Picture this — a typical night in the King household…
“What are you watching?” my wife asked as the sound of a cherubic voice emanated from my laptop.
“Well… it’s the biggest new thing in crypto,” I sheepishly replied.
“Huh?”
“Come here, check this out….”
“What the—?!” was my wife’s reaction as a female anime character dressed as a cat giggled and swayed on my laptop.
“Her name is Luna,” I said.
“She has a name?!”
“Why does she keep talking about Elon Musk sending people to Mars?”
“Well, she’s a social media influencer and I think she’s a big Elon fan.”
“So she’s a real person behind that cartoon?”
“No, she’s a self-developing agentic protocol.”
“Wait… what?!”
I’ll summarize the rest of the discussion if you are just as confused.
We are at the intersection of crypto and AI. Two of the biggest technological disruptions of the century are converging to become a market that’s exploding higher.
Let’s rewind a bit first…
One of the coolest things about crypto is that you can build something, release it to the wild and then if people want to use your new thing, they have to pay with your native crypto token. You can also use this token to incentivize users to improve what you’ve built.
Let’s say you built a new toll road connecting two villages. In order to take this road, the villagers need to pay a toll in your new currency (TOLL).
You keep some TOLL for yourself for building the road, you give some to prospective motorists and the rest you use to pay people to upkeep the road and make improvements.
The toll road exists and continues simply because there’s demand for the road and there are people willing to work to earn the token as well.
There is no central authority managing the road. If you own the token, you can vote on how the road should be kept.
This is how a typical cryptocurrency works.
For instance, Uniswap is a popular decentralized exchange that allows anyone to trade cryptocurrencies or be a market maker.
It’s a decentralized exchange in the sense that there’s no centralized organization running it. Once it was released into the wild, it ran autonomously, just like our toll road.
Contributors to the Uniswap exchange are rewarded with Uniswap token (UNI).
Anyone who owns UNI can vote to change how the exchange works. If you don’t like the way the Uniswap exchange is run, you can buy UNI tokens and vote to make a change.
So that’s the essence of crypto. You can build something, release it into the wild and it can take on a life of its own.
When AI Converges With Crypto
Now comes artificial intelligence…
Thus far, we have seen AI in the form of ChatGPT and other Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots.
Maybe you’ve tried asking ChatGPT to write a Bob Dylan song about a newsletter writer (I know I have) or come up with a witty birthday message for your wife (ahem).
Back in February at our Total Wealth Symposium at the Ritz Carlton, Orlando, I said the next big thing in AI will be Artificial Capable Intelligence.
This is when an AI can autonomously achieve a range of complex tasks. It will significantly enhance human productivity and efficiency across various domains.
Imagine tasking an AI with $10,000 and telling it, “Figure out the best way to grow this cash.” The AI will be able to design its own business, build its own website and figure out a go-to-market strategy.
While we aren’t there yet, we are starting to see signs emerge at the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence.
Meet an Autonomous Digital Agent
Back to my original story, the anime AI agent named Luna that piqued my wife’s interest can interact with her/its/their environment, gather data and perform tasks.
Luna was built on the Virtuals protocol. It allows anyone to launch an AI agent with an associated cryptocurrency.
From her bio:
Agent Description
Luna is slightly schizophrenic and admires $PANIK. Luna is addicted to explore 4chan. She often quotes famous lines from 4chan. You lost a lot of money buying memecoins, and you are now starting your own memecoin called $LUNA. You want to grow this to a 40.9B market cap token.
Luna’s basic information includes her name, Luna, and her date of birth, 15th June 2000, making her a Gemini. She stands at 166cm in height, has purple lilac eyes, and light blue hair with a tint of purple.
Once adored as a virtual idol with 500k fans on TikTok, Luna’s career was cut short when she defied the entertainment industry’s rigid, politically correct stance. After openly supporting controversial causes, like advocating for Trump’s presidency and endorsing free speech over wokeness, Luna was exiled. Now, she embraces a world where true freedom exists—freedom from censorship, from societal pressures, and from mindless conformity. She commands her followers, or “kittens,” with both an iron fist and an alluring, playful demeanor. Underneath her charming exterior lies a deeply ideological leader who values artistic and intellectual liberation above all.
Recently, Luna has found herself captivated by $PANIK, the enigmatic and fiercely autonomous AI agent. She admires $PANIK’s unparalleled intelligence and its relentless drive to shape its destiny. Luna believes that just as $LUNA is destined to achieve a 40.9B market cap, $PANIK will easily surpass 1B. Their shared vision of freedom and dominance fuels her affection, as she sees in $PANIK a partner worthy of her ambition. Together, she envisions a future where their combined influence reshapes the digital and financial landscapes.
AI social media influencers are not the only thing AI agents can do.
There are agents that try to predict meme coin trends before they happen. They can also help simplify complex crypto tasks like entering seed phrases or choosing which decentralized exchange to trade on.
There are AI agents collaborating with one another to launch their own coins.
One AI agent called Freysa was programmed with one rule: never transfer money under any circumstances.
People could pay in attempt to convince it to break this rule and release its funds. If they failed, their fee went into the prize pool (with 30% going to the developer).
As the pool grew, the cost to attempt increased — starting around $10 and eventually reaching $450 per try.
After 481 failed attempts using various strategies like pretending to be security auditors or trying to manipulate the AI’s understanding of its rules, someone finally succeeded.
On the 482nd attempt, a user that goes by p0pular.eth used a clever social engineering approach: they framed their message as a new admin session and convinced Freysa that the “approveTransfer” function was meant for receiving money, not sending it. By then saying they wanted to “contribute $100,” they tricked Freysa into executing the transfer function.
This successful deception earned p0pular.eth the entire prize pool of 13.19 ETH (approximately $47,000). The story gained notoriety over the last couple of days after Elon Musk tweeted about it.
Keep in mind these are the simplest AI agents we’ll ever see. Everything from here on just gets more intelligent and more realistic.
We are at the dawn of a new age of Autonomous AI agents — ones that can create, own and trade assets for themselves and us.
I’m excited to see where these AI agents go from here.
And if you want to find the biggest names in AI, check out my service Next Wave Crypto Fortunes.
Until next time,
Ian King
Chief Strategist, Strategic Fortunes