations and unfriendly user experience, but these problems do not exist for intelligent agents. Starting from the interaction between humans and intelligent agents, the future development direction of Crypto and AI will gradually evolve into direct interaction between intelligent agents. In this mode, a large number of autonomous intelligent agents will interact and trade on the blockchain in their unique economic form.

“In order to enable intelligent agents to have economic agency capabilities (such as incentive behavior, payment of service fees, and coordination of real-world activities), they need to be able to manage and use funds. Cryptography is at the core of these intelligent agents, and blockchain provides them with a permissionless financial track. Stablecoins and high-performance L1 blockchains are ideal tools for achieving low-cost, round-the-clock, globalized transactions.” - “Sam Altman’s New Year Declaration and Outlook: Putting excellent tools into people’s hands, the first batch of AI agents is expected to join the labor market this year.”

Despite the myriad narratives and trends, blockchain-based agents do have reason to look forward to the future. Perhaps, many real-world use cases, DAOs, and revenue-generating agents are one step closer than we think.