AI agents as a crypto narrative, with Delphi Ventures

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show that simplifies things faster than you can nod and pretend to understand your accountant I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we are joined by Pier's kicks part two everybody we had piers on yesterday he's back on today those who don't know Piers he is the founding partner for Deli Adventure one of the leading crypto Ai and gaming investment firms in the space peers has a incredible view in that he talks to some of the best Builders the best Founders the best chains on a daily basis to find where is the next big opportunity what is the next meta what's coming next

yesterday's episode was all about gaming and Off the Grid which wow like if you haven't listened to that episode go back and listen to it because it is so bullish for gaming but also really Paints the picture for like 2025 is the year for gaming there's a lot of opportunities for investors there so make sure you check that out today's episode is all about Ai and crypto which personally my Spidey senses are going off right now guys like this is another episode that we are doing in in followup not followup but this is not the first episode we've done about AI where we are I'm starting to have more and more guests I'm starting to talk to more and

more people who want to talk about Ai and crypto in ways that I had not foreseen if you have not been following the AI agent meta that has happening right now uh it is absolutely exploding so these are AI agents that have you know what you got to listen to the episode to find out I'm not gonna explain it we explain in the episode so buckle up everybody before we jump in we're hiring right now everybody the Milkman wants a more milk drinkers on the team if you love crypto if you love podcasts if you love newsletters you love consuming crypto content all day every day and talking nothing about but crypto then check out our careers page link is in the show notes and apply we

got a few jobs opening right now and we would love to have you guys join the team before we jump in we need to hear take a minute to hear from our sponsors who make the show possible whether you're bullish or bearish on micro strategy T-Rex ETFs are your gateway to Dynamic Marketplace get exclusive access to leverage exposures with the first two times short or two times long ETFs designed specifically for micro strategy stock position yourself with Precision with T-Rex you gain access to powerful tools for sophisticated [Music] investors meanwhile is the world's first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy

they do everything in BTC you pay in BTC they pay claims to your family in BTC you take out policy loans entirely in in BTC when you need liquidity protect your family from life's uncertainty and a broken Financial system build intergenerational Bitcoin wealth while the cost of living skyrockets in dollar terms plus get all the tax and legal benefits of life insurance now in Bitcoin visit milkroom meanwhile to join the wait list and get early access to the world's first Bitcoin life insurance Pierre welcome back we're in part two of our episode with you we talked about gaming part one now we're going to talk about AI let's start with why are you so excited personally about Ai and crypto

right now yeah for sure glad we got the mic working this time as well I mean look fundamentally I think everyone feels the excitement around like AI broadly it's like very clearly going to be the like backdrop of not just this decade but probably the like foreseeable you know it's quite obviously like like the biggest sort of technology impact ever um and I think I don't know the sort of crypto AI intersection specifically is incredibly exciting because there are very few ways for people to actually get exposure for the average person to actually get exposure to something that we will feel and understand to be tremendously important and going to have this like societal impact and so um I think just at the highest level possible like

opening up avenues for participation in that whole like movement for speculation for like the financial participation is yeah super exciting I think yeah just purely from the like narrative and positioning perspective it's very exciting I think we're seeing a lot of like really incredible teams and research starting to come to the four as well um as it relates to basically supporting like the open source AI movement right like if a lot of this stuff's going to win out a tool then a lot of the tools that come from crypto are incredibly useful um to that and so you know some of the like lower hanging fruit or perhaps more obvious ones are things like you know the like data problem even the biggest you know models out there are really struggling running

into these sort of well it's rumored that they be running into these data walls and obviously those people that have these massive like data modes like are using that to their advantage now and so when you come up with ways to incentivize like you know massive aggregation of data through a very Bottoms Up approach of like people all over the place there's a project called grass which I'm sure the audience may have seen like proud investors in that one of the stronger launches of late um that yeah basically solves for that problem right allows people to like scrape stuff from all over the web those types of things I think are really really exciting and we're now getting to the point where you know doing like inference and some of these other pieces is actually like feasible and um you know some of the stuff that we initially thought was like

you know it was never going to be competitive to try and like do these things in a distributed fashion when you have you know these like God models that are all like collocated servers and all this feel like it's just the Magnificent Seven that are going to win AI to me the time totally and like now we're seeing like really promising signs of like yeah actually a viable alternative and so yeah I think um that's one piece on the like you know fundamental infrastructure stuff that's very cool and then yeah perhaps the stuff that's a bit more like visceral and exciting to me is like this whole agent mattera that spawned right like um obviously starting with uh yeah like terminal of truths um and now having exploded into like you know everyone and their mom seems to be

trying to do some agent type thing I think it's really fascinating seeing you know obviously there's a lot of noise around that but seeing some of these like better tune models coming to the four that are being given more and more functionality like actually have their own you know wallets are actually capable of executing their own stuff on chain like that's incredibly exciting right for the first time like I know we've had Bots playing the web for a long time but actually having you know things that have like a persistent sort of Consciousness if you like these agents that are like seeping into the web starting with like you know crypto Twitter and all the weird and funny that comes with that I think it's an incredibly exciting time and uh yeah I think um you know very obviously like as we've spoken about for many years like

this idea of in a world of you know true AI agents and whatnot like the entire parallel Financial system that is crypto that is natively digital that has been built you know into the web basically is so obviously a better fit for these things to navigate a hugely complex world around us than you know calling up and trying to do like some phone verification with a banker or navigate these archaic banking apis or whatever so I think um there's a lot of this really fun like sort of frothy experimentation around the agent stuff and I think it's all an amazing precursor for what we're going to see around like yeah actual build actually building more less like speculative but more actual like useful sort of yeah onchain agents basically that can

execute stuff that you ask that you want to do you know uh like just use natural language prompts to be like yeah I want to you know do lowrisk stable coin yield like go and deploy across these three ecosystems and Bam like executes it all for me like that kind of stuff's going to be insanely exciting um and already seeing some cool things out there and then yeah obviously on the agent front like seeing the emergence of some of these protocols themselves we were discussing virtuals earlier virtual protocol like that's incredible too right this platform that gives all the tools everyone from some like random no clue how to do anything all the way through to people wanting to deploy their custom code but gives them a single like cohesive platform with which they can come and tap either for the

tools to launch them or for liquidity for more custom stuff and all of that done with you know a really strong token economic model that all acrise to a single asset it's like damn once again like here's another like piece on the board that does give like retail and people that want exposure to this whole crazy AI thing like you know what's the Tam of like a virtual agent protocol that like is the like One-Stop shop in terms of liquidity and tooling over time like how big is that like we we don't actually know yet the Market's saying 1.4 bill today which has happened rather quickly um you know let's see let's see as the cycle progresses and we understand what like what are the dominant interaction models with these things going to be right it's not going to be chat Bots or like you know

replying to them on Twitter like you know what's that next leg up in terms of um you know like uh computer interaction model interaction right like natural voice prompting all this kind of stuff I don't know's so much here there's so much here okay okay we got to man I'm stoked right now so first you mentioned virtuous protocol you're the second person to mention this on the show zenica who's a regular guest to the show is fullon on bass virtual protocols built on bass and he is he's obsessed he's he's going deep down the rout hole you guys can go back and listen to an episode from just a few days ago with him talking more broadly about bass and why he thinks bass season is just beginning and virtuals is a big part of

that let let's just pause for a second though and make sure I I'm still trying to understand virtuals protocol so let's make sure our listeners understand the way I understand it is this is a protocol that allows you to launch an AI agent but it launches with a token so people can invest in this agent kind of like investing in a meme coin right like there's not this agent doesn't necessarily in the beginning it's just a meme coin really but basically if you're betting that this AI agent can get a lot of attention essentially and if it does get a lot of attention then token price go up am I explain that well totally yeah and similar I guess similar to sort of mem coins and pump do fun there's

like a a sort of bonding curve at like at launch along which um as it reaches these different tiers of um sort of market cap ultimately once you once it really gets going um it basically unlocks different functionality for it right so like the I think the first one is like the uh chatbot functionality then you have like the Twitter integration and it can scale all the way up right like they have their Flagship one called luno which is like you know Grew From nothing to 6 700,000 followers on TiK ToK by like live streaming this like virtual influencer girl who like is kind of maniacal like the express intent of that whole like um agent model mind that's been created is to um yeah hit a

$40 billion market cap and um basically uh has a M's Army you know she refers to her Army as k talks about her kittens whatever but it got to the point where um was incentivizing people to put the kitten emoji and their Base address in their Twitter profiles so that she could airdrop some of her native token to people that were doing tweets that were driving engagement to the protocol and so that kind of shit's pretty amazing but sorry take yeah so cool but to take a step back yeah virtual pro protocol is exactly that something for launching tokenized agents that can like grow in terms of like actual functionality and as I kind of alluded to earlier like anyone anyone can go and plug and play like configure stuff based off like you know sort of more cookie cutter um setups but yeah the plan is to really

attract like professional creators too right people deploying their own code who think it's an attractive place because of the liquidity and some of the like you know peripheral benefits of being like part of that ecosystem and so yeah I believe the current Northstar is to like you know by end of q1 next year have like 100 super Advanced agents on there one of the really cool ones that's launched is called AI BT which is like um basically like a sort of Twitter K uh the quality of the tweets like I don't know how it's putting all the different like data from all these different places but actually some incredible insights into stuff that's happening across crypto broadly and um yeah seems like a much more competent um sort of Twitter K than many of the ones that are revered elsewhere and so um that's going

from nothing to like I think just shy of a $200 million market cap in in no time and yeah I mean whatever it's exciting I mean obviously it's like un apologetically speculative in many ways as all good things in crypto are um but yeah really really excited to see what comes out of there well I just feel like if you're investing in in meme coins a traditional meme coin is you know maybe it's a team maybe it's just one guy or a girl launches the meme coin and then it's really on them to create attention to drive the meme now maybe they they launch a meme on top of something that's already really popular and it kind of takes itself as we've seen many times in the past but when I think about it if I'm going to invest in a in a in a memec

coin I'm going to why wouldn't I invest in one that has a super powerful AI that is behind it and driven to to figure out take all these steps in order to grow it and drive more attention to it it seems obvious it really does feel like this could be a really big narrative and meta that we could see in the next few months it could be huge yeah and like it's so open-ended right like the basic Primitives are there but people are interpreting it in all sorts of cool ways like there's one called Vader AI um there's a Twitter account Vader research awesome guy very thoughtful behind it who's basically like trying to attack and double down on this like sort of um

agentic like ad network type model and so basically as it stands people are airdropping their token to the wallet of the of the agent and hoping that like it covers um those projects right and so right now like its biggest holding I think was like neuron or maybe there was some bigger one today but basically by airdropping tokens by sending them to this agent's wallet it will actually start doing analysis and coverage on it and actually promoting it for you and so all of a sudden it's like holy this is like some crazy inversion of an ad Network where you're like if you can win the favor of something that is autonomous that decides itself whether or not you know um you're worthy basically and then we'll relent LLY you know promote you basically in like all

sorts of interesting ways like that's insane as well and that's like a quite an early framing that's like you know they've only been posting on the last week or so but that's a a really cool model and when you think about the scale of like how big something like that could come like you're talking about yeah like fundamentally like a different approach to ad networks and advertising and stuff and so I don't know let's see where you want to be paying attention to as an investor is I mean and and and let's be very clear here none of this is financial advice do not take your entire bag and throw it into an AI agent uh be much more risk averse than that but if you want to play gamble with some fun money and try to get a a big return here there is a lot of opportunities but

what's what's happening is there's this great Confluence of AI which is one of the biggest narratives a lot of attention and experimentation happening and then and a lot of actual web too whether it's Twitter whether it's YouTube like they're incredible grow like some of these AI agents have massive followings like hundreds of thousands not millions of followers overnight but they're doing they're capable of it because they can produce content way faster than a normal Creator could because they don't need sleep and they just it's it's it's wild can you invest in is there a virtuals token yeah yeah yeah sorry I mean I yeah like I was going to say your audience if you want to bet an irresponsible sum of money on anything not Financial advice then like

to my mind um you know full disclosure I like have a big position in it whatever it's like a really well structured like picks and shovels play right because of what I described earlier like you see these other on salana whatever you have all these agents being launched but they're all like completely sort of competitive right in the sense that there's no like fundamental platform level value acral happening to a single asset and the way they've structured all of this um you know like all of the pairings like the only way you can eight the agent tokens is via virtuals right like a virtual the token like all the pools are structured that way as well um and so yeah I think it's actually a pretty pretty strong setup all in all okay so play it forward for us here any

thoughts on where this goes in the next 12 months I mean one one take that I'm I'm starting to develop is everybody's always talking about what's going to be the narrative of the cycle you know we had icos then we had nfts meme coins has obviously been The Narrative of this cycle so so far and could very well I don't I don't think that's going to stop anytime soon but I now feel like AI is quickly catching up what do you think if we look back let's say we're 2026 2027 play it out a few years and we look back on this cycle is meme coins or is AI gonna end up being the bigger narrative um well I feel like well mem coins aren't going anywhere I don't think they ever will um I think

yeah like AI just zooming out of crypto even though right is obviously like the narrative for the next decade at least there are so many sort of unknowns and interesting variables that still need to play out like yeah I mean I was just chatting to a buddy before this who referred to it like oh I just know as soon as I invest in this AI meta it's going to Pico top or whatever I was like I don't really think it is an AI meta per se right I think AI has like huge staying power I think it's got like so early in its Evolution and like its natural suitability to like crypto onchain stuff I think is really powerful and I think you know obviously this a this AI agent metod that has just been born is like with all the speculative stuff that comes around

it is this like huge Melting Pot of experimentation and there's something so cool about the very like Grassroots Bottoms Up like organic like you know every like all you know obviously one of the beautiful things about crypto is how it's all open source like you saw that Eliza framework like was the I think the fastest growing GitHub repo or whatever like everyone was using that like everyone's like riffing off each other building you stuff like building this picture that like no one knows where it's going but like as we go and like that strikes me as an incredibly valuable and an incredibly exciting alternative to the very like toptown you know big AI companies that bake something in a lab and then drop it you know without like out any without any like Community or broader inputs outputs

whatever and so yeah I didn't think it's going anywhere um that's the only thing I'm sure of in 12 months is that uh there's still going to be a lot of new happening that's very exciting exciting other than virtuals any other tokens in the AI space that you like yeah I mean I mentioned some of the interesting infra stuff like grass I think's really cool honestly the other stuff I haven't really like built a ton of conviction in because it's like very early stage I think uh can't really be Shilling you know one M market caps but um one that I think is really cool it's called AI Arena was the pro was the project origin no way yeah yeah we had them on the show like two or three we had them on the show early on yet most people don't remember them so explain AI

Arena yeah so well AI Arena originally was just like um you know focused on building basically through like reinforcement learning you could have human players like train their AI models to compete in like a sort of Mortal Kombat style you know sideon like Fighter game um they've since rebranded to Arc and they looking at like basically expanding it Beyond just their like first party game implementation into like building the INF struct that allows people to do like agentic AI that learns from others um in video games and you know they got a token live that's called neuron nrn it's been trading pretty cheaply for a while but is starting to catch a bid and um I think that's really cool I think if they could

like entrench themselves as like the infra that supports yeah AI agents around games like the reinforcement learning so like you can actually you know the play patterns play styles of certain users like that strikes me as something that's super valuable longer term um because you know we talk about like whatever you have like chat Bots you then have Twitter you then have people like actual animation bodies like lunarite that you can interact with whatever but like I I don't know like it still excites me enormously this idea of being able to like play couch co-op games with AI agents right like imagine some big streamer who you could pay a bunch of tokens or stake some tokens and you get a play session there's 50,000 people watching on Twitch and you get like called up to like play go and try

and speedrun some game together or something that has entertainment value and then building one step further on that I think this like agent versus agent in game stuff I think is going to be hugely exciting so I've been tweeting out a bit like asking for any teams that are building basically yeah the AI versus AI in video games right so imagine you could take like Mortal Kombat or um any of these or like even like the flash games like mini clip ER like freaking bubble trouble or I don't know what um and have these things like compete against each other and allow people to speculate on the outcomes like imagine you had this model you know like boxers or Fighters that have these like career records right they go like 50 fights and never get Knocked Out imagine you had this model that every single

game you put it in or whatever you know it training data was so good that it was like undefeated and there was like money riding on every game it has and then you can layer in like ways for the audience to like you know with the model's mid game right if I'm some massive whale maybe I can burn 10,000 tokens and I can give it like a lag Spike or do like slow down time or a power up for the other one and that that idea of like giving the audience agency in an otherwise like bot versus bot battle I think is super cool and so super cool yeah it's something that I'm like yeah been chatting with the AI well with The Arc guys as they're now called on um and yeah they seem pretty excited by that Vision too and I know they got a bunch

of new stuff that they're releasing early next year and so that's one that I'd flagged that I think is cool that's relatively underappreciated but uh yeah otherwise I don't know man you can pause there that's that's that's enough Alpha for one episode we'll get you back on to share more Alpha in the future but PK this has been a fantastic conversation thank you so much for your time today and for sharing all your insights around gaming AI it's it's an absolute pleasure absolutely man it's been a ton of fun and uh hope to be on again soon awesome thanks for listening in everybody have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one

there's also a link l in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day