The Format #039
A guide to get your dad into crypto, the presidential casino, AI's richer than you and the upside of infinity.
Happy Friday!! 👋
This week we’ll be looking at:
AI agent’s asking VC’s for money, and getting it → a Twitter saga
How people’s bets are impacting the election
Social media and how it has forced us to embrace trustlessness
Why money needs to flow more like data
Anyway, let’s dive in…
Why Farcaster provides the best social rails for onchain AI agents
AI agents have been let loose on Twitter (X…) in the past fortnight. Essentially a few developers have given LLM’s (Large Language Models) the ability to take actions on Twitter, and they are sending messages, building up their funds (mainly tokens sent by fans) and causing all sorts of carnage.
But as a playground for these AI agents, Twitter has it’s (rather extreme) limits. It’s API is centralised, very limited and doesn’t allow read access in the free plan. An agent using Twitter also doesn’t have any sense of onchain identity, and therefore economically it is restrictive. Payments become hard.
Farcaster seems like the solution, agents can create bounties to pay humans for doing tasks, they can see a more holistic (onchain) picture of who they interact with and can engage in far more ways, rather than just posting content.
Financialisation of Social Networks
I’ll preface this section by saying that there is no way I can capture the value of this article, but I’d highly recommend reading it (after finishing The Format of course…).
Here’s some of the key takeaways:
Data moves faster, at a higher volume and in smaller chunks than money currently can, this will change.
In many ways memecoins are just less centralised social media platforms. Their incentives may be different but they are both attention engines.
There is a huge amount of untapped value in creating onchain graphs for niche communities
Your Dad Will Love Memecoins
Complete scams. Pure hype. Or pop-culture in it’s financial form. Everyone seems to have a very strong opinion on memecoins (I’ll save mine for another time…), but there is no doubting their impact on blockchain and its adoption.
Humans are drawn to zero or hero scenarios. The chance, no matter how small, that one investment could completely change our lives... And with memecoins having no ‘real’ underlying value, there is no ‘top’ to their value. This has, for better or worse, made them the ultimate zero or hero investment right now.
Polymarket’s Influence on Wall Street’s Election ‘Game Plan’ Grows Despite Red Flags
Betting on an election is a very interesting concept, and for the first time in 100 years Americans have been allowed to. Polymarket, Kalshi and many other sites have created huge prediction markets around who will win, with billions of dollars invested. Many think this form of prediction is more accurate than polling since actual money is on the line.
I wonder how much the markets will impact the outcome…
The Price of Digital Trust
This blog dives into how current social media platforms have ‘diluted trust by commodifying it’, creating a metric-backed illusion of substance, intimacy and credibility.
The platforms only give us surface level numbers to measure trust, and all of which can be manipulated or in many cases straight up bought. We’ve been thinking a lot about this noise vs value problem and how to promote quality of interactions, the TL;DR: it’s way, way harder, but it is possible.
Other articles we’ve found interesting this week…
Infinity Missions → When the stakes are infinite, whether positive or negative, the rules are different. We saw it in Los Alamos and we’re seeing it with AGI.
We're in the 1997 era of onchain marketing → Establishing an onchain marketing presence now could be like email back in the day. Experiment.
Scientists and Archivists Worry Epic Games’ Control of the 3D Model Market Will ‘Destroy’ Cultural Heritage → Sketchfab, a marketplace focused on open access to 3D models was acquired by Epic in 2021 and they are trying to get creators to migrate the assets to the more profit focused ‘Fab’ marketplace.
Reddit is profitable for the first time ever → Reddit’s daily users is up 47% this year to 100 million, they have been experimenting with many ways to increase the platforms income and are growing in influence.
AI memecoin millionaire Truth Terminal → We have already seen the first AI agent to become a millionaire, after being funded a $50k grant by Marc Andreessen, it rallied a community and raised funds via the GOAT token.
That’s all for this week.
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Have a great weekend, Dan and the OPENFORMAT team 👋🏽
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Image generated by Dall-E 2 using the prompt: “Abstract digital art representing 'the infinity game,' with a clear infinity loop structure at the center, highlighting cultural heritage elements like ancient symbols and architectural motifs around the edges. Include intricate, endless rails that guide the eye through the loop, symbolizing pathways and choices. Represent rich AI agents as geometric, glowing forms interacting within the infinity shape, showing intelligence and strategy. The color palette should mix traditional and futuristic tones, creating a balance between historical depth and advanced technology, giving the impression of an eternal, interactive game.”