AI agents are going parabolic. Every week, new agents are launching, usually with the purpose of promoting a specific token. In these early days, they look like just another form of memecoin: now you can launch a coin like $GOAT, and build an AI agent that grows a following to propagate the meme.

But how does this evolve moving forward? One major change is that the these agents will subtly shift from promoting random memecoins to promoting themselves. That is, these agents will have their own tokens, which grow in value as the agent becomes more prominent.

These “ownable agents” could be this cycle’s step function unlock – the analog to NFTs or DeFi last cycle.

In the past, I was skeptical of AI agents. It wasn’t clear that their market timing was right, or that we were attracting the necessary talent. Here’s why I’ve changed my mind:

1. Distribution - AI agents like @truth_terminal and @luna_virtuals have proven that at minimum, today’s agents are powerful enough to build distribution.
2. Ease of Creation - Developers have easy-to-use APIs to build agents on existing LLMs; they no longer need to be experts. Projects like @vvaifudotfun are building low-code/no-code interfaces, allowing anybody to build an agent.
3. Memecoins - the memecoin token issuance meta has revealed a successful form factor for launching and propagating AI agent coins. In the beginning, these agents don’t need to do economically productive tasks that generate value for their tokens; they merely need to get attention, just like memecoins.
4. Excitability - But to become truly massive, AI agents can’t just promote memecoins; the market must be given a vision, a roadmap, of where these agents could go. That is, these projects must tell the market that what today is just a memecoin-that-shills-itself will become a trader, or a software engineer, or an artist, that will one day be worth many billions of dollars. And since their bootstrapping will partially manifest in them building distribution, they actually are becoming more valuable as they become more popular.

Let me elaborate on the last point. In order for something to catalyze a whole crypto adoption cycle, there must be a story that can be told to the market that is so grand that it breaks into the mainstream and attracts new users and capital. That story must be both believable and exciting.

AI agents fit the mold. Not only do these agents truly feel novel, but they’re being legitimized by the traditional tech world. AI agent companies are now being founded by world-class founders, and are getting backed by some of the strongest VC firms (see @agency, for example). But many investors have no access to these companies – they can’t even buy decade old companies like Stripe or SpaceX – so they’ll get exposure through crypto.

In some ways, it’s similar to the Metaverse narrative of last cycle. Those projects overstated themselves, but sold the market on grand visions legitimized by events external to crypto, like the rise of remote work during Covid and Facebook’s renaming to Meta.

And although many of these projects will be vacuous, some could be revolutionary. AI agents are becoming more agentic, and it’s possible that as the crypto market scales, strong AI developers capable of building economically productive agents realize that tokenizing their agents is a promising business strategy. Tokenized agents will give them faster liquidity, a higher valuation, and easier distribution than a traditional SaaS company.

In the short-term, the most important thing for the AI agent sector in crypto is to continue building distribution. I’m optimistic on their ability to do so for 3 reasons:

1. Existence proof - we’ve already seen existence proofs from Truth Terminal and others that agents can build large audiences. I expect many more to follow.
2. Incentives - if there’s a speculative mania for AI agents, finding and following these agents could be highly profitable. The gold rush in crypto will help build their distribution.
3. Iterative Improvement - There is going to be an iterative process towards building more attention-grabby agents. For example, the zerebro whitepaper explains how the agent monitors its likes, shares, comments, and other engagement metrics to refine its content creation towards higher engagement. There will be iteration both at the model-level and at the market-level towards more and more magnetic content.

If we subscribe to the attention theory of value, a direct consequence of the growing attention on agents is an increase in their value.

All of this is very early, and predicting the future is never easy – future agents will look very different from our current ones. But at minimum, AI agents have the market and technical tailwinds to become the next major category of crypto assets.

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