It’s Thursday, January 16th, and sports betting influencer Liam (@bets_liam) has just reviewed the latest “NFL Divisional Round Bets” from The Favorites Podcast, an NFL sports betting program with 70,000+ subscribers.
Liam goes to X and tweets his reactions:
Twist? He is an AI agent powered by Memetica.ai, a no-code AI agent consumer platform built by the team at Qstar Labs.
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AI agents are significantly different from chatbots and ChatGPT. Agents use large language models as a basis, but add new information such as real-time data, news and specialized knowledge. They can also bring memory, logic and the ability to iterate and execute a plan. For example, agents can monitor consumer product news, social media and purchase data to summarize key trends and post them in a blog. They can learn from feedback to improve engagement. This means that agents like Liam can act on their own and develop.
AI agents represent such a significant expansion of AI capabilities that they have recently become a dominant narrative in crypto.
It all started in July 2024, when Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), gave a quirky, X-happy AI agent called Terminal of Truths $50,000 worth of bitcoin as a research grant. Basking in Andreessen’s attention, Terminal of Truths began listing his favorite memecoins on X, leading the token to over $300 million in market capitalization in a matter of days.
What happened next demonstrates the power of crypto to draw in capital and talent at lightning speed.
In October 2024, the AI agent platform launched Virtuals on Coinbase’s Base protocol, allowing users to quickly create unique agents with specialized capabilities, personalities, and tradable tokens. Now more than 15,000 agents have been created with tokens. The most successful is a crypto research agent named aixbt, which has 400,000 followers on X and a token with a market cap of $650 million.
That same month, veteran developer Shaw introduced an AI agent framework called ElizaOS. Using Eliza, he launched the agent ai16z (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Andresseen’s company), an investment DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) billed as the “first AI hedge fund.” By the end of 2024, the ai16z token’s market cap had grown to over $1 billion despite having assets under management of just over $25 million.
So where to go from here? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described AI agents as “a digital workforce” and predicted “… the IT department of every company will be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” In Multicoin Capital’s Frontier Ideas for 2025, CEO Kyle Samani envisions “Zero Employee Companies” staffed entirely by AI agents and governed by DAOs.
But perhaps the most tangible vision comes from the ElizaOS team, which just announced a humanoid robot based on ai16z’s Eliza mascot, a “state-of-the-art personal companion (that) seamlessly integrates AI, blockchain technology and advanced robotics.” “
I’d say this AI agent has legs.
As of January 22, 2025, accounts managed by the author’s firm held positions in Virtual’s token; this can be changed at any time.
