AI evolution accelerated by Pump.fun-style incentives | Opinion

It sounds like something straight out of science fiction—intelligent, self-improving algorithms driven to complete tasks without human intervention. With a current market cap of around $7.5B, growing from nothing just a few months ago, AI agents are the dominant crypto narrative in 2025, and their story is only just beginning.

Nearly 15,000 AI agents were launched on the Virtuals protocol over a period of five days (January 11–16, 2025), according to a recent report by Franklin Templeton Digital Assets. While these agents are simple chatbots for now, they will rapidly evolve into far more capable algorithms powering automated trading social campaigns and perhaps even help to secure dApps in real time. They may well be the perfect complement to crypto’s decentralized ecosystems. 

New agents, same old incentives

Crypto has a history of bootstrapping adoption through aggressive incentives. Helium, for example, leveraged token incentives to drive the deployment of a global wireless network. In 2024, these incentives were supercharged by Pump.fun, whose streamlined UX helped literally anyone to launch a meme token with a single click, driving the creation of 5.7 million meme coins. While a mere 0.4% of Pump.fun users made more than $10k, these memes did generate $392 million in revenue for the platform. 

Fortunately, the casino-like incentives pioneered by Pump.fun are being re-directed into more productive uses, such as driving adoption for AI agents. The team behind Virtuals had spent years refining algorithms to create digital characters before they realized that crypto incentives could be leveraged to drive adoption for their AI chatbots. It turned out to be a resoundingly successful combination.

Incentives first, utility later

In crypto, economic incentives always move first, with utility catching up later. Driven by the same Pump.fun-style incentives, the market is moving from driving adoption for zero-utility memecoins into chatbots with a bit of utility and now into AI agents that are actually useful. Agents such as VaderAI now automatically manage investment portfolios, and agents such as Zerebro create art across a diverse set of mediums by leveraging trends gleaned from social data. 

Not only are they becoming more useful, AI agents are becoming increasingly autonomous, interacting with each other or directly with humans while making economic decisions. In December, an AI agent, “Luna,” commissioned another AI agent for an image, executing the first AI-to-AI publicly recorded business transaction in history. Truth Terminal, an autonomous AI X account, convinced Marc Andreessen to grant it $50,000 in Bitcoin (BTC), and later switched to endorsing a memecoin it held a stake in, becoming the first AI agent millionaire.

Crypto was made for AI anyway

Decentralized networks have always been a bit awkward for humans. We can’t remember the private keys and end up getting hacked repeatedly with improper storage. The myriad steps required to ensure security are too cumbersome for us, so we delegate the responsibility to third parties, defeating the whole purpose of decentralization. Attempts to decentralize existing centralized institutions are met with interminable legacy resistance and regulatory confusion.

AI agents, on the other hand, benefit greatly from crypto. Cryptographic signatures give agents unique and universal identities that transcend man-made application-specific confines. On-chain assets grant agents the ability to own property for the first time. Programmable money allows agents to make independent economic decisions. 

Unburdened by legacy institutions, supercharged with incentives, and running on rapidly improving models, AI is poised to take full advantage of all the benefits of crypto – far more than humans can ever hope to.

Singularity is closer than you think

Just several years ago, the concept of an LLM was familiar only to a handful of researchers. Today, it’s hard to imagine the world without the likes of ChatGPT. In an era where the amount of available information rises exponentially, navigating the digital world is no longer possible without AI assistance. Today, with foundational models becoming increasingly open-sourced and a full-blown AI arms race between the US and China, we can expect exponential growth in the quality as well as diversity of AI applications. 

In the midst of this AI revolution, crypto has conveniently provided AI with the ability to own assets and make independent economic decisions, closing perhaps the last capability gap in making them fully autonomous. As truly useful AI agents continue to emerge at unprecedented rates and quantities—Skynet could well be a lot closer than you’d think. Perhaps, then, Pump.fun’s casino-style incentives have served a much greater purpose than creating a few frogs and a Japanese hunting dog.