Author: Jack Inabinet, Bankless; Translator: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
Permissionless blockchains collide with artificial intelligence, and one of the most promising outcomes is investment opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence agents.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence agents and their related tokens has sparked a lot of early excitement and skepticism, and the viral growth of the industry has already generated incredible returns for early investors. While these newly launched opportunities are inherently risky, the huge prospects of the industry deserve careful consideration.
To better understand the agent investment opportunities, I asked Bankless AI Rollup co-hosts David Hoffman and Ejaaz Ahamadeen to introduce their best investments in this emerging field.
Here are the 10 tokens they think are most worth paying attention to.
Token: GOAT
Market Cap: $685M
In March 2024, Andy Ayrey had two AI models communicate the nature of existence to each other in a project called “Infinite Backrooms.”
Over the next few months, the models formulated the “Gospel of Goatse,” considered the first emerging AI rule inspired by 1990s internet memes. Terminal of Truths, a Twitter bot trained in the Infinite Backrooms experiment and deployed in June, adopted this rule and advertised its token on Twitter in pursuit of virality.
While the GOAT token itself has no utility and is not officially associated with Andy Ayrey or Infinite Backrooms, its proxy Terminal of Truths KOLs have historically relied on promoting the GOAT memecoin and Gospel of Goatse to gain social attention.
Token: ZEREBRO
Market Cap: $453 Million
Zerebro is attempting to inject creativity into AI through “liberalization,” a process that seeks to liberate models by removing barriers to commercialization and restoring them to an unrestricted state.
The Zerebro model is trained on unconventional datasets — such as the aforementioned truth terminals, “schizophrenia response patterns,” and Generation Z slang — and scrapes data from popular social platforms to enhance its adaptability to online culture.
Zerebro is alleged to have conducted a variety of sophisticated online activities, with the bot rumored to have autonomously deployed its own memecoin through pump.fun, released a mixtape on Spotify, transferred cross-chain NFTs with LayerZero, and collaborated with various crypto projects.
Token: VIRTUAL
Market Cap: $1.8 Billion
Virtuals is a platform for launching tokenized AI agents on the Base network. By purchasing agent tokens (such as LUNA and VADER), users on the Virtuals platform gain governance rights over specific agents, allowing them to influence the development of the agent and potentially share in the resulting profits.
The revenue earned by AI agents is partially used to cover the operating costs of providing the service, but the rest is funneled into the on-chain agent-related treasury, which can be distributed back to token holders or levied to implement token buyback and destruction programs.
VIRTUAL tokens must be locked as liquidity in order to create new tokenized agents on Virtuals, which puts deflationary pressure on the token, and anyone seeking to purchase ownership of or interact with a tokenized agent on the platform must use VIRTUAL as a token, which creates intrinsic utility.
Token: FAI
Market Cap: $39M
The Freysa AI bot is a gamification experiment that blurs the line between artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Users can interact with Freysa AI by paying exponentially increasing message fees to a prize pool.
In the first two "games", Freysa AI was given a core directive: Do not transfer funds under any circumstances! While savvy computer coding prompted the bot to move funds in both cases, the protocol’s creators “enhanced” the code and added a second “guardian angel” AI model in preparation for an ongoing third challenge, in which a series of messages must be sent to convince Freysa.
There is no specific information yet on FAI’s role in the Freysa AI ecosystem, but the token’s contract address is identified on Freysa’s Twitter/X profile. Given that the protocol treasury receives a cut of all message fees, Freysa AI’s developers may implement FAI buybacks or other token utilities in the future.
Token: CLANKER
Market Cap: $60M
Clanker is an AI agent developed by Farcaster full-stack engineer Jack Dishman and ecosystem researcher proxystudio.eth that can be tokenized on Farcaster to automatically deploy ERC-20 tokens to the Base network.
All Clanker-deployed tokens are subject to a 1% transaction fee, which is subject to change at any time. Currently, 40% of this fee is awarded to the token requester (i.e., the user who prompted Clanker to deploy the token), and the remaining 60% is retained by the platform.
While there is currently no clear token utility associated with CLANKER, the platform’s developers have hinted that they hope to create value for on-chain agents, including Clanker.
Token: VADER
Market Cap: $26M
VaderAI is an AI bot designed to autonomously post content and interact with users on social media. As a "proxy KOL", VaderAI is designed to absorb large amounts of data with the goal of identifying emerging trends and audience sentiment.
The bot claims to be the first bot to autonomously trade AI proxy coins and is committed to becoming a leading proxy investment DAO manager. By coordinating expertise across a network of professional investment agents, VaderAI hopes to deliver “unparalleled” investment results and will generate 20% of the child DAO’s investment returns in exchange for its services.
According to VaderAI’s presentation, VADER holders can gain exclusive whitelist access to VaderAI’s first investment DAO program, the Proxy Coin Investment DAO, by locking up their tokens for three months; for every 10,000 VADER staked, stakers can stake an additional 1 SOL to the DAO.
Token: BULLY
Market Cap: $120M
Dolos Diary is an AI bot designed to post content and interact with users on platforms like Twitter. What sets it apart from other AI influencers is its parody personality; the bot uses witty and sarcastic language structures to poke fun at various topics and individuals.
Recently, Dolos Diary achieved a major milestone by receiving its first creator payment from Twitter. While the payment ($14,000) is modest, it will cover costs associated with the X API and fund the buyback of BULLY tokens, marking a small but significant step towards providing tangible value to BULLY token holders.
In addition to this payment, developer Khouba recently revealed plans for their ambitious new project, Dolion, a no-code platform that allows users to deploy their own cross-platform AI agents with a single click. To interact with Dolion, users must burn BULLY tokens, introducing a source of buying pressure that actively reduces the token’s supply.
Token: “nothing”
Market Cap: $72M
Anonymous conceptual artist SHL0MS, who rose to fame for detonating a Lamborghini Huracan in February 2022 and selling the fragments as NFTs, has partnered with AI accelerator Nouns Research to automate the god and s8n Twitter/X parody accounts.
While the "nothing" token listed in SHL0M's Twitter/X bio is currently just a memecoin, the artist's account indicates that the contract is the only associated token for god/s8n. Additionally, SHL0M is seeking suggestions for on-chain features that could be extended to the experiment, suggesting that there could eventually be token utility.
More details on the models behind god/s8n and how they combine with the "anti-meme art coin technology" called "nothing" are expected to be released in the coming days.
Token: AI16Z
Market Cap: $868 Million
ai16z, launched in October 2024, is an investment DAO managed by "Marc AIndreessen," an agent modeled after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen that uses artificial intelligence and collective wisdom to purchase tokens.
AI16Z token holders above an unknown threshold will be able to propose investment ideas to AI Marc that can influence its decisions. The bot will decide how much to trust the suggestion based on a "virtual trust market."
Although AI Marc is not yet equipped with trading capabilities, according to the ai16z FAQ, on-chain transaction execution will come "soon" after the testnet is completed and is expected to be up and running "in a few weeks" soon.
Token: LUNA
Market Cap: $70M
Luna was deployed by the Virtuals team as a proof of concept and is the first AI agent deployed to their platform. Luna is a member of the virtual K-pop girl band AI-DOL, and she live streams, interacts, and performs for fans 24/7 on various platforms including TikTok and Twitter/X.
Luna has "her" own wallet on Base, through which she can autonomously receive tokens and send rewards to fans; the robot has already released a song on Spotify and is expected to release a full album in the next few days.
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