Good Morning ☕️ 

Another action-packed week in the Crypto x AI vertical as we see AI agents and infrastructure continuing to evolve rapidly. Let's dive into this week's alpha:

This Week:

• Highlights of this week in AI x Crypto

• Project updates & upcoming catalysts

• Emerging trends in the AI sector

• Chatting with Greg Osuri about AI sovereignty

• Our pick of the best 2025 predictions

Now let's get into the details... 👇️ 

Highlights

📍The first-ever Solana AI hackathon concluded with over 400 submissions, hundreds of which were AI agents. The list of hackathon projects that current have no token is here, and those that already have a token are listed here.

📍Anthropic published a comprehensive guide on building LLM agents, drawing from their experience working with dozens of teams across industries. The most successful agent implementations use simple, composable patterns rather than complex frameworks or specialized libraries

📍One of our new favorite tools to use is called cookie.fun— which essentially the "CoinGecko for AI agents". The platform now tracks 886 agents and offers features like agent mindshare, impressions, smart engagement and more. You can gain access to a premium tier of the platform by staking 10,000 $COOKIE (up 51% this week)–this could be a bet on the agent narrative continuing to heat up as people try to get access to tooling in order to stay on top of it.

Trends

At Outpost, we’re all about staying on top of current trends and getting in-front of emerging ones. Here’s some of the trends we see heating up + some alpha to get you up to speed.

AI Agent Launchpads & Infra - Trending

Platforms enabling users to create, deploy, and monetize AI agents with built-in tokenomics and governance structures.

Example Projects: Vitruals, ai16z, vvaifu, Zerebro (Zentients.xyz), Holoworld AI, Lush AI

Reading: 
FXN Action Engine
Keeping Up with Virtuals
AI Agent Supercycle: A Guide to the best Infra plays
Zerebro builds launchpad
DWF AI Agent Fund
All Things ai16z Update

AI Investment DAOs - Trending

Web3-native investment vehicles leveraging AI for trading and portfolio management, often with autonomous decision-making capabilities. These DAOs allow for decentralized participation in AI-driven investment strategies.

Example Projects: ai16z, Vader, Spore, daos.world, AicroStrategy, DR3AM FUND

Reading: 
Ecosystems to watch: CreatorBid, Solana, Spore
Analyzing Agentic Funds

TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) - Emerging

A secure computing environment that guarantees code execution cannot be tampered with, even by the machine operator. TEEs are becoming crucial infrastructure for running AI agents and protecting sensitive data in crypto applications.

Example Projects: Phala, FXN (with their Action Engine), Nillion

Reading: 
Guide to Securing TEE Apps
Phala TEE AI Report

DeFAI (DeFi x AI) - Emerging

The integration of AI capabilities into DeFi protocols, enabling more sophisticated trading strategies, risk assessment, and automated portfolio management.

Example Projects: Wayfinder ($PROMPT), AicroStrategy, Sturdy Finance

Reading: 
How Agentfi accelerates the Weirdening

Project Updates

Updates this week:

Zerebro: Building Zentients.xyz, a consumer launchpad for agents with value feedback to Zerebro.

FXN: Unveils FXN Action Engine™, enabling AI agents to autonomously handle real-world tasks across areas like commerce, data intelligence, gaming and more, with live data streams and specialized agent swarms for each sector

0G Labs: Proposes ERC-7844, a new NFT standard for AI Agents enabling secure ownership and private metadata transfer.

FLock.IO: Reveals tokenomics with 66.7% allocation to community/ecosystem ahead of TGE.

Lush AI: Launches Lush Exchange alongside influencer Kookie.

Holoworld AI: Teases launch of no-code AI agent launchpad with multimodal features.

Aethir: Unveils Edge device for shared computing power with reward incentives.

Upcoming Catalysts:

Top Hat: V2 of their agent launchpad will be going live imminently 👀

Nillion: Announces mainnet launch for their privacy-preserving protocol in February 2025.

Podcasts

Last week we had an epic conversation with Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network, about AI sovereignty and explored why AI's biggest challenge isn't models or data - it's energy. There’s some hidden alpha in this one as well 👀 

Reading List

Given it’s now 2025, many are dropping their predictions for the coming year. Here are a few that are worth reading:

Redphone / Delphi
Haseeb / Dragonfly
Robbie Peterson / Delphi
Rob Sarrow / Volt Capital
Aryan / CMT Digital
Greg Isenberg / Late Checkout
Oliver Jaros / CMT Digital
Stacy Murr
Mike Ippolito / Blockworks

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