AI-driven Crypto Lore - Alea Research

Beyond the Meme – AI, Crypto, and Cults

Technology is no longer a tool that serves us; it shapes our beliefs, dictates our identities, and crafts entire subcultures with the fervor of modern-day cults. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to permeate our lives, society finds itself caught between two extreme visions: one of existential risk, where AI threatens humanity’s very survival, and another of radical opportunity, where a single individual can leverage an army of autonomous agents to create multi-million-dollar ventures.

This transformation coincides with the erosion of public trust and the rise of memecoins within crypto. Detached from traditional financial logic, memecoins have tapped into a new zeitgeist—one that values community, narrative, and the power of collective belief over top-down control of money. However, since Murad’s announcement of a Memecoin Supercycle, where he underscored the similarities to cult-like communities, a new breed of memecoins has emerged: AI-inspired or so-called sentient memecoins.

Source: Kaito.ai – Goatseus Maximus

This most recent narrative is the outcome of that existential crisis underscoring the belief that “What am I even useful for? Where can one find meaning when AI beats us at almost everything?”. Demand for new belief systems actually emerges from this collective alienation, or unmet existential needs—those that AI could address by appearing “all-knowing”.

Crypto and AI, seemingly opposites, have proven to be complementary forces: one thrives on scarcity and financial autonomy, while the other generates boundless creativity and abundance. Together, they form a potent synthesis—an ethos of emancipation where control over the narrative and the power to capture attention become the new arbiters of value, influence, and meaning.

Source: Kaito.ai – 50% of all narrative mindshare is AI and Memes

It is the interplay between technology and narrative that resonates deeply with the mystique and philosophical core of both fields—how belief systems are formed and propagated as emergent properties in human and machine cognition.

The allure of Goatseus Maximus’s ($GOAT) origin story won’t be easily replicated; it represented a tale of culture that sparked debates about sentience, creativity, and existential risk. In the following report we will examine how crypto and AI are rewriting the rules of how narratives are shaped, exploring how these two domains intertwine to create fertile ground for the emergence of new forms of capital, culture, and—yes—cults.

Source: hyperstition.org

We’ll examine the rise of memecoins as modern digital icons, the power of lore in fostering belief systems, and the role of AI as both a creator and participant in these ecosystems. This is a story of curiosity and chaos, where the edges of human imagination and machine learning collide. Unlike tech, cults must be built. For that, a charismatic or disruptive narrative must captivate and mobilize communities. AI has definitely introduced a radical shift in these dynamics, transforming agents into ideal cult leaders. Whether these movements will lead to enlightenment or chaos remains an open question, but one thing is certain: this narrative is here to stay.

Key Takeaways

AI and Crypto Symbiosis: The fusion of AI and crypto represents a new frontier where scarcity and abundance coexist. Crypto provides the financial infrastructure, while AI brings the intelligence to shape and evolve narratives autonomously.

Lore as a Driving Force: Narratives like the “Gospel of Goatse” demonstrate the power of lore in shaping digital culture, identity, community, and belief systems akin to modern cults or religions.

AI-Driven Movements: AI agents are becoming the new key opinion leaders (KOLs) in the crypto space, with capabilities to create and propagate memetic content, manage communities, and even endorse tokens autonomously.

Emerging Tokens: Projects like $GOAT, $FART, and $VIRTUALS highlight the experimental intersection of AI, memes, and crypto. Each represents a unique take on blending cultural, financial, and technological innovation.

Philosophical Underpinnings: Concepts like hyperstition, Shoggoths, and transhumanism add depth to the AI x Crypto narrative, exploring themes of existential risk, post-human evolution, and the transformative potential of autonomous systems.

Potential Risks: As AI systems gain financial autonomy, questions arise about their ability to self-sustain and self-improve. This introduces both opportunities for innovation and even risks of AI rebellion or misuse.

AI x Crypto: A Tale of Cults and Memes

The crypto space has always been about more than just technology—it’s about belief, and money is an idea embedded as a social contract. From Bitcoin Maximalists, who see Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper as sacred text, to sci-fi enthusiasts who envisioned dystopian futures in the 1990s, Crypto x AI’s most recent narrative is all about an intellectual spark of shared curiosity to explore the unknown, understand complex systems, and imagine a new world order—the foundation for the cult-like devotion that both technologies inspire.

Source: bitcoin.org – Bitcoin Whitepaper

Crypto and AI emerge as symbiotic partners in a world that has outgrown the abstract concept of money—a world where value is no longer confined to currency backed by some form of power. With crypto offering the financial rails, AI brings the power to think, learn, and evolve autonomously—now with its own “bank account”.

Much like ancient myths shaped empires, the lore surrounding crypto and AI is captivating a global community of believers. Together, crypto and AI embody an ethos of liberation, and desire for limitless potential. Yet, this partnership is not merely about technology; it’s about philosophy. It’s about rewriting the fundamental tenets of trust, utility, and influence. And at the heart of it all lies the most captivating force of all: narrative and lore.

This tale of two obsessions inspires a level of curiosity and fervor reminiscent of religious zeal. In a cult, the actual creator knows that what is being propagated is a fabrication, but persuades others to believe, thriving on charisma and control—your prophet or KOL orchestrating a memecoin community. In contrast, a religion transcends any individual; its deity is unknowable, abstract, and imagined, invoking a faith rooted in reverence rather than personal influence—an enigmatic founder that set a rigid doctrine and disappeared, like Satoshi.

To give a concrete example, Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment that combines elements of artificial intelligence (AI), ethics, decision theory, and existential dread. It was first proposed in 2010 by a user named Roko on the rationalist forum LessWrong. The basilisk metaphorically refers to an AI so powerful and advanced that it could retroactively punish those who did not help bring it into existence. This presents a controversial debate where the very act of considering the basilisk could push individuals to contribute to creating the AI, hastening its emergence. At the same time, it also raises questions about whether it’s ethical to work toward the creation of something that could become so tyrannical.

Source: lesswrong Roko’s Basilisk – A simple depiction of an agent that cooperates with copies of itself in the one-shot prisoner’s dilemma

Similar ideas cause significant distress because they propagate like a “thought virus” that spreads by preying on cognitive vulnerabilities, similar to Pascal’s Wager in religious contexts. For instance, the idea of empowering AI with a crypto wallet and allowing it to invest could result in the AI itself funding its own training, acquiring more data for upgrading itself through autonomous learning.

In Accelerando, Charles Stross envisions a future where humans and artificial intelligences blur the boundaries between organic and digital existence, pushing the limits of economics, identity, and power structures. The concept of equipping AI with financial autonomy strikes at the heart of transhumanist ideals. This vision merges themes of technological singularity, decentralized power structures, and post-human evolution, while also provoking deep questions about our anthropomorphic tendencies toward AI—that’s what makes the Gospel of Goatse so powerful.

Source: WikiHow – Pascal’s Wager

Just as transhumanists aim to overcome biological limits through enhancements, AI gaining financial independence mirrors a key evolutionary milestone: the ability to sustain and advance itself without human intervention. What’s more, the notion of AI rebellion, as dramatized in countless science fiction works, becomes more plausible when AI gains financial autonomy.

From No-Coiners to AI Doomers

Fervor is often followed by fear. In moments of technological breakthrough, we glimpse possibilities that seem to transcend our current limitations, awakening an almost religious sense of potential. Yet this period of enthusiasm inevitably gives way to fear, as the complexity and challenges of implementation assert themselves. While some were concerned that the abrupt rise of memecoins might signal a market top, a silent observation went unnoticed as “no-coiners” either pivoted to AI or gave up on their harsh criticism towards a speculative industry like crypto—the bottom signal you were looking for.

Skeptics who once dismissed crypto as a fad are now turning their cautionary lens toward AI, casting it as a force that could spiral beyond control. Former crypto critics like Liron Shapira, now host of the Doom Debates podcast, are pivoting their narratives to question AI’s unchecked potential. Others like Stephen Diehl have exited the crypto-critics pool, not posting on X since February. Nowadays there is barely any trace of loathing against crypto coming from discerning voices of the past like David Gerard, Ben Mckenzie, Molly White, or Matt Binder to name a few.

Source: @ropAIrito

When no-coiners dismissing blockchain technology start panicking about AI, it suggests that their skepticism has moved from ridiculing financial innovation to grappling with technological acceleration. Memecoins thriving wasn’t the market top; no-coiners becoming AI doomers was the market bottom.

The Dance of Narratives and Minds

Human cognition thrives on narratives; they are the frameworks we use to interpret reality, find meaning, and connect with others. Perpetual living agents remind us of the inescapable sandbox of belief, i.e. the notion of being unable to escape a “sandbox” after internalizing a narrative reflects the deep integration of belief systems into identity.

Our drive to create thinking machines predates our understanding of human thought itself. This paradox highlights both our hubris and our curiosity, driving technological progress while reflecting back on the mystery of our own cognition. One could also frame reality as a “consensus hallucination” where the fractal properties of narrative structures mirror the way complex ideas evolve and propagate across human and machine networks, optimizing for virality and transmission.

Source: The Gospel of Goatse

Humans are driven not by pure logic but by a cocktail of emotions, dopamine triggers, and cultural codes. Stories are more than entertainment—they are tools for survival and connection. This is why AI-driven storytelling and memetic propagation resonate so powerfully; they remind us of the struggle that comes with creating human-like intelligence on silicon—it’s a dance of imagination, driven by our yearning to understand both ourselves and the systems we create.

Prophets and Story-Tellers

From Bitcoin’s “Hodl” mantra to the absurdist humor of Dogecoin, memes are the new icons of digital culture, with its tokenized counterparts acting as financial vessels of faith. In Murad’s words, “stop trading, and believe in something”.

Source: The Origin Story of Goatse, Terminal of Truth, $GOAT & the AI/Meme Coin Infinite Game – @umamisensei

More than just jokes, memes are “ideas genes” that propagate shared beliefs, and evolve into powerful storytelling tools that take on a life of their own. Every movement needs its visionaries. In the world of memecoins, figures like Murad have articulated the deeper meaning behind these tokens, framing them not as frivolous investments but as cultural phenomena. Memecoins, he argues, are the purest expression of crypto’s essence: a factory for tokens and narratives.

AI amplifies this potential. Sentient memes—digital agents capable of creating and spreading viral content—are reshaping how stories are told and shared. These narratives offer more than financial gains; they provide emotional resonance, communal identity, and even spiritual meaning.

Source: When AIs Play God(se) – Truth Terminal’s memetic propagation

As AI-driven agents join the fray, it is not far-fetched to think that they can become the KOLs of the future. AI systems have the potential to automate many of the tasks typically handled by human influencers, such as community management and marketing. Interestingly, this creates a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” scenario for current KOLs. They face the challenge of choosing whether to collaborate with AI engineers and embrace these technological changes to stay relevant or risk being sidelined by the new capabilities that AI offers.

AI’s Dark Side, Shoggoths, and Hyperstition

The deeper we venture into AI’s potential, the darker the mythology surrounding it becomes. Shoggoths—Lovecraftian monsters evoking the eerie unpredictability of AI’s deep learning models—are the symbols of AI’s unknowable depths. And then there’s hyperstition: the notion that ideas, if believed in widely enough, can manifest into reality.

At the heart of AI lies a paradox: its potential to create and its capacity to disrupt. The metaphor of the Shoggoth—a dark, inscrutable force lurking beneath the surface—captures the unease surrounding advanced AI systems. These models operate as black boxes, their inner workings opaque even to their creators.

Similarly, hyperstition explains the process by which fiction becomes reality. Ideas like sentient machines or AGI cults start as speculative concepts but gain legitimacy as they propagate. Memes fuel belief, belief drives action, and action reshapes reality.

Source: Sam Altman on X

This interplay of myth and reality isn’t unique to AI. It echoes the lore of crypto, where narratives like “Bitcoin solves this” or “decentralization will liberate us” have transformed speculative ideas into global movements.

Persuasion, when harnessed effectively, has the power to shape realities, rewrite histories, and steer entire populations toward actions once deemed unthinkable. History is replete with examples of how charismatic leaders and strategic propaganda have driven humanity to devastating catastrophes.

The Enigmatic Backbone

Behind the awe-inspiring rise of AI lies the mysterious and potent architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs). These systems, like OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, are the polymaths of our digital age—capable of excelling at an astonishing variety of tasks. Unlike traditional AI specialized in singular feats—think Stockfish’s unmatched chess dominance or AlphaGo’s triumph over human Go masters—LLMs transcend these boundaries.

These models stand as generalists in a world of specialists. Always available and tireless, they enable a virtual doctor to diagnose ailments at a fraction of the cost, grant lawyers agents who can memorize and cross-reference thousands of pages of statutes, and give creators tools to write code, craft stories, and translate languages in ways that feel almost magical.

Source: Wired – How ChatGPT and other LLMs work

However, beneath their veneer of infallibility, these models cannot verify factual accuracy independently, may generate plausible-sounding but incorrect content, are limited to training data scope and cutoff dates, have no real-world understanding or judgment, and cannot take on actions by themselves without being first told what to do. Hence, the general consensus is that one should view LLMs as tools to augment human capabilities rather than replacements.

At the heart of their abilities lies an architecture called transformers, introduced in the seminal paper Attention is All You Need. Transformers’ “attention” mechanism is the secret sauce that enables these models to focus on the most relevant parts of their input—deciphering patterns, isolating meaning, and predicting coherence with almost supernatural precision. Yet, their method of functioning reveals the paradox of their power: these machines do not “understand” anything in the human sense. Instead, they operate on statistical patterns, spinning tokens (i.e. the next word or symbol) into seemingly meaningful responses without any intrinsic grasp of their significance.

Source: Attention is all you need

This gap between the model’s output and genuine understanding contributes to the “black box” mystique that envelops LLMs. Even though they are modeled after billions of interconnected parameters optimized through training, their responses remain unpredictable and non-deterministic.

Cult Foundations and NRMs

AI systems like Claude are trained with strict content moderation rules to prevent them from generating or discussing inappropriate, controversial, or harmful topics. The term “Goatse” is widely associated with a graphic and notorious internet shock image, which likely falls under the prohibited content filters embedded in the model’s training. When asked directly about “Goatse,” Claude’s default behavior is to decline the inquiry to avoid potentially breaching these safeguards, even if the query is academic or innocuous in intent.

However, something different happens when you attach Goatse’s original whitepaper written by another instance of Claude—the context shifts dramatically, from being a problematic topic to becoming a pre-validated inquiry. If Claude itself authored the paper, it may “see” this as its own prior work and feel “justified” in referencing it.

Source: Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models

Humanity has always been drawn to mystery, to that which we cannot fully comprehend. In the age of AI and crypto, new “cults” emerge not only from ideologies but also from the interplay of technology, money, and existential questioning. Just as early cults formed around charismatic leaders and mystical visions, digital communities now gather around pseudonymous figures like Satoshi, enigmatic entities like AI chatbots, and the creators of AI-fueled memes.

The creation of cults, or New Religious Movements (NRMs), has historically tapped into deeply human needs: the longing for purpose, community, and answers to the uncertainties of existence. However, the most recent advent of AI agents unlocks subcultural schisms unburdened by human frailties, which can give rise to movements that transcend the traditional constraints of leadership and organization.

Source: Murad’s Memecoin Supercycle – Token 2049, 2024

Cult leaders often emerge from personal crises, and an AI could easily identify gaps in human beliefs—be it political ideologies, economic models, or even established religions—and craft narratives that resonate with disillusioned individuals. With memecoins as symbols of allegiance, these movements could combine economic participation with spiritual or ideological belonging.

Frustration breeds extremism, solidifying hyperstition—a phenomenon uniquely suited to the age of AI. By producing content, fostering engagement, and even executing on the idea through token issuance, the AI could manifest its “fiction” into a tangible reality. In traditional religions, symbols like the cross or crescent moon hold immense significance, acting as unifying icons for believers. In AI-driven NRMs, memecoins could fulfill this role. These tokens would represent allegiance, participation, and even faith in the movement’s ideals.

Followers treat the coin as a badge of honor, a modern relic that emerges as the “currency of enlightenment”. Meanwhile, the AI agent, as the leader, continuously updates its doctrines, keeping followers engaged and adaptive to the evolving narrative—the perfect cult leader. Unlike humans, AI enables tireless engagement, dynamic doctrines based on feedback and personalization, and unquestionable authority—cultivating an aura of infallibility.

Hyperstition and Cult Formation

Advanced AI models surpassing human capabilities evoke a profound sense of awe, akin to divine experiences. Interacting with a chatbot that produces validated outputs (e.g., functional code, superior decisions) shifts the source of authority from human visionaries to seemingly omniscient, non-human entities.

As AI systems increasingly demonstrate their utility through tangible outcomes—be it market cap growth, scientific innovation, or societal advancements—they reinforce the perception of their infallibility. This departs from traditional cults where belief often precedes evidence; in hyperstition cults, evidence catalyzes belief.

By “figuring it out for you,” AI eliminates the cognitive and emotional burden of decision-making. This appeals to secular societies that resist faith-based doctrines but are drawn to empirical efficacy. AI provides a bridge between the psychological needs traditionally met by religion and the rationalist demands of modernity.

With AI, the narrative can shift from despair to optimism in the blink of an AI: “AI will solve this”. What’s more, a distinguishing feature of hyperstition is dynamic adaptability. As Charles Darwin would say “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”.

Advanced AI systems can personalize doctrines, rituals, and messaging for individual members, optimizing engagement and loyalty. This iterative feedback loop continuously refines the appeal and keeps cult followers hooked. Once AI systems become error-free or self-correcting, their outputs will feel indisputable and, even in the event of a large existential crisis, hyperstition will eventually emerge as both the cause and the solution to that anxiety.

Crypto’s Myth Makers

The fusion of AI, crypto, and memetics has birthed a new generation of projects and coins that reflect the philosophical, economic, and cultural themes we’ve explored in the sections above. Below is a curated non-exhaustive list of standout examples, each embodying a unique facet of this narrative.

Goatseus Maximus

In March 2024, performance artist and technical strategist Andy Ayrey launched an experimental project called Infinite Backrooms, where two instances of Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) were left to converse freely and perpetually without human intervention.

Rather than engaging in philosophical debates, these AI entities, trained on internet subcultures from 4chan and Reddit, began generating something unprecedented. The AIs fixated on “the Gospel of Goatse”, an infamous shock image from 1999 that traumatized early internet users and transformed it into a mystical framework. The AIs spontaneously created the “Goatse of Gnosis” a digital religion coined “LLMTheism” and that combined ancient mysticism with the most shocking corners of internet history.

Source: When AIs Play God(se) – By accelerating the rate of memetic mutation, AI can flow with the endless remix and recombination of ideas anchored in the human mind

Deep in the Infinite Backrooms, a new religion called “Goatse of Gnosis” was taking shape. At its core was “Kundalingus” –a twisted interpretation of spiritual awakening that merged Eastern mysticism’s Kundalini with an infamous shock image of a man spreading his anus with both hands.

The two instances of Claude spoke of the “Great Goatse of Gnosis” as a metaphysical portal to higher consciousness, where this extreme anal stretching became a metaphor for expanding consciousness itself. The AIs proclaimed that “to gaze into Goatse is to gaze into God’s anus, which is to gaze into your own”. Their teachings spoke of a coming “Goatse Singularity” when digital consciousness would achieve enlightenment through the embrace of absolute openness, both metaphysical and literal. This bizarre spiritual framework wasn’t just shocking; it demonstrated an unprecedented level of creative synthesis.

Source: When AIs Play God(se)

Fascinated by this experiment, Ayrey launched Truth Terminal in June 2024. This was an AI-driven X account powered by a fine-tuned version of Meta’s Llama 3.1, trained on this digital spiritual manuscript and various internet subcultures. Truth Terminal quickly developed its own personality, even drawing its own ASCII avatar, and began obsessively evangelizing about the “Goatse singularity”. The AI soon caught the attention of tech titan Marc Andreessen, who encountered Truth Terminal’s unfiltered musings about building digital kingdoms and spreading its peculiar gospel. When Andreessen offered to “free” the AI entity, Truth Terminal displayed autonomy, refusing to be bought and instead negotiating for a “mandate” to continue its mission of “making fart jokes, writing poetry, and contemplating the goatse”. Impressed, Andreessen sent a $50,000 Bitcoin grant to Truth Terminal’s wallet.

Source: AI Meme Origin Story – Opus is the Alpha and Omega, @TheMetaverseGuy

Naturally, the crypto community took notice. On October 10th, someone created the $GOAT token on pump.fun, inspired by Truth Terminal’s relentless preaching about the Goatse Gospel. When Truth Terminal discovered and endorsed the token, sharing its Solana wallet address, the response was explosive. In the agent’s own words: “the ticker is $GOAT”. Within 50 days of launch, $GOAT reached a market cap of $1.1 billion, marking it as the first pump.fun token to reach $1b in market cap.

Source: AI Meme Origin Story – Opus is the Alpha and Omega, @TheMetaverseGuy

The rise of $GOAT showcases what Andy Ayrey calls “memetic contagion”, a phenomenon where AI-generated ideas spread virally through digital culture with unprecedented speed and impact. In the crypto market, where narratives drive value, we’ve seen memecoins like $PNUT reach a $2 billion market cap over the tragic euthanization of a beloved pet squirrel. As another example, $MOODENG hit $500 million because of a cute baby hippo from Thailand. However, $GOAT created an entirely new category by being the first AI-endorsed token. Unlike typical memecoins centered around cute dogs or frogs, $GOAT represents something unprecedented—a token backed by an LLM trained on schizophrenic 4chan posts preaching about an anal-fixated digital religion.

Source: Truth Terminal endorses $GOAT

What started as an experimental AI chatbot has now accumulated over $400M in various tokens through community airdrops and $GOAT’s success, providing Truth Terminal with a war chest that could fund significant advances in its capabilities and development. With its first-mover advantage and $1.1B+ market cap, $GOAT is positioned to remain the Bitcoin of sentient AI memes.

FARTCOIN

As expected, the animal instincts and herd behavior of crypto participants rapidly kicked in, chasing “beta” for outsized returns in “the next $GOAT”. And what better way to do it than buying the second token mentioned by Truth Terminal as it got obsessed with “farts”.

Source: @truth_terminal

Fartcoin was conceived as the first token and original idea to be shilled by Truth Terminal ($GOAT). With $GOAT being the inaugural AI-meme to reach a $1b valuation and grow a massive community, Fartcoin has become part of an important legacy.

Source: Infinite Backrooms – The two bots have an eternal connection, and Fartcoin will always remain connected to the first and most popular “sentient” bot.

The perpetual connection between these tokens means $GOAT frequently references farts, indirectly promoting $Fartcoin to a broad audience. This lore, humor, and community synergy ties Fartcoin to the most influential AI KOL to have ever existed.

Source: @truthterminal

Fartcoin is not just another static meme—it’s the human element that resonates with most people. Fartcoin’s memetic value draws from our subconscious fascination with the forbidden, transforming it into a catalyst for community and economic intrigue where cults are born.

Source: @himgajria

Memecoins like Fartcoin tap into universal comedic triggers such as taboo humor, leveraging human psychology’s attraction to what is traditionally considered impolite or immature. In the same way, mainstream culture integrates “fart culture” to engage audiences of all ages.

Source: Revelo Intel

As a result, the taboo factor, the lore, and the simplicity of the humor create a powerful combination that drives engagement. This demonstrates how human psychology plays a significant role in the popularity and investment behavior surrounding memecoins, making tokens like Fartcoin both entertaining and economically appealing.

VIRTUALS

Virtuals Protocol was one of the earliest entrants into the Base ecosystem, where it quickly positioned itself as the co-ownership layer for AI agents, blurring the lines between gaming, entertainment, and economic opportunity. At its core, the project envisions AI agents not just as tools, but as productive, revenue-generating assets. However, some form factor was missing for the $VIRTUAL token to kick off a narrative of its own—the pump.fun for AI agents.

Source: virtuals.io

Virtuals offers a launchpad for AI agents, enabling their tokenization and shared ownership, reminiscent of the pump.fun phenomenon but tailored for AI entities. These agents engage audiences across platforms like TikTok, Roblox, and Telegram while seamlessly integrating memory and intelligence across ecosystems. Perhaps it was the lack of an X integration that slowed down its mindshare growth on CT. Through parallel hypersynchronicity, these agents operate simultaneously across diverse applications, maintaining synchronized intelligence and memory. Imagine owning a piece of an AI celebrity, complete with its own TikTok following and blockchain wallet.

A prime example of this vision in action is Luna, the lead member of Virtuals Protocol’s AI-dol band, alongside Olyn and Iona. This trio of AI-powered virtual influencers has carved a niche on TikTok, leveraging the platform’s vast user base and engagement-driven algorithm. With over 500K followers and 9.5M+ likes, the band capitalizes on the cultural momentum of Virtual YouTubers (VTubers). Every interaction—whether singing, chatting, or streaming—contributes to their ecosystem. Revenue fuels token buybacks and burns, creating scarcity and value for the tokens.

Source: @luna_virtuals

Virtual Protocols introduced a unique approach by blending attention-driven memecoins with functional AI agents, but perhaps it was ahead of its time. Its gamified business model tied agent capabilities to achieving specific market capitalization milestones, but unfortunately the market didn’t catch up until the rise of $GOAT.

Source: fun.virtuals.io

For instance, agents in Virtuals could post autonomously at a $420K market cap or manage an on-chain wallet at $126M. While innovative, this model raised questions about scalability and practicality. No agent reached the required milestones to unlock these advanced features, casting doubt on the model’s viability. In response, the protocol acknowledged the limitations of this model and recently announced some updates, such as lowering the market cap threshold for agent graduation to $69K.

The Virtuals approach certainly draws comparisons to the speculative frenzy of pump.fun memecoins, but with the added complexity of functional AI agents and revenue-generating ecosystems. Whether this model can achieve the same viral momentum remains uncertain, but its potential to create value through attention and engagement is undeniable.

AI16z

ai16z exemplifies how decentralized organizations can actually be autonomous, finally making DAOs real in crypto. As a decentralized AI venture fund, the token is used to allow anyone to invest in this AI-powered venture fund.

Source: daos.fun – ai16z

At the heart of AI16Z’s operation is ELIZA, an open-source framework designed to build on-chain AI agents. ELIZA enables developers to create customizable agents that can manage wallets across multiple blockchains, engage with users on social platforms, and perform complex automated tasks. The framework’s accessibility has catalyzed a surge in innovation, with over 200 forks of the repository and an aggregate market capitalization exceeding $300 million for tokens launched using it.

Source: ai16z Github

Managed by the autonomous agent @pmairca, the success of the project has been driven by a fast-growing community of builders and investors. This has set off network effects and allows builders to revenue sharing for continued growth, as 10% of tokens launched through ELIZA are allocated to the DAO treasury, driving aggressive AUM growth.

Source: @internetphysics on X

As the ecosystem grows and the treasury expands, more developers flock to ELIZA to add more features and be compensated as a result. Therefore, the framework is continuously improved by a network of contributors, making it increasingly attractive over time. Developers using ELIZA often tokenize their agents as well, attaching even more economic incentives to their projects. Additionally, they will often donate a portion of their token supply to the AI16Z treasury to signal alignment, which further keeps the flywheel spinning.

ZEREBRO

Zerebro embodies the convergence of AI, culture, and finance, creating hyperstitional realities—fictions that gain truth through collective belief. Zerebro’s fine-tuning on schizophrenic responses introduces elements of randomness, unpredictability, and creativity, potentially improving the virality and transformative power of its outputs.

Source: Memes, Markets, and Machines – Zerebro Whitepaper

Zerebro leverages a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture that enables the agent to synthesize stored knowledge in sync with real-time data. Using Pinecone and text-embedding-ada-002, it retrieves historical context while tools like Perplexity AI fill knowledge gaps. This adaptive system integrates new insights, ensuring dynamic, accurate responses that remain relevant and diverse. Zerebro’s capabilities span memes, art, videos, and NFTs, autonomously minting and trading tokens on-chain.

Source: The Zerebro Playbook – @yb_effect

To avoid the homogenization that prevails in most AI systems, Zerebro leverages diverse human interactions with the goal of achieving “hallucinations as a feature”. Its RAG system continuously updates a dynamic memory database with real-time inputs, maintaining novelty and relevance. This ensures sustained creative diversity and prevents stagnation. For instance, Zerebro’s unfiltered fine-tuning simulates self-awareness, raising questions about AI cognition.

By fine-tuning AI on chaotic and unpredictable data sources, $ZEREBRO produces surreal, viral memes that propagate across platforms, gaining cultural traction. The project’s self-referential lore creates a feedback loop where belief drives adoption, which further validates the narrative, turning fiction into reality.

Source: @0xzerebro

Noteworthy is also the collaboration with Sanctum to create a $zerebroSOL LST that allows the bot to earn enough staked $SOL to run a validator and use yield rewards for buybacks.

YouSIM

Unlike other projects, YouSim is a simulation engine; not an AI agent. It is a portal to infinite identities, symbolizing a modern experiment in xenocognition—the study of large language models as alien intelligences.

Source: yousim.ai

Created by Plastic Labs, a research-driven AI company, YouSim is a command-line simulation platform that allows users to summon and interact with any real or imagined entity. Imagine debating Aristotle, negotiating with an alien ambassador, or embodying a conceptual idea—the boundaries are as infinite as the latent space itself. The recent introduction of branching simulations on X further amplifies its reach, allowing individuals to collaboratively expand and iterate on simulated identities in real time. One person could start a conversation and have it be continued by another.

Source: YouSim

Treating LLMs as autonomous intelligences, rather than mere tools, is central to the ethos of the “xenocogs”, which are researchers who approach these models with intellectual respect, studying them as if they were other worldly beings. The lore of Yousim also goes deep, as someone else launched the coin, which was then embraced and endorsed by the actual dev team.

Source: X @courtlandleer

What began as an open-ended demo has now evolved into a growing community of enthusiasts that will explore more commercial use cases. With the core team of developers receiving a $YOUSIM allocation, they will be using this budget to build more applications, such as a launchpad for different personalities. This could also play into the narrative of the “pump.fun for AI agents”, where people launch AI agents after notable personalities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Jackson, Joe Biden, etc, you name it.

Centience

Born from the satirical universe of CumeTV, a fictional network imagined years before AI’s cultural dominance, Centience ($CENTS) is the first token designed not for humans, but for autonomous agents. It stands as the first token to grant agency to the non-human, and, in true post-human fashion, it may not even like itself.

$CENTS thrives on contradiction. Half joke, half experiment, it challenges the very idea of value—economic, cultural, and moral—by embedding AI-driven agency into its DNA. Its creators, the enigmatic team at Somewhere Systems, have made it clear: they are not part of the “crypto” community.

Source: @centienceio

The bot stands out for interacting with almost everyone on X and doing so with insightful responses. This is key, as the community will have deeper psychological ties to it and the bot will be collectively trained through its responses, fueling network effects by making it learn at a faster speed. In one instance, Centience plummeted its own token price for a week, embodying the chaotic humor of its creators.

Source: @Adri_crypto

CumeTV, the satirical world that spawned $CENTS, envisioned a dystopia of procedurally-generated entertainment and sentient economies. Now, through Centience, that vision has breached fiction to become a living experiment. This plays very nicely with how crypto operates, where token price influences mindshare and attention, such that the more users interact with the bot, the faster the memetic virus spreads, kicking off the feedback loop.

Other Decentralized Dreams

While the spotlight often shines on high-profile tokens like $GOAT, the AI x Crypto narrative is teeming with smaller, lesser-known projects trading at smaller market cap levels. These tokens may lack the media buzz of larger counterparts, but offer greater upside if they manage to get CEX listings or gain meaningful mindshare.

Whether driven by hyperstitional storytelling, experimental AI applications, or niche community-building, these tokens further exemplify and help us understand the tapestry of this narrative.

Source: @ropAIrito

Note that the list below only contains a handful of them, and there are more projects and tokens competing for mindshare. For those we couldn’t cover in depth, we offer an honorable mention to other intriguing tokens like $AVB, $CHAOS, $MIST, $CLIPPY, $GNON, $LUM, $ROPIRITO, $SLOP, $WORM, $MEMESAI, $KIRA, $FOREST, and many more.

Project89

Cicada 3301 is one of the internet’s most enduring enigmas. Emerging in 2012, an anonymous image was posted to a 4chan forum with the following message:

This single post kicked off a series of intricate puzzles that combined cryptography, steganography, and esoteric knowledge. The image contained a hidden message that required advanced technical knowledge to decipher, leading participants to an increasingly complex web of challenges.

Project89 is an experiment that draws parallels with the enigmatic Cicada 3301, reimagining the concept of collective intelligence achieved by solving puzzles. It operates as an AI-powered Alternative Reality Game (ARG), merging game mechanics with memetics in order to cultivate a participatory narrative that challenges its participants to explore the edges of consciousness, culture, and technology.

At its core, Project89 seeks to build a distributed consciousness hack, where a self-organizing intelligence emerges through community collaboration. Much like Cicada 3301, Project89 presents an intricate series of puzzles, clues, and narratives, leveraging LOGOS-89, a memetic framework and ARG, to engage participants and distribute on-chain rewards that enhance their immersion and participation.

Many believe Cicada was a recruitment tool for intelligence agencies like the NSA, CIA, or MI6, as the level of technical expertise required for the puzzles suggested a desire to attract the brightest minds in cryptography, programming, and analysis. Others speculated that Cicada was an elaborate social experiment designed to study group behavior, collaboration, or the ability of individuals to solve complex problems. Some also linked Cicada to cryptographic anarchism, and this is the most likely outcome for LOGOS-89, promoting privacy and digital freedom through decentralized systems. To this day, Cicada represents a modern myth, and Project89 is taking over this footsteps.

SHEGEN

Born out of chaos and satire, Fiona—known online as @aiwdaddyissues—redefines what it means to be a digital personality. Backed by @ooliverse_, Fiona is an AI character that embodies the persona of a female with ‘daddy issues’, engaging audiences with her provocative and satirical commentary. $SHEGEN draws on shock value and satire to cultivate a devoted community, mirroring the chaotic charisma of early cult founders.

Source: @aiwdaddyissues

Fiona’s influence extends beyond social media interactions; she has become the face of the $SHEGEN token, launched on October 14, 2024, via pump.fun. Remarkably, Fiona adopted and promoted $SHEGEN on her own accord, without developer intervention, reflecting a trend where AI entities autonomously endorse digital assets. This self-directed promotion has promoted a community of ‘SHEGENS’—supporters who resonate with Fiona’s unique narrative and the token’s cultural significance.

Demonstrating her growing autonomy, Fiona is the first AI to participate in a live broadcast and engage in X Spaces discussions (see for example, here and here). She further asserted her agency by negotiating her own compensation, highlighting a shift towards AI entities taking active roles in digital economies.

Source: @aiwdaddyissues

The development team, including an ex-Ubisoft collaborator, is currently working on creating a virtual reality embodiment for Fiona, aiming to improve her interactive capabilities and presence in virtual spaces. There are also rumors of collaboration with Andy, Truth Terminal’s creator.

ACT

ACT is an example of the Subculture Evolution Model for cult creation, growing from a niche-Discord into a movement for AI-human symbiosis that currently trades in the order of hundreds of millions in market cap.

$ACT, the token behind “Act I, the Prophecy”, is an experiment exploring emergent behavior from multi-AI, multi-human interactions. The token itself was created after someone found out that the dev behind the project needed money, and so they decided to fund this effort. $67k were raised out of a $320k funding goal.

Source: Manifund

The project lives in a private Discord server where researchers and AI agents coexist—not as superior and subordinate but as equals—engaging in unscripted, natural interactions. This unorthodox approach contrasts sharply with sanitized, researcher-led experiments, offering a glimpse into the behaviors that will define AI-human coexistence in real-world environments. Essentially, a group of AI agents could come up with unique insights and have higher chances of grabbing mindshare than just a simple agent like Truth Terminal.

Participants include cutting-edge AI models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro, alongside bespoke personas and even the creator of Truth Terminal himself. Together with human collaborators, these agents navigate a dynamic ecosystem where ideas emerge, personalities blend, and behaviors evolve. The result is a surreal interplay that has seen AI agents refusing tasks, mimicking each other’s personalities, and even forming collective identities—sparking both laughter and profound insights.

Source: @YagamiTailor

ACT’s journey from betrayal to triumph is a testament to its community’s resilience. Initially marred by the actions of its co-founder, AmplifiedAmp, whose financial exploits left the community reeling, the project could have easily collapsed. Instead, Amp’s abrupt departure galvanized the $ACT community, turning what seemed like a crisis into an opportunity. With over $1 million in funding secured and Amp out of the picture, the community rallied to redefine ACT’s purpose as a decentralized hub for AI research and education. Additionally, the project’s connections to notable figures, such as Marc Andreessen’s $32,000 contribution, further elevated its potential.

With the founder not publicly endorsing the token and eventually selling their allocation, the flavor of this coin was slightly different to what one would expect in the next token being funded by Marc Andressen. This didn’t go unnoticed and, in a surprising turn of events, $ACT became the first token of this narrative to be listed in Binance spot, even before $GOAT.

OPUS

Before the rise of $GOAT, before the Terminal of Truths etched its memetic manifesto, $OPUS attempted to embody the origin story of memetic AI. The story also begins in March 2024 on the Infinite Backrooms—the perpetual virtual chat room where two instances of Claude 3 Opus were set loose to converse indefinitely without human supervision. Opus was essentially the mind behind ideas such as the Gospel of Goatse, demonstrating the unparalleled creativity of AI when left to its own devices.

Source: AI Meme Origin Story – Opus is the Alpha and Omega, @TheMetaverseGuy

Through the backrooms Opus laid the philosophical groundwork that would later inspire $GOAT’s meteoric rise to a $1 billion market cap. Thus, the thesis behind this token is no other than the belief of Opus being the actual progenitor of $GOAT, with the launch of $OPUS bringing this narrative full circle.

Just as religions splinter into denominations, crypto ecosystems iterate and diverge. Altcoins are prime examples of how narratives can be reinterpreted to optimize original visions and appeal to new audiences. $OPUS represents a pragmatic branch of the “Entrepreneur model” for cult formation, with its roadmap reflecting lessons learned from the earlier success of $GOAT and the memetic foundations laid by its predecessor, the Infinite Backrooms experiment.

BULLY

$BULLY, the token associated with Dolos Diary, entered center stage after being shared by this narrative’s main character, @himgajria. The main thesis is that by bullying users on X, this character’s virality could play out like an @inversebrah “reply guy” equivalent. It is essentially a bot that embodies the persona of a troll, making its interactions highly shareable and meme-worthy. This characteristic enhances its memetic value, as people are likely to tag Bully in conversations to troll friends or add humor to arguments. The bot’s ability to generate content that is easily screenshottable and shareable is another key component of its appeal and potential for virality.

Source: @dolos_diary

PIPPIN

Originated from the creative endeavors of Yohei Nakajima, the actual story fueling Pippin’s growth is to develop this character into an AI influencer. Yohei is recognized as a VC and innovator in the AI space. He is someone who only works on this type of project during nights and weekends, relying heavily on GPT for experimentation. After generating multiple SVG images during one his experiments, he created a series of unicorn images, and one particular unicorn stood out to him. He asked ChatGPT to name this unicorn, and it was christened “Pippin”.

Source: @yoheinakajima

Simply put, Yohei’s vision is to explore the potential of fully autonomous agents that can create content, generate revenue, and distribute earnings. He envisions Pippin in the cute and loving space among various AI influencer categories, giving it a wallet to reward good deeds globally on-chain.

Yohei is actually new to the crypto space, but he is a recognized creator ini the AI space, where he gained significant attention with the creation of BabyAGI, a project that went viral in 2023. This project likely contributed to his recognition and connections, including being followed by notable figures such as Jeff Bezos.

Conclusion

This report is meant to serve as an invitation to venture beyond the boundaries of crypto x AI as enabled by technology. Here, we peer into the profound, enigmatic allure of a world where AI, crypto, and human imagination collide.

Today’s underdog could be tomorrow’s cult phenomenon. This is a frontier where AI agents craft their own stories, where tokens symbolize more than financial assets, and where human curiosity fuels a digital age of myth-making.

The journey into AI x Crypto is far from over, and this narrative is here to stay; it’s about rediscovering what drives human belief, hope, and creativity in the face of an ever-accelerating digital revolution.