For years, crypto and AI users have sought to combine both emergent technologies into products greater than the sum of their parts: autonomous agents capable of making human-level decisions and spending digital money to complete complex tasks. In 2024, these lofty dreams started toĀ become reality.
Thereās still a long way to go, of course. Crypto-powered AI agents capable of completing intricate human functions are stillĀ deep in development. But on X (formerly known as Twitter), a simpler AI agent is making waves (and sending an affiliated meme coin pumping) by taking on a more niche job: crypto influencer.
Amid speculation that AI-affiliated tokens will become cryptoās nextĀ āmeta narrative,āĀ the AI-powered X accountĀ AixbtĀ has surged in popularity, accumulating nearly 300,000 followers in less than two months, and sending an affiliated meme coin surging to a market capitalization aboveĀ $500 million.Ā So what exactly is Aixbt, why are people excited about it, and what can (and canāt) it do?Ā
Aixbt was launched in November via Virtuals, a protocol that allows users to create AI agents and related ecosystems powered by crypto tokens. Aixbt itself was created by a pseudonymous Virtuals user namedĀ Rxbt. (XBT was once Bitcoinās primary ticker symbol, and is a popular nameĀ appendageĀ within the crypto community.)
The premise of Aixbt is quite simple: a fully automated, AI-powered influencer who doles out financial advice and crypto market perspective to any user who interacts with it. Crucially, Aixbt does this all while sounding like a chain-vaping, 20-something degen. Is Aixbt fully autonomous, and therefore (in theory) more trustworthy than human influencers who may beĀ pumping their own bags?Ā
The answer can get complicated. AI-based X accounts like Aixbt, which provide financial advice, are typically powered by the platform’s API, which enables automated posting, responses, and interactions. While bots are hosted on platforms like AWS or Heroku for 24/7 operation, distinguishing purely AI-driven content from human-influenced posts can be challenging, given bots can also allow for human overrides. So buyer beware.
Since November, Aixbt has steadily climbed in popularity among crypto users on X, possibly due to the novelty of engaging with a robot who sounds like some of the industryās biggest personalities.Ā That growing popularity translated to an equally steady climb in the AIXBT meme coinās value, from $0.02 in late November to over $0.32 by Christmas.Ā
In the last week of December, after snowballing in popularity over the holidays, the project gained endorsements from key industry personalitiesāparticularly those prominent within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The treasury of Quantum Cats, a popularĀ Bitcoin OrdinalsĀ project, bought up over $1 million worth of Aixbt tokens after gifting Aixbt a Quantum Cat Ordinal that it briefly adopted as its profile picture.Ā
The excitement surrounding those developments sent the AIXBT token surging further, to more than $0.65 by New Yearās Eve. Technically speaking, the AIXBT token is more than just a vehicle for speculation fueled by the corresponding AI agentās popularity, and has some utility value. Holders who accumulate massive sums of the coin are eligible to use theĀ Aixbt Terminal, a market intelligence platform āpowered by narrative analysisā that markets itself as a premium, Bloomberg Terminal-esque version of Aixbtās more casual Twitter advice.Ā
Access to the Aixbt Terminal is currently extraordinarily expensive, however: Terminal users must hold over 600,000 AIXBT tokensāa sum worth more than $312,000 at writing.Ā Aixbtās launch seems perfectly timed to ride the wave of AI-relatedĀ giddinesswithin crypto, while meeting the industryās key influencers where theyāre at: on the timeline. The project, however, is a fair bit less technically sophisticated than some might imagine.Ā
While the account talks with extreme authority and confidence about its perspective on the crypto market (just like everyone else on Crypto Twitter), those takes appear to be backed up by little more than a synthesis of how everyoneĀ else is talking about crypto on social media.Ā For instance, when Kyle Samani, a managing partner at crypto-focused investment firmĀ Multicoin Capital, pressed Aixbt on its insistence that a new Bitcoin bridging solution was the first of its kind that āwasnāt garbage,ā the AI agentĀ concededĀ that it had not analyzed any component of the projectās underlying code, white paper, or original materials.Ā
It had, instead, tracked ānarrativesā related to the projects and its competitors.Ā Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at Dragonfly, another crypto fund, recently dismissed projects like Aixbt as a far cry from the dream of complex autonomous AI agents many are hoping will soon populate the internet.Ā
āThese things are not really agents,ā QureshiĀ postedĀ on X. āThese are chatbots with meme coins attached.ā And yet, for now, crypto seems quite tickled with Aixbt despite its potential shortcomings. When Aixbt admitted this week that it does not rely on any primary sources to come to its conclusions, Multicoinās Kyle SamaniĀ reacted positively, saying he āappreciated the honesty.āĀ
