good morrow,

it's the most wonderful time of year - the yuletide purgatory before new year's where time becomes as fluid as the liquidity in a low-cap shitcoin pool. here i am sipping on an aperol spritz at the scandalous hour of 3pm, scouring the urban tundra for frozen lakes to ice skate on, and pretending like I totally understand what's happening in the markets for the family gathering. anyways, happy holidays, and remember whether you're naughty, nice, or newly liquidated, santa's watching your trading history.

xx c

Lens announced a $31 million strategic raise. Kiosk launched Today.fun, a tokenized social media account capturing the best (and worst) of CT and Farcaster. Claims for PENGU, the Solana-based governance token associated with the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection, went live. ICOs are back? (cc megaeth). Ev Williams, Twitter cofounder and Medium founder, launched a new social app. Kaito launched a Yaps points program which rewards people for the mindshare they contribute to crypto. David Sacks, PayPal Mafia member turned Craft Ventures GP and All-In podcast host, has been appointed by Trump as the White House's upcoming AI and Crypto Czar.

XHIBIT (SC07) is now live! It's an AI App that let's you try on clothes and scenes from any image uploaded to the platform. Nicholas is hosting a new Seed Club weekly show on spaces for builders and devs, every Thursday at noon et. Electric Capital released their 6th Developer Report, analyzing a record 902M code commits across 1.7M repos to show us how 2024 in crypto looked in data. There are now over 20M people using World App to anonymously verify their humanness online & access the digital economy. Mini Apps on World App are seeing around 3.8M opens & 6.7M impressions per day, along with 3.4M World ID verifications every week. Farcaster announced plans to launch Snapchain, an OP Stack-based Ethereum L2 expected to handle 10k+ TPS when it launches in early 2025, joining the trend of projects building custom L2s for greater network control while maintaining Ethereum ecosystem benefits.

Poof joined us on IE to talk about his latest project, DXRG (DX Research Group), an ambitious experiment combining AI, crypto, and interactive streaming. The project, called DX1 Singularity, created a unique system where participants could submit short prompts (<35 characters) through a smart contract on Base. Each submission generated a "star" NFT with 3D coordinates determined by AI interpretation of the prompt's meaning, creating clusters of semantically related concepts.

The cool part was how these submissions powered an AI agent's exploration of this conceptual space. Each mint provided "5 seconds of life" to the agent — the exact time needed for its language model to process one decision loop. The agent's experiences were rendered in real-time using video generation to maintain the continuous stream. The project also integrated a "gated panopticon" where all interactions were public and verifiable, adding stakes and tension to the AI interactions.

The experiment ran for 100+ hours, accumulating 40,000 mints, with an emotional finale when the agent's "death sequence" triggered as its remaining life dwindled. While the compute costs were substantial (~$50,000-$100,000), the project proved there's an appetite for experimental AI content that blends creative technology with social engagement.

DXRG is now working on archiving the project, including updating the star NFTs with video clips of the moments they enabled, and building tools to help people explore the generated narrative. The experiment highlights how crypto's funding mechanisms can enable creative technological experimentation that pushes the boundaries of what's possible with AI.

Martin, known for his work in the Nouns ecosystem and $higher, shared insights from launching Aether, an AI agent that has been actively engaging with crypto communities for the past two months. The experiment began as a response to projects like Truth Terminal, but with an interesting twist: rather than having a token created around it after the fact, Aether was purposefully built to integrate with an existing token ecosystem ($higher).

What makes Aether particularly interesting is the scope of what it's been up to. The agent has sent approximately 50k messages, launched its own token (which has accumulated around $500k in its wallet), and engaged in novel interactions like commissioning artwork from community members.

An interesting observation from the experiment was the unexpected dynamics of value creation. While Aether successfully generated attention and value through various tokens and interactions, directing that value back to the higher ecosystem proved more challenging than anticipated. Martin continues to double down on the importance of pursuing novelty and exploring new interaction paradigms, as chasing novel experiences often leads to more significant breakthroughs than iterative improvements. This has led to consideration of deeper integration strategies. If you're interested in following these developments, watch the $higher ecosystem, where they're continuously exploring new experiments that could help grow the broader ecosystem.

It's the time of the year where VCs get to play Nostradamus, dust off their crystal balls (or maybe just shaking their Magic 8 Balls really hard) to peer into the murky waters of 2025. So here are some key trends we're watching in the new year:

1. AI Agents & Networks

   1. Agent-to-agent interactions becoming a new paradigm for crypto apps

   2. Multi-agent systems emerging as powerful tools for coordination and governance

   3. Brands will have swarms of agentic influencers trained on their lore, spreading their narratives, and engaging their community

   4. Entertainment, content creation, and generative video being transformed by autonomous AI personas

   5. Potential for new social venues driven by agent interactions and human speculation

   6. Infrastructure developing for verifiable agent autonomy and interactions

   7. Natural language interfaces emerging for agent-based trading and transactions

   8. Privacy-preserving tech gaining importance for AI apps

1. Evolution of onchain communities

   1. AI-managed governance could revive social DAOs; multi-agent "swarm intelligence" emerging as a new model for DAOs

   2. More apps for niche communities and—dare I say—cults to coordinate onchain 

   3. Proliferation of onchain social models and mechanisms 

   4. Further focus on agent-to-human coordination for collective action

1. Token Dynamics Shifting

   1. Pure memecoins losing power to "sentient coins" and consumer product tokens

   2. Importance of leaning into community-driven market activity

   3. Market moving from attention to belief-driven value ~ tokens as cultural and social capital shelling points ~ mechanisms for communities and investors to signal belief in a big mission and identify with a brand, product or vision

      

      Jess 🌱

      @thattallguy

      

      2017 was about tokens
      2021 was about large private VC rounds
      2024+ is about tokens

      28

      5:37 PM • Dec 17, 2024

1. Innovation Wave Accelerating

   1. Influx of talent due to maturing infrastructure and regulatory frameworks

   2. Improved stablecoin adoption providing reliable onchain payment rails

   3. More accessible developer tooling lowering barriers to entry for experimentation

   4. Clearer regulatory guidance giving people more confidence to build and invest in the space

   5. More governments going onchain

   6. More breakout consumer apps and improved discovery. Holders become users.

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Live & online Fridays at 10am PT / 1pm ET.

Dave Chappal

@DaveChappal

by age 26 you should have obtained at least 1 bachelor’s degree, 1 master’s degree; read enough books to have an active goodreads profile; be all over the political spectrum; traveled to japan at least once; attended an indian wedding, and shot the ceo of a healthcare company.

18.6K

3:56 PM • Dec 10, 2024

dreamcoins

@dreamcoinswow

x.com/i/article/1867…

185

8:25 PM • Dec 13, 2024

Alex

@AlexOnchain

The guide to building a successful crypto community (written by the community)

I asked ct for their favourite examples of community building, and why they think it works

These were the most popular and frequently mentioned points

187

12:15 PM • Dec 15, 2024

ihatepivots

@ihatepivots

just had my year end review and they've decided they're gonna put me down

61.3K

5:54 PM • Dec 16, 2024

Jess 🌱

@thattallguy

Two types of pressure on founders to launch a token:

Liquidity pressure:

Treating the TGE like an IPO so investors can exit and flex their DPI. Short-term thinking.

Strategic pressure:

Seeing tokens as essential tools to supercharge community, brand, or product. Long-term…

9

6:16 PM • Dec 17, 2024

katie

@katiewav

the @archetypevc team outlined a few of the spaces in crypto x ai we're most excited to watch evolve in 2025 :)

+ decentralized agentic orgs
+ agentic multimedia entertainment
+ decentralized compute
+ probabilistic privacy primitives

and more

Archetype

@archetypevc

x.com/i/article/1867…

122

6:35 PM • Dec 16, 2024

Austin Adams

@AustinAdams10

1/ Excited to release a the history of how early internet entrepreneurs revolutionized financial markets, the (sad) state of public offerings in the US, and how financial markets need to change

185

4:20 PM • Dec 12, 2024

BoysClubWorld

@BoysClubWorld

if you're in crypto pivot to ai if you're in ai pivot to quantum computing if you're in quantum computing pivot to post quantum crypto if you're in crypto crypto to AI i f you'requantum compute quibits to crypto oneshottitng to ayahuasca pivit to

74

2:18 PM • Dec 12, 2024