Crypto AI Agents Are the New Meta

There’s a new meta in crypto with the astonishing rise of AI agents that can analyze market trends and price movements, automate digital asset trading

There’s a new meta in crypto with the astonishing rise of AI agents that can analyze market trends and price movements, automate digital asset trading, and manage users’ portfolios in an entirely autonomous way.

Different from traditional trading bots, AI agents aren’t restricted to following predefined rules.

Rather, they use powerful machine learning algorithms to learn, adapt, and improve their trading strategies over time.

They act on behalf of human investors,  ostensibly helping them make smarter and more profitable decisions in real time, and the early signs suggest that they’ll live up to the billing.

AI agents are often said to be the next evolution of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

They’re trained on large datasets just like their peers, but unlike those general-purpose systems, they’re usually designed to specialise in a very specific area and go further by not only answering questions but also taking action on users’ behalf.

Previously, you could prompt ChatGPT to tell you where the best hotels are in a certain city based on your requirements, but then you’d have to go ahead and book the room yourself.

AI agents not only find the most suitable hotel but also reserve it for you, even using your credit card to pay for the reservation, if you authorise it to do so.

When we combine these AI agents with blockchain, the possibilities become even more tantalising.

By giving an agent access to a crypto wallet, it can authorise you to make trades on your behalf in pursuit of whatever profit target you define.

These crypto AI agents are specially designed for automated trading, helping investors to buy and sell assets and manage their DeFi portfolios across multiple protocols and blockchains.

They analyse the markets 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to spot trends that might present opportunities for profitable actions.

So far, the consensus on AI agents in crypto appears to be a little mixed. While some users say they provide them with an edge over human traders, others argue that they still struggle to reliably predict asset price movements and cannot always execute trades efficiently.

These critics argue that any profitable AI agents are likely to be beneficiaries of fortunate market conditions.

Are they profitable?

Even so, there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests crypto AI agents are on the right track.

One of the most successful AI agents to date has been Truth Terminal, which caught the attention of the legendary venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in July 2024.

After discovering the agent on social media and briefly interacting with it, Andreessen gave it $50,000 worth of Bitcoin as an experiment, to see what it would do with that capital.

It played out far better than he could have ever expected.

Using that cash, Truth Terminal created a brand new meme coin on the Solana blockchain called Goatseus Maximus (GOAT), and within weeks the new token's value soared to almost $1 billion.

It was a roaring success, but naysayers argue that much of it was due to the agent's self-promotion on X and other social media platforms and the huge interest that was sparked by Andreessen’s $50K Bitcoin gift.

With so many people following the story on X, it was perhaps inevitable that many would also take a chance and buy the new memecoin.

Whatever the reason, it was undeniably a success, and Truth Terminal became one of the richest crypto AI Agents in the business.

Besides Truth Terminal, there is other evidence that points to the advantages of AI agents in crypto.

One recent study that was focused on reinforcement learning in crypto trading found that AI agents using self-created strategies delivered profits of anything between 9.94% and 31.53%, compared to an average profit of just 8.33% for traditional bots.

Enhancing DeFi yield

Then there’s the case of Giza’s ARMA, a new trading bot on the Base blockchain that reportedly delivered a stunning 83% increase in yield on DeFi lending markets, compared to maintaining a static position.

ARMA’s case study took place over a weekend during which two of the biggest lending protocols on Base engaged in an ongoing yield battle, continually optimising their rewards to try and attract lender’s deposits.

When the sequence began, the Morpho x Seamless vault offered the highest yield with a competitive 9.16% APR, but it was quickly surpassed by Moonwell, where the APR shot up to 9.69%.

The ARMA bot, with over $1,000,000 of user’s funds under its management, performed an in-depth analysis that considered all of the protocol incentives and ecosystem rewards as well as gas fees, then proceeded to make more than 600 withdrawals from Morpho, depositing these amounts into Moonwell to take advantage of the higher APR.

Over the next few days, ARMA proceeded to shift those