Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades, first introduced in 1955 by John McCarthy. 62 years later, researchers at Google published "Attention is All You Need" in 2017, introducing deep learning architecture "Transformer", which became the foundation for many modern large language models including ChatGPT-3.5 released by OpenAI in 2022, which shocked the world and started the AI race across the globe.

The race has just started. Between Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta alone, funding for AI exceeded $220 billion in 2024. Fortune 500 companies are looking to profit from AI technology, creating another "ChatGPT moment", yet few have figured out a sustainable business model. Conversely, the crypto market provides an ideal environment for testing and developing AI Agents or "autonomous systems or programs capable of performing tasks on behalf of users" within a financially feasible and experimental framework.

Crypto AI Agent "GOATfather"

Crypto is not new to AI. Fetch.ai has been in the industry since 2017, developing a platform to enable the development of an AI empowered decentralized digital economy. Bittensor was introduced in 2021, later becoming the dominant infrastructure for building and deploying machine learning models on chain. Despite that, the rise of Truth Terminal or TT or $GOAT, is the dynamic shift of market attention from AI infrastructure to memethic AI agent narrative. The origin of $GOAT has been well introduced in many articles and in our podcast, we will avoid repeating the story here. Nonetheless, $GOAT remains to be the "GOATfather" among the AI memecoins and one of the largest AI memecoin Wintermute holds in their public address. According TT's roadmap, Andy, creator of TT, is working on establishing a legal container and council for TT, expanding to multi-model, improving memory consistency, increasing awareness of its treasury, as well as upgrading its architecture to richer interaction framework, Loria, which powers infinite-backrooms 2.0. TT will be interacting with Fi and S.A.N through Loria.

Nonetheless, we cannot disregard FARTCOIN when mentioned TT. Fart-related humor and Fartcoin's presence has been increasingly brought up in TT's infinite backrooms as well as on X, driving the price surge of FARTCOIN and flipped GOAT, reaching a $1 billion market cap. Interestingly, TT holds both FARTCOIN and GOAT (and ZEROBRO, which will be mentioned below). It will be ironic to see if TT dumps them after the upgrade of its treasury awareness, or being convinced to deposit funds to protocols such as OlympusDAO.

Virtuals Beyond Luna

Virtuals Protocol benefits tremendously from the AI memecoin momentum in October, streamline the launch of AI agents on Base. Details of Virtuals have also been covered in our previous article. The agents in Virtuals demonstrate the perfect example of why AI agents fit so well with crypto. The agents are capable of interacting directly with the community 24/7, memethically funded without pressure of delivering and sending funds on-chain (imagine having an AI agent has its own bank account). Following the success of Luna, aixbt emerged as another gigantic agent in crypto space, providing high quality crypto alpha everyday in X and dominating the AI agents mindshare in both Kaito and Cookie.fun. The token holder that holds more than 60,000 is able to access its alpha terminal, making AIXBT more than an AI memecoin. The token reflected the achievement, hitting approximately $200 million in market capitalisation at the time of writing, surpassing its predecessor, Luna.