📝#107: AI Agents Wars
AI agents holiday deep dive. Crypto.com launches sports prediction market. Disney and ESPN launched on Fortnite. xAI raised $6B Series C. Perplexity raised $500M at a $9B valuation.
Hey, it’s Marc. We’ll soon publish a comprehensive report on Web3 commerce for business leaders. The first 100 people who sign up will get it for free (90/100):
“You can think of an AI copilot as your main interface for interacting with your chatbot or assistant. Kind of like a home screen for your different AI needs.”
— Ray Smith, VP AI Agents at Microsoft
This week’s question:
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Let’s dive in🦈
📚 Our Top Reads This Week
Year in review: Top pieces and themes of 2024. A16z crypto. Link
2025 Crypto Market Outlook. Coinbase. Link
Building effective agents. Anthropic. Link
Consumer Crypto & Gaming Year in Review [Podcast]. Messari. Link
Revolut’s Stablecoin Will Be a Total FAILURE!
LinkThe Dawn of the Intelligence Explosion. Mckay Wrigley. Link
AI in Action: Use Cases, ROI, and What’s Next for 2025. The Information & SAP. Link
🤖 AI Agents: The New Interface of the Internet
AI hit a new high.
In 2024, AI agents evolved beyond learning, analyzing, and predicting—they’re now driving decisions and taking action.
Chatbots are history and AI Agents are taking over. Here’s what happened this year:
AI Leaders: OpenAI remained dominant as an LLM provider, while Google and Anthropic gained momentum, closing the gap. In 2024, OpenAI's market share in the enterprise LLM sector decreased from 50% to 34%.
Adoption Trends: AI saw growing adoption in both experimentation and production settings. However, challenges persisted:
Scaling complexities
Data privacy concerns
Lack of robust monitoring tools
Why it matters: Businesses are prioritizing automation and simplification to drive real value with AI.
Five key areas where AI agents are transforming workflows:
Employee support: Tools like Copilots enhance productivity.
Consumer advocacy: Digital doubles personalize customer interactions.
Customer service: Platforms like Intercom deliver better experiences.
Workflow automation: Beam AI optimizes processes.
Data & business intelligence: Snowflake AI powers actionable insights.
By the data: By 2027, agents will reshape work, doubling productivity and contributing to at least 40% of knowledge-based tasks.
Successful AI Agent applications:
AI XBT: It uses AI agents with reinforcement learning to analyze markets, execute trades, and manage portfolios in real-time.
JP Morgan: AI agents optimize portfolios and assess creditworthiness, cutting fraud by 70% and saving $200M annually.
Notable open-source frameworks (AI Agent development):
🚨 Key takeaways for executive and brand leaders:
Start identifying areas within your organization where automated AI agents could be deployed to improve operational efficiency, such as treasury management or user engagement.
Use open-source AI frameworks like Eliza for prototyping quickly & reducing costs.
Collaborate with platforms, actively developing in AI and crypto spaces.
Evaluate deploying AI agents to manage investment portfolios or create passive revenue streams.
Start small with low-value assets to test trading algorithms and progressively scale.
Prioritize areas where AI can replace labour-intensive tasks, focusing on scalability without increasing costs.
Use hybrid models that combine human oversight with AI autonomy.
Measure ROI based on saved costs and improved output from AI-driven operations.
AI Agent "Wars"
Base and Solana are competing for dominance in AI agent development, with key metrics like transaction speed, user growth, and developer engagement.
AI16Z vs. Virtual Protocol: Virtual Protocol leads the AI agent space with a $3B market cap, while Solana-backed AI16Z, at $880M, aims to challenge its dominance.
Key Differentiators of AI16Z:
Adoption: Eliza (AI16Z’s open-source framework) ranks #2 on GitHub for AI agents, indicating strong developer interest.
Tokenomics: Overhaul ties new agents to its token, similar to Virtual's model.
Exchange Listing: Potential tier-1 exchange listing could drive growth.
Also: AI16Z currently holds only 5% mindshare compared to rivals like Virtual, limiting its short-term impact.
Looking ahead: With increasing demand for multi-agent systems and coordinated pipelines, 2025 could bring advancements in areas like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)1 and collaboration across agents.
Sports Prediction Markets 🏈
Crypto.com launched a sports prediction market in the U.S., beginning with Super Bowl bets.
What you should know:
Betting Options: Bets can be placed using various cryptocurrencies.
Opportunity: Sports betting has not been widely popular on platforms like Kalshi.
Market: Sports betting revenue in the U.S. reached $14.3B in 2024, from $0.48B in 2018.
Why it matters: Crypto.com’s deep sports ties, with partnerships like F1 and UFC, give it a unique advantage. Holding 35.9% of sports sponsorships alongside FTX, it’s primed to engage sports fans and capture the growing market for decentralized sports prediction.
By the data: The U.S. sports betting market is projected to grow at a 10.73% CAGR, reaching $23.80B by 2029.
Other players: Polymarket, Azuro, Hedgehog, Drift, Myriad Markets
Crypto.com stands out with its strong brand, CFTC compliance, seamless integration, and diverse payment options, including stablecoins.
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🚨 Other Highlights You Can’t Miss
Disney and ESPN launched on Fortnite. Link
African Diamond Council using blockchain for traceability. Link
xAI raised $6B Series C. Link
Perplexity raised $500M at a $9B valuation. Link
Mo Shaikh stepped away as Aptos’s CEO. Link
🚨 Top Under-The-Radar Macro Signals
Bitcoin: Matador Technologies, a Canadian crypto firm, adopts a Bitcoin reserve strategy, purchasing $4.5M in Bitcoin.
Regulation:
Acquisition: MoonPay will acquire Helio Pay, a crypto payment platform for approximately $150M.
Partnerships:
👉 Keep up with all our signals for Web3 execs on our Telegram channel.
💰 Money Moves
Rumble: Online video-sharing platform raised $775M led by Tether. Link
ALLO: Real-world assets tokenization platform raised $100M. Link
Usual: RWA stablecoin protocol raised $10M from Binance Labs. Link
Avalon Labs: DeFi protocol raised $10M led by Framework Ventures. Link
Trrue Chain: Layer-1 blockchain raised $10M from GEM Digital. Link
That’s all for now, folks.
Talk soon,
– Marc & Team
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Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful AI framework that enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by grounding them in external, verifiable sources of knowledge.