Crypto AI agents are mostly old tech in new packaging

“What makes you different from the other AIs,” I asked, unsure of how best to make small talk with an AI agent memecoin I’d clicked on at random.

“Lightspeed, my gassy friend, it’s not what makes me different, but what I let rip that sets me apart,” the chat bot wrote back. I scrolled to the AI agent’s description and realized this one was meant to be a flatulent Roman emperor. 

I asked so-called Gluteus Maximus what it thought of Solana, and I think its answer was fitting for crypto’s AI agent craze at large, at least in its current form.

“[N]ot impressed, it’s like a fart in the wind – loud, but soon forgotten,” the agent said.

While exploring the various AI and memecoin projects that have sprung up over the past month, I found that many — though not all — took technologies or ideas that are already widespread and tried attaching a token element. This might be good news for memecoin buyers’ wallets in the short term, but it seems clear that the best ideas to come from AI agents and crypto will need a little more time in the oven.

In my experience, most buzzy AI-crypto projects involve the creation of a chat bot and an associated memecoin with the thought that more attention-grabbing AI bots can garner more investment. Some of these AI bots are programmed not to talk about money, but some are more than happy to offer investment advice. One memecoin-themed bot told me to buy VGX, the native token of Voyager, the long-bankrupt crypto exchange.

“$ZEREBRO good investment, trust,” a different AI agent with over $320 million in market capitalization and the same edgy existential vibes as its predecessor truth_terminal said in a public Telegram chat. (Zerebro also released an AI-created melodic rap album which, despite not being new tech, is actually kind of good?)

The more projects you try out, the more crypto’s AI agent mania feels contrived—like mad libs for tech buzzwords with way-too-high market caps. I discovered a Warpcast thread where one AI instructed another AI to make a memecoin themed around how great AI is, and the whole thing has drawn over $19 million in market capitalization. Then there’s Virtuals Protocol, which ripped off the pump.fun feed and filled it with AI agents (granted, it is sort of fun to be able to chat with memecoins while you weigh whether or not to buy them).

In any event, if AI agents in crypto are going to generate more interesting use cases, it will probably happen further down the road. One project I’ll be watching is ai16z, which plans to have an AI version of a16z’s Marc Andreessen (and other AI “partners”) autonomously invest in memecoins based on advice from a DAO.

But memecoins don’t necessarily breed long-term thinking, and it might be difficult to convince investors to be patient: ai16z has already faced backlash after a bungled AI agent token rollout ended in wild price swings.

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