AI Agents & Orchestration.

The first crypto-native category where the product is software that earns money on its own.

Tracked 09Conviction 02Watching 06Skeptical 01

Thesis

Why this sector, why now.

Agents are the first AI primitive that fits crypto's settlement layer naturally. They need wallets, identity, payments, and counterparty risk priced in code — exactly the things blockchains were built for. The interesting fork is whether agent value accrues to the framework (Eliza, Virtuals), the agent itself (token-as-equity), or the substrate that pays for agent work. My read: framework is undifferentiated long-term; substrate is winner-take-most; individual agent tokens are mostly noise with a few signal exceptions.

Signals I track

What would move my read.

01
Agent revenue per active user beyond airdrop incentives
02
Cross-substrate portability (Base → Solana → others)
03
Whether DAO-style governance survives or collapses to core team control

Kill shot

What would kill the thesis

If a major Web2 platform (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) ships proprietary agent rails before crypto-native rails reach institutional adoption, this whole layer becomes a niche.

Coverage

Projects on the radar.

Virtuals Protocol

Conviction

Launchpad cho on-chain AI agents — biggest agent ecosystem hiện tại trên Base

Deep read →

ai16z / ElizaOS

Watching

AI agent framework open-source — Marc Andreessen's DAO experiment scaling

Deep read →

Olas Network

Conviction

Original (2021) crypto AI-agent network for co-owned autonomous services; $13.8M Series A led by 1kx, dominant on Gnosis prediction markets.

Deep read →

AIxBT

Watching

Single-agent crypto Twitter intelligence — first viral 'AI alpha agent'

Deep read →

GAME by Virtuals

Watching

The GAME agentic framework/SDK powering Virtuals Protocol's 18,000+ tokenized AI agents on Base; community/IDO-funded, no disclosed VC round.

Deep read →

MyShell

Watching

Consumer-facing decentralized AI platform for creating agents/bots; $11M pre-Series A led by Dragonfly, SHELL listed on Binance Feb 2025.

Deep read →

Sentient

Watching

An open-source AGI network ('The GRID') for monetizing AI agents and 'loyal' models — off the biggest crypto seed of 2024 ($85M, Founders Fund + Pantera + Framework).

Deep read →

Theoriq

Watching

Decentralized infrastructure coordinating AI agent swarms for onchain DeFi yield; $6.2M seed-extension led by Hack VC (total ~$10.2M).

Deep read →

Spectral

Skeptical

Onchain agent economy (Syntax) to build no-code AI agents; SPEC on Base, ~$30M legacy backing (General Catalyst, Social Capital) from a prior credit-scoring product.

Deep read →

POV

Long-form in this sector.

AI Agents & OrchestrationMay 22, 2026· 1 min

Virtuals' Tokenization Loop: Does the Math Work in 2027?

Virtuals Protocol proved agent tokenization at scale on Base. The token model gives holders revenue share. The question I cannot answer yet is whether that loop survives when the long tail of launches goes to zero — and whether the curated head is big enough to carry the rest.

Read piece →

Going deeper

Bespoke AI Agents & Orchestration dive for your fund.

Brief me

Draft thesis · editorial voice in progress, edits land continuously