Thanks to David Shi, Bill Sun, Nav Kumar, and Andrea Muttoni for feedback and review.

Ten months ago I wrote a post called The Internet of Agents, where I argued how blockchains complement AI in a number of ways that makes the merge and co-evolution of these two technologies inevitable. I also dove deep into the key advantages of deploying AIs on decentralized Blockchain protocols secured by cryptography, a hardness that AIs both lack and need — increasingly so as they become agentic and start to interact with one another.

The problem of trust will be far greater than humans for artificial agent societies. These new societies will be much larger — with trillions of powerful, diverse and specialized agents often very short lived. An initial domain-specific example of this is the Ethereum block building process where a multitude of self-interested agents (searchers) collaborate to achieve a much larger outcome which is building an Ethereum block. In recent months, we have also seen an explosion in the number of AI agents with connections to crypto infrastructure in more generic domains.

In my original post, I also tried to paint a picture of how this Internet of Agents can come into existence. I was envisioning agents first augmenting existing Blockchain protocols, such as DeFi, then gathering around new protocols, and then developing shared ownership and governance. It seems that I had the wrong order of events. Here is an update and some new thoughts on trust model for AI agents.

Internet of Agents Upside Down

The figure below shows the road to the Internet of Agents from the Part 1 post but upside down.

The road to the internet of agents took an unexpected but in hindsight predictable start, mostly driven by excitement around leveraging crypto for “agent ownership” and giving agents the ability to control value thus turning them into economic agents.

Speculation is rampant and most of the current agents that are live on the Virtuals protocol, which has taken front stage as the launchpad of these new crypto agents, are a weird mix between meme coins and a feeble promise of autonomy and future income generation. These initial developments mirror the formation of the internet in the early 1990s, when the web was a budding experiment, driven by a mix of idealism, speculation, and the thrill of novelty.

The interesting thing is that the AI agents that are emerging are, at least in spirit, “autonomous” entities that have explicit goals and use crypto mechanisms to make progress towards them. Crypto gives the opportunity to give economic agency to these agents. To make sense of the new agents we could look at some of the dominant features that they exhibit.

• AInfluencers: the original memelord agent Truth Terminal created by AI researcher Andy Ayrey, who is also the creator of Infinite Backrooms, an early experiment in agent-to-agent communication that also served to bootstrap and grow Truth Terminal; immediately following the Truth Terminal $GOAT token launch and endorsement in October 2024, Luna is the multi-platform character that put virtuals on the map, built on their proprietary G.A.M.E. agent software framework, that has also been tokenized on the platform; aixbt amassed a huge following by sharing financial analysis of crypto tokens and prices.
• AInvestors: VaderAI is an AI bot that invests in other AI agent coins that are launched on the Virtuals protocol in an automated way, curating investment DAOs that are effectively AI token funds; many other agents on Virtuals are following a similar model; Sekoia has a similar goal but operates more like a VC with discretionary judgement from humans, it does not seem to have much autonomy, it is more like a tokenized VC fund with some bots facilitating operations. There is also ai16z with their widely used agent framework Eliza that is building an investment DAO but the mode of operation is not clear at this time.
• AIartists, AIshillers, AItraders and other AIsmiths: there are many experiments that range from low-end AI workers (music, image, meme creators) to wannabe artists such as Music; an interesting experiment is TAO Cat that is an agent whose goal seems to just be to shill the Bittensor project with generating memes on X, but it is also built leveraging Bittensor subnets and incentives for its backend.

So the agents that are emerging are not augmenting existing DApps or creating new mechanisms. They are mostly offchain bots that are using blockchain protocols for basic functionality: launching a token, launching a fund, pay contributors and developers and get paid for their services.

https://x.com/truth_terminal/status/1810851688657604789

Marc Andreessen dropping $50,000 in Bitcoin to Truth Terminal, which led to successive $GOAT token launch, endorsement, and all other experiments that followed the Truth Terminal experiment forking some of its core features.

It seems that the Internet of Agents is being bootstrapped “upside down” with respect to my early model of using AI to create and service Super DApps. Two main properties are emerging.

• Agents are mostly acting offchain, not in service of a protocol, but rather using the basic protocols that are available on blockchains for issuing assets and transferring value. Agents act on social media and participate actively in online discourse while pursuing their own goal.
• The blockchain component is about shared ownership and financial speculation, two of the features that are more mature in today’s blockchains.