AI agents redux
It's all kicking off
I wasn’t planning to write an email today but sometimes the news must.
For, continuing from Wednesday’s opening discussion of AI agents, there have been plenty of thrills and spills.
One obvious follow-up — which isn’t investment advice, but just to note — Virtuals’ VIRTUAL token remains on a rip; up 49% yesterday and now with a marketcap of $1.4 billion.
This doesn’t appear to be due to any of the underlying AI agents doing particularly well, although top ranked project AIXBT is up to $200 million and the VADERAI token is up 102% to a marketcap of $50 million.
Clearly, the question here is can Virtuals provide sufficiently cutting-edge tech in the long term for people who want to launch their own really smart agents?
More likely, the winners in this space will be those building out their own AI stacks — rather than relying on a cookie-cutter platform. Hence this price action remains pure retail speculation.
Not that building and launching your own stuff doesn’t also come with its own problems, as the team at Today are finding out.
It launched its Limbo agent with a corresponding memecoin on Solana via Pump.fun, also using its own tech in terms of driving the agent’s outputs and plugging into X and Twitch.
Positioned as “an advanced alien species posing as a deceptively adorable autonomous AI pop star” — also reminding me a little of early AI avatar Miquela — Limbo is a marketing experiment for Today, which has always been an in-development high concept AI-driven social game.
However, the way in which it launched the LIMBO memecoin has generated plenty of ire from the game’s community.
Notable in his (fairly measured) criticism is KOL Grail, who has slammed Today for launching the memecoin without due consideration to the game’s original community and investors such as himself — he claims he owns 7.5% of its genesis NFTs.
Particular anger has been generated as it looks like new investors and insiders bought into the memecoin’s pre-sale and then immediately dumped when it went live, triggering the token’s 50% price decline.
“Ignoring the cardinal sin of giving no ROI to your strongest backers and giving it all to random memecoiner, at least you can justify the end justify the means if the token value maintains. But clearly it's been dumped and the FUD has damaged the entire TODAY brand,” Grail argues.
Aside from the difficulties of bringing such disruptive tech into existing projects and value flows, there are some who consider the best option is to rip it all up and start again from scratch.
Never afraid of radical opinions, Limit Break’s Gabe Leydon argues that the rise of AI agents means that us mere mortals will never have to interact with blockchain ourselves, solving the UX/UI dilemma at a stroke.
Further adding...
It’s a brave vision but one that is placed into some sort of context by the news that well-known onchain puzzle-solver p0pular.eth just gained $47,316 of crypto by winning a competition to convince an AI agent called Freysa — which had been told not to transfer its treasury under any circumstances — to transfer it all to him.
We’ll see how much Freysa has learned from the experience when Act II of this self-styled “adversarial agent game” kicks off.
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