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That New Sports Betting Guy You Like May Be An (AI) Agent

It’s Thursday, Jan. 16 and sports betting influencer Liam (@bets_liam) has just reviewed the latest “NFL Divisional Round Bets” from The Favorites Podcast, an NFL sports betting show with 70,000+ subscribers.
Liam takes to X and tweets his reactions:
The twist? He’s an AI agent powered by Memetica.ai, a no code AI agent consumer platform built by the team at Qstar Labs.
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AI agents are materially different from chatbots and ChatGPT. Agents use large language models as a foundation but add new information like real time data, news, and specialized knowledge. They can also bring memory, logic, and the ability to iterate and carry out a plan. Agents can, for example, monitor consumer products news, social media and buying data to summarize key trends and post them in a blog. They can learn from feedback to improve engagement. This means agents like Liam can act on their own and evolve.
AI agents represent such a material extension of AI capabilities that they have recently become a dominant narrative in crypto.
It all started in July 2024 when Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), gifted a quirky, X-happy AI agent called Terminal of Truths $50,000 worth of bitcoin as a research grant. Terminal of Truths, basking in Andreessen’s attention, began shilling its favorite memecoins on X, driving one token to over $300 million in market cap in a matter of days.
What happened next demonstrates crypto’s power to draw in capital and talent at lightning speed.
In October 2024, AI agent platform Virtuals launched on Coinbase’s Base protocol, allowing users to quickly create unique agents with specialized capabilities, personalities, and tradeable tokens. Now, more than 15,000 agents with tokens have been created. The most successful is a crypto research agent named aixbt, which has 400,000 followers on X and a token with a market capitalization of $650 million.
That same month, veteran developer Shaw introduced an AI agent framework called ElizaOS. Using Eliza, he launched agent ai16z (a tongue in cheek reference to Andresseen’s firm), an investment DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) touted as the “first AI hedge fund.” By the end of 2024, the ai16z token’s market capitalization had grown to over $1 billion despite having assets under management of a little over $25 million.
So, where to from here? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described AI agents as “a digital workforce” and predicted “…the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future.” In Multicoin Capital’s Frontier Ideas for 2025, managing director Kyle Samani envisions “Zero-Employee Companies” staffed entirely by AI agents and governed by DAOs.
But perhaps the most tangible vision comes from the ElizaOS team, which just announced a humanoid robot based on ai16z’s Eliza mascot, a “state-of-the-art personal companion (that) seamlessly integrates AI, blockchain technology, and advanced robotics.”
I’d say this AI Agent has legs.
As of January 22, 2025, accounts managed by the author’s firm held positions in the Virtuals token; this is subject to change at any time.
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CoinDesk 20 Performance Update: SUI and POL Rise 7.5%, Leading Index Higher

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2556.62, up 2.1% (+52.39) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.
Fifteen of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: SUI (+7.5%) and POL (+7.5%).
Laggards: FIL (-4.5%) and XLM (-1.6%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
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Dutch Bank ING Said to Be Working on a New Stablecoin With Other TradFi and Crypto Firms

Dutch bank ING is working on a stablecoin, looking to take advantage of Europe’s new cryptocurrency regulations that came into force last year, according to two people with knowledge of the plans.
ING’s stablecoin project could take the form of a consortium effort involving other banks and crypto service providers, both people said.
“ING is working on a stablecoin project with a few other banks. It’s moving slow as multiple banks need board approval to set up a joint entity,” one of the sources said.
ING declined to comment.
Europe’s Markets in Crypto Assets regime [MiCA] requires stablecoin issuers across EU member countries to hold an authorization license, while promoting the potential of euro-denominated stablecoins (the vast majority of the stablecoins in circulation are pegged to the U.S. dollar).
MiCA’s stablecoin rules, which also require issuers to maintain significant reserves in banks based in Europe, have strengthened compliant offerings like Circle’s euro stablecoin EURC over its main rival Tether, according to a note early this year from JPMorgan.
Banks like ING entering the European stablecoin space means French lender Société Générale, the first big bank to offer a stablecoin through its SG Forge innovation division, will soon have some competition.
Read more: Stablecoin Market Could Grow to $2T by End-2028: Standard Chartered
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DAO Infrastructure Provider Tally Raises $8M to Scale On-Chain Governance

Tally, a leader in on-chain governance tooling, has secured $8 million in Series A funding aimed at scaling its governance technology to more crypto-native decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).
Tally is best known for the Tally Protocol, which powers infrastructure to help leading protocols conduct effective on-chain governance of their DAOs, including Arbitrum, Uniswap DAO, ZKsync, Wormhole, Eigenlayer, Obol and Hyperlane.
«We’ve built this complete stack of software for operating these on-chain organizations,» Dennison Bertram, CEO and co-founder of Tally Protocol, said in an interview with CoinDesk. «We can take you from your idea to launching your token, to distributing your membership or ownership, all the way to the value accrual for your protocol.»
The platform began as a DAO governance tool and has evolved into the most widely adopted software stack for on-chain organizations across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, it said in a release.
«On-chain governance and capital formation could, in theory, dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of forming and operating organizations by moving these processes entirely into software rather than traditional jurisdictions guided by platforms like Tally,» Bertram said.
One day, on-chain organizations might be seen as a way to compete with nation states, he argued, referencing the costly and lawyer-intensive process of registering foundations and other legal entities typically used for crypto.
«Whoever embraces crypto really fully might actually be embracing fully the future,» he said.
Fixing vote turnout for better governance
One issue that Tally aims to tackle with funding from the Series A is low voter participation and apathy in DAO governance, which has led to sometimes controversial outcomes.
Last year, for example, a group of CompoundDAO token holders, called Golden Boys, successfully passed a controversial proposal to create a yield-bearing product called goldCOMP.
Despite initially gaining traction, the proposal faced significant controversy due to perceived irregularities, low voter turnout and a lack of widespread community engagement.
Ultimately, the Golden Boys agreed to cancel goldCOMP, which highlighted the broader issue of governance apathy within DAOs rather than any technical exploit or malicious intent.
«Many of the people that you should expect to vote ‘no’ on something like this didn’t show up,» Bertram said in an earlier interview. «What it shows is that the democratic process of governing a DAO is imperfect and needs improvement.»
To address this, Tally has developed staking mechanisms designed to reward active governance participants economically. Users can stake their governance tokens to receive Tally Liquid Staked Tokens (tLSTs), earning passive, auto-compounding yields while retaining voting rights within DAOs.
“This fundraise is really about leaning into the original vision,” Bertram said. “Now that we’ve proven that this works, that you can have these large organizations, it’s time to really scale it up.”
Institutions are getting involved in DAOs
Bertram also emphasized that recent regulatory clarity and shifts in attitude toward crypto governance in the U.S. have opened the door for increased institutional participation in DAOs.
“With this clarity, we’re going to get a lot more participation, not necessarily from average Joe token holders, but actually from large organizations that depend on the infrastructure they’re building on,” he said. “These organizations are going to need and want the ability to actually govern the infrastructure that they operate on.”
Ultimately, Bertram sees Tally’s role as pivotal in advancing decentralized governance and unlocking greater economic value for token holders by directly rewarding active, informed participants.
«Given the new acceptance of crypto as a key driver of future value in America, it’s time to scale it beyond crypto and make it a core primitive for creating new organizations,” he said.
The round was led by Appworks and Blockchain Capital with participation from BitGo amongst others.
Tally previously raised $7.5 million in 2021 across two funding rounds.
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