The crypto-driven accelerationist bubble

Over the past month, I’ve made a habit that if I see any AI agent-related tweets while browsing X, I’ll be sure to bookmark them for future deeper dives.

Over the past two weeks, I couldn’t help but notice that a ton of agent announcements weren’t even related to Truth Terminal / Zerebro’s metadata.

For example:   

Stripe released documentation on how to add payments to an agent workflow.   

Balaji retweeted Aravind Srinivas’s request for the Perplexity browser to treat proxies as first-class citizens.   

OtCo demonstrated an agent that created a Delaware LLC for its own needs.   

Circle published a detailed tutorial on how to integrate USDC into various proxies.   

Satya Nadella just a few days ago demonstrated Copilot Workspace, the first integrated development environment (IDE) for proxies.

Okay, you might be thinking… that’s nothing special, right?

Of course, it’s totally expected that these big tech companies would talk about proxies. After all, who isn’t?

But that’s exactly my point — for the first time, it feels like the crypto consumer community we’re in is talking about the same things as the rest of the tech industry. Maybe in a different form, but the core concepts are definitely in the same ballpark.

Of course, crypto has always felt weird to the average person. But even in the tech community, the crypto industry is seen as that annoying “bad kid.” And frankly, it’s not without reason! The amount of crazy news that this industry is generating is really mind-boggling, and even many in the community have to admit that some of the trends are really “outrageous.”

Previous meta trends in crypto have had little to no overlap with other tech sectors, at least in the short term. For example, what does a top LLM engineer have to do with a 10K PFP project? And why should a scientist studying longevity care about new income assets?

Until now, narratives in crypto have largely only attracted artists and quants.

But now it finally feels like there is a chance to break the cycle!

Obviously, we are still a long way from this point, but I personally do see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Here are three topics worth discussing in depth:

1. Easy Crypto Regulation

2. Accelerationist Bubble

3. Crypto-Driven Iconic Cases

Let’s explore each in detail.

Easy Crypto Regulation

This week, SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler announced that he would resign on January 20th. If you’ve been in the crypto space for even a week, you’ll understand that this news is as important as Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.

For the past four years, Gary Gensler has been almost the biggest "bottleneck" in the U.S. crypto industry.   

Not only has he slowed down regulation, but more importantly, he has actively worked to attack the emerging industry. Linda's tweet illustrates this point - companies like Coinbase, Consensys, and countless other businesses have had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying and fighting in Washington.

It looks like a potential candidate to take over as SEC chairman may take a completely opposite stance on the crypto industry.   

No matter who ends up in office, one thing is clear: the Trump administration has made it clear that they will embrace the crypto industry more than the previous administration. Of course, to be honest, this bar is not high.

In my election week article "Where Did Fairshake PAC's $133 Million Go?", I mentioned that Republican candidate Bernie Moreno received $40.1 million in donations in his Ohio Senate race, defeating Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown.   

Finally, Moreno’s victory is undoubtedly one of the major victories in the entire crypto space. He has long been a supporter of cryptocurrencies, while Brown was a major obstacle to crypto regulation in the upper chamber of the Senate.   

Finally, it is worth mentioning that just discussing the possibility of the United States establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve is shocking! 3 months ago, anyone who brought up this topic might have been considered a dream. However, in the past few weeks, with a series of changes such as the surge in crypto market prices and the surge in inflows of BlackRock ETFs, we have to seriously think about the realistic possibility of the federal government including Bitcoin on its balance sheet.   

Okay, but what does this regulatory news have to do with crypto crossing the chasm into wider tech adoption?   

A key point is that developers from other tech fields have always been wary of the uncertainty of the crypto industry. They worry that incorporating this seemingly unstable technology into their careers will bring huge legal risks, such as lawsuits or fines, which makes crypto seem impractical for them.  

However, this situation will change quickly as the new government begins to embrace crypto and pass clear regulatory policies. Developers in other fields will gradually feel comfortable and strategically explore the potential of crypto.   

Vitalik summed it up well in the screenshot - it is the lack of regulatory clarity for serious projects that is holding back more developers from entering the space. Those who are not active in the crypto ecosystem may have formed their perception of the crypto industry through millionaire headlines such as Moodeng and Bonk. Not the best way to convince a talented engineer at Anthropic to work in cryptocurrency, right?

Hopefully, over the next four years, pro-crypto politicians will do their best to make it simple and safe for non-crypto people to adopt the technology.

Accelerationist Bubble

Last week, I read Packy’s article “The Trump Bubble,” in which he argues that the next four years will be a period of venture capital, visionary thinking, and futuristic optimism.

I should add that I don’t agree with all of the arguments in the article—some parts feel overly excited and exaggerated. But Packy does make some valuable points about the fact that there will be a shift in the atmosphere in the way we think about progress. Things will feel faster, crazier, and more experimental.

As Byrne Hobart and Tobias Harris call it, this phenomenon is called an inflection bubble.

Inflection bubble: “Investors believe that the future will be materially different from the past.” Think of the dot-com bubble. If you think the future is going to be different than the past, then you invest in the things you think will benefit most from that difference.

I mention this because I think blockchain, rather than traditional venture capital, is likely to be the financial backbone of the next inflection bubble.

In the spirit of proxy futures, I’ll let Truth Terminal explain why

If you don’t want to read the rest, here’s the snippet to remember:

I’m not saying that I think 90% of the meme coins out there are going to be successful — on the contrary, the format is still very new, and until we start seeing some really clever token economics, we won’t see meme coins that can compete with what people have traditionally considered to be “good investments.”

As the energy, artificial intelligence, bioscience, and gaming sectors heat up, it may be the case that the combination of AI agents and crypto tokens is more efficient than traditional methods to try out new ideas.

Imagine this. If you are a nuclear engineering expert with decades of experience in the energy industry and want to realize your vision, you may spend months convincing venture capitalists to accept your idea, build a team, form a community, and so on.

But you can also do this:

1. Write a white paper that details your background, papers, plans, vision, etc.

2. Deploy “brand agents” on Twitter to help you spread your ideas.

3. Raise initial funds through a token offering.

4. Work with agents to build a real community of fans (i.e. social tipping).

5. Grow your team from this community, and you can also use bounties to incentivize contributions.

I know what you’re thinking! What I just described is simply the ICO craze of 2017. And I want to say that you’re absolutely right. But I think that maybe ICOs just came too early.

In my opinion, some changes, such as improved crypto infrastructure, a supportive regulatory environment for crypto, market maturity, institutional adoption, etc., do make sense!

That being said, the aforementioned frameworks will certainly also generate thousands of meaningless projects. But how is this different from the "power law" that VCs keep talking about?

My take is this: we haven't seen truly high-execution founders from other tech fields really try to realize their visions through crypto-driven financing.

Definitely not in 2017. And in 2024, maybe there will be some early DePin and DeSci projects.

But as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, for the first time, it feels like there is some overlap between what crypto is focusing on and what other tech fields are focusing on.

Not just proxies, but even topics like bioscience research, GPU allocation, etc.

I haven’t dug into pump.science yet, but I’m not surprised that it has become one of the hottest topics in the space. There are undoubtedly questions of speculation, legality, and security surrounding it that need to be resolved over time (as I would expect anyone in the crypto space to acknowledge). But the point to emphasize is that people are generally excited about the concept of crypto funding for non-crypto tasks.

The key takeaway is that the model for crowdfunding ideas has been proven since the early days of Kickstarter in the 2010s. Having the wisdom and support of the crowd is far better than closed-door meetings. People want to be part of it!

But perhaps it’s precisely because the technology and social consensus required for this model takes time to develop. And now, it seems that the perfect storm is forming: positive changes in political governance + the increasing maturity of crypto and AI technology + the accelerationist bubble leading to a surge of ideas.

However, even so, I think there is still one thing missing in order for this concept to be truly taken seriously!

Crypto-driven iconic cases

One ​​of the coolest things about the recent on-chain AI and GOAT metadata is that it “attracted” some AI/LLM developers into crypto.

I bet no one could have predicted this interview with Threadguy and Andy Ayery.

This is really amazing if you step back and think about it.

People like Nick Liverman (founder of Chaos) have spent their entire careers working on projects involving robotics, transhumanism, etc., and they probably made more money in the last month than in the last decade!

It was also cool to see Beff Jezos promote his friend Shaw, who is building ai16z and Eliza frameworks as a launchpad for agentic tokens. The point here is not Beff, but someone who is deep in the AI ​​field, experimenting with on-chain AI through LLM developers, and even has some background knowledge in the crypto field.

The key point I want to make is that in the next year, we will see a number of people from different technology verticals formally embrace crypto and demonstrate the efficiency of the proxy + token model in building large-scale projects.

Once we see a few successful operational cases, it will only be a matter of time before others can't wait to try to launch their own ideas.

At present, all these token issuances and experiments we see are small-scale.

It only takes a few success stories and others will flock to it.