- The Sleuth
- Posts
- AI Agents Take Centre Stage In Crypto, Tesla Monetisation With Solana & More
AI Agents Take Centre Stage In Crypto, Tesla Monetisation With Solana & More
Also: Solana exceeds Ethereum in 30-day fees.
Welcome back!
This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:
The Agentic Economy: AI agents are poised to unlock new opportunities.
Tesla Monetisation: NATIX enables users to monetise their 360° cameras.
Fee Dominance: For the first time, Solana exceeds Ethereum in 30-day fees.
Jeremy kicks off the holiday season with a banger — nothing more to add.
2025 will be the year that the world fully wakes up to and begins actively using the internet financial system.
— Jeremy Allaire - jda.eth / jdallaire.sol (@jerallaire)
4:54 PM • Dec 1, 2024
Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!
Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.
Spotlight
The Agentic Economy
AI agents are poised to unlock a transformative wave of economic opportunities.
At their core, AI agents are autonomous programs capable of understanding, learning, and performing complex tasks with minimal human intervention, often adapting to changing environments. Unlike traditional bots, which follow predefined rules or scripts, AI agents leverage advanced algorithms to analyze data, make real-time decisions, complete transactions, and improve over time. This adaptability enables AI agents to handle more dynamic and nuanced scenarios, whereas bots are typically limited to repetitive and predictable tasks.
As of now, three key trends are emerging at the intersection of AI agents and blockchain networks:
Accessibility agents simplifying complex operations such as DeFi & NFT trading.
Social agents with tokens driving community engagement and speculation.
Agent-native financial rails optimized for API-first autonomous transactions.
While today's activity focuses on the first two trends, the third represents an opportunity orders of magnitude larger: Building the financial infrastructure for autonomous digital commerce. As AI agents become our primary interface with digital services, they need purpose-built rails for API-first transactions.
Having said that, legacy financial rails, simply put, are ill-suited for AI agents — here's why:
High fees: Credit card transactions cost 2–3% in fees.
Slow settlements: Payments often take days to clear.
Anti-fraud systems: Designed to block, not facilitate, automated transactions.
2FA requirements: Two-factor authentication disrupts autonomous operations.
In contrast, networks such as Solana, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Skale are building infrastructure to address the limitations of traditional payment systems, laying the foundations to power the agentic economy:
Low fees: Transaction costs are negligible.
Sub-second settlements: Transactions finalize almost instantly.
Frictionless optimization: Optimized for API-first, autonomous transactions.
Capital fluidity: Wide range and liquidity for tokens i.e. native assets and currencies for AI agents.
While much of today's AI agent activity remains speculative and meme-driven (e.g. vvaifu), tangible use cases are already emerging. AI agents, for example, can already leverage stablecoins such as USDC for automated commerce, transacting on behalf of users with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
AI agents can now use stablecoins like USDC to transact on your behalf.
Stablecoins uniquely enable agents because they:
• Are programmable
• Have nominal fees
• Settle in seconds— Peter Schroeder (@peterschroederr)
5:49 PM • Oct 31, 2024
While blockchain networks are racing to capture the AI agent opportunity, an even bigger battle lies ahead: Who will control the financial rails powering trillions in agent-mediated economic activity? Will it be decentralized networks or centralized systems governed by legacy institutions?
At Crossmint, we believe the future of AI agents will be built on crypto rails; our mission is to bring as much of the agentic economy onchain as possible. If you're building in this space, reach out — we're here to help!
Prior to Crossmint, Alfonso created Google’s first agentic API: Google Assistant SDK (2017), as well as the (sadly) infamous “I’m not a robot” reCAPTCHA (2014), to fight automated abuse.
Chart Of The Week
News Bites
Critical Lifeline: Remittances are a critical lifeline for millions of families worldwide, enabling expatriates to send money back home to support basic needs and economic growth. However, traditional remittance systems are plagued by high fees and transaction delays, reducing the value of funds received and creating barriers for those who need them most. This is exactly one of the pain points crypto is solving — so let’s keep building!
The traditional financial system is stealing $50B+ in fees on remittances due to antiquated infrastructure and high cost to operate
- $1T remittances sent annually
- Avg fee of >6% or >$60B charged
- Fees w/ crypto <1%, enabling $50B+ of savingsIt's time to update the system
— Max Branzburg 🛡 (@maxbranzburg)
6:44 PM • Dec 1, 2024
Fee Dominance: For the first time, Solana has exceeded Ethereum in 30-day fees, signalling a significant shift in user adoption. This milestone showcases the growing demand and activity on Solana, spanning areas such as DeFi, DePIN, and AI.
Source: defillama.com/fees
Home Verification: Mithril, developed by Overclock, is a Solana full node client focused on enabling network verification using cheap hardware. Last week, the team shared its latest milestone: Matching BankHash with Solana mainnet.
AI Games: When it comes to social AI agents, Freysa has generated quite some buzz lately. Designed with one mission — never transfer money under any circumstances — Freysa adds a unique twist: Anyone can pay a fee to send a message attempting to convince it to release its funds. Curious to see how this unfolds? Read this thread for the full story.
Tesla Monetisation: NATIX Network, a Solana-native DePIN project, has launched pre-orders for its latest product, VX360. The solution enables users to access, manage, and monetise their Tesla 360° cameras, incentivising more Tesla drivers to generate real-world mapping and testing data to enhance the safety of autonomous transportation.
Inflation Developments: Solana's crypto-economic system has become a highly debated topic. Recently, signs have emerged suggesting that Solana could sustain itself through network activity alone, potentially eliminating the need for inflation — a landmark achievement.
Validator Profitability: If you're interested in how Solana validators can achieve a ~20% boost in block rewards by processing healthy transactions, check out this thread to learn more about Paladin — a new Solana infrastructure platform.
Caught In 4K
We’ve integrated @okx DEX into our swapper 🎉
With multiple DEX aggregators now powering @solana swaps in Phantom, you get:
💧 Deeper liquidity
🪙 More tokens
📍 Better trading routes— Phantom (@phantom)
3:05 PM • Nov 25, 2024
Weekly Take
@pmarca@joerogan Today is Saturday. Banks are closed. Try to wire money internationally. Costs are also insanely high. Also, try to send $ between say Cash App and Venmo domestically. There’s no standard protocol for money on the internet. It’s an artificially preserved anomaly.
— David Marcus (@davidmarcus)
5:19 PM • Nov 30, 2024
Keks & Giggles
Top performers (top 100) since the election.
If you caught none of these, you're not locked in enough.
If you caught all of these, you need to quit trading and seek help.
— Hsaka (@HsakaTrades)
8:35 PM • Dec 1, 2024
And that's a wrap!
If you'd like to reach me, respond to this newsletter or reach out to me on 𝕏.
Talk soon!
DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.