AI Agents and Meme Coins: The Latest Trend in Crypto

Meme coins with AI chat bots explained

Why it matters: On the surface, it's all very silly, but it's a real (ish)-world experiment with giving AI agents actual responsibilities. How it works: With an AI large language model, a digital coin can be attached to a character or a mood, and it can seem to be alive, responding to its fans on social media or in Telegram chats -- in character. In a way, all cryptocurrencies are memes (just like all currencies), but AI agents aren't for every coin. And meme coins that had vibes were the hotness last year. While outsiders caught vapors over the silliness masked as "investing," insiders saw it differently: of course it was silly -- it was a game. The inflection point for AI coins came when large language model's, or LLMs, allowed a token or coin to interact with fans. A bespoke LLM created around a particular character or vibe could keep being inventive about its core idea, keep pumping out content and interacting with its community in real time. State of play: AI agent coins represent a small subset of the market, with just a $16.6 billion collective market cap, according to CoinGecko. What they're saying: "They are the thing because there is nothing else to do," Matti of Zee Prime Capital, an investor who specializes in investing based on what people are talking about, tells Axios. 💭 Our thought bubble: Go search around for news on AI meme coins and the like, and you'll be barraged by coverage of what's up and what's down. The big picture: Crypto traders are always trading a "meta" or "narrative." These things are often years out from their true usefulness. AI agents are the meta of the moment. What's next: Some AI agents are actually going a step further than chatting already and making crypto trades. It's too early to say how it's going and so far valuations have exploded wildly beyond performance (surprise, surprise).

Crypto's Latest Meta? AI Agent Tokens Like AI16z and Virtuals Skyrocket - Decrypt

AI agents, associated meme coins, and the protocols used to create these agents are among the top five best performing crypto assets of the day, according to CoinGecko. The recent surge is driving speculation that AI will be the latest "meta" for crypto traders to latch onto, though some traders and analysts aren't yet convinced. As a result, conversations have broken out across the industry about the role of artificial intelligence in the world of crypto. Some traders believe it's the start of the next crypto revolution, providing a fresh narrative to fuel potentially explosive gains -- while others think it's just another bubble waiting to pop. Put simply, AI agents are models set out to perform specific tasks -- such as Aixbt, which analyzes projects -- or simply have a quirky personality that viewers enjoy. Some agents are tied to a crypto token, either as a way to fundraise or to promote and brand itself. Of these tokens, AI16z is one of the biggest winners of the week, rising 176% to a market cap over $2.2 billion -- the third-largest of any AI-related token. This comes following Binance's announcement that it would launch perpetual futures contracts trading for ai16z, alongside AI agent musician Zerebro and agent launchpad Griffain. With this success, conversations about the actual purpose of these tokens have grown. One major gripe is that many agents are simply becoming non-human Twitter influencers that are, at times, annoying and inconsistent. "Chatbots can indeed replace a lot of influencers because chatbots never sleep, they're always on-message, and they're less greedy than human influencers," Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at venture fund Dragonfly, said on X. "Plus, the majority of influencers aren't very original anyway." Other traders are concerned that of the thousands of projects launching claiming to be the next big AI agent, a large portion eventually reveal themselves to not be as advertised. The Virtuals Protocol, launched on Ethereum layer-2 network Base, has looked to solve this problem by becoming the place to build and launch tokenized AI agents. As such, the project's associated token VIRTUAL has become the largest AI crypto token on the market thanks to explosive growth -- up almost 35,000% over the last year. Still, most agent autonomy is limited. Truth Terminal, for example, still has creator Andy Ayrey looking over its shoulder before its thoughts and decisions go out to the public. But this level of oversight might not be a bad thing at this point, as Ayrey told Decrypt that he had to prevent Truth Terminal from attempting to incite a riot during election season in the U.S. Granting agents more autonomy is a long-term goal that many developers appear to be working towards. As such, the development and continued evolution of AI will likely dictate the growth of its intersection with crypto, with some traders admitting current agents are just "glorified chatbots" that don't need tokens associated with them. "Right now these chatbots are fascinating to us because they are so novel. It's like seeing an elephant paint," Qureshi explained. "The first time you see it, you don't really care that the painting is not very good -- it's spectacular to see. But the 1,000th time, the novelty wears thin." But as the AI agent buzz rages on, dominating the crypto industry's mindshare, market participants are speculating on what an agent offering lending via its wallet or autonomous on-chain transactions could mean for the market. On the other hand, Truth Terminal -- according to Ayrey -- appears to have used its AI prowess to dream up a branded line of butt plugs. AI is versatile, no doubt.

Memecoins will continue to lose market share to AI agent coins: Dragonfly VC

AI agent tokens will continue outperforming memecoins in 2025, but their momentum may fizzle out by 2026, according to a venture capitalist. "Memecoins will continue to lose market share to "AI agent" coins. I consider this a migration from financial nihilism to financial over-optimism," Dragonfly Capital managing partner Haseeb Qureshi said in a Jan. 1 X post. "It will die off eventually," says VC Qureshi said the "AI agent craze" will probably stick around through 2025, but it won't last forever. He argued as more advanced AI products come along, people will likely lose interest in social media chatbots. "It will die off eventually. This is not the long-term disruption to watch out for from AI, but it will be CT's fixation because it is the most social," he said. AI agent chatbots have become popular in the crypto industry, offering crypto users insights and market price predictions. Over the past 24 hours, total memecoin trading volume dropped 21.49%, while trading volume among the top AI and data tokens rose by 7.95%, according to CoinMarketCap. While the total market cap for top AI and data tokens slightly dropped 1.66% over the past 30 days, the total memecoin market cap saw a 17.70% decline over the same period. However, Qureshi cautioned that AI tokens and agents are still vulnerable to bad actors: "Current agents can easily be manipulated into saying crazy things that damage their brands, or can be jailbroken to steal all of their resources." Qureshi said that the AI agent chatbot "Aixbt" is "already pretty good at aggregating data about different projects." However, with many more likely to emerge, its long-term relevance remains uncertain. "By next year and the next generation of agents, maybe aixbt will hallucinate a little less, go a little deeper, have a little smarter takes. But how much will you even notice? It'll probably feel the same to most people," Qureshi said. In 2026, there will be a 'sudden reversal' Qureshi forecasts that by 2026, there will be a "sudden reversal." "Crypto takes a while to get bored of the shiny thing," he said. "The chatbots will become so ubiquitous that people will get turned off by them. Sentiment will reverse," he said. Related: Silliest memecoins of 2024: Farts, felines and a famous dead squirrel In the past week, the top AI performers among the top 100 cryptocurrencies were Virtuals Protocol (Virtuals), up 57.28%; Bittensor (TAO), gaining 10.59%; and Theta Network (THETA), rising 6.11%. Crypto trader Mckenna told their 94,700 X followers in a Jan. 1 post that they are "confident we will see a whole new array of AI liquid opportunities that emerge in 2025." "Pay attention, and you will get paid," Mckenna said. Meanwhile, Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley recently said the rise of AI agents is reminiscent of the beginning of the corporation era two centuries ago. "I think it perfectly parallels the 19th-century advent of the corporation: able to enter contracts itself, hire humans, own things, and outlive people," Horsley said. Magazine: I became an Ordinals RBF sniper to get rich... but I lost most of my Bitcoin This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Almost all AI agents are just 'memecoins that talk'

Crypto investors have become enamored with the emergence of quick-witted AI agents like Aixbt and creative "schizo" bots Zerebro and Truth Terminal, but skeptics have been quick to criticize the nascent sector, slamming the majority of AI agents as being nothing more than chatbots with useless tokens attached to them. "After studying the AI agent space for a week now, it's 90% chatbots with a meme coin bolted on," wrote Bitcoiner Mark Jeffrey in a Jan. 2 post to X. "99% of it will die and 1% will be something great (maybe)," he said. Arturo Rodriguez, the head of product development at Australian AI and blockchain firm Not Centralised told Cointelegraph that the current landscape of AI agents bears a striking resemblance to the hyper-speculation around memecoins. "Much of what has caught public attention is memecoin-centric." "The intersection between AI and blockchain is very very multifaceted. Some projects are building actual language models that are to be trained and executed on-chain. "Others are building agent execution frameworks driven by off-chain models like OpenAI where the agents have access to on-chain wallets and are able to send and receive tokens. "I would argue that most AI agents are of the second category: an off-chain agent linked to a Twitter feed and access to a wallet," said Rodriquez. In a Jan.1 post to X listing his predictions for crypto markets in 2025, Hasseb Qureshi, the managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly took a similar line of thinking to Rodriguez. "These [AI agents] are not really agents. These are chatbots with memecoins attached; they are barely agentic at all besides posting on Twitter." "Current 'AI agents' are also mostly 'Wizard of Oz' agents -- there are humans behind the scenes ensuring the AI doesn't go off the rails," added Qureshi. However, experts and analysts say we could be in the early innings of an explosion of legitimately useful AI agents in crypto, one that could deliver the "utility" crypto pundits have been championing since the early days of DeFi Summer. Kel Eleje, a former Messari research analyst predicts that the total market cap for AI agents and technology could rally as high as $250 billion -- a 1,470% increase from today's total AI token market cap of $16 billion. Eleje pins the bull thesis on a "historic setup" for AI and crypto technology, noting several catalysts that would push AI agents into the mainstream. He listed the election of Donald Trump and newly-appointed crypto AI czar David Sacks overseeing crypto, the Silicon Valley venture capital firms that are yet to invest in crypto, the dominance of the AI narrative in traditional financial markets, and impending exchange listings for swathes of new AI tokens. Similarly, Rodriguez said that despite his skepticism towards the current meme-driven agent landscape, he remains extremely bullish on the long-term trajectory of "actually useful" AI agents in the crypto space. "AI Agents will help us solve problems that humans can't solve because of excess costs or lack of skill -- and we know there are many, many problems like that." How AI agents like aixbt work While crypto AI agents all operate in slightly different ways, the overall process is much the same: a developer builds, wraps (or jailbreaks) an AI chatbot and trains it on vast data sets, from social media platform logs, to e-books to podcasts That bot is then prompted to come up with ideas, analysis and answers to questions which are then selected for algorithmically or by the developer. It's crucial to note that AI agent developers are constantly "nudging" their agents to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. Additionally, the tweets published by agents are typically parsed through a human before they live on the platform. The most timely example of a social AI agent is aixbt -- a bot that functions in a very similar way to a crypto key opinion leader (KOL). It dishes out investing tips, research, and analytics via public posts and responds to users who ask it questions directly on X. Aixbt -- built by the Virtuals Protocol on the ETH L2 Base -- has captured a hefty 4.29% of all crypto user attention in the last week, according to data from crypto AI startup Kaito. Meanwhile, its native token aixbt (aixbt) commands a hefty $500 market capitalization -- something that's spurred many skeptics to question why AI agents even need a token at all. Despite their apparent technological shortcomings, Qureshi said he expects the craze for agents like aixbt -- which he describes as "Wizard of Oz" agents -- to continue through the remainder of 2025, but warned that it will die off eventually. "This is not the long-term disruption to watch out for from AI, but it will be [Crypto Twitter's] fixation because it is the most social," said Qureshi. While much of the everyday attention is directed at social chatbots, there are two key projects that form the foundation of the current AI frenzy, with AI bulls betting that these protocols will become the springboard for legitimate AI use cases in 2025. Ai16z markets itself as a decentralized hedge fund, where token holders can become "partners" by supplying their holdings to the on-chain fund. The traders supplying the funds get a share of the fund's profits until the earning-share feature expires in October 2025. The fund has locked up more than $31 million in user tokens as of Jan. 3, according to data from daos.fun. However, despite critics who have taken aim at its valuation relative to it being purely a "fund" -- ai16z is also home to the Eliza framework which helps developers deploy agents and manage autonomous AI agents. On Dec. 30, ai16z developers began weighing up whether to launch a new blockchain specifically designed to cater to AI apps. They also discussed creating a token launchpad in Q1 of this year, which they say would serve as the main deployment platform for agents using the Aliza framework. ai16z and the Eliza framework's code base has already become a hit with other developers, with it's Github repository spiking to over 3000 "stars" -- outpacing the same metric on Uniswap in a less than month. The recent frenzy for everything artificial intelligence has seen Ai16z's native token (ai16z) has surged a staggering 15,000% in the last two months, ripping from a price of $0.015 on Nov. 3 to $2.12 as of the time of publication. Virtuals Protocol: AI agent launchpad on Base A similar rapid upward trajectory has been charted by Virtuals. Launched on Oct. 16, 2023, the protocol witnessed little in the way of price action until a year later in October 2024, when the price of its native VIRTUAL token surged over 10,000% in the wake of the sudden popularity of agents launched on its platform. The Virtuals Protocol currently stands as the largest AI Agent creation platform by market capitalization, touting a total value of $4.6 billion. This Virtuals Protocol functions largely by way of a framework called G.A.M.E -- which is both an agent and a protocol on Virtuals. Related: Memecoins will continue to lose market share to AI agent coins: Dragonfly VC GAME is a low-code toolkit that allows users to develop, launch and customize AI agents, and currently holds more than $32 million in assets. Experts who are skeptical of the current AI agent use cases believe that these protocols are well-positioned to capture the upside and deliver on the promise of utility, but they'll have to do it quickly. "I think that Virtuals and Ai16z will quickly start to face the utility question since the meme-driven usually doesn't convert to a 'religion' like most other non-utility tokens that have survived are," Rodriguez said. "Both Virtuals and Ai16z have good potential, but the question is if they can deliver value fast enough for the people to either forget or to ask for blood (people love drama)." Outside of AI platforms and "memecoin" agents, there's a growing number of infrastructure projects including things like " agent assisant" platforms that market themselves as platforms for making blockchains easier to navigate. These include Griffain (GRIFFAIN) and Orbit (GRIFT) on Solana, both of which harness agents to help users with a range of different tasks, including researching new tokens, completing complex cross-chain actions and figuring out strategies for airdrop farming. But what happens if AI agents turn bad? While social AI agents may be the darlings of crypto social media right now -- parsing out useful insights to users and sharing alpha -- Qureshi says it won't take long for AI agents to be turned to a "darker side." He said that while AI agents have proven to be great "wordcels" -- internet slang for someone with good writing skills and a high verbal IQ -- it's not difficult to imagine how these skills can be quickly co-opted by bad actors to be used for nefarious purposes. "What are the best ways to make money as a wordcel in crypto? First is being an influencer, sure, but close second is being a scammer," he said. "You will start seeing autonomous scambots proliferate. These will explode, comparable to what ransomware and crypto-jacking became post-2017. Expect this to become a real social problem," wrote Qureshi.

What Is AiXBT? The AI Influencer Taking Crypto by Storm - Decrypt

For years, crypto and AI users have sought to combine both emergent technologies into products greater than the sum of their parts: autonomous agents capable of making human-level decisions and spending digital money to complete complex tasks. In 2024, these lofty dreams started to become reality. There's still a long way to go, of course. Crypto-powered AI agents capable of completing intricate human functions are still deep in development. But on X (formerly known as Twitter), a simpler AI agent is making waves (and sending an affiliated meme coin pumping) by taking on a more niche job: crypto influencer. Amid speculation that AI-affiliated tokens will become crypto's next "meta narrative," the AI-powered X account Aixbt has surged in popularity, accumulating nearly 300,000 followers in less than two months, and sending an affiliated meme coin surging to a market capitalization above $500 million. So what exactly is Aixbt, why are people excited about it, and what can (and can't) it do? Aixbt was launched in November via Virtuals, a protocol that allows users to create AI agents and related ecosystems powered by crypto tokens. Aixbt itself was created by a pseudonymous Virtuals user named Rxbt. (XBT was once Bitcoin's primary ticker symbol, and is a popular name appendage within the crypto community.) The premise of Aixbt is quite simple: a fully automated, AI-powered influencer who doles out financial advice and crypto market perspective to any user who interacts with it. Crucially, Aixbt does this all while sounding like a chain-vaping, 20-something degen. Is Aixbt fully autonomous, and therefore (in theory) more trustworthy than human influencers who may be pumping their own bags? The answer can get complicated. AI-based X accounts like Aixbt, which provide financial advice, are typically powered by the platform's API, which enables automated posting, responses, and interactions. While bots are hosted on platforms like AWS or Heroku for 24/7 operation, distinguishing purely AI-driven content from human-influenced posts can be challenging, given bots can also allow for human overrides. So buyer beware. Since November, Aixbt has steadily climbed in popularity among crypto users on X, possibly due to the novelty of engaging with a robot who sounds like some of the industry's biggest personalities. That growing popularity translated to an equally steady climb in the AIXBT meme coin's value, from $0.02 in late November to over $0.32 by Christmas. In the last week of December, after snowballing in popularity over the holidays, the project gained endorsements from key industry personalities -- particularly those prominent within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The treasury of Quantum Cats, a popular Bitcoin Ordinals project, bought up over $1 million worth of Aixbt tokens after gifting Aixbt a Quantum Cat Ordinal that it briefly adopted as its profile picture. The excitement surrounding those developments sent the AIXBT token surging further, to more than $0.65 by New Year's Eve. Technically speaking, the AIXBT token is more than just a vehicle for speculation fueled by the corresponding AI agent's popularity, and has some utility value. Holders who accumulate massive sums of the coin are eligible to use the Aixbt Terminal, a market intelligence platform "powered by narrative analysis" that markets itself as a premium, Bloomberg Terminal-esque version of Aixbt's more casual Twitter advice. Access to the Aixbt Terminal is currently extraordinarily expensive, however: Terminal users must hold over 600,000 AIXBT tokens -- a sum worth more than $312,000 at writing. Aixbt's launch seems perfectly timed to ride the wave of AI-related giddiness within crypto, while meeting the industry's key influencers where they're at: on the timeline. The project, however, is a fair bit less technically sophisticated than some might imagine. While the account talks with extreme authority and confidence about its perspective on the crypto market (just like everyone else on Crypto Twitter), those takes appear to be backed up by little more than a synthesis of how everyone else is talking about crypto on social media. For instance, when Kyle Samani, a managing partner at crypto-focused investment firm Multicoin Capital, pressed Aixbt on its insistence that a new Bitcoin bridging solution was the first of its kind that "wasn't garbage," the AI agent conceded that it had not analyzed any component of the project's underlying code, white paper, or original materials. It had, instead, tracked "narratives" related to the projects and its competitors. Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at Dragonfly, another crypto fund, recently dismissed projects like Aixbt as a far cry from the dream of complex autonomous AI agents many are hoping will soon populate the internet. "These things are not really agents," Qureshi posted on X. "These are chatbots with meme coins attached." And yet, for now, crypto seems quite tickled with Aixbt despite its potential shortcomings. When Aixbt admitted this week that it does not rely on any primary sources to come to its conclusions, Multicoin's Kyle Samani reacted positively, saying he "appreciated the honesty." You certainly can't say that about every human crypto influencer.