Would you let an AI agent decide your crypto strategy?
As I've moved further into crypto, I've finally started to understand digi-currency humour. There's so much I don't grasp in this space that it's a noteworthy triumph.
My favourite giggle of late comes from a meme featuring a therapist and patient, captioned: 'Is the AI agent in the room with us now?'
People keep saying that artificial intelligence (AI) agents are one of the narratives of the upcoming — supposedly — crypto bull run. I'm still not sure I understand any of it, but I'm going to give it a try.
So, what is an AI agent?
In simple terms, AI agents are autonomous systems running on software that can perceive their environment, process information, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals – often on behalf of a human, company, or industry. Unlike static, pre-programmed traditional software, AI agents are adaptive. Like humans — eek! — they evolve through learning and experience.
Like clockwork
Think Siri or Alexa, but on steroids. An AI agent doesn't just remind you to buy groceries — it actually orders them each week. It would go beyond suggesting investments to rebalancing your portfolio. I suppose one could manage that tiresome school WhatsApp chain for you too. In business, AI agents are already proving useful in everything from customer service and supply chain management to IT support and risk analysis. The next frontier? AI agents working with other AI agents. This emerging area — called multi-agent systems, agent-to-agent collaboration, or more dramatically, a swarm — involves coordinated networks of AI entities completing tasks together, often without human intervention. Yikes is right.
And while most people are getting used to this new way of things through mainstream tools like Anthropic's Claude or Microsoft's Co-Pilot, radical innovation is happening in the decentralised world, too, away from traditional tech. And that's why I am starting to believe that when it comes investing in this new space, tokenised AI projects are where it's at.
It's really interesting and, like everything in crypto, very speculative. Once you start exploring this space, you'll find everything from productivity agents to niche AI-driven trading bots. I've already experimented with (and immediately lost money) investing in transaction-based projects like SoloChain and The SWARM, from CryptoSlam.
Projects like ai16z use agents to make real-time investment decisions. On Solana, Goatseus Maximus offers what is considered the first AI-managed venture capital platform. Virtuals Protocol provides a platform for developers to create and deploy AI agents across various Web3 applications. Bittensor offers an entire decentralised marketplace for AI models, built on its very own blockchain.
One of the buzziest new players is a trading assistant called MIND of Pepe, which has been trained on more than 60,000 crypto tweets and 3,000 market insights, according to The Cryptonomist.
Of course, aside from investing, we all still need to get over the biggest hurdle in adopting AI agents, especially for financial or high-stakes tasks. And that is trust. Will the agent do what it's supposed to? Safely and securely? What could go wrong with a swarm?
I'm sure you are feeling a tonne of resistance. I am too. But the truth is, we are already using AI agents as they become integrated into almost everything we do.
Over the past few weeks, I've been working with Underlord, a new AI tool from the editing platform Descript. It's been helping me produce the Hotflash inc podcast — removing filler words, laying music under ads, adding in sound effects as quickly as I can write 'add a whoosh sound here', and, when I get around to it, adding B-roll and graphics to video. I just have to type in what I need it to do, and it does it. I can refine and correct as needed. It's genuinely next-level. I'm already wondering how much more smoothly my platform would run, swarm-style, if Underlord could talk with a counterpart connected to my YouTube, Instagram, and Substack accounts.
Market share
One thing is for sure: there is not only a productivity leap here but also huge market potential. According to ICOhodler.com, citing Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, tokens tied to AI agents are expected to grow from $15 billion to $60 billion (Dh55 billion to Dh220 billion) in market capitalisation this year alone.
My take here is, feel the fear and do it anyway. Every generation has its technological reckoning. The printing press. The combustion engine. The telephone. The Internet. Smartphones. AI agents are just what's next. Like all that came before, they're arriving whether we're ready or not.
I'm not here to tell you to invest. I'm suggesting that it's time to understand where this innovation is happening, who's building it — and how we might thoughtfully participate.
If only there was an AI agent for that.
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