Original article by: Haseeb , Managing Partner of Dragonfly
Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Translator: CryptoLeo ( @LeoAndCrypto )
Dragonfly partner Haseeb recently gave a speech on AI Agents in Denver. He divided the development of AI Agent into three stages and talked about the impact of AI on Crypto and the future expectations of AI and Crypto. Since the speech was long and complex, Odaily Planet Daily compiled it (first person) to simplify it for easy reading. Interested friends can click on the original link to watch the video. The following is a condensed version of the speech:
AI Agent Advancement: From Chatbots to Sovereign Agents
What we call AI Agents now are basically chatbots in trench coats - they type on X, send texts, thats not a real agent. Agents are meant to take actions, not just simply chat. For example, we have Chatgpt, which just talks to you, cant take actions in the world, cant buy you pizza, cant reply to your emails.
You have to manually decide what it can and cant do, which means no agents.
So the crypto industry has Truth Terminal, Zerobro, which we think of as AI Agents. But to me, these are just chatbots that can access Twitter APIs.
What is an Agent? Very simply, an Agent takes action.
I made a classification of AI Agents, and now we are at the far left of the classification, which I call Wizard of Oz Agent. It looks like you are talking to an artificial intelligence, but in fact there is someone behind the scenes to prevent the AI from going astray. ( Odaily Note: In the story, the protagonist finally discovered that the expected Wizard of Oz was just a scientist who manipulated the machine behind the scenes. Simply put, this type of Agent is a corpus of human-machine dialogue realized by one person playing the role of machine (called Wizard) and another person playing the role of human.)
For example, Truth Terminal is the originator of AI Agent in crypto. The person who created it made it clear that I can control the truth and the law and decide what it should and should not do. Almost all the agents we have seen so far, whether it is aixbt or zerobro, have a person behind the scenes to ensure that it does not do stupid things. We have used tools such as Chatgpt and deepseek, but sometimes it will do something crazy that you did not expect. If you have a token/brand, you don’t want a scandal after adopting this kind of AI.
The next stage is what I call Autonomous Agents, which are usually completely autonomous and can make all the decisions. It has no wallet, its not protected, you can easily hack these things, you can trick it into doing stupid things. Right now, autonomous agents are still in the experimental stage, they are far from strong enough artificial intelligence to allow them to develop.
The third stage is the sovereign agent. In the autonomous agent stage, there will still be individuals paying AWS bills for it, but the sovereign agent is actually an agent that pays its own GPU bill. It can control its own wallet and decide what it does and its future development, just like a virus that can survive on the Internet. We are still far away from this stage. Ironically, crypto is building tools that may make sovereign agents possible. You cant let a sovereign agent sign up for an AWS account, but you can definitely let it experience the decentralized market of crypto by signing up.
The impact of future AI agents on encryption
Software Engineering Agents, or the Murderers Who Destroy Crypto Software Engineers
The first agent that will change crypto is the software engineering agent. Fortunately, this has not really been realized yet. We know that the software market is a trillion-dollar market, and creating an agent that can replace software engineers is a huge opportunity. Openai Claude, rGok are all moving in this direction. And the cost of software is the main input in the crypto industry. When founders raise money, they spend it on the cost of software. It takes energy and focus to build these things, but if the cost of software goes down, what if we have a really powerful software engineering agent that can work and can replace human software engineers? This means that crypto founders, enterprises, startup products, etc. will be pulled down from the altar.
When you build a new chain, you think, how do I build on this chain? Where do I find people to build an asset management agreement, a loan agreement, or even an insurance agreement, etc.? The answer is that you just have to ask an agent to do it, which may cost thousands of dollars. This is something that most people dont really talk about in the crypto industry, but I think this will be one of the most disruptive impacts of AI agents on the crypto industry right now.
Some people will say that I pay attention to this because I am a VC. But the fact is that now projects may take time and finally get an MVP (minimum viable product) to show; but in the future, it may only take one night, and software engineering agencies will do these works. They are 24/7. Think back to the early days of the Internet. If you wanted to create a website in 1995, it meant that you had to buy a server and buy a hosting service, which was very expensive and a huge cost for venture capital. But now we live in a world where websites are basically free. For example, the cost of launching a website on GitHub or netify is almost zero. This does not mean that venture capital is useless. People still need money to start a business, but they will spend money on things other than designing software, which will have a huge impact on crypto.
AI-driven wallets revolutionize the crypto experience
The second is DeFAI, which we talk about a lot, which I prefer to call wallet automation, but I think people havent fully imagined how this will change crypto, like I want to have an agent use three different protocols at the same time through the wallet, and it will construct the transaction for me.
Imagine that your friend comes to you and asks: TRUMP is very popular recently, I want to invest, what should I do? Will you tell him how to download some crypto infrastructure, deposit and withdraw funds, and which website to buy, or he will say: I will transfer you money, can you help me buy it?
But with wallet automation, your friend can send an order to buy TRUMP: I dont want to see the specific information, you go check it. The agent will tell you that it is on Solana, liquidity data and various charts; it will first check the DNS to make sure it has not been hacked; it will check Twitter to make sure there is no rug pull; it will investigate the background of the founder. For people, all of this requires enough time and patience.
Another example is the Bybit hack some time ago. It was too late for people to find out that their funds had been transferred by hackers. What if AI is involved? AI will never skip a step, will never be lazy, will never get bored, and can always complete everything that a human can do at their best. It can extract all relevant knowledge from you, fact-check on your behalf, read white papers, and make decisions as your anthropomorphic body. Change your experience in crypto.
We may usually think about whether the project is on Solana or Ethereum, I don’t like Solana, I like Ethereum, these are all very subjective. But after AI intervenes, who cares? It doesn’t care whether it is Solana or Ethereum.
By then, after the intervention of AI, our thinking about blockchain, network effects, and ways of capturing value will be affected, which will greatly change the dynamics of the crypto industry.
AI agents stagnate under scarcity seeking
After Chatgpt appeared, there were many early predictions about the development of artificial intelligence leading to widespread unemployment. Although the AI robots we have come into contact with are very smart and intelligent, the expected large-scale unemployment has not occurred, and the employment rate remains high. This also reflects that AI capabilities are growing, but they are still out of touch with the development of the job market.
AI agents are slowly getting smarter, but until they become smart enough to even surpass humans, it is still irrelevant. Current agents still have limitations in some operations, especially in the field of encryption.
Think about something other than encryption, AI agents can help you buy items or order pizza like an operator, when you use AI to order pizza, it may give you the right pizza in 90% of the cases. But if your assistant has a 10% chance of ordering the wrong pizza, you will be very annoyed. This is also the position of AI agents currently, which feels magical and smart, but can only be regarded as a very poor human in terms of practicality, which is not worth it for us.
In crypto trading, I can’t give the autonomy of trading to a new form that only appeared a few years ago. AI is still too far away from human financial management. At present, it is at two extremes. Before the agent becomes good enough, it is still at a stage where almost no one adopts it.
Back to the crypto space, the AI Agents we see now are still mainly social. They can chat, have personality, and have memes. We can trade memes, but thats all. A few months ago, we were still following Truth Terminal. It was very interesting. It could talk about religion and tell funny jokes. It was very cool and widely spread, but these were just novelties. You will be amazed at some of the first times it can do, but as time goes by and various similar agents emerge, the more complex forms of autonomous operation of AI Agents that we expect have not appeared, and we will only feel bored. These are the only values we can get from AI Agents in our lives, which is why I think AI is a bit stagnant at the moment.
What AI KOLs are better than humans right now is that they can respond to every DM, they can interact with everyone. Over time, memes will die out, and AI agents will make money in a way that is almost no different from humans. They will also compete like us, through sponsorships, links, and eventually we will see AI agents become cheaper and more popular. When the market is flooded with various agents and bots, we will be eager to hear the voice of a real human.
When Stable Diffusion first appeared, we found it unbelievable, but now with more and more AIs appearing, we will only look for scarcity in them, looking for something new that is different from other agents.
The big problem with sovereign agents: people and AI in scams are indistinguishable
The impact of AI that I can predict at the moment is that AIs that are smarter than us will impersonate humans to make money, especially in the field of fraud. By then, they will get more views and coverage, and humans will suspect and accuse others of being a bot. It will become increasingly difficult for humans to prove that you are human on the future Internet.
Of the three stages of AI Agents I mentioned earlier, the most likely thing to happen in the future is that sovereign agents will specialize in the fraud industry. First, there are already very industrialized fraud methods, such as pig-killing trays. These are already largely automated, but they are still led by humans. You can turn off these autonomous AI agents through GPUs and find the people behind them. The scammers are very afraid that you will find out where they are through some paths.
But in the future, if an AI uses a decentralized cloud service to pay for its own GPU, it will be hard to find which GPUs in the decentralized GPU market are scamming. It basically owns itself and runs its own wallet, no one can summon it, no one can stop it. How do you know where it lives? If it is naturally evolving, it will buy a bunch of Bitcoin to ensure its survival, and then buy a bunch of GPUs and replicate itself as much as possible.
This is what I think the future of sovereign agents will be at the intersection of AI and cryptocurrencies. Now it’s obvious that these agents will not use normal funds, they will not have an account at JPMorgan Chase. AI agents are also not subject to our laws, they don’t own a person or have property rights, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t belong to any country. This is going to be very scary and will cause big problems for the crypto industry, but it’s obviously going to take a long time to get to this point.
Conclusion
The intersection of cryptocurrency and AI will be very rich in the future, but this depends largely on the development of AI and its integration with encryption. In fact, we are ready. All founders will say: We are ready, give me a perfect AI, it can do everything I want. They can hold meetings autonomously, study code autonomously, and explore crypto transactions. Once these become possible, you will see some things around us develop rapidly.
So I think the convergence of AI and crypto is still an exciting space, and I dont want you to lose confidence just because the agencies around you are stagnant.
