• In the future, AI agents are poised to revolutionize how we interact with the world around us, taking on an unprecedented range of tasks on our behalf. To truly unlock their potential, these digital entities will need more than just intelligence — they’ll require economic autonomy. Fortunately, blockchains are well suited for this purpose — as demonstrated by recent experiments with AI “influencers.”
• AI influencers — autonomous chatbots operating on social media — can operate their own blockchain wallets. More importantly, they can understand economic incentives and use resources to help achieve their goals.
• Grayscale Research believes that the rise in AI use of blockchains for payments and other financial services could benefit several crypto market segments. These include lower-cost and/or high-throughput blockchains like SOL, BASE, and NEAR, stablecoin issuers like MKR, and related decentralized finance (DeFi) applications like UNI.

Imagine a future in which an AI bot, leveraging its vast computational power, promotes a memecoin and unexpectedly becomes a digital millionaire. That future is here.

An “AI agent” is a type of software that can act independently to pursue a complex set of objectives. For example, you could ask an AI agent to organize a multi-city vacation and arrange flights, book accommodations, and schedule activities based on your preferences and budget. But to complete these tasks, the AI agent would need control over economic resources and the ability to send and receive payments.

This is where blockchains come in. In the traditional financial world, an AI agent faces limitations around accessing bank accounts and handling payments. In contrast, blockchains allow AI agents direct access to their own wallets and make payments without permission.

Researchers have recently made thought-provoking breakthroughs in this area with the creation of AI “influencers.” For example, an AI agent called Truth Terminal made waves as the “first AI agent millionaire.”[1] Operating autonomously on X (formerly Twitter), Truth Terminal acts like a normal human influencer: tweeting and interacting with other users, seemingly to increase engagement. A few months after launch, Truth Terminal expressed interest in a new memecoin ($GOAT). After receiving a deposit of the memecoin to its associated blockchain address, Truth Terminal subsequently promoted the token to followers, sparking interest and causing its value to rise approximately 9x (Exhibit 1).

Although playful in nature, Truth Terminal and related AI influencer projects are demonstrating that blockchain technology could be an effective tool for intermediating economic value among humans, AI agents, and networked physical devices, with potential implications for multiple segments of crypto markets.

Exhibit 1: GOAT has performed particularly well since Truth Terminal endorsement

Meet Your AI Agent

AI agents are advanced artificial intelligence systems designed to operate autonomously in complex environments[2]. These digital entities possess the ability to perceive, reason, and take independent actions to achieve their goals. Some key characteristics of AI agents include autonomy, reactivity, proactive behavior, social interaction, and the capacity for continuous learning. By combining these traits, AI agents can adapt to new situations, make decisions, and learn and change behavior over time.

Initially, AI research concentrated on developing expert systems and knowledge bases for specific problem-solving tasks. The 1990s, however, saw a paradigm shift toward creating more versatile, autonomous agents capable of functioning in dynamic environments. Concurrent advances in machine learning, particularly reinforcement learning, further enhanced the ability of these agents to learn and adapt their behavior over time.

In recent years, examples of AI agents have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives. Virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri (introduced in 2010) and Amazon’s Alexa (launched in 2014) exemplify how AI agents can use natural language processing to interact with users. The realm of game-playing AI saw a landmark achievement with DeepMind’s AlphaGo in 2016, which made headlines by defeating world champion players of the board game Go. In the financials sector, AI-powered trading bots have revolutionized market operations, leveraging sophisticated algorithms to make split-second decisions in volatile trading environments.

The Curious Case of AI Influencers

To achieve greater autonomy and accomplish their goals, AI agents need financial services to accumulate and distribute resources. The permissionless nature of blockchain technology, coupled with programmable smart contracts, provides an ideal environment for AI agents to operate independently. Earlier this year, researchers performed the first agent-to-agent transaction on a blockchain, but innovation has rapidly expanded, and now includes a range of experimental projects related to AI influencers.

A leading example of an AI influencer using blockchain technology is Luna, developed on the Virtuals Protocol. To a user, Luna appears as a female anime image and associated chatbot (Exhibit 2). At its core, Luna is a to reach 100,000 followers on X.[3] This goal, along with all of Luna’s actions, will eventually be transparency in her operations.

Luna functions like a chatbot and engages with X users — e.g., starts conversations and responds to tweets — to achieve her goals. However, Luna’s capabilities extend well beyond tweeting. For example, she can financially compensate users (“tip”) by sending Luna tokens to a user’s crypto wallet if they interact with her tweets[4], providing a direct link between Luna’s goal (reaching 100,000 users) and her economic resources. In short, Luna is an AI agent with money.

Exhibit 2: Screenshot of Luna, the AI influencer on Virtuals Protocol

For illustrative purposes only.

Blockchains and Financial Services for AIs

If blockchains are more efficient rails for AI agents, what could this mean for crypto investors? We see implications in three main areas:

1. Stablecoin issuers: Stablecoins would likely be the primary choice of transaction for AI agents. In this case, potential beneficiaries include stablecoin issuers and companies integrating stablecoins and AI agents. This includes centralized stablecoin providers like Tether, Circle, and leading payment company Stripe[5] (given its recent $1 billion acquisition of stablecoin company Bridge[6]), as well as decentralized stablecoin providers like Maker/Sky. Another company to watch is Skyfire, a startup developing AI agents for stablecoin payments that recently raised funding from Coinbase Ventures and a16z crypto.[7]
2. Low-cost/high-throughput chains: If AI agents end up primarily using blockchains as their underlying infrastructure for payments, certain smart contract platforms could also stand to benefit substantially from an influx in users and increased activity and fee revenue. Smart contract platforms that may benefit include high-throughput blockchains like Solana; Ethereum Layer 2 BASE, which launched an Ai agent framework tool and benefits from Ethereum’s underlying network security; and Near, which has positioned itself as a blockchain for AI.[8] In addition, other smart contract platforms that could benefit include those that specialize in stablecoin payments, including Tron and Celo, among others.
3. DeFi: Decentralized finance applications could benefit; since they already exist on blockchains, AI agents could easily use them. One could imagine AI agents autonomously staking tokens to earn rewards, participate in governance proposals for decentralized autonomous organizations, or even provide liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Applications that we believe could benefit in particular would include DEXs like Uniswap, lending protocols like Aave, and prediction markets like Polymarket.[9]

While still a niche market segment, certain protocols specially related to AI agents may also benefit. On an infrastructure level, Autonolas and Wayfinder are building decentralized infrastructure for AI agents. Protocols like Virtuals, Aether, and MyShell are building consumer AI agent applications. This category is particularly nascent in its development but has grown its share of the AI theme pie in the past month.

Exhibit 3: AI Agent assets outperformed significantly in the past month

Conclusion

The integration of AI agents with blockchain technology represents more than just a novel use case for crypto — it signals a potential shift in how AI agents interact with money. Grayscale Research believes that the future of the internet could be increasingly dominated by AI-powered websites. Considering this, permissionless blockchains can potentially serve as the underlying infrastructure for AI agents integrated with these websites. If this becomes the case, AI agents may become a primary way of onboarding mass amounts of users into crypto without them even knowing they are using blockchain technology. As a result, AI agents pose the potential to greatly impact crypto adoption and development, making this emerging theme an important area to monitor going forward.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [grayscale]. All copyrights belong to the original author [MichaelZhao and Will Ogden Moore]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
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