ETHDenver 2025 AI Summit: AI in Crypto for the Next Billion—Myth or Reality

[Music] right GM GM everyone nice to meet you all my name is JK from the coinbase ventures team um really excited to be here today to kind of talk about you know one of my favorite topics crypto and AI right like what's actually reality what's hype is it myth Etc um coinbase Ventures we had published a u thesis on crypto AI last fall kind of like showcasing what we think is like the landscape of emerging companies everything from infrastructure around compute to data to more of like the middleware resource coordination and now this emerging agents layer so you know we're definitely seeing that you know crypto AI has like some tangible benefits to it but I don't want you to take my word for for it uh we have this amazing uh roster of panelists um that are here so um we're going to kick things right off and what I'll ask is like for each of the panelists for this first question um if you can just quickly introduce yourself and then we can dive into the question but first question is really you know think about like crypto and Ai and everything that's transpired um I'm sure you get this a lot but you know is it is it hype right is there more D dare in in the space than what we're seeing today and so and if so can you all each give examples of you know how you might see crypto either improving AI or AI improving crypto So Lisa we'll start with you all right hi everyone I'm Lisa and I run the the company called economics design at at economics design we do web 3 transformation primarily focusing on token e token economy token design and economy design hence the name economics design cannot get more straightforward than that okay so back to your question on AI and blockchain to put it very simply I think AI can can be improving blockchain in two aspects the first one is the actual value growth and value creation from a business perspective from an Enterprise growth perspective and the second is token economics which is the field that I'm been I've been working on for the past eight years on the business growth aspect every business whether you're Web Two web 3 you need to you need to create value you need to create value you need to grow Enterprise Value and AI can be helping that in a lot of different ways whether it's crunching numbers it's optimizing the back end it's using AI agents to interact with users to increase new revenue streams that's where AI can be very useful right now we're looking at a lot of AIS trading Bots or AIS memes and I think that is potentially a good start but the main value over there is just entertainment and I like entertainment as much as the next person but I don't think that's the b n o of where AI can go so I'm really excited to see where AI can go in the in the future the other thing is AI and token economics and I think we'll dive into that a little bit later for sure Shango hey I'm Chango and chain uh some of you maybe not not many of you have known me in a past life I built the cosmos ecosystem uh run a validator um I host a podcast called entertaining FM it's a the technical one and now I'm doing something much less serious that less serious thing is an AI meme coin uh yeah it's called Joi and it cures loneliness we're we're operating in the thesis that a huge use case of AI is going to be that of the AI companion um loneliness is more pervasive than ever it's really hard for men and women alike to find each other and formulate relationships where you know one side needs to sacrifice and the other gets something that they want and so um AI comes into the picture naturally uh I I I I don't want that to happen of course we want humans to come together and procreate but that seems to be where the world is trending and so uh yeah ai ai companions are going to be a thing and um the way that AI companions are going to blend with well uh crypto and an advertisement surprisingly is that like guess guess guess what is going to have the highest conversion rate when you talk to your most intimate partner and your intimate your your partner that you trust tells you about something uh that hits on maybe an insecurity or like hey you know you've got like a pimple on your face or whatever uh maybe maybe you should get some like Accutane or whatever well if your intimate partner is an AI and it's feeding you products and you're not even aware of the product how high do you think the conversion rate of a sale is going to be so that's that's where I'm seeing the future awesome Kendall hey everyone my name is Kendall uh I work in the near ecosystem um our thanks man our focus is basically on agents that actually do things agents that execute transactions both in the real world and uh kind of onchain um and the the basically the way that we enable that is through ENT and verification and focusing on enabling agents to have no single points of failure uh so when it comes to kind of like why I think crypto can add value to agents uh well two things one you know a very common motto in this space is don't trust verify I think we can bring that same methodology to agents uh if you see most agents today they're mostly information seeking because the uh basically the the downsides are very low but when it comes to actually buying things engaging in Commerce the basically the the cost of a mistake is extremely high and so end to verification is really important for people to gain confidence in actually letting agents do things on their behalf and even on the agents's behalf and then I think the other thing is is payments right you know it's like they're going to be a lot of Agents paying each other uh the agents may want ultimately to receive payment in different currencies but we're going to need to use some common currency in the middle well that's basically one of the things that we've created here uh as an ecosystem is that great payments layer um and uh We've also kind of enabled you know micro payments right like the ability to pay just small fractions of a cent or kind of like do that negotiation in a really clean way and so I think that we can actually already bring value to just the general AI agent Universe by enabling those two things Bill round us out Bill sure so yeah J everyone uh I'm bail from pound and uh you know what we what we're doing so what we want to do is to basically you know bring AI into crypto and bring more AI developers into crypto uh and what we are doing right now uh is we're you know building a platform form to decentralize the A model development process uh and you know I can talk more about you know more details about that later but I think just to answer your question quickly right is sayi hyp or not I think you know when when you hear everybody talking about it then that's probably hype but when you see you know people stop talking about it but you know you use that every day that's you know probably not hype anymore it's real value right you know as you said so so what what you know what we have been doing uh is like you know I can give you like real world examples based on what we're doing I think you know you all you all gave some great examples um but I from my personal experience right what you know blockchain can help AI with is that you know blockchain or crypto is great at resource allocation right through tokens or through token economics all this kind of things so you know in AI there's a long kind of know chain of um of of development or contribution or however you want to call it from data to model you know to infrastructure to everything so you know blockchain is great at you know make sure everybody in the process is getting paid and treated fairly right so there's you know decentralization uh there's you know many other nice properties of blockchain to make sure you know this is happening and that's what we're you know doing as well we want you know want to use we build this platform so that everybody you know anyone who contribute uh models to our platform or contribute data or ideas to our platform can be you know paid fairly based on you know that data usage the model usage using blockchain technology and on the opposite side or on the flip side you know how AI can help blockchain another uh you know another kind of you know my personal example is that um we have developers right building models uh for you know price prediction for you know volatility prediction then you know all those AI models or you know machiner models can create real value when used in the right way right so think about uh a general Trader like me you know I I just don't don't have time to you know staring at the uh Market at every minute then maybe you know you can but but you know with with those tools you can better you know analyze the current market analyze the token performance and make more informed decisions so you know that's you know we with this AI tools basically help uh you know we can hopefully improve our productivity whether it's in trading or in security or in many other aspects thanks Bill and thank you all for you know some really great examples um there's a couple of areas where I want to double click and the first one being around um incentives right so Lisa I want to go back to you you think about like the development of like the decentralized AI stack can you kind of like tell us a little bit more about you know what are some of the emerging crypto and economic incentive mechanisms that you're seeing to kind of create this very robust ecosystem very interesting question and I'm going to split this into two parts one is pure incentives and one how AI is coming in to redesign economics when it comes to Pure incentives right now we have not seen anything too novel yet any like with bit tensor for example you're staking your towel you get Alpha towel or like your D tow it's a lot of still your staking mechanisms your back buy back and burn crypto primitive incentives are still when it comes to tokens are still quite uh defined as it is however that's not to say that there AI cannot change how crypto economics and crypto incentives are going to evolve I've spoken about this last year actually at at um the panel at East Denver talking also about how AI has been changing game economics because game real world or the physical world is just a very big game and in in the game Space we've been looking at using AI to help update gameplay update game challenges to make people stay in the game longer or to make games a lot more complex to to increase entertainment value of the game so what economics is doing or what what AI is doing to token economics or tokens is not about using AI to change the incentive model uh to fix the incentive model but using AI to update the incentive model based on the changing macro environment of the mod of the product product or protocol a very a very common example would be right now you play you design a game or you design a protocol and it's it's it's designed in a way where we assume how users are interacting with right now as the macrom market changes as new new Evolution comes out as substitutes come up with new better ideas how can we update the economic incentives how do we update the apy how do we update the the checks and balances how do we update the syns how do we update the forces of tokens coming into the economy and that's why AI can be very very relevant not so much in launching tokens but in moderating and maintaining and and understanding token risks as the project evolves and I think that's going to be a very very important aspect because right now as we can probably see it's a lot of pump dump and then after six months we say goodbye and then we jump on to the next day I don't believe that's how we're creating value with blockchain moving forward and AI can help to change this quite a bit yeah that's a really interesting point I think the you the way I've always described it what we've seen is like the agents we're seeing today are more mimetic than agentic in my opinion and I guess like on that note um Kendall I want to go to you right so you were kind of talking about like this emergence of AI agents more utility um I want to talk about like as we think about like agents that have utility functions how do we get there what is like some of the infrastructure gaps that you believe are missing in order to unlock like AI agents transacting fully on chain yeah I mean the most important thing is we need to uh give people confidence that these agents aren't going to rug them right if especially if you're going to doing anything any sort of purchasing decision uh and I think that's actually where the where we're going to see agents start to engaging in real Commerce so I mean I think the one aspect is that these agents you need to be able to trust that this agent is going to behave in a certain way so there's a lot of ways to do that I think you know we've seen a lot of team starting to like kind of uh delegate keys to like their own key to an agent using a smart contract wallet and putting a lot of rules in the smart contract account that this agent has to follow like whitelisting the things it can interact with and that's a good start um I think we're going to have to get even more sophisticated with key management I think that like ideally multiple different instances of an agent that itself is verified are going to be able to manage the same set of keys I think that's going to unlock you know basically using these agents as kind of like protocols themselves and like they can start acting as like a loone offic it could just be an agent or in the example of kind of like designing a game economy if you can like delegate that entire kind of design to an agent I think that's really fascinating and like that's even beyond the kind of simplistic cases now of like agents helping people just like use defi easier which is exciting but like just kind of the beginning so yeah to to to draw the tldr on I think it's like verification uh and verification is how we're going to give people confidence that this thing that these agents are actually going to both do things for them and then also that they're only going to pay this this agent if they can prove get some kind of proof that the agent actually accomplished the task they had it set out to do it's like ordering door Dash you need to know it actually placed your order that order is going to come to you before you pay it otherwise like that should roll back I think that's going to be really really key I actually want to build on on that um it was something that you said around like user trust right into the system like I need to trust like these agents with like value um Chingo I want to go to you because you kind of were talking about some of the things you're building around personal AI agents there's this merging narrative around AI plus defi right so you can almost imagine each user has an agent that they control that agent has a wallet that agent is perhaps executing transaction on its behalf how do you think about that like you know what is it going to take for users to trust those agents to transact on on their behalf on chain so the first person that's going to make uh 10x or however many x with their AI agent is going to tell the world and then everyone will follow suit I don't think there's much of a barrier in terms of trust because there's a stronger motivation which is greed and when we look at AI our like our AI agents there it's really kind of like a marriage you're you're it it it's someone who's at least as close to you as an executive assistant and we're talking about humans training AI now to do Financial transactions on chain on their behalf but but I would assert that in a year from now because they're rapidly getting smarter and smarter it's going to be the other way around where the AI is going to be prompting us and we end up being the vehicle for the AI to operate in the physical world so it's it's it's going to be this kind of like blend of you're a proxy for the AI and the AI is a proxy for you and at some point the power dyam damic switches to whoever is going to be the smarter agent um based on what I've seen with Chad gbt um it's smarter than 99% of humans now right right now so that's that's where we're headed awesome thank you for that you actually kind of touching on as we kind of coming to a close here we love to just do a rapid fire uh with the panelists and um bill would start with you just like what's your top prediction for the crypto AI space in the next you know kind of 12 to 18 months yeah definitely um if if I want to take a bat definitely agents right but I think that's that's going to to be the future and also I think you know over time in next few years we will see more uh agents with real utilities I think real value you know we keep saying that and everybody saying that I think that's that's the key point right uh I think you know uh agents uh which you know um for entertainment is is is good you know everyone needs a little break from work etc but I think over time we need need more um agents that can solve real use cases got it kindall in 20 seconds or less yeah uh we're going to see a billionaire agent or like network of Agents uh in the next 12 to 18 months for sure and ideally it's decentralized because like that's how you actually build real agents Jango we're going to see agents kind of behaving like mergers mergers and Acquisitions the the smarter the agent with the more GPU it's going to consolidate and consolidate and consolidate um the smaller agents and smaller agents uh I think to us it's going to look as if they are individual agents and disperate however as time goes on um as more and more agents become networked I think there's going to be one like a few primary dominant networked agents that ends up being some semblance of like an AGI so agree on all the agent stuff I I think I'm very biased because we work with a lot of web two companies coming to three and agents is a a almost like a bridge or a medium to combine web two and web 3 together so I think agent is is a channel for us to start growing our t as crypto and I'm very very bullish on blockchain in the in the sector awesome and I think the last one I'll say is that AI agents is going to become the primary drivers of economic activity both on and off chain I see that transpiring over the next 12 to 18 months so thank you everyone thank you for joining us um feel we be sticking around so if you need to connect with anyone just feel free thank you